Lecture: The McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture

April 11, 2014 - Salt Lake City Public Library

Presentation Draft

Kathleen Flake, “The LDS Intellectual Tradition: A Study on Three Lives”[1]

Some of you know Lowell Bennion, Sterling McMurrin and Obert Tanner not from afar but as friends, even as fathers. For those of you who don’t, I look forward to introducing you to them and their contributions which warrant the attention they are receiving in the next few days. I have chosen to emphasize those facts about them that reveal their intellectual commitments in an anti-intellectual period of Latter-day Saint history. Admittedly, this will by no means capture their full character. Those of you who knew them personally may feel that keenly, as I speak. I apologize for that and am relieved to know that tomorrow’s panels will treat them individually, each on his own merits and in greater detail.

Let me acknowledge also that, not only in detail, but also in their focus, tomorrow’s panels will compensate for my remarks. You may have noticed these panels are dedicated to discussing the men’s “distinctive visions that penetrated beyond their treasured religious heritage.” I, on the other hand, will be inviting you to think about them in terms of their religious heritage; sometimes “treasured,” sometimes not. I was struck by an unusual turn of phrase in the description of these panels; the reference to “distinctive visions that penetrated beyond.” Typically one merely “goes” or “extends” beyond something. But, here, a more forceful expression is used as if there were a barrier in need of breaching in order to be free of the limits of their “religious heritage.” Though the usage is unusual, the sentiment is not, of course. Indeed the sentiment is so familiar that it has the ring of commonsense. Reason and faith are assumed to be diametrically opposed. That is the problem with stereotypes — they usually begin with a generally accepted type; a type so generally accepted that it shortcuts reason. And, that my friends, is what being an intellectual is all about, as you know — reason. So, let us reason together tonight about what these men have to teach us about being reasonable and religious.

First, a caveat, however. It is only reasonable to begin by admitting that conflicts between reason and faith are not limited to those of the Mormon faith, but common to all faiths. Indeed, it contributes to the very definition of modernity and my students of a variety of (religious) stripes wrestle with it. Nevertheless, the conflict has a social location, as we intellectuals like to say about everything. It takes its shape and form from historically specific cares and aspirations, anxieties and confidences of the people engaged in such conflicts. Therefore, faithful reasoners or the reasonably faithful have reacted in a variety of ways to them. Tonight I would like to consider how Professors Tanner, Bennion and McMurrin responded to the religious conflicts of their time and place.

Their Lives

Our subjects’ lives spanned nearly the entire “American century,” as the twentieth century has been called.  All three arrived within a decade of one another beginning with Obert Tanner’s birth in 1904.  It was a time of radical change and expansion for the nation certainly, but, no less for Mormonism. The LDS Church was about to recover from the economic costs of the onerous anti-polygamy campaign and had just placed an apostle in the United States. Reed Smoot would represent both church and state for thirty years, rising to the highest levels of political influence. Thus, our subjects arrived at a time when the Church was moving out onto the national stage with unprecedented authority and about to follow the American flag abroad.

Obert Clark Tanner was born in Farmington, Utah, the tenth child of plural wife, Annie Clark Tanner and her absentee husband. From her journal, which Obert took such pains to publish, we get a glimpse of his life, too — the personal, moral, economic and, yes, religious conflicts which were the warp and woof his formative years. Obert’s birth coincided with the start of the Smoot hearings in Washington, D.C. He would not have remembered the details, since he was nine years old when the hearings ended. But, you could say, their consequences were lived by him, as he saw the Church’s diminishing moral support for his family’s way of life. The business he founded as a University of Utah undergraduate gave him, for the rest of his life, a degree of wealth which not only spared him repeating his family’s poverty, but also their susceptibility to the Church’s fluctuating policies.

