Backstory: The Man Who Would Be King
[The title links to the DMI post, by the way.] I got this book in the mail about two months ago and finished it about a month ago, I just haven't been quite sure how to approach a blog post on it. Strang is an interesting subject, but Speek's narrative offers little or no analysis or commentary on the events it recounts, and I see that as a problem, especially when most of the readers are Restorationists (a term which includes the Mormon denominations in the Midwest as well as the main LDS Church headquartered in Utah). For example, Speek recounts, in two pages, Strang's finding of "three small plates of brass" and the announcement of his translation of the plates one week later with no commentary whatsover and no references to any scholarly reflection on the plates or translation, either in defense or criticism of Strang's production. Here's an excerpt from the book:
A week later, Strang invited his supporters to a meeting where he read his translation of the plates. Quite a crowd had gathered to see and handle the brass objects. Strang told the crowd the plates were an ancient record of a man called the Rajah Manchou of Vorito, who had fallen in battle at that site. Before the raja died, he had managed, under the command and direction of God, to bury a short history of his people.
You're probably curious what the Rajah Manchou of Vorito had to say. Here's a brief passage from Strang's translation, as given in the book:
My people are no more. The mighty are fallen and the young slain in battle. The bones are bleached on the plain by the noonday shadow. ...
Other strangers shall inhabit thy land [where] I an ensign there will set up. ... The forerunner men shall kill, but a mighty Prophet there shall dwell. [From ch. 2; second ellipsis in original.]
Hmm, I wonder who "mighty Prophet" might be referring to? It seems like you just have to provide some critical context to such an account, or at least drop a footnote or two to an account that does so, with a brief comment on what the substance of the scholarship is. Bracketing the ultimate question of veracity doesn't mean an author can't or shouldn't provide any commentary. I did note this weakness of the book in my comments at DMI, although I didn't dwell on it.
I guess the other thing to note about the post is that I really didn't have anything in particular in mind to say when I sat down last night to bang out the post. Sometimes writing and thinking occur in parallel. Two interesting things hit me while I was writing that I tried to convey in the post. First, the contrast between Strang and Brigham Young. Strang obviously (well, it's obvious to me, your experience may vary) patterned his activity and religious claims after Joseph Smith's experiences. But Brigham did his own thing and never (as far as I know) felt insecure about his religious authority because, for example, he didn't stumble on a cache of buried plates somewhere in Wyoming. In retrospect, it's a little surprising he didn't feel some need, early on, to make some showing along those lines. Brigham was his own man. That's one of the marks of a natural leader, I think. And it was a time when the LDS community really needed a natural leader. These days the system marches on regardless of who's at the top of the org chart.
The second thing that hit me (I didn't get to this one in the post) was the perspective the Strang period throws on Joseph Smith III and the formation of the RLDS Church. Strang didn't figure out how to lead a Mormon community that could get along with the neighbors. But Joseph III did! And he did so a couple of generations before the Utah branch of the movement figured it out (step one: renounce polygamy). The failures of Strang, Rigdon, Wight, and others who tried to lead groups of Mormons in the immediate post-Nauvoo period make the experience of Joseph III (when he finally deigned to lead the Midwest Mormons around 1860) look better. Maybe I'll have to check out his biography again and actually read it this time.
