Show notes
Matt Harris told me that only 30% of his research went into his book "2nd Class Saints" due to space restrictions. What was left out? We'll find out and also get a preview of his upcoming biography of Hugh B Brown. Check out our conversation...
https://youtu.be/fQBhV5kMdZ4
Don't miss our other conversations with Matt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/matt-harris/
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What Was Left Out?
GT 00:30 I think I've only asked you 1/20 of what I wanted to ask. I need to let you go, but the last question that I want to hit you on, I remember we had a conversation one time, and you said that when you write a book, you only put in about 30% of your research. Usually it's because of page limitations and that sort of a thing. Can you share a story or two of the 70% that's not in this book?
Matt 01:07 Yeah.
GT 01:09 I mean, I guess the Brown stuff, that's for your new book. But what are some things that due to space restrictions you just couldn't get in?
Matt 01:21 Well, just a quick thought, the Brown stuff is in there, his activism and speaking to the press and getting Monroe Fleming ordained or trying to get him ordained, that's all in there in great detail. But the later stuff in the 1970s...
GT 01:34 Daddy, the recording, I don't think that was in there.
Matt 01:38 No, no, no. That will be in my Brown biography. And in full disclosure, I found some of this stuff after, later.
GT 01:53 A book is never finished. Right?
Matt 01:58 Oh, my goodness. Well, there are other details that I'll include about Brown and the ban, in particular, because it's so pivotal to his story, as is polygamy, weirdly enough. And also, the other story I'll just start with a teaser, is that Brown was told that he would be an apostle at the age of 15, if he lived righteous enough. He wasn't called in the Quorum of the Twelve until he was 78 years of age.
GT 02:19 Wow.
Matt 02:20 That is a problem, especially if you've been told...
GT 02:24. We could have gotten rid of the ban sooner. Right? If he was only 20...
Matt 02:29. The teaser I'll give you is it wasn't the ban that kept him out. It was something else. He was accused of doing something he did not do.
GT 02:36 Did Newell Bringhurst share that story, or maybe you did. Was it with alcohol?
Matt 02:43 Newell wouldn't have known this. Well, Newell knows it only for me. This is all new stuff that nobody knows about. And I've shared it with a few people.
GT 02:47 Was it with the alcohol commission or something?
Matt 02:52 Yeah. Some other time, I'll tell you more about the details of that. It's a fascinating thing. He was accused of taking bribes that he didn't take. But perception can be reality.
GT 03:02. It doesn't matter when it's politics.
Matt 03:04 That's right.
GT 03:04. Accusation is good enough.
Matt 03:05 That's right, and especially when people's income is at stake. So there's a lot of things I didn't talk about in this book. I couldn't because of space constraints, but some of it was--I'll give you a couple of examples. One deals with the activism. I talk a lot about the Church Education System and the BYU religion faculty and CES/Institute people, those who teach the young men and women of the Church, college age. I was shocked at the level of pushback from people who are paid to teach religion to the college-aged kids, how much they opposed the ban.
GT 03:51 Oh wow.
Matt 03:52 And you definitely get that in this book. You see it. I mean, I name some names, just the more high profile people like Lowell Bennion. But because of the length of the book, and they wanted to keep the price down, the press and all of that, I had to cut out a lot of details on that.
GT 04:10. Can we get a sequel?
Matt 04:14. And so I name names. I one of those people I go into, I talk about Hugh Nibley in this book, and he doesn't agree with the ban. But I go into a lot more detail about Nibley's views on the ban, that didn't make it into this book. For example, let me tell you what...
GT 04:31. Can I get--you know, with Lengthen Your Stride, Edward Kimball had that. It’s one of my favorite books, the $150 book, from Benchmark.
Matt 04:41 The working draft.
GT 04:41 Yeah, from Benchmark, yes, because that is incredible. Can you do one of those?