Just four years younger than Obert, Lowell Bennion, too, grew up in this particularly torturous period in Mormon family and ecclesiastical life, but he had a much easier time of it. Reared in what appears to have been an idyllic setting in Salt Lake’s suburbs, he met family expectations for educational excellence and sincere religious piety. His parents had not followed their parents into the Principle. More influential on their son were their educational aspirations and attainments. Trained at Columbia, his father Milton was a professional educator who had been named for the great British poet, as sign of his own parents’ aspirations.  In turn, he named his son, Lowell, after the Boston intelligentsia. The son did not disappoint him, as we shall see. Also influential on the young man, however, were early and rewarding experiences with ranching that left Lowell with great affection for “tent living, cold showers and dawn-to-dusk labor;” not unlike his later friend and colleague Sterling McMurrin.^[2]

Sterling, like the other two, was a child of the Mormon pioneers and richly connected to LDS leadership and middle management. On his mother’s side, he had the benefit of connections to the Moss family, founders and later general managers of the Deseret Livestock Company. Summers working in what he called the “real world” of the ranch seemed to have been for him antidote to the more cultured, even formal environment of his paternal grandparents. He later recalled that a visit from his grandfather McMurrin “was very much like have a visiting church authority in our home.”^[3] Maybe that was because he was one—holding, as he did, one of the top twenty positions in the LDS hierarchy.^[4] Though Sterling spoke emphatically of his deep love and indebtedness to both grandfathers, later interviews show his mother’s family and their ranch made the more lasting impression. He was especially impressed that, for grandfather Moss, Mormonism was “simply an inherited property, like the color of his eyes” and, though he was a bishop and “genuinely devout person,” “the Church didn’t own him.”^[5]  The same could be said of the grandson. His chief chronicler introduced him as “Enviably free.”[6]

In each case, these men’s families placed them close to the origins of Church authority. They were of a generation that inherited a level of familiarity with Church hierarchs that made them less high. That would soon end. Church authority was itself changing during these years. Mormonism was modernizing with the rest of America. It was a “progressive” era,” a time of enthusiasm for professionalization and specialization or, in other words, for higher education and bureaucratic ordering with their rational approaches to any problem. The new generation of Church leadership — David McKay, James Talmage, Richard Lyman, John Widtsoe — were college men, not frontiersmen. With them came the ordering of Church auxiliaries and quorums according to their specializations and the application of corporate principles and educational curricula. As William Hartley has shown, it was no longer permissible to alternate religious lessons with readings from “Frank Among the Rancheros” and “Pigs is Pigs.”[7] True to the spirit of the time, our subjects joined the out-migration of Mormons who sought professional training. After receiving baccalaureate degrees at home from the University of Utah, they spread their wings abroad. By a mixture of opportunity and talent, as well as their own resolve, they received degrees from some of the world’s finest institutions.

Lowell’s intellectual aspirations drew him to the German research university, but Nazism drove him across the border to be credentialed by the University of Strasbourg. There he produced the first work on Weber in English and the first work in any language synthesizing the great sociologist’s methods. Such accomplishments notwithstanding, he chose to commit the next thirty years of his life working in the LDS Church’s education system. The Institute he founded at the University of Utah was his “sanctuary,” he said, and he experienced deep satisfaction there. Thirty years later, upon being forced to leave it – a story we will return to in a minute — he served as the University of Utah’s Associate Dean of Students and on its sociology faculty for a decade before retiring. He appeared to never regret dropping his innovative work on Weber and not ever having had a research appointment. He wrote and gave lectures of another kind though. In the words of Mary Bradford his former student and biographer, as a public intellectual he “helped give rational consistency to Mormon thought, focused it in social morality and service, and opened it to ecumenical dialogue.”^[8]

The one of the three who may be least well known as an intellectual is Obert Tanner, benefactor of the Center we celebrate today. Though it is not a bad thing to be best known for one’s philanthropy, it is good to remember his philanthropy was an expression of his intellect – his philosophical love of the good, the true and the beautiful — not only his charitable character. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts and of Law from the University of Utah, he went on to study law at Harvard as well and earned a masters degree and “most of a Ph.D in philosophy from Stanford.”^[9]Before he finished, the premature death of his and Natalie’s eldest son apparently made them want to come home. Stanford’s loss was Utah’s gain. For nearly thirty years, Tanner was a full-time professor in the University of Utah’s philosophy department, authoring or co-authoring ten books. While on the faculty, he added a juris doctor to his credentials, but his interest was always academic; he never practiced law. Much more could be said of course, especially about his influence; not only on Utah’s cultural community, but also in national and international circles. It must suffice to measure this aspect of his work by noting that it earned him the National Medal of Arts and the status of honorary fellow of the British Academy, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.

