White Man’s Dilemma

A tag Kyle attaches in Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling to a passage on the anti-Mormon fury that culminated in Joseph Smith’s murder. Bushman’s account stresses that the violence came not from outsiders but from “quite ordinary people … roused to levels of hatred and fear they never reached at any other time” — neighbors who “trampled down law and democratic order to destroy their imagined enemies.” The book likens Mormons in Hancock County to abolitionists in the antebellum South and Black freedmen during Reconstruction: figures who took “something powerful and valued” (biblical prophecy, equal rights) and, by twisting it, were seen as turning it “dangerous.” Kyle’s tag groups this with the book’s broader Mob Rule thread — the dynamic by which ordinary, law-abiding people abandon democratic order against a perceived familiar threat.

Where this appears

• Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling — tags Bushman’s passage on ordinary neighbors turning to mob violence, comparing the Mormons’ position to abolitionists and freedmen