In the first biography of Joseph Smith since Richard Bushman’s 2005 Rough Stone Rolling, John G. Turner tells the story of a very American prophet. Raised in a tight-knit family and endowed with “almost preternatural resilience,” Smith’s personal ambition and collective vision propelled him far beyond his humble New England origins (117). Like other famous self-made Americans, such as Franklin or Carnegie, Turner argues, Smith was a “constant innovator” who intuitively understood that success in America relies on “constant acts of self-creation” (6, 154).
If Turner’s story of Smith’s rise from obscurity to power follows a familiar American archetype, then so too does his account of Smith’s almost Hollywood downfall. The book’s subtitle points to the fact that for Turner, Smith became his own worst enemy. Time and again, the author contends, the Mormon prophet’s growing arrogance, lust for power, recklessness, and overly ambitious plans undermined everything he and his followers had built. Thanks to his populist charisma and resilience, Turner’s Smith routinely recovered with “renewed audacity” (51). But during the final years of his life in Nauvoo, Illinois, Turner argues, Smith became a borderline megalomaniac, secretly marrying scores of LDS women, alienating the state’s political parties, going deeper into debt, and openly flaunting his power, until it finally cost him his life.
Readers of Mormon history will find much here that echoes Fawn Brodie, in particular Turner’s portrait of Smith as a kind of playful and good-natured scoundrel. Fortunately, Turner improves upon Brodie in two significant ways. In addition to the Joseph Smith Papers Project, Turner’s biography also benefits from several decades’ worth of monographs and articles in the field of Mormon Studies. Although it does not contain any new research, it does show an eye for detail in synthesizing much of the best recent research on Joseph Smith and early Mormonism.
The second major improvement from Brodie is that even though Turner does not accept Smith’s prophetic claims, he sees no reason to cast doubts on his religiosity. Brodie famously characterized Smith as a kind of accidental prophet whose piety was as shallow as his theology. For Turner, Smith was genuinely religious in his youthful anxiety over the state of his soul, his ongoing hunger to experience the miraculous, his fascination with ancient scripture and languages, and most of all, his hatred of religious disunity.
For better or worse, Turner’s view of Smith’s character influences many of the book’s narrative choices. This is especially true of his treatment of polygamy, to which he devotes more attention than any other topic. For example, his characterization of Smith as someone who “thirsted for excitement [and] reveled in risk” explains why Turner is adamant that Smith not only had a sexual relationship with Fanny Alger in the mid-1830s, but that it was an affair rather than a polygamous marriage (4). To posit Alger as Smith’s first plural wife, as Bushman does, means accepting the possibility that Smith was more methodical and cautious in his approach to polygamy, which he may have been contemplating as early as 1831. These possibilities raise questions about Turner’s portrait of Smith as an irresponsible risk-taker.
The weakest section of Turner’s book is his shallow treatment of the Book of Mormon. Like Brodie, he struggles to draw a straight line between Smith’s youthful involvement in seer stones and money digging and his supposed authorship of a long, dense, and frequently dry work of scripture. Not knowing quite how to explain the connection between these two Joseph Smiths, Turner simply assumes that one led to the other, as if seeing lost objects in a stone was a natural conduit to writing a second Bible. Because the Book of Mormon does not seem to come from the same mind as his reckless and thrill-seeking Smith, Turner mostly ignores it, devoting only eight pages to the work that made Smith who he was. Turner is far more interested in the Smith who married multiple women than in the Smith who produced and published the Book of Mormon.
Yet to his credit, Turner possesses the humility to recognize that neither he nor any other historian can contain Smith, whom he describes as “maddeningly elusive” (1). While readers who are eager for nuanced and detailed analysis might be disappointed by this book, those looking for an exciting, accessible, and fast-paced narrative will delight in Turner’s clever turns of phrase and in his ability to find the distinctively American qualities in the story of Smith’s “rise and fall.”