Sterling McMurrin began his academic career studying history and political science and then earning a master’s in philosophy at the University of Utah. He went on to obtain a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Southern California and was immediately offered a position on their faculty. Twelve years later he, too, returned to the University of Utah, joining Tanner on the philosophy faculty. Over the next forty years McMurrin held many positions: Dean of College of Letters & Science, Academic Vice President, Provost, Dean of the Graduate School, and founding member of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Many honors followed, including the title Distinguished Professor, the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence and, with Tanner, Utah’s first Governor’s Award for Excellence. McMurrin was author or editor of twenty-one books and 250 other publications. Midway in his tenure, he was appointed Commissioner of Education in he Kennedy administration. But even that could not keep him from Utah. He returned home to complete his distinguished career with seven honorary degrees and two professorships named in his honor.

It may come as a surprise to you that, not only Bennion, but also our other two intellectuals began their illustrious careers employed by the LDS Church’s education system. Obert Tanner taught at Stanford for five years. Meanwhile, Sterling McMurrin was laboring in Zion’s nether regions — Richfield, Utah, Montpellier Idaho, and finally Tempe, Arizona, until he finished his doctoral training. One wonders how he stood it and the answer is, unsurprisingly, not very well. We will pick up that story, too, in a minute. For now, it is important simply to note that, after stellar educations and multiple professional opportunities, each returned to Utah and, if they left again, it was for a limited purpose and time. All three were, as McMurrin said of himself, “one hundred percent Utahn.”^[10] I ask you to consider this was not simply a matter of place, but culture. They were a product of and became producers of Mormon culture. They must have liked it, for all their struggles within it.

Finally, let me point out their lives were intertwined, though in too many ways to enumerate. A sample must suffice. All three met during their early years of professional formation. Bennion remembered selling his Oldsmobile to a very young McMurrin in the mid-1930s. Later, McMurrin would replace Bennion at the Arizona institute. In a decision that would have repercussions for McMurrin, they would trade places again when Bennion asked McMurrin to assume leadership of the “Swearing Elders,” a faculty study group at the U.^[11] Tanner and McMurrin became “fast friends” in 1938 and office mates when they joined Utah’s philosophy department, respectively six and eight years later. Meanwhile, the Bennion and Tanner families were neighbors both in the city and, then, as their children grew, in the suburban homes to which they moved in the mid 1940s. These ties gave them much pleasure, but also bound them in times of crisis. When McMurrin was about to be put on trial for his church membership, Tanner made a beeline to his “great and good friend Apostle Adam S. Bennion” who, in turn, told Church President David McKay. This led to McKay’s famous offer to serve as a witness on McMurrin’s behalf.^[12] As for Bennion, when evicted from his Institute sanctuary and wondering if his new academic assignment at the U would satisfy him, he declared “if not I’ll quit and be Obert’s gardner.”^[13]

It is not surprising that our three subjects knew each other so early and their paths continued to cross often. Early twentieth-century Mormonism made for a very, very small town in terms of human relationships, and it was still intact in the 1950s.  For example, University president Ray Olpin, heard rumors at the local barbershop about trouble brewing between McMurran and his bishop. So, when asking McMurrin to be dean of Arts and Science, Olpin addded “by the way, is it true that you’ve been excommunicated?” adding, “’The last time I got my haircut there . . . someone said they were making you an apostle. Then someone else said, no he’s been excommunicated.” (Apparently, either fate was plausible.) It was the 1954 and Mormonism’s small town had been invaded by a new crisis that would draw our academics down from their ivory towers and out of their sanctuaries.

Not just the norming of higher criticism and evolutionary theory, but also the rise of the social sciences and advances in the physical sciences surfaced new challenges, especially to biblical truth, concerning, for example, the age of the earth.  No less destabilizing were challenges to religious tolerance of and even rationalization of racial segregation. Meanwhile, America’s churches were finding common cause in a modern holy war against godless Communism. Fundamentalists especially were active on any front that offered hope of regaining the cultural authority they had lost in the 1920s. Mormonism did not escape these broad social forces. The moderate Republican consensus, which had served it so well during the Reed Smoot years, declined under pressure from such sources as the anti-intellectualism of Joseph Fielding Smith and anti-Communism of Ezra Taft Benson. It was at this historical moment our three heroes, now trained in the classic liberal arts of rhetoric and reason, reached their professional maturity. Little wonder, then, that they became enmeshed in the cultural combat. Two incidents have become symbolically potent for Latter-day Saint intellectuals: first, the failed effort to excommunicate McMurrin in 1954; second, the successful purge of Bennion from the Church Education System in 1962.

