Interview
Meeting of the Minds - Richard and Claudia Bushman

Dennis Lythgoe
Volume 23, No. 2

The following are excerpts of an interview that Dennis Lythgoe conducted of Claudia and Richard Bushman when they were in Salt Lake City to give lectures on their current research – he at Westminster College and she to deliver the Arrington Lecture on Elizabeth Kane. Although Dennis went on to write an article based on this interview that appeared in "Scene" section of the 7 November 1999 issue of the Deseret News, this is the first time the interview itself has appeared in print.

DL: Tell us about your roots.

R: I was born in Salt Lake City, but at age four, my family moved to Portland, and I grew up there.

C: I’m from California. We’re part of what I call the second Mormon diaspora from Utah. The first went to Canada and Mexico with polygamous families, and the next went to the West coast. Both of my parents went to southern California, and then migrated to the San Francisco area to make a living.

DL: How did you meet?

C: In Cambridge. After World War II, many eastern colleges decided to adopt a more national focus. Richard was picked up as a very promising young man to go to Harvard, and I got a scholarship to Wellesley in the same kind of situation. 

In those days, not many LDS students were in the area. It was a nice group, small enough that I had heard about Richard from a dozen people before I met him. He was sort of a legend.

I studied English literature. My master’s was in American literature, but I migrated toward history and literature, so my doctorate is in American Studies from Boston University.

DL: I understand that your research has dovetailed in recent years.

R: Actually, our working together started with researching farming. Claudia’s current book is a study of a Virginia farmer. In 1991, we decided we would do a large study of farming in the 18th century. Claudia ran into the diary of a farmer named John Walker, who had written a fabulous, rich account of both his farming life and his spiritual life, as well as the society around him. Claudia thought it was worth a book, which it certainly is. I continued to work on farmers and, somewhere along the line, I realized it was the time to work on Joseph Smith. Then we were approached about three years ago by the editor of a series on religion in America to do a book on Mormons in America, published last year by Oxford University Press.

C: I would say we really started working together sooner than the farming project. Researching and writing history is not the life I would have lived under other circumstances. Richard has been my great teacher through all these years, and because I was married to someone at a university, going to graduate school was a relatively easy and inexpensive thing to do. I think all housewives need some structure, something to think about besides the babies and the floors. I would get ideas, and Richard would make something out of them. 

For instance, I started working on cleanliness. Richard decided we ought to do more with that. So we put together an article on it, which was jointly published. We’ve always read each other’s works, which has been very helpful. I mostly criticize Richard’s style; he mostly criticizes my ideas. All of our books are collaborations to some degree, and when we’ve gone off to various places and spent years in one place or another on sabbatical, we’ve worked very closely together. It’s been helpful for both of us to have a resident critic. 

R: We’re in the fortunate position that we don’t think or write alike. So we’re always reading against the grain when we look at each other’s writing. Claudia has never been satisfied with my style, so she is always pummeling it and shaping it, which is very helpful because she can hear the clunky parts of sentences that I can’t. Claudia has this marvelous gift for seeing things intuitively, but she doesn’t have a conscious control of what her idea is. So my task is, in a way, to tell her what she really thinks. Giving structure.

DL: Ever have conflicts when criticizing each other?

C: Sometimes it’s painful when your best idea is thrown out. If you can’t stand letting it go at first, you put it aside and come back to it the next morning, and then you say, "Yes, he was really right."

R: The good thing in our working relationship is that there is appreciation. I always feel that Claudia basically respects my imagination and that I have immense respect for her writing and for her intuitive powers. It’s a regard that underlies the criticism that makes it all possible.

C: Yes, however, I think this working relationship developed over time; it’s not a natural one. Research is not the kind of thing I would normally do. I’m a Californian. We’re not interested in the past. Even now I think, "What am I doing in this business?" And yet, you can find out fascinating things about any subject you work on for any length of time. So I think that in our working relationship, the actual project we are working on matters less than that the process – the fact that we are doing something and doing it together.

DL: How does the founding of Exponent II fit into this?

C: Exponent and other Mormon women’s projects started in the Cambridge area were an outgrowth of the women’s movement in the ‘60s when women all wanted to talk about our lives. A number of projects lead up to Exponent II: Beginner’s Boston, a guidebook to Boston; the issue of Dialogue we did; a class we did for the Institute, "The Roots and Fruits of Mormon Women" (I loved that title, but nobody else did), which became Mormon Sisters. This was 25 years ago. It’s hard to believe. 

One day, I said to Richard, "We've done all these things – what else can we do?" He said, "Well, why don't you start a newspaper?" So, Exponent II was really his idea. He was always encouraging about those projects and was always ready to consult and give his opinion.

