Leonard Arrington

The central figure of LDS academic history as Kyle reads him — economic historian, founder of the Mormon History Association, and the Church Historian whose tenure defined the so-called “Camelot” era of open Mormon scholarship. The dedicated biography Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (by Gregory A. Prince) is Kyle’s main source: it frames Arrington as a model of Institution Building and the Republic of Letters, a leader who deflected titles (“titles were not important to him”) and got the work done without making it about himself — a pairing Kyle ties to Whatever You Are Be A Good One. The “Knopf revision episode,” where Arrington’s manuscript was judged “too pro-Church,” becomes a case study in finding the line between hagiography and reductionism.

Arrington recurs across Kyle’s Mormon-intellectual reading as the embodiment of the scholar-vs-institution tension. In Stretching The Heavens he is the head of the same Camelot-era Historical Department who hired (and then saw blacklisted) Eugene England; he organized the Mormon History Association as an independent forum, and his early BYU Studies article arguing the Word of Wisdom’s enforcement was financially as much as spiritually motivated got that journal suspended for a year. His landmark work Great Basin Kingdom surfaces in Working Toward Zion as the text a Manila area presidency studied to learn how LDS pioneers raised their standard of living. In Faith is Not Blind he’s quoted on how settlement-era hardship “became more formidable with each subsequent telling” — folklore inflating over time, a note about the gap between remembered and actual history.

Context: Leonard J. Arrington (1917–1999) was an American economic historian, author of the seminal Great Basin Kingdom (1958), and the first professionally trained historian to serve as Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1972–1982), a period of unusual scholarly openness later curtailed. He is often called the “Dean of Mormon History.”

Where this appears

• Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History — the Prince biography; Arrington as institution-builder and model of nuanced religious history
• Stretching The Heavens — head of the Camelot-era Historical Department; founded the MHA; the Word of Wisdom article that got BYU Studies suspended
• Working Toward Zion — Great Basin Kingdom read by the Manila area presidency for lessons on a Zion economy
• Faith is Not Blind — quoted on settlement hardship growing in the telling