Before considering these events in detail, let me suggest some reasons why Obert Tanner plays a marginal role in the collective memory of these events. First, we know of no incident where he came into public conflict with the LDS Church.  This may be because we don’t have a comprehensive account of his life; most of what we know comes from others.  In their words, he appears, like McMurrin, less inclined to take certain fundamentalist concerns – such as the age of the earth – seriously. Moreover, again like McMurrin, his employment in the academy gave him distance that Bennion did not have.  After all, it was Bennion’s handing over to McMurrin the “Swearing Elders” which gave McMurrin the opportunity to do combat. On the other hand, Tanner seems to have been more like Bennion in his piety.  Religious experience, not theological proposition mattered to him. In published lectures, he voiced this deep preference: “The argument from religious experience,” he said, “is [like friendship] . . . not a matter of proof but rather of experience, so too is beauty a matter of experience, also love and goodness, and so also is the experience of God. It is a deeper matter explained by the poet:” Earth [is] crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God: but only he who sees takes off his shoes.”[14]

Finally, once can’t help but wonder whether his status as a successful entrepreneur and generous benefactor gave him access to or, as he chose, independence from institutional power that the others did not have. Any of these factors could have placed him on the margins of fundamentalist conflicts. He spoke privately, not publicly about what concerned him in Church affairs. Thus, loyalty, too, played a role. McMurrin summed up his friend’s position this way: “In the encounter with scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom, [Tanner] moved from an early orthodoxy to a naturalistic and humanistic piety, but [his] devotion to his church, its traditions and its people, constantly strengthened rather than weakened.”[15]

Tanner’s omission does not mean he was not sympathetic to the difficulties his friends were having.  Indeed, as I’ve said, he interceded on McMurrin’s behalf through a friendship with an LDS apostle. McMurrin believed that intercession precipitated MacKay’s support that ultimately revealed the absurdity of the local bishop’s concerns and presumably the futility of his efforts, since the matter was dropped. As for the bishop’s intentions, I think it is fair to say they remain a mystery.  McMurrin himself never knew the exact cause, but thought it arose out of a discussion he had with Apostles Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee, McMurrin’s second cousin, no less. They were concerned about the study group referred to earlier, “The Swearing Elders,” comprised of academics at the U and joined by some daring souls from BYU.  The group evidently discussed the religiously charged issues of the day with great frankness and, it appears, some criticism. Lee asked McMurrin, it’s leader, would “it be possible at the end of every session for you to summarize the position of the church and simply remind everyone what the beliefs of the church are?” “Utterly impossible,” answered his cousin.[16]

This answer led to a discussion of McMurrin’s own beliefs. As he had when a seminary teacher, he responded honestly with his naturalistic views, including a denial of Jesus’ divinity, as well as of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.  The two apostles seemed surprised, he said, but responded “graciously,” even adding their impression that he had the Holy Ghost.  Afterwards McMurrin left for a year on a Ford fellowship. When he returned, friends like Olpin told him they heard he was going to be excommunicated.  He scheduled a meeting with his bishop, a highly placed church bureaucrat, who admitted his sense of duty to determine whether an excommunication trial was appropriate. The bishop admitted also that no adverse witnesses could be found.  He wondered would McMurrin help? So, Sterling gave him the names of “two members who are thoroughly acquainted with depth of my heresies.” You’ve guessed it, I’m sure: apostles Smith and Lee – another “utter impossibility,” this time for the bishop. At this point Obert Tanner interceded with David McKay, who outranked Smith, and the matter quietly died.

This story illustrates at least two concerns in the conversation about anti-intellectualism and freedom of conscience, Mormon-style.  The first has to do with the range of belief among Latter-day Saints and the permissibility of expressing it.  The second has to do with administrative anxiety about “Swearing Elders” or intellectuals as sources of unbelief. McMurrin cites McKay for liberality with respect to both propositions. To McMurrin’s self-effacing statement that “a person of my beliefs does not have any claim on membership in the church,” Mckay is said to have angrily replied, “Now just what is it that a person is not permitted to believe without being asked to leave this church? Just what is it? Is it evolution? I hope not, because I believe in evolution.”[17]  Evolution was, as you may know, one of Joseph Fielding Smith’s chief theological anxieties.  Secondly, McMurrin states that McKay, pointing in the direction of Smith and Lee’s offices, advised him, “If those men. . . try to get you in a corner again . . . you just refuse to answer them because what you believe is none of their business.”[18] Something easier said than done, but it apparently did not need to be done. Four years later, in 1957, when Ohio State University asked the Church to provide a lecture on Mormonism, McMurrin was given the assignment and by Harold B. Lee no less. His lecture was later repeated at the University of Utah and BYU. “One of the major strengths in Mormon theology is its concern for reasonableness in religion,” McMurrin once said. He certainly made it sound so. Published as The Philosophical Foundations of the Mormon Religion, his characterization of Mormonism is still print.

