Mormon Moses

The first Latter-Day Saint loved to think of himself as inscrutable. In his last year he half-boasted: "You don't know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history." He left a mixed enough legacy: "divine revelations" on subjects ranging from the Church of God to the price of stocks; a dank aura of scandal; a church which, a century after his death, has a million members.

Saint or sinner, Joseph Smith Jr., founder and prophet of Mormonism, possessed a personality so powerful and fascinating that men, and women too, have sought down the years to "know his heart." One of these is Mormon-born (but Mormon no more) Fawn M. Brodie. What she has learned she tells with skill and scholarship and admirable detachment in No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (Knopf $4).

Mormonism's early growth in the revivalist, reformist 18303 stemmed not so much from its theology (a potpourri of American religious thought spiced with a characteristic 19th-century belief in the inevitability of progress) as from the personality of Smith. Divine revelation, his ultimate authority in all things, was an unanswerable instrument of power. He used it to create and maintain his theocratic dictatorship.

When Oliver Cowdery, one of the faithful, indiscreetly started having revelations of his own, he was promptly rebuked by God in an unequivocal counter-revelation (via Joseph): "Behold, I say unto thee, Oliver ... no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this Church, excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun."

Saint or Sinner. Smith's kingdom, as he said, was of this world. In Mormonism's early, monogamous days, big, handsome Joseph exclaimed: "Whenever I see a pretty woman, I have to pray for grace." Sometimes grace failed. A Mormon apostate published a vitriolic exposure of Joseph's clandestine marriages. Then one day, after long argument with his (original) wife, Joseph announced a new revelation ; by it, plural marriage became a part of the Mormon code, remained so until 1890.

What manner of man was this, who could convince people that his will was God's, even in the most mundane matters, even when it flew in the face of a frontier civilization's deep-dyed Puritan morality? Was he shameless fraud or true prophet? In Mrs. Brodie's well-documented version, he held something of both.

Joseph Smith Jr., the New England farm boy obsessed with the idea of digging for buried treasure, who claimed to have "translated" the Book of Mormon from golden plates (by putting a "seer's stone" in his hat, then pulling the hat over his face), was an out-&-out impostor.

Martyr's Crown. But as the early Mormons moved westward, across Ohio to Missouri and then to Illinois, harried from Zion to Zion, sometimes tarred and feathered, sometimes killed in skirmishes with gentiles, Impostor Joseph Smith came close to being a prophet. Smith (Biographer Brodie believes) gradually hypnotized himself as well as others. He saw himself now as a true Moses, and at the end, faced with the choice of flight or death by lynching, he wavered, then took death and a martyr's crown.

After Mrs. Brodie, more men will know Smith's history, and him also. Against the lusty, florid background of the frontier stands her careful, analytical study of the man whose legend present-day Mormons know before they learn the alphabet, the man to whom Brigham Young paid this revealing tribute: "He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor's wife every night, run horses and gamble . . . but the doctrine he has produced will save you and me and the whole world."

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