Cheryl Bruno is the editor of “Secret Covenants: New Insights into Early Mormon Polygamy.” She has come up with some surprises to the polygamy narrative we’ve all been taught. Check out our conversation….
Don’t miss our other conversations with Cheryl: https://gospeltangents.com/people/cheryl-bruno/
Copyright © 2024
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission
Intro to Secret Covenants
GT 00:31 Welcome to Gospel Tangents, I’m excited to have a very busy author. You’ve got two new books out. We’re going to talk about the green one. So go ahead and tell us who you are. And you’re the author of what?
Cheryl 00:44 I’m Cheryl Bruno and the newest book I have out is called “Secret Covenants.” Right there.
GT 00:50 Alright.
Cheryl 00:51 It’s about early Mormon polygamy.
GT 00:54 Alright. Tell us more about it. It’s an anthology, where you’ve got a bunch of different authors that write about it. We would just like to do a little bit of an overview here. Give us an overview of the book.
Cheryl 01:05 Great, I’m the editor of this book. I’ll tell you the story of how it came about. Gary Bergera from Signature Books contacted me about two years ago. Since then he’s retired. But he contacted me and said, we’d love for you to pull together a book on polygamy and just gather together a few essays that have already been written. We’ll put them together into a book. I thought to myself, I know a bunch of authors on early Mormon polygamy. I bet that I can get them all to write something new and interesting for this book. So, I did. I called Don Bradley, Todd Compton…
GT 01:48 Who just won the best documentary award at MHA, (Mormon History Association) by the way.
Cheryl 01:52 There you go. Todd Compton just won at MHA. We’re here at MHA. He just won the Best Documentary Book for his,” In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents.” He’s one of our well-known authors on polygamy. And we have Susan Staker, William V. Smith, just so many. Then we have actually two new authors in this book as well who Rick will be interviewing and let everybody know about Mary Ann Clements and Mark Tensmeyer. I think this is their first published article, but I think I haven’t mentioned Christopher C. Smith. I know I’ve probably missed somebody.
GT 02:37 Yeah, we can look in the table of contents, I guess. We don’t want to leave anybody out.
Cheryl 02:40 We don’t, so we have Clair Barrus, Christopher C. Smith, Don Bradley, Susan Staker. John Dinger, Todd Compton, Devery Anderson, I don’t know if we mentioned Devery.
GT 02:56 No, we didn’t mention Devery.
Cheryl 02:57 He’s also done a lot.
GT 02:58 An award-winning author.
Cheryl 03:00 We have several award-winning authors here and William Victor Smith, and then our new ones: Mark Tensmeyer, and Mary Ann Clements. It’s just an amazing lineup. They’ve all written some original things here.
GT 03:15 Well, you forgot one.
Cheryl 03:16 Myself. {both laughing}
Cheryl 03:20 But, I have an essay in the book as well. Of course, I have written on polygamy. We’ve come up with some new insights,
GT 03:30 Very, very new insights. So, I love it. This is just going to be a quick overview. One of the nice things about an anthology is you don’t have to start at the beginning and go to the end. You can skip around.
Cheryl 03:41 Exactly.
GT 03:41 I’ve done that. And so, I wanted to read Mark and Clair. They cover the same time period from two different points of view. Tell us about that.
Cheryl 03:51 Okay, so, first of all, I’ll just say that right now, we have a big controversy going on in the polygamy studies world about whether Joseph Smith actually practiced polygamy or not. There’s pushback on that. This book was not written, since it started about two years ago. We didn’t write the book to respond to that. But it just so happens that some of the essays do respond to it. Right before it went to press, Mark edited his chapter real quick, and made it a little bit more updated. His essay in particular responds to this question, Did Joseph Smith practice polygamy? He did such a great job at addressing that. It’s very current and very apropos to what’s going on right now.
GT 03:55. Yeah, well, not only that, but Clair talked about the revelations that Joseph had, as early as 1831. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Cheryl 04:53 Well, yeah. The 1831 Revelation, I don’t think Clair, really, he discusses it. But I don’t think he really includes it necessarily, in a polygamy document. But he does discuss it and tell us his analysis of that. Then he also talks about since Joseph was known to have said that he had the Polygamy Revelation, when he revealed section 132. He said he had already had polygamy revealed to him before that time. So, Clair has gone back and investigated what those documents were, what revelations that those could refer to. He came up with quite a few, the revelation that Joseph Smith had received, pulled it from here and there. And so that’s really interesting.
GT 05:44 Yeah, it’s very interesting. I haven’t read a chapter I haven’t liked yet. So let’s talk a little bit about Don Bradley, because he tries to date the Fanny Alger episode. It’s as early as 1833. Don dates it later than anybody else. Can you tell us more about that?
Cheryl 06:05 Yes, this is actually something he’s done work on for years, I think he presented at a conference one time, where he actually used the title,” Dating Fanny Alger”, which is really cute.
GT 06:18 I attended that.
Cheryl 06:18 Yes, I did, too. I was there. But since then, he’s done much more research on that. He’s gotten it down. He’s narrowed it down very closely to when he thinks the Fanny Alger incident occurred. It talks about, I mean, he really, really digs down. I think I’ve heard Don say that if you can put something into chronological order, you can really understand the history of it. So, that’s what he tries to do in this article, or this chapter. He tries to date these things. It’s a little bit difficult to do, because some of the sources and the documents that we have on Fanny Alger are late, or there’s problems with them. He acknowledges that in his chapter, but I think he uses them quite well. I think that you’ll really feel that he has come very close to a correct date on that.