McMurrin remained, as he said of himself, the “loyal opposition,” a giver of “in-house criticism.”[19]  His preferred self-description was “a good, well-rounded heretic.”  This label was not only apt, but also served to create a useful boundary, marking his independence within Mormonism. Lack of such independence was his chief criticism of his people. Whenever asked, he lamented that “the intellectual life of the church– in terms of openness and free discussion– has been going downhill since the deaths of BH Roberts and James E. Talmage in 1933.” Note this is the year McMurrin turned nineteen.[20] Today we are hard-pressed to think Talmage a freethinker or Roberts part of a free discussion. So, McMurrin’s nostaligia for those days may be, well, just nostalgia – even a reflection on a loss of innocence from the days when, with his father, he would read these men’s writings. Nevertheless, as late as 1981, he told an interviewer: “We are going through a stage of intense indoctrination in the Church that robs the individual of intellectual freedom.” And, he was right, as least about the first half of that assertion.  The last twenty years of the 20^th century was a time when LDS Church organization was fully bureaucratized and dogmatism dominated its official discourse. Those at midcentury, including McMurrin at times, who believed McKay was the exception and had a moderating affect must admit he never publicly used his considerable authority to speak against dogmatism, even when it was — and he and others in his council believed it was — doctrinally in error. This was especially fateful for Lowell Bennion.

Bennion’s story is more complicated and without a happy ending. He was known for his liberal views. But, in his sanctuary and supervised by pragmatists at the general level of the Church, he had avoided conflict. This ended in the 1950s, when the Church Education System was reorganized and put at its head was newly appointed BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, a lawyer and protégé of Apostle Ezra Taft Benson. Wilkinson wanted to replace institutes with junior colleges as feeder schools for BYU and the program Bennion has established at the University of Utah was his biggest stumbling block. Through a number of strategies, Wilkinson ultimately forced Bennion from his position. This was made easier by Bennion’s having publicly confronted two apostles at the annual conference for church educators. He challenged one for his views on evolution, the other for his racism. He was called to account for his actions and the interview did not go well.  Bennion continued to insist on what appears today to be a rather mild proposition: that students not be asked to choose between science and their faith, especially with a litmus test on the age of the earth. Wilkinson had already placed Bennion on a “list of teachers who have critical attitudes” and this seemed to prove that he belonged there.[21] Bennion hoped McKay would intercede, but he did not. When the University of Utah offered Bennion a position as Dean of Students, the Church had a way to escape having to choose between the two men (directly, at least). After twenty-seven years, Bennion lost his sanctuary.

In response to the uproar of appalled friends and students, he would only say  “‘I managed not to please somebody, so we go on to other things.” Marion D. Hanks recollected, “It had to hurt him and badly . . . . [But] He took it better than his defenders and protagonists who wanted to cause a stir. He put that down.” Bennion took the advice he had consistently given his students: focus on the gospel message, not matters on its periphery. “My satisfactions lie in creation, service, and trying to keep my integrity,” he said.[22] The ethical life and loving service were the core, everything else was periphery[23] So, he turned to other institutions, some of which he created, like the Teton Valley Boys Ranch, others which he led, such as his seventeen years at Salt Lake Community Services Council. As significant, however, were the innumerable acts individual kindness and, even rescue. Happily, these are memorialized in the University of Utah’s Bennion Community Center, which encourages students to go and do likewise.

