No. 19

Last week, I was doing the dishes with Jeopardy! on. The Final Jeopardy question was: Ann Eliza Webb, an ex-spouse of this man, penned an exposé about the experience titled “Wife No. 19.”

I said, “Brigham Young,” without looking up from a soapy pan.

One contestant guessed Hugh Hefner, which was incorrect. (Hefner was married only three times!) The right answer was Brigham Young, as I said.

“Have you read it?” Matt asked.

“No,” I responded, drying my hands. “I just figured ‘that’s a lot of wives; it’s gotta be Brigham!’ Besides the number 19 jumped out at me. I always heard his 19^th wife was ‘the crazy one.’”

“What made her ‘crazy’?” Matt asked.

“Oh, sorry,” I backpedaled. “I don’t believe she was really ‘crazy.’ I think she was dismissed as crazy for criticizing the church. I don’t know much about her. I always assumed that she was a young woman, unhappy about being the 19th wife of a cranky old man who everyone around her believed was a prophet who talks to God regularly and therefore is never wrong about anything. That must have suuuuuuucked.”

But once I started thinking about Ann Eliza, whose name I learned from Ken Jennings (also a Mormon) and that Final Jeopardy question. What did she write about? She was a first-person witness to some interesting history; why haven’t I ever looked her up before?

I quickly discovered that Wife No. 19 is in the public domain. I found a scanned copy online (here) and started to read. I thought it would be dull prose written in old-timey language and sanctimonious anecdotes, but that isn’t what I found. While her writing is still controversial to modern Mormons, I found that Ann Eliza Webb was a careful narrator who tells you when she’s repeating something she heard rather than something she knows as fact.

As you might imagine, she doesn’t pull any punches. She accuses Brigham Young of everything from fraud to murder. And I have no illusion that Wife No. 19 is an objective account. It is a memoir written by a woman in the middle of a bitter divorce from one of the most powerful men in the American West. Like every memoir, it has a point of view, blind spots, and grievances. Historians continue to debate particular claims and interpretations, although many of the events she described—once dismissed outright—are now accepted parts of nineteenth-century Mormon history.

What struck me was not her anger with her ex-husband or the institution of Mormonism. It was her curiosity about the people who remained faithful to it. Instead of dismissing the early followers, she tries to understand how otherwise decent, intelligent people came to accept things that seem impossible from the outside. Here is a passage from early in the book describing an event that happened before Ann Eliza was born. Her father had invested in Joseph Smith’s Kirtland Safety Society, a financial institution founded in Kirtland, Ohio, which quickly collapsed.

My father, of course, lost every cent which he had invested. He was intensely disgusted with the whole proceeding, which, if it had happened in the [non Mormon] world, would have been termed swindling, and Smith would not have been easily let off by the mere calling of names. Many [non Mormons], who had suffered by the failure, were not so lenient as Smith’s followers, and demanded that the Prophet should answer to the complaint of swindling before the United States court. … The poor Saints, although losing, many of them, all their hard-earned savings, were still loyal to their leader, and excused him on the ground that ” he had lost the Spirit” for the time, and the revelation was not of divine origin; although he was unconscious of that fact, and received it in good faith. My father, however, not so ready to excuse what seemed to him an act of premeditated dishonesty, and having very little faith in “revelation” at any time, was very bitter in his denunciations ; and it was only by my mother’s influence, who still clung fondly to her faith, that he did not then renounce Mormonism.

Ann Eliza seemed genuinely interested in understanding the psychological work belief was doing for the people around her. That struck me as remarkably modern. She wasn’t simply asking whether Joseph Smith had committed fraud. She was asking why the people who had lost everything were still able to trust him. She noticed something that has fascinated psychologists for decades: when deeply held beliefs collide with stubborn facts, people often revise the facts before they revise the belief.

Years ago, I read a comic by Matthew Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal, about why facts so often fail to change our minds. (I’ll link it because it’s awesome.) His point is that our beliefs don’t exist as isolated facts floating around our heads. They become connected into a structure. Change one insignificant belief and not much happens. Challenge a central belief and suddenly you’re knocking down load-bearing walls. That’s why facts often fail to change people’s minds. It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because remodeling is exhausting.

Psychologists have names for this: assimilation vs. accommodation. Sometimes new information either fits comfortably into the mental models we already have. A child sees a horse and calls it a dog. Parent says, “No, that’s a horse.” If the child simply adds “horses are another kind of four-legged animal,” that’s assimilation. Their mental map of the world just became more sophisticated without any subtraction.

Sometimes it doesn’t fit, forcing us to remodel those mental models. This is what The Oatmeal comic describes, where learning something you don’t want to confront about George Washington’s teeth makes you emotionally uncomfortable. Maybe even angry. Most people will feel the resistance to the new information, but eventually accept that they need to update their understanding and move on. That’s accommodation. We must rearrange part of our worldview to accommodate, which requires work.

Reading Ann Eliza made me wonder if there was a third response to new information which goes beyond what The Oatmeal is talking about. This is more like Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning, which says adults sometimes encounter a disorienting dilemma that forces them to critically examine the assumptions through which they’ve interpreted their lives.