R: These women needed to talk. They were trying to find their relationship to the women’s movement and to their Mormonism. But Claudia became very impatient with just talking. She always likes to turn talking into projects of some sort. So after they’d enjoyed talking for several months, she said, "Well, what are we going do?" So all that energy became productive.

DL: Did you know, Richard, in the early part of your marriage, that Claudia was a feminist? 

R: She was not a feminist then, but she had one quality that was impossible for me to deal with: she had more energy and need for expression than there were outlets. She had everything that she had really hoped for – she was married, she had lovely children. We weren’t rich but we were stable, and we had good friends, but there was still some restlessness in her. However, not a hint of an ideology, of a feminist movement, had reached us. Claudia recognized that women need many dimensions to their lives long before there was any feminist movement to tell women it was their right to have many dimensions to their lives. When the feminist movement came along, I don’t think it really changed her much. She’s never been an ideologue or a radical. She’s always felt women should have a chance to develop, and that’s Mormonism, that’s not secular ideology.

DL: She also has this natural energy of her own?

C: I’m a Brigham Young feminist. I want to see the talents of women developed for the benefits of the community and for themselves. 

DL: Were you satisfied with Exponent II?

C: I think Exponent II is a wonderful thing. I think it was Laurel Ulrich who said it was "like a long letter from a dear friend." Anything that builds that net of sisterhood and friendship and understanding, which I think happens much better outside the official institution, is a good thing. To just have that record of how so many people felt over a twenty-five year period, I think, is a great, great achievement. I would be proud of it if I’d had nothing to do with it. I want people to write down what they have to say. I want that to be recorded some place. 

DL: Did you have difficulties because the paper worried Church authorities?

C: I think people who do things on their own are often in tension with Church authorities because the pattern is that so much direction comes from on high. But I think you can organize your energy so you can work in a trickle down position yourself. That’s the way I see it. For my purposes, I just do what I think until I get in some sort of difficult situation, then I just move on. Last year, I produced a concert in Carnegie Hall that was a church event. We organized the Mormon oratorio chorus. We had our wonderful singers perform. We raised all the money and produced it for free for Church members and their friends. It was an artistic success, and we filled the house. We were planning to do it again, but the authorities decided it wasn’t "appropriate." Well, I don’t know why, but there’s no point in worrying about that. You just do something else. 

DL: You just roll with the punches?

C: I think so.

DL: Dick, when Claudia was in charge of Exponent II, was it a problem for you as a church leader? 

R: Well, it certainly was, because what the Church didn’t want Exponent to be in any sense official. For the stake president’s wife to be running this, it couldn’t help but seem official, at least within the bounds of our stake. I couldn’t see that when it started, but it became clear as it went along that this wasn't going to work and that’s when Claudia resigned as editor. I can see the Church’s position on that. There were never any objections to the content of Exponent; the Church just didn’t want to have something that seemed an official publication when it was not. 

C: I would point out that there was a double standard in operation of which we’re all aware. Richard was on the board of Dialogue. That didn’t seem to bother them. It’s women speaking out that’s alarming.

R: I'm not sure I agree with that. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t on the board of Dialogue when I was stake president.

C: But you were writing for Dialogue. That very issue was brought up in one of the meetings, and they said it was all right for you to write for it, but not for me to be involved in Exponent.

R: All right.

DL: My wife Marti remembers the T-shirt, "It was hard but I did it," which was attributable to you – do you remember that?

C: I don’t. Tell me about it.
[Story about an event at their home that was a huge success and, when complimented, Claudia said, "It was hard, but I did it." The women liked that response, contrasted to the usual, "Oh, it was nothing." So they made up the T-shirts to celebrate it.]

C: That’s a nice one! I’ll add it to my list of mantras.

R: It is a wonderful thing!

C: That was true of a lot of things we did. I thought it was marvelous the way people were stretched beyond the things they’d done before. Carrel Sheldon gave a little talk at the recent 25th anniversary reunion saying she had been a mother of two little children and so worn out she couldn’t do anything – couldn’t catch up with the laundry, always exhausted. Then she got started working on Exponent II, and suddenly she was doing twice as much as she’d done before and managed it all much better.

DL: Tell me about the things you did when you left Boston.

C: When we went to Delaware, I still had to finish my dissertation, which I’d been working on in Boston. It’s always hard for women to start a new life. Men move from something to something, and women move from something to nothing. So you’ve got to create a new life. It’s my experience that it takes about five years to really get established. 

I taught Women’s Studies classes and in the honors program at the University of Delaware. One of the classes I taught was about our town, Newark, which had an old academy where the signers of the Declaration of Independence had studied. I found out a lot of interesting things, but the local wisdom was that there was no history in Newark. So I made it my cocktail party conversation: "Why doesn’t Newark have a historical  society?" Finally, some of my students and I started one. It was quite a bombshell because here was this newcomer, who didn’t know anything about the town, and suddenly I was the doyenne of local history. 

