I'm Kara Santa Maria. I am Christopher Smith. Hi, I'm Andrew Torres. This is Naked Mormonism.

The Serial Mormon History Podcast.

Before I went into podcasting, the job I was working had this general manager, and he knew anything and everything about how the company worked.

You know, he was always the go-to guy when anybody had a question or needed, you know, help with something.

Maybe some of you, you know, have coworkers like this. This guy knew everything about how the company worked from top to bottom.

He'd been there for over a decade and a half, helping to build the company, establishing

rapport with clients and, you know, learning and optimizing every single day that he worked there.

This guy quit a year and a half into my time there, and the void left behind simply couldn't be filled by one person.

A person under him was promoted to fill that position, but he was so overwhelmed that a new hire from the outside with management experience had to be brought in to help, you know, kind of pick up the pieces and fill that void.

Reckett Bennett, leaving the church in 1842, wasn't just a nightmare for the exposés and the

public outcry stemming from those exposés. Bennett held so many positions of consequence in

Navu. Reckett Bennett was the glue that held a lot of Navu government and military together.

He'd seeped into nearly every crevasse and had cured into said crevasse in whatever way he was

needed. He'd been there since the beginning of the Mormon settlement when Navu was still

commerce, Illinois, with just a few buildings and, you know, thousands of Mormon refugees living

there out of tents and wagons. Bennett had pushed through the city charter through the

Illinois State Legislature. He built the Navu Legion with his military training and arms that

he had supplied by the Illinois State Armory. And he was awarded the position of Major General

and Inspector General for his work.

Reckett was Chancellor of the University of Navu and helped develop the curriculum in early 1841.

He worked with Crazy Willie Smith and The Wasp, along with Don Carlos Smith, and later Willard

Richards and John Taylor in the Times and Seasons in order to publish a constant stream of

...