Leonard James Arrington (July 2, 1917 – February 11, 1999) was an American author, academic and the founder of the Mormon History Association (MHA). He is known as the "Dean of Mormon History" and "the Father of Mormon History" because of his contributions to the field. From 1972 to 1982, he was Church Historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), the first non-general authority to fill the assignment since it began in 1842. He was director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History from 1982 until 1986.
Arrington grew up in a large family in Idaho, where he and his family were members of the LDS Church. After high school, he studied agricultural economics at the University of Idaho (U of I) and continued studying economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). While teaching at the Utah State Agricultural College (later Utah State University (USU)) in Logan, Utah, Harvard University Press (HUP) published his book Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 in 1958. After a Fulbright professorship at the University of Genoa in Italy, Arrington raised funds to pay for research and writing on Mormon biographies. He taught Western American History at Brigham Young University (BYU) from 1972 to 1987.
In conjunction with his teaching appointment at BYU, Arrington was also appointed as the first Church Historian for the LDS Church from 1972 to 1982. It was the first time a professional historian was given this job. Arrington and his team of researchers, forming the Church Historical Department, began many projects to document LDS Church history, ranging from articles for the church's official magazine to scholarly books written for a non-LDS audience. The Historical Department was not subject to the church's Correlation Program and enjoyed some freedom of research. However, over time, various church members and apostles disliked the historical articles. The new director of the Historical Department, G. Homer Durham, required that all publications go through him and halted the hiring of new employees. In 1982, the LDS Church released Arrington as Church Historian and transferred the History Division to BYU, creating the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. Arrington published over 20 books and articles, including several biographies, with the help of many research assistants.
Arrington donated his research and personal papers to USU and also donated microfilms of his pre-1982 diaries to the LDS Church Archives, with the condition that the diaries not be read until 25 years after his death. However, the LDS Church broke the agreement when shortly after Arrington's death they argued that they owned part of the collection, and asked Arrington's daughter to excise portions of Arrington's diary. After legal negotiation, half of a box of the collection was given to the LDS Church Archives.
Early life Leonard Arrington was born in Twin Falls, Idaho on July 2, 1917, the third of eleven children. His parents, Noah and Edna, were farmers and devout Latter-day Saints, the largest and most well-known branch of Mormonism. Arrington grew up as an aspiring farmer and active member and one of the first national officers of the National FFA Organization. For his FFA independent project, he raised several hundred Rhode Island Red chickens and won a prize for them at the Idaho State Fair in 1934. The chicken project helped him win a Union Pacific Railroad scholarship.
Arrington was also a member of the Boy Scouts and read books by Ernest Thompson Seton, naturalist co-founder of the Boy Scouts. In the summers, he slept outside in the family orchard to have a quiet place to read and enjoyed an idyllic country life. On one evening observing nature, Arrington had a transcendent experience where he felt "an intimate kinship with the world" which he said "made it easy for me [...] to integrate personal religious experiences and intuitions with the more formal affirmations, practices, forms, and ceremonies of the organized church."
During the Great Depression, Arrington was curious about the price of potatoes and set about his first economic experiment. He put slips of paper in some of the sacks of potatoes his family harvested, with the information that the potatoes were sold for five cents per hundred pound sack and requested that the recipient tell him the price they paid via his address. Several people responded, and one person had paid two dollars for the same sack of potatoes.
Education Arrington's father offered to pay for Arrington to serve as an LDS Church missionary, but not for a university education. Arrington did not serve an LDS mission, but considered his educational endeavors a form of church service. Under a scholarship to the U of I, Arrington studied agricultural science in 1935, later changing to agricultural economics. George S. Tanner, the director of the LDS Institute at the U of I, was a progressive intellectual Mormon who taught Arrington that Christianity and science could be compatible and that other translations of the Bible could assist in its interpretation. One of the university's newest economics professors, Erwin Graue, taught the ideas of Alfred Marshall and influenced Arrington to see economics as a study of human relationships and not just mathematical economic forces. Marshall wrote that religious fervor could influence people to act altruistically.
Arrington graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1939. Arrington then began graduate work under a Kenan teaching fellowship at UNC. and married Grace Fort in 1942. She joined the LDS Church in 1946.