GT 07:15 Yeah, and it makes sense because Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated in 1837 because of the “dirty, nasty, filthy affair”/scrape. Don goes into a lot of detail on why. Anyway, they refer to the same thing. But it makes sense, if it’s 1836 that the “incident”, I’ll just call that, “the incident in the barn” happened. It makes sense that Oliver would maybe talking about that in 1837, when Joseph wasn’t very happy about that. So chronologically, I think it makes a lot of sense. I really do.
Cheryl 07:53 Yes and he uses things like when Joseph Smith leaves town, different things like that. Who was in town at the time? Who was living next to who? And many things like this that he uses in his analysis.
GT 08:06 Yeah.
Cheryl 08:07 I’ve got to tell you, I asked everyone to give me about 50 pages in their chapters. I didn’t want more than 50 pages and Don took quite a long time. Then he submitted me something that was 80 pages long on the subject. I kept saying, Don, it can’t be 80 pages. It’s got to be less. You’ve got to cut it some more. You’ve got to cut it some more. So, he synthesizes. He’s made it very tight. I think it’s exciting reading to read it. But he’s got a lot of information on it.
Giving Polygamy Deniers Credibility
GT 08:41 Yeah, well, let’s talk a little bit about your chapter, you talked about Emma Smith’s public denials about polygamy. Tell us about that. Well, before you do, I will just preview a little bit that there were surprises there.
Cheryl 08:56 Yes, let me just say that some of these essays do have some real surprises. That’s why we call it, “New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy,” and particularly the chapter that Don and Chris Smith have done together. [They] present the Fanny Alger affair in a way that I have never read before. And so, it is brand new. It’s controversial. It’s exciting. And so, a lot of these articles are like that. For mine, I’m building on the work of the late Johnny Stevenson. He wanted to show that Emma did not participate in any of the plural marriages. I know that we did hear that there was a possibility that Emma placed the hand of the wives into the hand of Joseph, or in other ways, allowed Joseph or gave him permission to marry people. But Johnny Stevenson objected to that. He had some really good research showing that Emma may not have participated in his plural marriages. So when he passed away a while ago, I didn’t have his research on it, but he and I had discussed it, so I had some of his sources. And so, I want to acknowledge him for the idea he had behind it, and I want to get it out. Because I didn’t know of anyone else who was working on it. We know that Emma denied very strongly that Joseph had ever participated or taught polygamy. I wanted to dig into that and see what the denials were, how late they were, who they were coming from. And so I talk about that first. Then I talk about whether she participated and the dating on that. Then I conclude by giving three possibilities of why she may have denied polygamy. Because this was written before the controversy of whether Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, I just assumed that he did, and that she’s denying something that happened. I may have gone a little bit of a different direction if I had realized that this would become such an issue. But for the time being, I just, I assume that Joseph did practice polygamy. And if you did, then what might be some reasons why Emma would deny it so strongly?
GT 11:27 Okay. So because you still think Joseph practiced polygamy.
Cheryl 11:33 Yes, I absolutely do. I believe he did.
GT 11:36 But, the question of whether Emma participated in the sealings, you’ve come to believe that she has not.
Cheryl 11:43 Yes, I think we have stronger evidence that she did not participate in that. The interesting thing is that Andy Ehat, wrote a thesis on quite, I mean, everybody loves Andy Ehat’s thesis. What he said was that in order to receive her ordinances that Emma had to acquiesce to plural marriage. So, everyone who’s written about that has followed Andy and just kind of cited him and not done any new research, but just followed what he said about that. But I’m going to push back against that a little bit. The reason why is because of my work on William Marks. It seems that William Marks never came to accept plural marriage, but he did receive higher ordinances. So, if he did, perhaps, Emma might have as well.
GT 12:42 Which leads into a whole new book on William Marks. I don’t have a copy of that one yet. {both chuckling}
Cheryl 12:48 Okay. So, within a month, these two books have come out.
GT 12:53 You’re a busy lady!
Cheryl 12:54 The book I edited and also a biography that I did with John Dinger on William Marks.
GT 13:00 Okay, can you give us a little snippet on that one really quick?
Cheryl 13:03 Oh, well, I just have become so enamored with this early church figure. And yet, people just don’t know very much about him.
GT 13:11 Yeah, he is in the RLDS tradition. (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.)
Cheryl 13:14 But he was so involved in Nauvoo. And so, when I gave a talk today in MHA about William Marks, I asked people in the audience if they had heard of William Marks. Since they’re all Mormon historians, they had heard of William Marks, most Mormons have not heard of him. But these people had and then I said, raise your hand if you know more than three facts about William Marks, and nobody in the room did. So I asked if they knew two facts. There was one gentleman who knew two facts about William Marks. But I think there’s a real need for this biography because he was such an important figure. And yet because Brigham Young found him a challenge to his leadership, he’s just erased him from history and pushed him out. And we’ve just forgotten about him in our tradition.
GT 14:10 All right, well, we’re just doing a quick overview. It was great to get together with Cheryl. But I will say this. Why don’t you show the camera the book again? Cheryl has signed her chapter, as has Mary Ann Clements and Clair Barris. We’re going to give away a free copy of “Secret Covenants.” So go to gospeltangents.com/contests. And you could win a copy. We’re going to try to get a lot of people to interview to talk about this. Do you have any final words?
Cheryl 14:46 You’re going to love this book. I’m telling you there are new insights. You may not agree and if you don’t, I’d love to hear about that. But you will be interested.
GT 14:55 Do you want to give your email address?
Cheryl 14:5 Yes, I will get my email address. It’s clbruno@gmail.com.
GT 15:02 Okay, alright. All the disagreements can go to Cheryl. All right. Thanks again, Cheryl, for giving us an introduction to “Secret Covenants.”
Cheryl 15:12 Thanks for having me.
{End of Part 1}
Copyright © 2024
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:41 — 15.3MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Email | | More
