One Hundred Years of Mormonism

The nature of the saints’ memory had to change as Joseph Smith’s vision sank deeper into the past and its foremost selectors, relaters, and repeaters passed away. Jan Assman’s terms communicative and cultural memory characterize the change. Communicative memory is temporary. It can last one generation, maybe two, depending on how well contemporaries of the event live and how well they transfer memory. They have to transmute memory into tradition—into the symbolic forms of cultural memory—to ensure it does not die with them. Young Mormons who came of age in the 1920s were the most likely to acquire enduring cultural memory of Smith’s vision as a result of the widespread commemoration they experienced in their most formative period. Mormonism matured as it turned one hundred. It was no longer a marginalized sect. It had a usable past that situated it safely within host cultures. It had a robust rising generation that could generally identify with Smith’s first vision while accommodating modern challenges to it. It had cultural memory.