The Actual Voice of One Who Was There

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As we begin to pivot from our overall “Witnesses” film project — which isn’t quite finished, but is nearing completion — to our new undertaking, “Six Days in August,” I find myself thinking very much about a remarkable recording of President Wilford Woodruff.

I distinctly remember how remarkably thrilled I was, probably around 1976, when I first encountered it in a flexible plastic LP record format that had, as I recall, been distributed with one of the Church magazines.  President Woodruff had recorded his testimony on 19 March 1897, not long after the celebration of his ninetieth birthday.  Sound recording was a very new technology at the time, and he spoke into a device that preserved his words on a cylinder that was encompassed with copper wire.

I listened to it over and over again.  I was amazed to be hearing the actual voice of a man who had not only known the Prophet Joseph Smith personally and well as a mature adult but who had been called by Joseph Smith to serve as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  He was bearing testimony of a time more than five decades before, shortly before the murder of the Prophet Joseph at the hands of a brutal mob.  I hadn’t known that any such recording existed.  Suddenly, the distance of time separating me from the earliest leaders of the Restored Church and, indeed, from Joseph Smith himself seemed greatly reduced.

President Woodruff continued to enjoy relatively good health for the rest of 1897 and into the early part of 1898, but then his body began to fail and he died on 2 September 1898.

You can listen to Wilford Woodruff’s testimony here:

And here is a transcript of what he had to say:

I bear my testimony that the Prophet Joseph Smith said before a large assembly in Illinois that if he was the emperor of the world and had control over the whole human family, he would sustain every man, woman and child in the enjoyment of their religion. Those are my sentiments today.

I bear my testimony that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God, ordained of God to lay the foundation of His Church and Kingdom in the last dispensation and fulness of times.

I bear my testimony that in the early spring of 1844 in Nauvoo, the Prophet Joseph Smith called the Twelve Apostles together and he delivered unto them the ordinances of the Church and the Kingdom of God; and all the keys and powers that God had bestowed upon him he sealed upon our heads. He told us that we must round up our shoulders and bear off this kingdom or we would be damned. I am the only man now living in the flesh who heard that testimony from his mouth, and I know this is true by the power of God manifest through him.

At that meeting, he began a speech of about three hours upon the subject of the Kingdom. His face was as clear as amber, and he was covered with a power that I have never seen in any man in the flesh before.

I bear testimony that Joseph Smith was the author of the endowments as received by the Latter-day Saints. I received my own endowments under his hands and direction and I know they are true principles. I not only received my own endowments under his hands, but I bear my testimony that Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards, George A. Smith, John Taylor, and other brethren received their endowments under the hands and direction of the Prophet Joseph, and also my wife Phoebe, Bathsheba Smith, Leonora Taylor, Mary Smith, and others whose names I cannot recall now.

The Prophet Joseph laid down his life for the word of God and testimony of Jesus Christ, and he will be crowned as a martyr in the presence of God and the Lamb. In all his testimony to us, the power of God was visibly manifest in the Prophet Joseph. This is my testimony, spoken by myself into a talking machine on this the 19th day of March, 1897, in the ninety-first year of my age, Wilford Woodruff.

Plainly, since this opportunity to record his testimony was a novel and uncommon one for anybody living in 1897, President Woodruff wanted to use it to say something that was very important to him.  And I believe that what he had to say should be important to us, as well.

I should probably note, too, his description of the Prophet’s face as being “as clear as amber,” and his saying that Joseph “was covered with a power that I have never seen in any man in the flesh before.”  This is consistent with reports such as that from Oliver Huntington, which I mentioned in my blog entry here yesterday.

Pending the arrival of Six Days in August, though, keep your eyes open for our docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon and for the short Witness-related features that we will probably begin to release for free, online, on a weekly basis beginning after Easter.  I’ve already seen eighteen of them that are essentially complete, and I know of two more that are in the works.

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“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”  (Albert Einstein)