Stretching the Heavens

The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism

Terryl L. Givens

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664347
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Eugene England (1933-2001)—one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals in modern Mormonism—lived in the crossfire between religious tradition and reform. This first serious biography, by leading historian Terryl L. Givens, shimmers with the personal tensions felt deeply by England during the turmoil of the late twentieth century. Drawing on unprecedented access to England's personal papers, Givens paints a multifaceted portrait of a devout Latter-day Saint whose precarious position on the edge of church hierarchy was instrumental to his ability to shape the study of modern Mormonism. A professor of literature at Brigham Young University, England also taught in the Church Educational System. And yet from the sixties on, he set church leaders' teeth on edge as he protested the Vietnam War, decried institutional racism and sexism, and supported Poland's Solidarity movement—all at a time when Latter-day Saints were ultra-patriotic and banned Black ordination. England could also be intemperate, proud of his own rectitude, and neglectful of political realities and relationships, and he was eventually forced from his academic position. His last days, as he suffered from brain cancer, were marked by a spiritual agony that church leaders were unable to help him resolve.

1

A SAFE VALLEY

You may suffer a lot, but you live intensely. Your life may be among the best things you have to offer and that story must be told.

— Richard Bushman to England, 18 March 1992

When people look back to the Church in the 70s and 80s, they may well find you the dominant voice.

— Claudia Bushman to England, 1 November 1989

PIONEER BACKGROUNDS

I came from [a] rather cold, emotionally reserved, largely Anglo-Saxon family background. — England, “No Cause, No Cause”

Gene England’s father, George Eugene England, was born in 1904. He came from Latter-day Saint stock, but he traced his line back to the Buchanan family, who were awarded a massive land grant by the king of England that included the island of Manhattan. The family story was that some or all of the estate passed through the possession of President James Buchanan, who bequeathed it to his posterity. George Sr. learned of the alleged bequest in 1933, the year of Eugene’s birth, and was told he would need to prove his connection to the Buchanan family to inherit his share — over a quarter of a million dollars for each descendent, by his reckoning ($5 million in 2020 dollars). The story had the ring of more fantasy than fact, but George recorded it as faithful family history. “The hunt for descendants stopped when several attorneys for the family died or mysteriously disappeared,” he wrote, compounding the sensationalism. “J. P. Morgan and others had a hand in that. They didn’t want to give up their hold on the properties in New York City.” As a Latter-day Saint, however, some good came out of the united effort to prove the family connections: “Mother said that it accomplished one thing: everyone showed up on her doorstep with their genealogy done.”¹

The England family’s Latter-day Saint roots ran deep. Thomas England was born in Somerset, England, in 1860. Converted to the Church of Jesus Christ, he emigrated to the States, pulled a handcart across the plains and settled in Plain City, Utah. There, his wife died soon after giving birth to George William. Thomas remarried, but George William never took to his new stepmother, though he stayed around long enough to support the family while Thomas returned to England as a missionary. When Thomas came home, George William set out to try working for his relatives in Moreland, a small town a few miles outside of Blackfoot in the Snake River Valley of southeast Idaho. He found a spot of land to work owned by the Abram Hatch family, who had a beautiful but frail daughter, Martha Jane. George and Martha fell in love and settled in the area. Eventually he found work on the Union Pacific Railroad with a bridge-building gang and raised his young family on a small farm he rented from his father. In 1904, George Eugene — father of Eugene England Jr. — was born.

George Eugene lived the hardscrabble life of an Idaho farm boy, tending animals, weeding crops, and watching his father carefully husband the precious irrigation water. Rights of access were a frequent cause of contention — George Eugene returned home one day to find a near tragic scene at the water gate: “I came home and found Mother and Dad down at the irrigation ditch. Dad’s forehead was split and bleeding. He had gone over and turned on the water. [Mr. Bankhead] told him that it wasn’t time for his turn yet, that he wasn’t through. Dad said, ‘Well, the time’s up, so it’s my turn now.’ Bankhead swung a shovel at Dad. He threw his arms up and glanced part of the blow off, but it had cut a gash in his forehead. I could remember Mother weeping and holding on to dad, and making his way down to the house. … I had never seen anything so violent before in my life.”² On good days, George Eugene would fish at the local pond for suckers and herring, using wire nooses at the end of poles, rather than fishhooks. He would pass on to Gene an abiding love of fishing. (One of his friends described his passion: “Typically I follow Gene on a stream. He always seems to be in the lead; he tends to vault over rock dams, ledges, and log jams. He’s been this way all his life.” He also remembered how Gene stalked fish like they were tigers, and emitted wild war whoops when he landed one.)³

When George Eugene was eleven, his father, George William, then homesteading 160 acres south of Pocatello, turned his hand to wheat farming. At first, he did so long range, but then he quit his job and, with young George at his side, he moved onto the homestead to work it in earnest. After a year, he traded his farm in Moreland for 80 more acres in Bannock Valley, and moved his family into a one-room shanty. These were years, George Eugene remembered, of “hard work and deprivation.” Wild sage hens supplemented a meager diet, enriched on lucky occasions by their eggs. Meat was one pig killed yearly and portioned out as long as possible, supplemented with water gravy when milk was scarce. The nearest water was an irrigation ditch more than a mile distant. Winters were fierce enough that a wintry night blast could freeze horses where they stood — which happened to several mustangs in a herd his cowpoke uncles were trying to expand.

