Episode 160: The Heber J. Grant Journals—Fruits of a New Policy

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:00)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:02)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:04)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills, straight out of Zion. This isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:32)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day. Saddle up.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:37)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:44)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:09)
Here we go. Hey, look, we're back on video. Where's your mic?

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:12)
Oh, that would be helpful with that.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:18)
Amateur.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:19)
How are the people gonna hear these words? All right.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:26)
Hey, look, who's hanging out on my couch?

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:28)
Must be time for late night conversations about sources.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:31)
Is that what we're calling this? My favorite thing.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:34)
So we've come to you a few times in this video format because you people feel like that listening isn't enough, which I personally am not a YouTube podcaster. That's OK. We don't we don't judge.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:48)
Isn't it obvious that we're not YouTube podcasters?

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:52)
We're kind of old school. But we do like these because they are fun to sometimes have conversations about sort of the state of Mormon history, things that are going on, things that we find interesting. And one of these is the unbelievable amount of things that have been digitized by the LDS Church Historical Department. And to me, that's one of the most exciting developments that we've seen lately.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:22)
It always reminds me, you know, ex-Mormons will be like, the church is hiding stuff. They just go search their archives first. Before you say that, go search the archives first. Have they historically always done a great job at it? No. Are they doing a better job at it now?

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:40)
Yeah. This is really kind of a fun topic to talk about because we are friends with so many of this kind of our generation of historians that are making incredible strides. Part of the problem was historically, you didn't have historians in the historical department.
Part of the larger story is the Leonard Errington experiment that depending on which side of that you fell on was either a great success or an exercise in this is why we don't let historians in here. So we're seeing the pendulum kind of going back the other way now. And it is interesting, you know, this it's become this trope to say, they're hiding everything. I think if you did a really good survey of people who say that, generally speaking, those are not people who are actually doing research.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:38)
Can I invoke Buchanan's law for a moment? So there is also this weird tension that happens in Mormonism, and you'll see this like with Warren Jeffs, for example. Warren Jeffs, like Joseph Smith and other prophets, had an ordained scribe that he took everywhere with them, and Mormons write down everything. Even the things that make them look guilty, they write down a lot.
There's also this weird thing of we have an excess of documents, we have an excess of writings, and that's why Mormon history is so fun because there's so much to pull from and dig from. And you'll be like, well, why would Warren Jeffs write down his crimes? Why would the church write and publish stuff that they don't know, that could make them look bad? Because sometimes they don't think it makes them look bad. That's not what we're talking about tonight, though, but I do think that that's also an interesting thing that happens in Mormonism where we write everything down. We're record-keeping people.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:44)
So tonight we wanted to talk about a recent release that was pretty important. So we were actually going to talk about this last year, but then, not really out of the blue, because we had inklings, it was coming, but this is when we talked about the 1886 Revelation was released, which obviously was a pretty big deal. So this one, that one kind of got ahead of this one. So we're going to talk about this now. So last year, the Church History Library released digital, full-res, full-color, high-res scans of the Heber J. Grant Journals. And this was pretty important because this was a record that covered six decades of Mormon history. So going from the 1880s right up until his death in 1945, this was a big one. And this kind of has an interesting history. So back in the early 1970s, when Mike Quinn is a young research assistant for Davis Bitten, one of the first collections that he gets into was the Heber J. Grant journals. And as he was wanted to do, he typed tons of excerpts. He, the way he tells it, Davis gave him sort of parameters. He was really interested in things like dreams and visions, but he basically just told Mike, go into it and, you know, excerpt out whatever you think sounds interesting. Mike said when he came back with several hundred pages of excerpts, Davis' eyes got real big. He gave Davis a copy, kept one for himself, and went on his merry way.