Truth Seeker: The Life of Joseph F. Merrill, Scientist, Educator, and Apostle

Abstract

Casey Paul Griffiths may be the foremost historian of the educational experience of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including its universities, junior colleges, and Seminary and Institute program. Griffiths is knowledgeable, insightful, and balanced. His study of Joseph F. Merrill (1868–1952), a seminal player in the beginnings of the LDS education endeavor in the twentieth century, is an important contribution to LDS history generally and to LDS educational history in particular.Born before Utah statehood to a future apostle of the LDS church, Merrill straddled Utah's nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultures. After graduating from the University of Deseret in Salt Lake City, he pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins, becoming among the first Utah-born PhD recipients. He returned to Utah in 1893 and taught physics and chemistry at the University of Utah and later headed its School of Mines (now College of Engineering). He married Annie Laura Hyde in 1898. A year after Hyde's death in 1917, he married Emily Traub, a recent convert to the LDS church.At the University of Utah, Merrill weathered several controversies, both political (he was a Democrat) and educational (notably the 1915 confrontation between faculty and the university's president). He was an early champion of LDS education and helped to found the first released-time high school LDS seminary in 1912. In 1928, the LDS church hired Merrill to head its church-wide school system. He helped to develop the first college-age institute and spearheaded a program encouraging church educators to gain advanced degrees at prestigious schools, primarily the University of Chicago. Merrill helped church education survive the beginnings of the Great Depression. In 1931, he was called as an apostle and, from 1933 to 1936, presided over the church's European missions. After a life of church service, he succumbed to a heart attack in 1952.In Griffiths's hands, Merrill emerges as one of the more liberal members of the LDS church hierarchy. This is not to say that Merrill was anywhere close to being a radical. But it seems clear that Merrill's embrace of education stood in contrast to the rigid conservatism of other more vocal and activist apostles. In fact, I cannot help but wonder how the intellectual climate and culture of Mormonism may have been affected had the ecumenism of Merrill and other like-minded LDS general authorities prevailed over the fundamentalist retrenchment initiatives of apostles Joseph Fielding Smith, J. Reuben Clark, Harold B. Lee, Bruce R. McConkie, and Boyd K. Packer. The prevailing argument in LDS church education circles today is that Smith, Clark, et al. saved the church from a left-wing turn to secular apostasy. But, having read Griffiths, I now wonder if Merrill's brand of liberalism was perhaps a better long-term strategy for securing a more intellectually savvy church membership, one less susceptible to, or at least better adept at navigating, so-called “faith crises.”I am sure I reveal more about my own biases, but I am surprised that Griffiths's fine biography was published by Brigham Young University's Religious Studies Center and the church's Deseret Book Company. Griffiths's approach seems to be too even-handed, too warts-and-all for such “official” imprimaturs. That Griffiths's study survived in-house review suggests that either I have been blinded by my own prejudices or that the BYU College of Religious Instruction (where Griffiths teaches) and the LDS church's publishing house are more supportive of a wider range of scholarship than I expected.Consider the following, for example. After the death of his first wife, Laura, by cancer, Merrill was depressed. Hoping to recover and move on, Merrill remarried sixteen months later. He soon discovered that he had acted too impetuously. In passages that seem almost too intimate to share, Griffiths quotes Merrill as lamenting: How many times have I repented! How much bitterness has come into my life? . . . The joy, the sweetness, the delight of living with a congenial companion can hardly be realized by those yoked together whose temperaments are as widely different as Millie's and mine seem to be. . . . If she could only come back to me—the mother of my children—the best wife that ever lived, the most loyal devoted, helpful companion ever given to man. . . . If only [Millie] were sympathetic, amiable! . . . I trusted too much. I took too much for granted. I hope too much. I acted hastily. . . . How long shall my miseries continue? I do not know (148).Relations between Merrill and Millie improved, but the decision of Griffiths and his publishers to quote Merrill at his most vulnerable speaks to their trust in their readers’ compassion.Griffiths's study deserves to be read by anyone interested in LDS history, Utah history, and LDS educational history. It also sets a high bar for LDS church–affiliated biographies.