Such a life could easily be romanticized through the mists of memory, but George remembered most acutely the humiliation of it all. “When I was a young man, we were always poor and in debt and never had anything extra. I felt almost like the down-trodden, poor, white people that I saw in the south when I went on my mission in later years. I was embarrassed because I didn’t have clothes that matched ordinary people’s clothes. When I was in the seventh and eighth grades, I was wearing a pair of knee pants and long stockings which were completely out of style. I wore out the seat of the pants, and I had to go home from school.”

It was a mode of life to build character. If it forged George’s determination to make his humiliating poverty a distant memory, it also helps explain the ambitions he would harbor for his talented, but professionally stymied, son. The family next settled into a home in nearby Arimo, and George William continued his work for the railroad — now as a painter — and left the running of the farm to fifteen-year-old George. George Eugene’s religious upbringing he described as a kind of casual Mormonism, and he found his father a severe and emotionally distant man. As a teen, young George found his avocation on the town softball team, which played on Sundays. Challenged by the bishop to quit the team so he could be ordained a priest, he made the decision to do so. (Young Latter-day Saint men are typically ordained priests — in a lay priesthood — in their midteens.) He dated that moment, 7 May 1922, as the day of his commitment to a life of gospel devotion. “It is right for us to commit ourselves and live up to those commitments,” he said of his decision with plainspoken eloquence.⁴

Not least of the fruits of his faithfulness, he wrote, was his attendance at a stake conference where he met his future wife, Dora — though he didn’t take much notice of her at the time. He’d been quite a ruckus-rouser to this point in his life, but after his church commitment, the most trouble he got into was when he and his friend tricked half a dozen younger long-haired classmates into coming to a meeting, where they were held down one at a time to have their hair clipped to what George and his coconspirators thought was a more appropriate length. Later the victims returned the favor, tracking George and his friend down and giving them reverse Mohawks. The feud escalated until the school board had to intervene.

George didn’t return to school in 1922 and decided he’d had enough of farming. His father told him that if he left home, he should not come back. That wasn’t particularly dissuasive to a boy who’d known nothing but grinding poverty, intermittent schooling, and backbreaking labor. He had prospects, he figured. “Dad didn’t understand me,” he later explained. “The Lord didn’t put me here to starve. He put me here, where there were opportunities to do things. You can go out and do it if you will. I decided I was going to do it. So I got on the train … and left home.”⁵ For Pocatello. He didn’t comment on the irony that the first job he acquired was the same one his father had held: painting coaches for the railroad, laying on gold leaf and lettering for 29 cents an hour.

He labored hard, prospered at work, and lived a sober and devout life. Three years later, recovering in surgery after a bout of appendicitis, he had a vision of the Savior that left him more deeply rooted than ever in his faith. Feeling undervalued two years into his four-year apprenticeship with the railroad, he left for better pay and opportunity in Montana. There he was forced out of his job when he wouldn’t join the union, so he became a traveling salesman based in Salt Lake City. The next year, he was offered a good wage to come back to the railroad as foreman and realized he was at a critical juncture: twenty-two and not even possessing a high school education. He decided to return home, go back to school, get his diploma, and aim for something higher and better. He financed the rest of his education by selling the pelts of badgers and muskrats he trapped, and doing farm chores for his father while he finished two years of schooling in one.

His religious commitments made and his educational plans proceeding apace, George set his eyes on marriage. His thoughts turned to the comely blonde he had met a few years back, sixteen-year-old Dora, daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Downey, Idaho. (Gossip was that George acquired his wealth by that marriage; the truth was rather different.) They courted over the next several months. The fall of 1928, a year after graduation, found George again in the hospital recovering from minor surgery. And once again, he had a visionary experience. “The Savior appeared to me, glorified in white. He assured me that I was accepted in spite of my youthful transgressions, and that I would be blessed in serving him. It was the same in every detail to the experience I had had four years before, with one great exception: Dora Rose Hartvigsen was at the side of the Savior, and he presented her to me as a gift from him.”⁶

But first he needed more financial security. With his father, he started a paint contracting business that ran successfully for a few years. Dora’s father offered him money to invest, but he declined the offer. No sooner had he saved enough money for college than his bishop called him to serve an evangelizing mission. George asked Dora’s father for permission to marry, presented her with a ring, then left to serve in the Southern States mission from December 1929 until February 1932. While he was serving, Dora graduated from the Utah State Agricultural College. George returned with $75 left to his name and resumed painting and farm labor while Dora taught school. By October they figured they had saved and waited long enough, so they traveled to Logan, Utah, to be married in the Latter-day Saint temple and for George to start at Utah State.

