Thomas G. Alexander on Brigham Young (Season 1, Ep. 2 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:06)
Welcome back to Speak Your Piece. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian for the Utah Dept. of Heritage and Arts.
Speak Your Piece is something about the past. As it's never truly in the past, it's all around us. It informs us, it speaks to our shared and to our separate identities. What's in store for the future? You can answer these questions sometimes better when you first examine the past. This is what the podcast strives to do. For the many diverse, geographically varied communities in Utah.
My speaker today is Dr. Thomas G. Alexander, long-time professor of history at Brigham Young University. I think altogether 40 years.

**Thomas G. Alexander** (0:49)
That's correct.

**Brad Westwood** (0:51)
Tom is the author of 27 books altogether, two of which were published just this year. He has also authored about 170 peer-reviewed articles, which have been published across pretty much every major journal related to Western history, Utah history, and Mormon history. It's my pleasure to speak to him today about his latest book, Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith, which has been published by the University of Oklahoma in Norman.
So with that, I'll say welcome to Speak Your Piece, Tom.

**Thomas G. Alexander** (1:36)
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (1:39)
Tom, as I think about all the books that have been written about Brigham Young, and I've listed a few that surprise me, of course, there's the 1877 Edward Tullidge book, Life of Brigham Young, S. Dilworth Young's 1962 Young Brigham Young, Newell Bringhurst's book on the LDS Mormon prophet, Leonard J. Arrington's 1985 Brigham Young, the American Moses, and then in 2012, John Turner's Brigham Young pioneer prophet.
That seems like a pretty good catalog of writings associated with the one man's life. I'm still staggered. I'm amazed as I've read through your book just how all these stories of Utah and Mormonism and the Western United States, even national history all come together, fold into the story of Brigham Young. Why now do we need another biography of this man, Brigham Young?

**Thomas G. Alexander** (2:49)
Well, partly it's because Dick Adelan at University of Oklahoma Press asked me to write one for the series, the series of Oklahoma Western biographies.
I put Dick off for some time, about five years, and he kept asking me over and over again. And finally, I decided that I ought to do it, that Brigham Young deserved to be in that series. And in addition to this, I've been thinking a great deal and working particularly on the environmental problems that the Latter-day Saints had during the 1850s. And those problems have never been dealt with in a biography.
In addition to this, there's been a lot of controversy over a number of different things, including the Utah War. Bill McKinnon has worked on that and on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Will Bagley and others have worked on that. There's been a great deal of work done on the 1850s. And it seemed to me that one of the things that I could do is to synthesize some of this scholarship. And put it together in a readable form for a general audience.

**Brad Westwood** (4:29)
I would also say, Tom, and tell me if I'm wrong, that each generation, each effort seems to add something else. I mean, really what's been asked in the last 10 years in regards to 19th century history and Brigham Young, you've tried to answer.

**Thomas G. Alexander** (4:46)
That's true. I went to the literature that's come out over the last 20 years, probably, and maybe more than that to try to deal with the inconsistencies, the different points of view and then to indicate where my point of view would stand on those various pieces of work that have been done.

**Brad Westwood** (5:16)
I really like the way you describe different writers' perspectives and then you give a very careful, I think a kind of ministerial kind of history professor, one who spent the last 50 plus years in this reading, in this writing, you kind of give your perspective even as you describe the other people's work.

**Thomas G. Alexander** (5:38)
Well, thank you. Yes, that's what I've tried to do.

**Brad Westwood** (5:42)
So, okay, so next question I want to ask you, Tom, has to do with the 1850s. You begin chapter two, excuse me, chapter six, by saying that the 1850s was a challenging decade for Brigham Young.
Can you explain in a little more detail what is going on in the 1850s that makes it so stressful and challenging for Brigham Young?

**Thomas G. Alexander** (6:09)
Well, you think about the times. In 1850, Utah became a territory. Congress in September of 1850 passed the law, the Organic Act that created Utah territory. Almost immediately after that, or at least within a year, various officials began coming to Utah. At first, Utah got along well with them. The Latter-day Saints who had begun to settle here got along well with them. But that broke down in September of 1851, when Perry Bracus, who had been appointed an Associate Justice of the Utah Territorial Supreme Court, spoke in general conference. He said that the federal government couldn't do anything about the problems that the Latter-day Saints had had in Missouri and in Illinois. He said that if the Latter-day Saints didn't feel right about it, they shouldn't donate a stone for the Washington Monument that was then in construction. And he really raised the ir of the congregation. Brigham Young called them down, but he said that Brachis was either willfully wicked or poorly informed. This is on the pulpit after Brachis had spoken. What happened frightened the territorial officials and most of them left the territory. Interestingly, this was the one time, perhaps the only time in the 19th century, that the Latter-day Saints won. The administration in Washington, DC supported the Latter-day Saints in part because of the public relations campaign that Jedidiah Grant and Thomas L. Kane worked out in Pennsylvania and writing letters to newspapers and writing a pamphlet about the situation.