Matt 04:47. Well, they asked me to recently. It's funny, you say that. The Benchmark people asked me to. But I talk about Hugh Nibley's views in more detail. Let's just take a pause for a moment with Nibley. He's the Church's apologist. He's trained at the University of California, at Berkeley. His field is ancient history. He's written some really big, important articles in the 1950s dealing with the ancient world. Then at some point in his career, in the ‘50s, he turns to Mormon apologetics. He's trying to put the Book of Mormon in its larger, ancient Near East context. He's less concerned about linguistics and more concerned about the history, and to a lesser extent, even the theology. Other people will pick up on those strands through the years. John Sorensen, the anthropologist, will try to build on Nibley, in his area of expertise.
GT 05:43. Unfortunately, he just passed away, too.
Matt 05:45. He just passed away in his early 90s. Yeah, so Nibley influenced a lot of people, apologists, but Nibley never believed in the ban. I talk about this in my book, again, for a couple of paragraphs. But in the larger one, I go in to more space. Nibley never believed in the ban. couple things; one is, he taught that God cursed land, not people. Number two, he never believed in this one-drop nonsense. Nibley was an astute reader of history, world languages. You know, he knew that the world was in motion, constant motion that different people from different cultures are mixing and intermarrying and having mixed race children. I mean, the whole race thing is just bogus. He knows this. I might tell your listeners something that Americans in general didn't know about race construction up until an anthropologist at Columbia University named Franz Boas started writing about it in the early 20th century. Franz Boas is really pushing back on this idea that race is something that's fixed, that we're born black, we're born white. He's like, "This is nuts. This is just a construction." If you look at how race is conceived in the United States in the early 20th century, if you live in Georgia, you could be classified as 1/16 black. You know, one of your great grand ancestors was black, or 1/32 in North Carolina, or 1/4 in South Carolina. I mean, think about that. They're trying to figure out who's black, based on a fraction that lawmakers had sat around a table arguing. It's possible that you could be considered black in one state and move over to the next state and you're considered white. And yet they're creating these racial markers. It's just driven by racism, that's all it is. Because if the state identifies you as black, that means you can't go to the white school. You can't go to the restaurant that caters to white people. So the stakes are high. This is why you get people crossing below the color line, light skinned people crossing below the color line, identifying as white, when the fact is their great, great grandfather's black. They're not going to reveal this. And why would they? They want to be able to vote. They want to be able to go to the best schools, go to the restaurants of their choice.
Matt 08:08 Franz Boas is just puncturing a hole in all of this white supremacy stuff that is really, really strong in the first couple of decades in the 20th century. This is where lynchings are taking place, all of this stuff. In high schools, American schools, they're teaching white supremacy everywhere. You look at the textbooks that they offer, and you look at best selling books from the day, that are predicated upon white supremacy. "Immigrants coming to this country," one of the authors writes, in the 1920s, "they're going to dilute the white race." This is what Americans are buying. This is the context in which Joseph Fielding Smith writes his seminal book, The Way to Perfection. This is when the eugenics movement's really flourishing. This is when Adolf Hitler's coming to power with his views of race, some of which he learns from Americans, by the way. So white supremacy is just so endemic in the early 20th century. Protestants and Catholics are preaching all of this stuff from the pulpit. Some are even members of the Ku Klux Klan. So Franz Boas is writing about that this is just a race construction. It's nuts. It's wrong. It's just to justify racism. Nibley reads this stuff. Lowell Bennion reads this stuff. And they tell the brethren, "There's no such thing as a one drop. This is crazy." And anyway, so Nibley doesn't believe in any of this stuff. But if you read some of the things he says in public, he's a loyal foot soldier. He is not an activist. He's not Lowell Bennion. He's not Sterling McMurrin. He's not putting pressure on the brethren in other words. McMurrin puts pressure from the outside on the brethren. Lowell Bennion puts pressure on the inside. Hugh Brown does both. But Nibley doesn't put pressure anyway, he just sort of—he says the right thing. He says, "Oh, the ban, I support it." But in private, he's criticizing the ban.
GT 10:10 So, in public, he's supporting it,
Matt 10:11 Yeah.
GT 10:12 In private, he's criticizing it.
Matt 10:13 Yes and, frankly, I lost a lot of respect for Hugh Nibley when I read his private papers. This is why it's important, any historians who are listening to this, you've got to get into the archives. So, in public, he's saying things about race, and then in private, he's saying the exact opposite....
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