Professor Peter Coviello

Polygamy was such a ready-to-hand way to dismiss any Mormon claim to dignity, sovereignty, peace, anything you wanted, and to do it as what happened in the 19th century, frantically, in frantically racializing terms.

They're Mohammedan.

They're Indian-like.

The followers are slave-like in their sycophancy to ecclesiastical leaders.

So the Mormons are always being produced as dubiously white people.

Like there's a great line in a Jack London story where somebody says, well, you can't get those who are white.

Oh, they ain't white.

They're Mormons.

And that's a real – of course, in the 19th century, the Mormons are again not wrong to hear in that.

The possibility of having become expendable life.

They are not ignorant of what the federal government does to racialized life, to black populations, native populations.

So they're not really wrong.

There was a lot happening.

Yes.

Well, Brigham Young, in a certain way that I will both say and then invite you to mistrust slightly, Brigham Young provides this excellent contrast between

Joseph Smith, who was theologically minded, intensely charismatic, oratorically gifted, and a graphomaniac.

He just wrote and wrote and wrote with tremendous down-home eloquence, like a kind of

There's a Whitmanian aspect to Joseph Smith.

That's not Brigham Young.

Brigham Young is an organizer.