In World War II, he served in the Army in North Africa and Italy from 1942 to 1945. He worked in the prisoner-of-war (POW) processing division and for Italy's Institute of Statistics. While stationed at a POW camp for Italian prisoners in North Africa, Arrington reported having another transcendent experience after reading The Brothers Karamazov. He reported feeling that God wanted him to become a teacher and a writer about religion and economics.
Academic career
He was a professor at Utah State Agricultural College in Logan, Utah (which became USU in 1957) from 1946 to 1972. He completed a PhD in economics at UNC in 1952, taking a year's leave from teaching and moving to North Carolina to complete his coursework. Arrington easily completed the coursework and examinations, as he had already been teaching much of the material and published several articles in the meantime.
In 1958, the HUP published Arrington's Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900, based on his doctoral dissertation, Mormon Economic Policies and Their Implementation on the Western Frontier, 1847–1900. Great Basin Kingdom was published through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which subsidized publication of books about economic history. Under the grant, all royalties went back into the fund to help publish more books; Arrington did not receive royalties from the book until the University of Utah reprinted it in 1993.
Arrington completed much of the research for Great Basin Kingdom in the LDS Church's library archives. Aware of the hostile relationship the archives had at the time with academic research, Arrington took John A. Widtsoe's advice and started his research with published materials and theses, working up to unpublished materials. Arrington was able to circumvent A. William Lund's policy of personally approving all notes taken in the archives: Arrington took his notes on a typewriter using carbon copy paper, enabling him to leave a copy with Lund and take his own copy home. In order to rewrite his dissertation into Great Basin Kingdom, Arrington took a sabbatical in 1956 and 1957 and was granted a fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
In Great Basin Kingdom, Arrington traces the Mormon pioneer practices of "central planning, organized cooperation, and the partial socialization of investment implicit in Mormon theory" to the democratic theory of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Arrington also noted that pioneers found religious significance in creating farms out of previously wild land, making irrigation central to their way of life. The way Mormons freely distributed irrigation water—through a central canal and diverted when needed—reflected their communal values. While the Mormon cooperative economy died out in the 1880s, their cooperative spirit anticipated later governmental planning. cited in Great Basin Kingdom's thorough documentation called attention to previously hidden sources in the LDS Church Archives. Dean L. May and Donald Worster criticized Great Basin Kingdom for overreaching its thesis that organized irrigation could rejuvenate a culture. One biographer attributes Arrington's overvaluing Mormon achievements to a lack of empirical studies on pioneer settlements at the time. Still, the book was received as an instant classic that raised the standard for Mormon scholarship. Dale L. Morgan, though critical of the lack of attention to the Gentile (i.e., non-Mormon) influence on Mormons, said that it was an indispensable ordering of Mormon data. The book is still considered one of the significant books on Mormon history.
From 1958 to 1959, he was a Fulbright Professor of American Economics at the University of Genoa in Italy. After returning from Italy, Arrington arranged for donations from patrons to fund the writing of Mormon biographies. Much of these biographies were researched and written by graduate students and other assistants, but published under Arrington's name with acknowledgements of the student work. Also in 1959, Arrington wrote an article featured in the first issue of BYU Studies entitled "An Economic Interpretation of 'The Word of Wisdom.'" The article argued that Brigham Young's enforcement of the Word of Wisdom as a commandment was motivated by a desire to keep cash inside Utah (and not spent on luxury imports). BYU Studies was suspended for a year, which Ernest L. Wilkinson told Arrington was because of his revisionist history paper.
From 1966 to 1967 he worked as a visiting professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1972 to 1987 he was Lemuel H. Redd Jr. Professor of Western American History at BYU. In 1977, he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the U of I (his alma mater), and in 1982 USU awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree.
Historical associations Arrington helped establish the MHA in 1965 and served as its first president from 1966 to 1967. After Arrington's article caused the suspension of BYU studies, it became wary of publishing any controversial material. Arrington formed the MHA in part to make a place where controversial material could be discussed. The association welcomed anyone with an interest in Mormon history. Wesley Johnson attended the inaugural meeting and proposed that the association could publish Mormon studies articles in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, a publication he helped form. Johnson's proposal was accepted and members of the Mormon History Association submitted papers to Dialogue.
Arrington also founded the Western Historical Quarterly and served as president of the Western History Association (1968–69), the Agricultural History Society (1969–70), and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (1981–82). For his distinction in writing American history he was awarded the Western History Association Prize in 1984 and he was made a Fellow of the Society of American Historians in 1986.
LDS Church Historian and Church History Division
Appointment