Kinderhook plates: Examining a nineteenth-century hoax, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by Peters, Jason Frederick

During the last half of the twentieth century, many anti-Mormon groups began to gain a small following and openly challenged the church. The plates were very popular with these groups and one of their first publications was Dr. James D. Bales's 1958 The Book of Mormon? Bales addressed the Kinderhook plates and came to the conclusion that "only a bogus prophet translates bogus plates."77 Infamous anti-Mormons Jerald and Sandra Tanner addressed the plates in their 1972 work, Mormonism: Shadow or Reality?78 For the most part these accounts should be considered as radical and biased. However, they did find favor with a small audience, which made the need for a proper scientific study as well as an official church stance on the subject very important. Using the findings of the study, the church could then further establish, or validate, an official position on the plates. With the anti-Mormon interest in the plates not subsiding, the church looked to science and history to solve their problem. In 1980, Mormon professor Dr. Stanley Kimball of Southern Illinois University obtained permission from the Chicago Historical Society to perform destructive scientific tests on the plate. Previous non-destructive tests were: made in the 1960s, the most recent by Dr. Paul Cheesman of BYU in 1969. Cheesman's tests were found to be inconclusive. Using a scanning electron microscope and various other means, Dr. D. Lynn Johnson of Northwestern University, working on Kimball's behalf, concluded that the plates had been etched with nitric acid and were made of a brass alloy typical of a nineteenth-century blacksmith shop.79 Kimball published his findings in the August, 1981 issue of the Mormon publication the Ensign. Kimball used the new scientific data as well as the recently-discovered clayton journal to formulate the church's new official position on the incident. he concluded that the plates were a crude frontier hoax-a hoax that Joseph Smith simply ignored, therefore exonerating him from the incident entirely.80 Most of the church accepted this position and it was restated by Kimball in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism in 1992.81

To examine the importance of the Kinderhook plates, one must first recognize the importance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in American culture, religion, and history. The LDS church began as a small millennialist sect in the early nineteenth century and grew to become a well-established, worldwide, recognized faith. The history of this faith is very important to the members of the church and, therefore, it is very important that this void in the historical record of the church be filled. The story of the Kinderhook plates will always continue to resurface unless it is properly and honestly addressed.

While the Church feels satisfied with the new position that the Kimball article presented, many issues were left unaddressed. The article does well to present its case for Joseph Smith's own position on the plates. However, it fails to recognize that, even if Smith was not fooled in 1843, the church itself was fooled for the next one hundred and thirty years. The Kimball article mentioned the Church's response each time the issue of the plates came up, but it failed to recognize that each response up to 1981 was the same-that the plates were genuine. This discrepancy in the historical documentation of the church, therefore, requires a certain degree of clarification-and this can only come from the church itself.