Dale Morgan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
American historian Lowell Dale Morgan (18 December 1914 — 30 March 1971), generally cited as Dale Morgan or Dale L. Morgan, was an accomplished researcher, biographer, editor, and critic. He specialized in material on Utah history, Mormon history, the American fur trade, and overland trails. His work is known both for its comprehensive research and accuracy and for the fluid imagery of his prose.
Morgan was forced by his deafness to communicate by letters throughout his professional life. This effort created a written network for scholars interested in Western American themes. Vast stores of correspondence indicate his willingness to help another writer or scholar, to provide information on sources and materials, or offer advice on projects. Many emerging scholars, particularly those out of the academic mainstream, considered him a mentor. As a result, Morgan stood in the center of a scholarly group of literary figures involved in history and biography of the American West. These individuals included Juanita Brooks, Fawn Brodie, Bernard DeVoto, Charles Kelly, J. Roderic Korns, A. Russell Mortensen, William Mulder, and Harold Schindler.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Morgan was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1914 and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the city. He was the oldest of the four children of James Lowell Morgan and Emily Holmes. His father, James Morgan died of appendicitis when Dale Morgan was only five years old. To raise her children, Emily Morgan worked her way through college and became an elementary school teacher.
A promising and intelligent youth, Morgan contracted meningitis in August 1929. The disease left him with a near total loss of hearing. Emily Morgan kept him home from school for an entire year, hoping that some hearing would return or that Morgan would learn skills to cope with his loss. Always shy, he became even more socially introverted, devoting much of his time to reading and study. Morgan recalled that he had not yet reconciled himself to his deafness by the time he returned to school. In 1951, in a letter to Marguerite Sinclair Reusser, he wrote that a minor family crisis in March 1931 led to a hysterical outburst. During this emotional time, Morgan finally confided in his mother the difficulties and fears he had faced over the loss of his hearing. I began to face the future instead of wasting myself in bitter regret over a past that was beyond my reach. That was the beginning of my adjustment to the fact that my hearing was gone and would probably never return. (Topping, p. 116) At this time, he began a lifelong pattern of writing, producing diaries, letters, and personal records.
Morgan learned and became quite competent in lip reading, but was never comfortable with the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the method. His friends noted that he could still speak quite well, although his conversation was locked in a high-pitched monotone. Instead he turned to communicating in writing, carrying on personal conversations with the use of note cards. Archivist and historiographer Gary Topping noted that ...because Morgan’s deafness shifted his communication with the external world entirely to the written world, his world became a literary world, and the long hours of practice with the written world turned him into a virtuosos of English prose in the same way that musical practice produces virtuosity. (Topping, p. 118)
The advent of the Depression, and Morgan’s deafness, reduced his ability to find employment after graduation from high school. However, an admiring English teacher found college funds for him in a vocational rehabilitation program. From 1933 to 1937, Morgan studied commercial art at the University of Utah, taking advantage of known talents in drawing and painting. However, he found his main interests in the social sciences and literary studies. He added to his writing experience by contributing to a student publication, “The Pen”, where he developed a close association with other students who would have a future in history and literature. These included historian Helen Zeese (later Papanikolas), Ray Benedict West, Richard Skowcroft, and biographer Fawn McKay (later Brodie). McKay especially proved to be a lasting influence, as their friendship and correspondence lasted throughout their lives.
[edit] Career as historian
In 1937, with the country still in the Depression, Morgan was unable to find a position in commercial art. He took a minor position as a book reviewer with a local newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune. In 1938, again helped by a recommendation from a friend, Morgan joined the Utah Historical Records Survey, and later became director of the Federal Writers Project.
In these New Deal relief programs, Morgan found his skills in research and organization. He acquired a deep understanding of archives and information retrieval from his work in the archives of the LDS Church. Within months, he was a major figure in the survey of state and county records, organizing much of the work and completing the writing of surveys done for state and county archives. By 1940 he was overseeing both programs, and by 1942 had supervised the production of histories of Ogden and Provo as well as acting as a primary writer of The WPA Guide To Utah. His work was well received by his superiors in the east and by local historians. Also in 1940, Morgan published a historical abstract in the Utah Historical Quarterly, analyzing primary documents dealing with the State of Deseret, including the constitution and early ordinances of the state, with a lengthy editorial introduction explaining their context. He also was involved in other personal projects, including a history of grazing in the western states.
In 1942, being unable to serve in the armed forces, Morgan moved to Washington, D.C. and worked in a war agency, the Office of Price Administration. While there, he found time to use the National Archives and the Library of Congress, accessing materials on Mormon and Western themes including information on Native American and mountain man activities. Morgan developed specialized research skills in Washington, D. C., including initiating the compilation of massive bibliographies, lists of primary sources, and transcriptions of newspaper articles, which he called his "tool books." These materials allowed him to complete projects he had begun in Utah, which were published in book form as The Humboldt: Highroad of the West in 1943, and The Great Salt Lake’ in 1947. Many historians consider The Humboldt his best written book. He also continued research for a planned multi-volume history of the Mormons and Utah.
