Dale Morgan - Skills, Viewpoint and Criticism

Skills, Viewpoint and Criticism

Morgan was a great-grandson of Orson Pratt, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Morgan’s family actively participated in church activities. Due to his sudden deafness, however, he drifted from the LDS faith and he did not affiliate with any religious organization as an adult. Morgan has been described by others as a "through going atheist". He was profoundly affected by the soft positivism of 1930s social psychology and took a stance in favor of historicism. Having rejected any religious motive as impossible, Morgan insisted that his work in western history and Mormonism present a completely objective, exclusively 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." Historian of the Latter Day Saint movement Jan Shipps 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 experience 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."

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 …" 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…" However the same focus on fact, coupled to a spectacular memory for detail, allowed him to produced work of breathtaking detail and scope within the field. His strength and greatest contribution was as a documentary rather than synthetic historian.