In Logan, with George studying, painting, and doing custodial work, Dora became pregnant. In the afterglow of a successful mission, a happy marriage to his patient bride, and preparing for a more prosperous future than he had yet known, George was overjoyed. “I was impressed to promise the Lord that if he would bless us with a son, I would dedicate him for the work of the kingdom. I would see that he wanted not for material things of the world if he would accept. I read in the Old Testament about Hannah promising the Lord that if He would give her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord. Samuel, who became a great prophet, inspired me to make such a promise.”⁷ On 22 July 1933, in the little white-painted cinderblock hospital in Logan, Utah, the anxiously desired blessing came: Dora delivered a beautiful baby boy. They called him George Eugene England Jr.

That summer of 1933 was the Great Depression’s worst. George worked as a carpenter, bridge builder, and painter — anything he could do to keep food on the table. Still, his small family suffered less than most of their countrymen. George’s brother remembered a traveling insurance salesman from back East telling him, “ ‘You people out here in the West don’t know what a depression is. You have plenty of food. You might not have money, but you had plenty of food and you traded with the stores, produce for clothes and all that kind of stuff.’ That’s what Dad did. Instead of taking money for his paint jobs he’d get grain and hay to feed our cow. … Then he’d take the grain down to the mill and they’d make cereal out of it and flour. … So we really didn’t have the depression. … We ate well.”⁸

The first Sunday of September, the day of young Eugene’s baby blessing, Dora’s parents drove the sixty miles from Downey, Idaho, in their gray model A. They brought with them a jar of boiled cream, some garden greens, and a sack of potatoes. In that evening’s worship service, after the administration of the sacrament (the eucharist), Jacob Larson (J. L.) Hartvigsen, George Eugene, and three men of the bishopric held the infant before the congregation, while George gave him a blessing for a long and righteous life and formally bestowed his name, George Eugene England Jr. Most of his life he would be called Gene Jr. by his parents and sister, “Little Gene” by his mother’s family, and “Slifus,” a Norwegian nickname, by his granddad.

After graduation in 1936, George Sr. moved to a small house in McCammon, Idaho, where he taught shop and general science at the local school. It adjoined a large pond next to the railroad tracks. Dora read to her son for hours. She covered the front room floor with a linoleum sheet and let Gene play with a toy cannon that ignited wooden matches and shot them through the air. One day he shot a swan from the back porch.

The next year, in a move that would foreshadow his own son’s career, George Sr. took a position with the Church Educational System to teach seminary in Downey, twenty miles south. Seminary, a daily hour of LDS gospel instruction during regular school hours, had been a program of the church for over twenty years. A replacement was needed for an instructor whose views had been deemed too unorthodox by the leadership. (The instructor had been teaching that Christ was a great teacher but not divine. He alleged that he had been persuaded by the writings of Obert Clark Tanner, an enormously influential figure in the Latter-day Saint community. Tanner, author of a popular Sunday school manual, was himself quite liberal, but he never explicitly denied the divinity of Christ.) George signed on and taught for three years.

The home in which Gene spent his earliest years was a ramshackle cottage owned by Dora’s father, the hot-tempered Norwegian they called J. L. George had to shore up the floors with supports and reroof it to make it habitable. George remembered little Gene, not yet four years old, bringing him his lunch. By spring, George had saved enough to begin transforming the cottage into a real home — with an indoor bath among other improvements. George worked for J. L. during farming season and taught school at other times. The hope was that George’s work investment would lead eventually to his inheritance of the farm.

About this time, Gene had a prophecy pronounced upon his head by Bryant S. Hinckley, father of the future church president Gordon B. Hinckley. Bryant was known as a kind of inspired phrenologist — a “pretty good predictor on people’s heads.” Gene had come through a traumatic birth process “looking like an upside-down ice cream cone,” with a deep sharp ridge through the middle of his head. J. L. thought the abnormality deserved a reading, and took him to Bryant. The old man did a careful examination from crown to brow, then pronounced his verdict: “I pity the parents who have to raise this boy.”⁹

Eugene England at...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction. A Polarizing Disciple
• 1. A Safe Valley
• 2. A Mountain in the Ocean: Mission to Samoa
• 3. Stanford and Activism
• 4. Dialogue
• 5. A Mormon among the Lutherans
• 6. History, Hollywood, and a Theologian Out of Season
• 7. Crossing Jordan: Brigham Young University at Last
• 8. Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Perils of Provocation
• 9. England as Essayist
• 10. Fraying of the Fabric
• 11. J’accuse! Beginning of the End
• 12. The Writing on the Wall
• 13. Legacy: A Dangerous Discipleship
• Notes
• Index