Though he served on the Church’s Youth Correlation Committee for the next ten years, he found the work stultifying and asked to be released. Being back in his ward freed him for what he called “the relational aspects” of church life. Many years later, Obert Tanner recalled his dismay at the firing:  “The Church had a very great and very good man, and the church should have been more careful . . . . I’m not criticizing the church. They did what they thought was right. I just think they did wrong.”[24]  But, Tanner was not completely without public criticism, while his friend was caught in a power struggle with Church fundamentalists.  He gave a speech entitled “Truth and Myth as Competitors for the Mind.” “A culture of greatness,” he said, “whether it be in politics, religion, or economics, should constantly read out truth claiming-myths. . . .  It is better to disband power structures for possibly better ones than to preserve them by the aid of myths.”[25] Though he could have been more specific, he could not have been more clear.

 

Let me close by asking you: Are there detectable patterns in these three men’s lives that illuminate for us how to be both intellectual and faithful in a time of religious fundamentalism? I say “patterns” in the plural because, for whatever they shared in terms of their historical context, these men were very different from each other. Attending to that difference, how did they analyze the problem of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism in a Church they valued, even believed to a degree? What advice would they have for today’s intellectuals who feel similar strains?

My list begins with Obert Tanner’s observation about the academy and the church: know the difference: He said, “It is no wonder that universities find religion a difficult problem, for it seems to defy or escape our intellectual categories. It is, therefore, also inevitable that universities are unable to deal with more than [the] fringe [of] religion – the ideas about religion, not the personal and private experience of religion. It is no wonder that churches and free universities are respectful but reserved toward each other.” [26]  We should likewise be respectful and reserved towards each.

As for Bennion’s advice.  I think he would tell us, as he told his students: be respectful of the difference between the gospel and the church. Or, as he put it: ” The church is the instrument, the vehicle, to inculcate the Gospel into the lives of men and women. It was established by Christ. . .  ‘To perfect the Saints’ .. . The church is both divine and human.” (Bradford 182)  Elsewhere, he expressed this as a matter of faith: “We who can honestly believe in God . . . . believe that ‘the things that matter most are not ultimately at the mercy of things that matter least.” [27]

Finally, what about Sterling McMurrin’s approach?  It’s a little more complicated and comes from a statement he made about himself, beginning with his days teaching seminary.  “ I had a genuine love for the church as an institution and its people. . . .  I was devoted to the church, really was, and am right now. I’ve always considered myself as Mormon as these Orthodox Mormons, though I have been a confirmed heretic.”[28] There is some truth here about the relationship of love to criticism and self-knowledge; something that goes to the heart of the difference between heresy and apostasy, between loyal opposition and just plain opposition.

In each of these statements, I believe there is wisdom for any day, not just their own.  It is the kind of wisdom that answers the dilemma Bonner Ritchie posited about this same conflict: You can’t make institutions safe for people — only people safe for institutions.  The wisdom of these three men can make people safe for institutions. And, this is what I recommend we remember: not the offenses that they received, but the wisdom they have to give.  I think they, too, would have it that way.

Now it is your turn to add to this list or to question mine. I look forward to the conversation. Let me simply close by again thanking Bob Goldberg and the Tanner Center for this opportunity.  My life has been greatly enriched by meeting these men who exemplify the LDS intellectual tradition.

 

References

[1] With thanks to Erin Shill for her research assistance.

^[2] Bradford, 20.

^[3] Conscience 5

^[4] Joseph W. McMurrin was one of the seven presidents of the LDS Church’s First Council of the Seventy. In that capacity, he served also as president of the California Mission of the LDS Church from 1897 until at least 1930

^[5] Conscience 8

[6] Newell’s preface, Conscience, xiii

[7] Hartley, “The Priesthood Reorganization of 1877: Brigham Young’s Last Achievement,”  BYU Studies (Fall, 1979), 13.

^[8] Bradford

^[9] McMurrin, “Matter of Conscience,” 235.

^[10] Conscience 23

^[11] Conscience 181

^[12] Conscience 197

^[13] Bradford 183

[14] One Man’s Search,151

[15] McMurrin, “Forward,” One Man’s Search, xii

[16] Conscience 193

[17] Conscience 198

[18] Conscience 199

[19] Conscience114

[20] Conscience 209. See also the 7^th street Press interview.  NB It was from his father, he said, that he received the “church writings” that were “far superior . . . To most of what comes out today.” In addition to Roberts and Talmadge, he admired Orson F. Whitney, and Adam S. Bennon.

[21] Bradford 165

[22] Bradford 183

[23] Bradford 132

[24] Bradford, 175

[25] One Man’s Search 109

[26] One man’s search 151

[27] Bennion, Things that Matter 59.

[28] Conscience 114