After the war, Morgan began a period as an independent historian. He left Washington, D.C. and continued his research in New York and New England as well as along the Mormon trail through Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. In 1947, he received his first Guggenheim fellowship. In late 1947, again in Utah, Morgan edited the Utah Historical Quarterly, publishing the journals of the John Wesley Powell expeditions of 1869-72 between 1947 and 1949. During these years, he narrowed his focus to the American fur trade and, shortly after leaving Utah yet again, produced several authoritative and definitive books, including Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953). A 1954 appointment as a senior historian at the University of California's Bancroft Library, ended Morgan’s precarious but productive years as an independent historian. In California, he wrote or edited some forty books including The West of William H. Ashley (1964), as well as producing well received articles and reviews. He received a second Guggenheim fellowship in 1970.
Morgan died of cancer in 1971 at the age of fifty-six. Much of his projected work on Mormon and Utah themes was unfinished. Later writers benefited from his extensive bibliographies, “tool books”, and his initial chapters of a work on Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. He was the moving force behind the first National Union Catalogue of works about Mormonism, which others expanded from its initial 700 entries. Using these documents, Brigham Young University librarian Chad J. Flake completed and published A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930 (1978), with an introduction written by Morgan before his death, which is considered an indispensable reference work for Mormon historians. However, according to Phillip Walker, 1000 crates of Morgan's personal papers, research notes, working drafts and bibliographies were deposited with the Bancroft library, and remain uncatalogued and unavailable to researchers.
The Utah State Historical Society has established the annual Dale L. Morgan Award, presented to the author of the best scholarly article published in The Utah Historical Quarterly.
[edit] Skills and Criticism
Morgan was a descendent of Orson Pratt, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Morgan’s family actively participated in church activities. As a young adult, however, he withdrew from the LDS faith and he did not affiliate with any religious organization as an adult. He was insistent that his work in western history and Mormonism present a completely objective, naturalistic viewpoint on religious matters, and encouraged other Utah and western historians to follow his example. In 1943, writing to S. A. Burgess, a historian of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ), Morgan said that his: ... viewpoint about Mormon history is that of the sociologist, the psychologist, the political, economic, and social historian. (Walker, p. 43) Historian of the Latter Day Saint movement Jan Shipps [1] credits Morgan, along with three other notable historians - Bernard DeVoto, Fawn McKay Brodie, and Juanita Brooks, with establishing a basis for the new historiography of Mormonism through significant Mormon related works in the 1940s and 1950s.
Morgan’s intellectual training in the federal WPA programs had both advantages and disadvantages for him as a historian. The independent nature of these programs encouraged his critical judgment and work ethic, forced him to work with a variety of people, and exposed him to a wide training ground on source development and research. However, it did not lead him to consider the larger meaning of the facts he gathered or to understand the philosophy and theory of history, as taught in an academic setting. In fact, during the trials of his career, he became quite antagonistic to academic requirements. In response to a negative academic review of a work by his friend DeVoto, he wrote: ...the term ‘history’ had better be redefined to mean, ’a species of writing produced by or enroute to a Ph.D.’ I have had enough troubles trying to break a path alongside this main-traveled road to know something of the snobberies at work here, and the ways in which the academic world and even the world of learning are geared to these attitudes. (Topping, p. 130)
According to Topping, this lack of perspective and understanding led Morgan to believe ...that historical facts contain their own meaning, and that the historian’s intellect ought to be active only in internal and external criticism, establishing the authenticity and credibility of sources, yet passive when it came to establishing the larger significance … (Topping, p. 146) As a result, Morgan ...fell short of the interpretive potential of (his) sources...asserting that the facts would somehow convey their own meaning without any help from him… (Topping, p. 6)
[edit] Symposium on Morgan
In August 1985, Sunstone offered a segment on Dale Morgan and Mormon History as part of their annual symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah. Historian William Mulder, a friend of Morgan, presented the segment.
[edit] Selected Publications
- The State of Deseret (1940)
- Utah: A Guide to the State (1941)
- The Humboldt: Highroad of the West (1943)
- The Great Salt Lake (1947)
- Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953)
- Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail. (1963)
- The West of William H. Ashley (1964)
[edit] With other writers and editors
- West from Fort Bridger: the pioneering of the Immigrant Trails across Utah, 1846-1850 original diaries and journals edited and with introductions by J. Roderic Korns and Dale L. Morgan; originally published 1951. Revised and updated by Will Bagley and Harold Schindler. Publisher: Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0874211786.
[edit] References
- Billington, Ray A., "Introduction," in Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (1973);
- Topping, Gary. Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History. 2003, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. ISBN 0-8061-3561-1
- Walker, John Phillip, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History (1986).