This happened to me a few years ago while listening to a podcast about Winston Churchill and the Bengal Famine. Until then, Churchill had been one of my heroes. He was the man who stood against Hitler when much of Europe had given up. Learning about his role in the famine didn’t simply ask me to learn a new historical fact. It felt personal. It was as though I had trusted him, and he had let me down. I remember feeling physically ill. That wasn’t because Churchill changed. I did. Or rather, the story I had built around him did. I had to let go of an image I had carried since childhood and replace it with a more complicated one.

I had to transform my understanding and let go of an image that I held as an ideal. Changing a cherished belief feels less like learning and more like processing grief.

Honestly, my Churchill example is trivial compared to what Ann Eliza is talking about in Wife No. 19. I looked up to Winston Churchill as an example of leadership and fortitude, but he was never my prophet. I think that brings us to a fourth response to new information. Let’s call it “identity transformation.” It is what happens when we place a belief at the very center of who we are. We don’t simply identify with it. It becomes our identity.

Beliefs become identities when they cost us something. Time. Money. Reputation. Family. A career. A marriage. A grueling journey across the plains. Every sacrifice becomes another thread binding us to the story that made the sacrifice meaningful.

That’s why witnesses who introduce inconvenient information, like Ann Eliza, are so threatening. That is why they get dismissed as “crazy” or “immoral.” They don’t merely challenge the founder’s story. They threaten the meaning of the followers’ sacrifices. They ask us to revisit the reasons we gave pieces of ourselves away in the first place. People will resist this new information because it undermines something existential.

Ann Eliza understood this because she watched it happen in her own family. Her father never fully trusted Joseph Smith after the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society. Her mother did because Mormonism had given her mother purpose, community, and hope. Even after the financial ruin (which happened to the Webbs multiple times after Kirtland), even after plural marriage entered their lives and transformed their family into something she had never imagined, her mother remained faithful.

Ann Eliza writes about her with extraordinary tenderness. Early in the book, she writes Mormonism gave her mother “the only happy time” of her life.  She understood that her mother’s faith was not simply a collection of doctrines. It was the story that gave shape and meaning to her entire adult life, and she sacrificed deeply for it.

How do you tell someone that the story that gave meaning to forty years of sacrifice was built on a foundation that may not be what they believed? Even if you’re right, what exactly are you asking them to do with those forty years?

Ann Eliza never asked her mother to pretend those years hadn’t happened. In the book, she writes, “although she has never openly acknowledged it, I think that my mother has since often regretted her steadfast adherence to the church at that time.”  The religion that had once given her meaning eventually “blighted her domestic life” and laid upon her “a cross almost too heavy to be borne.” Yet through it all, Ann Eliza says, her mother “never complained, but endured her sufferings in silence.”

It would have been easy for Ann Eliza to write her mother off as gullible or weak, or even a villain in her own story. She doesn’t. She doesn’t even blame her mother for consenting to a marriage that would make her twenty-five-year-old daughter the nineteenth wife of a sixty-eight-year-old man (something Ann Eliza didn’t want but was pressured into because Brigham was using his influence over her brother Gilbert’s financial situation to force her to accept his proposal). Instead, she extends to her mother generosity while also refusing to pretend that the choices hadn’t cost her anything.

Reading Wife No. 19, I slowly realized that Ann Eliza wasn’t just helping me understand nineteenth-century Mormons. She was helping me understand my time. We all know what it is like to see people we care about trapped in their own mythology. They have sacrificed too much and dug in too deep to ever dig back out. We sometimes become desperate to help them. Or simply to convince them. But how do we change their minds?

You often can’t, and that feels awful. Your instinct might be to present more information. Maybe a pie chart and a long form article from The Atlantic. It doesn’t work because facts are not persuasive when you’re arguing with meaning, not evidence. Instead of asking, “How do I change their mind?” it may be more useful to ask, “What is this belief doing for them?” Compassion is usually more productive than debate.

If you’re the one inside the dilemma, the challenge is different. The Oatmeal suggests cultivating awareness and self-compassion is key. I would add curiosity. Notice the moment when your need for a story becomes stronger than your desire to know what is true. Then get curious about what you’re afraid of losing.

It’s easy to congratulate ourselves for seeing through someone else’s mythology. It’s much harder to ask which stories we are protecting because they have become intertwined with our own sacrifices. We all have stories that explain why the choices we’ve made were worthwhile. Maybe the question isn’t why we need those stories to make sense of our lives. Maybe the question is whether we’re willing to hear the Ann Elizas when they appear and say, “but wait, there is something else you need to know…” Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when it stirs grief.

I do think there is good news. If you can make it through the grief of revising the story, you sometimes discover that the parts worth keeping were sturdier than you imagined. Even as a lapsed Mormon, these early stories hold immense meaning for me. Whenever I am overwhelmed with my personal struggles and my inner narrator says, I can’t handle this! I reflexively think about my Pioneer ancestor, Phoebe Draper-Palmer-Brown, marching more than two thousand miles across the West with the Mormon Battalion (in her fifties!). That story still gives me courage. It still enlarges my life. Somehow that image immediately quiets my own panic. If Great⁸-granny Pheobe could do that, I can deal with these emails!

Every generation inherits stories that explain who we are. Every generation also inherits people who complicate those stories. The health of a community may depend less on whether its founders were flawless than on whether it can make room for its witnesses.

Nothing Ann Eliza wrote changes what I believe about my ancestors, because I don’t need Brigham Young to be a saint in order for Phoebe to be extraordinary.

Happy Pioneer Day.