We did lots of great stuff. We put out publications and organized celebrations. The Newark Historical Society became the stepping stone from which I moved to the Delaware Historical Commission, a state agency that celebrates things connected to Delaware. I was in charge of that agency for about five years. It was a wonderful time. There are only about 600,000 people in the whole state; Delaware is the kind of state where you can make a difference.

The bicentennial of the Constitution came during my tenure – a very big deal in Delaware because of the constitutional compromise that allowed this small state equal representation in the Senate. The senators from this tiny state, Biden and Roth, commute to Washington, and so they’re in town all the time. So politically, it was an extraordinary time, very interesting for me. 

R: Claudia had really become a power in the state by the time she left. She had intimidated the governor and the lieutenant governor, who wanted to put their own political lackey in charge of her organization. She faced them both down.

DL: What have been your interests in New York?

C: New York is a lot harder, a much bigger state with so many more people. Whereas I could call Sen. Roth’s office and get all kinds of things done, I can’t get anything out of Sen. Moynihan’s office. I've been teaching American Studies at Columbia, and it’s a great pleasure to teach such wonderful students. I’m teaching a class about New York City at the turn of the century, one on autobiography, and sometimes a class on California. 

We have lots of students over to our apartment, which is two blocks from campus. We have a pretty good-sized apartment, so we have frequent pot-luck suppers for our students – his in history, mine in American Studies. We get speakers – members of the faculty or some visiting important person. Richard’s graduate students gave him a plaque last year for "improving the quality of life for graduate students at Columbia."

I was talking to a faculty member who is in charge of the 250th anniversary of Columbia, which is coming up in 2003 – 4. I told him about my work on historical commemorations. So for a year and a half, I’ve been working on plans for this big commemoration. We’re going to celebrate for a year and a half. 

DL: Have you worked on Elizabeth Kane before?

C: This is my first paper on her. I think people’s first-hand accounts are invaluable for recreating a period, so I started with her diary about going south to St. George and her newly re-discovered diary that she wrote while she was in St. George. She is a terrific writer and an astute observer. They’re just gems in telling what life was like in that era. The Arrington Lecture will be published as a pamphlet. 

DL: How many books have you written?

C: I figure seven, not counting the one on John Walker. Some of these are edited books. I did two big volumes of Delaware statutes, the Constitutional ratification documents.

DL: Dick, how far are you on the Joseph Smith biography? 

R: I’m actually just barely beginning. I’m adding this book onto my first book about him so they will blend together and so that they become a single-volume biography. I’ve just written one new chapter. I’ve had the idea for this biography in my mind for a number of years, but other occupations have carried me off some of the time. I have leave for two years now, so I’m going to work on it full time. After that, I’ll probably resign to open the space to work on Joseph. I’m aiming for completion by the 200th anniversary of his birth, which is in 2005. I’m hoping I can wrap it up in four years. 

DL: It’s about time we had a definitive work on Joseph Smith. Will this be the definitive work?

R: It will be the definitive work during the year in which it is published. History books don’t last very long, as you know. It’s my aim to tell the story of his life as it has to be told but also to add two qualities – which should have been in every other biography of him – and they are his religious life and thought. All the biographies about him tell the story of his adventures. Fawn Brodie had no respect for his religious thought, so she said very little about it. My aim is to develop the direction of his religious life, which is more important than any other – both for him and the movement that he started. 

The other feature I hope to add is a cultural dimension in order to place him in his time, so we can see exactly what his contribution was compared to other religious figures of that period. Fawn Brodie was writing from a parochial stance, from inside the Church. Putting him in his milieu is why it’s taking so much time to write the book. If it were just a matter of assembling the massive Mormon materials on Joseph, that would be a huge venture in and of itself, but then to build around it the world he lived in really doubles the labor.

DL: Have you read the new Brodie biography by Bringhurt? 

R: I’ve read portions of it. The parts I read I thought were utterly enthralling. She truly was a magnetic figure. I think she was thought of as a betrayer of the faith and her heritage, but she had a love for the Mormon Church. People have told me she was devastated when she was cut off from the Church. She even asked for a blessing during her last illness. 

DL: Have you picked up anything new at this point about Joseph? 

R: It’s hard to explain, but as soon as you put Joseph in his environment, he begins to look different. So it won’t be a matter of discovering a treasure house of new documents or of revealing something new but of really understanding what’s been in the record all along. 

