Important Historical Documents Seized by LDS Church

(from The Salt Lake Tribune, January 13, 2002)

The Arrington Diaries

When the late historian Leonard J. Arrington gave microfilm copies of his personal diaries to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he imposed the condition that the journals not be made accessible to anyone other than his children for 25 years after his death, which occurred in 1999. Despite that, an LDS Church historian read, copied and circulated portions of the diaries among church officials.

Arrington's son Carl understandably views this as a breach of his late father's bequest of the documents to the church. Some archivists agree, others do not. But in any case, this latest controversy over the late historian's papers is deeply ironic, given that LDS Church officials last year mounted an aggressive campaign to recover copies of documents among papers Arrington had bequeathed to Utah State University which the church claimed were its private property and should not be made public.

In an effort to advance that claim, church historians breached the confidentiality provisions Arrington put in place when he donated copies of his diaries to the church. Indeed, Richard Turley, managing director of the LDS Church's Family and Church History Department, has acknowledged that he read the Arrington diaries in an effort to determine whether the diaries themselves were church property. That claim rested on the notion that Arrington was the chief of the church's history department for a decade, may have created portions of the diaries in his church office, may have included minutes of meetings in them and may have been assisted by other church employees in their preparation.

In the end, the church decided not to press that claim. To his credit, church President Gordon B. Hinckley brokered a compromise with USU and the Arrington family.

As part of that settlement, USU gave certain documents from the Arrington collection to the family, which agreed that the historian would not have intended them for public view. These documents mostly concerned research the historian had undertaken for the church's First Presidency on the early history of temple ritual, which members of the LDS faith consider both sacred and confidential. Other papers included excerpts of minutes of meetings of the church's apostles. Once USU gave those documents to the family, it promptly donated them to the church.

That seemed to bring an amicable conclusion to the matter.

Still, the case of Arrington's personal journals raises important issues for donors and historians. Most people would assume that a man's diaries belong to him, not his employer, even if his personal and professional lives were deeply intertwined, and that a bequest which imposed a confidentiality provision for a specified period would be honored absolutely.