Turning Borrowed Anti-Mormon Writings into Scholarly Mormon Works - The Art of Story Telling by Academic Professionals

     Anti-Mormon literature from over 100 years ago are stories taken from stories and then borrowed and rewritten and brought forth even for our day.  "Nothing new has been added."  None of the endless hours of research has brought forth anything of significance to add to the anti-Mormon "wild tales of the busy gossips of Palmyra and Montrose."  Even Columbia University Professors haven't confirmed the wild accusations of myth makers, but there is a "great deal to discredit, their stories and those of their imaginative successors.  For over a hundred years specialists in Mormon atrocities have done nothing but borrow from each other."

     "As the three mirrors of a kaleidoscope, by reflecting only a few bits of broken glass or scraps of paper, produce endless but strangely monotonous and tiring varieties of design, so the producers of anti-Mormon epics seem incapable of anything but endlessly repeating each other.  "A" picks up a story from "B" and hands it on to "C," from whom it progresses through the hands of "D," "E", "F," etc., whose combined authority ultimately convinces "I," "J," and "K" that they must be telling the truth.  So one of these last becomes assigned reading for the students or even the congregation of Drs. "O" and "P," and so on.  Thus Mr. Irving Wallace will take some grisly tale from the pages of Mrs. Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young Denning, who has got the story from her friend Mrs. Stenhouse, who got it from the terrible Bill Hickman, whose book was written by a rather sordid hack writer named Beadle, who confirms his frightful charges by appealing to Judge Harding, who got his best Mormon stories from his cousin Pomeroy Tucker, who is beholden to J.C. Bennett for his insights.  And every one of these people steps before the public as a firsthand authority on the Mormons, bandying the old threadbare tales about with the skill and assurance of one who really knows."  Adapted from Sounding Brass Nibley