One thing that becomes apparent, for example, is that having a vision was not unusual in his time. There was a whole culture of people who had visions, some of them quite like Joseph’s – being told that the churches were wrong, seeing heavenly beings. But the fact that he chose to translate a book was entirely outlandish in his culture. It was just inexplicable that this uneducated person would even think of himself as a translator of a book of this kind. And that, of course, is how he presents himself: He does not tell the story of his visions in the early years; he comes across as the translator of the Book of Mormon.

It’s a variety of things like that, I feel, that can help people understand Joseph by understanding his milieu –  the word priesthood, for instance. The word priest was a derogatory term in his culture, yet he creates a whole kingdom of priests. It’s only when we realize how much priests were depreciated in his time that we begin to see that, in a way, he is reversing the Protestant Reformation. 

DL: Are you saying that the reason he did not talk about the first vision initially is that it would have made him sound too much like everybody else? 

R: Yes. It would have put him in a class with a group of local "prophets" and visionaries that would have made it much easier to dismiss him. When he goes to the ministers, they know exactly what he’s talking about, and they do dismiss him. They’ve dealt with people who have seen God and Christ all too often, especially the Methodists. The Methodists had a powerful visionary tradition, but in the 1820s the leaders were trying to stifle these forms of enthusiasm, trying to shut up people who talked that way. The 1820s was a decade of transition between the Methodists’ fundamentalist, mystical approach and a more rational approach to religion. Joseph gets caught in that crossfire of the Methodist Church. I think he learned very quickly not to talk about that vision.

DL: This is a different slant from Jim Allen’s study of the First Vision in which it was allegedly so unusual that it brought persecution. 

R: Yes, it is the fact that it was commonplace that leads to the resistance.

DL: What are you speaking about at Westminster?

R: I’m using the occasion of this speech to address a subject that has been embryonic for a number of years. It takes off from a very influential book, called Orientalism, by Edward Said, who teaches comparative literature at Columbia. Said is a Palestinian whose family was expelled to Egypt. He makes the case that orientalism – the image of the Orient generated by scholars, travelers, novelists, institutes – is really a fabrication. Outsiders construe the Orient as being sensual and despotic in terms that the Orientals themselves wouldn't recognize. He sees this attitude as an aspect of imperialism. Foreigners establish control over the government of India or Palestine, and cultural agents appear who have constructed this new land in a way that is understandable in the imperial metropolis. In time, these ideas are assimilated by the culture itself so that people in India think of themselves the way the British think of them, the way blacks think of themselves in a double take. 

In the same way, Mormons sort of describe themselves as easterners would describe them. How do you write what is true for the Mormon culture that you know first hand in a way that can also be understood by the larger culture. It forces you to think of yourself in alien terms. It’s a convoluted line of reasoning, but it’s a position I see myself in in writing this book about Joseph Smith. Am I writing it for Mormons, or am I going to try to make it intelligible for people outside the Church? 

DL: You will retire after two years, then?

R: Yes, I won’t get this book completed unless I do. There is no necessity for retiring in the academic world, but the time comes when you want to leave a little space for younger people. My life has been chewed up by the university in committee responsibilities and lecturing, and my scholarly output in the last five years has dropped sickeningly, I must say. 

DL: How many books have you written?

R: Six. I’m one behind my wife.

C: Richard’s at Princeton this year. He has an apartment there. That gives him a lot of free time.

R: I am at the Shelby Cullom Davis Research Center. They take about six fellows a year strictly to do their own writing. The theme for these two years is conversion, so everyone there is researching how minds are changed. I’m working on Mormon conversion. What does it mean to convert to Mormonism? What changes actually take place in your mind and in your habits? How does this come about? I’m actually just writing a biography of Joseph Smith, but I’ll give a paper on the nature of conversion to Mormonism.

DL: When you retire, will you stay in New York?

R: Yes, we'll stay at our Columbia apartment in New York. It’s very comfortable. 

C: In the meantime, we have bought a house in Provo, but that’s another story.

DL: So eventually you will move there?

C: No, not necessarily.

R: We bought it because it’s been in our family 130 years. It’s an old adobe house. We just hated to see it go out of the family, so we bought it. We rent it out in the winter and live in it in the summer when we came out here to work.

DL: Would it be difficult to move back to Utah after all your years in the East? 

R: We spent a year at the Huntington in Pasadena. We loved Pasadena. We love our summers in Provo.

C: We spent a year in Chapel Hill. We loved it there.

R: Actually, New York City is a powerful magnet. It’s a wonderful place when you’re older because there is so much going on, the transportation is so easy, you can have your groceries delivered, plus you can have a marvelous cultural life. So I think we just may stay there because we love it.

Dennis Lythgoe lived in the Boston area for twenty years. He is currently the Book Editor at the Deseret News and an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Utah.

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