For His Was The Kingdom, And The Power, And The Glory … Briefly (June 1970 | Volume: 21, Issue: 4)

For His Was The Kingdom, And The Power, And The Glory … Briefly

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Authors: Robert P. Weeks

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June 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 4


In the fall of 1846 a short man with a great reddish-brown beard walked into the phrenology parlor of Fowler and Wells at 131 Nassau Street, New York City, to purchase a phrenological examination. He was barely five feet three and of slight build, but his full auburn beard, his curiously bulging forehead, and his intense, deeply set dark eyes gave him a vividness and dramatic presence that compensated, along with his black stovepipe hat, for his short stature. After the report of the examination was written by Samuel R. Wells, the short man read it with satisfaction and left.

A trip to the phrenology parlor was hardly a rare occurrence in mid-nineteenthcentury America. Nor was it even highly unusual that the short man in the stovepipe hat later published his nearly two-thousand-word phrenological description on the first page of a newspaper he edited. (Walt Whitman was so taken by the report Fowler and Wells wrote on him that he had it bound into early copies of Leaves of Grass .) But this particular visit to the phrenologist is of some interest because the man in the stovepipe hat was no ordinary person—as the phrenologist himself seemed to realize, even though his subject’s name, James J. Strang, meant nothing to him.

The report said, for example, “You are quite radical in your notions,” which is not a bad characterization of a man who convinced thousands of Mormons that an angel had designated him to succeed Joseph Smith as leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The phrenologist also credited him with “versatility of talent, which enables you to attend to a variety of things. …” Again, an apt comment on a man who besides serving as a state legislator was acknowledged as a full-fledged prophet to whom God had entrusted a major portion of the Bible, lost since the Babylonian captivity of the Jews in 597 B.C. , and who was also an instinctive linguist who translated the ancient Oriental language in which the Biblical fragment was written, even though he had never studied any language but English. And certainly not the least of this versatile man’s achievements was to have become a king whose kingdom lay within the United States and whose loyal subjects numbered in the thousands.

The learned phrenologist also said of him, “You are fond of variety and change,” as he indeed was. At the time of his death he had five wives, the oldest forty-three, the youngest eighteen. Not only had they borne him ten children, most of whom lived with him and his four youngest wives in the royal palace, a solidly constructed log house in northern Michigan, but when he died each of the four youngest wives was with child. As Professor Wells perceptively remarked after carefully feeling and measuring the long narrow skull of James Jesse Strang with its bulging