The Desire of Wages

Chapter 1 - Take Your Books into Your Own Hands

by Dirk Anderson

Moses heard the voice of God from a burning bush. Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up. Ezekiel saw the heavens opened by the river Chebar. Ellen White heard the voice of the Lord too, and in February 1899 she told Elder J. N. Loughborough what she heard. It was not a call to repentance, a vision of the throne, or a warning about the end of the world. It was advice about her publishing contracts: “Then the word came to me from the Lord, Take your books into your own hands.”¹

To understand The Desire of Ages, you have to understand the woman who sold it. Long before the book came off the press, Ellen White had become one of the shrewdest operators in the SDA publishing empire. She fought her own sect for her royalties. She shopped her manuscripts between publishers. She borrowed money at interest from believers and lent it back to the work. And when SDA corporate businessmen got in her way, she did what no ordinary author could do: she told them God was on her side.

Fifteen Cents a Copy

The story begins in earnest in 1885. Her husband James had been dead for four years, and Ellen White was now handling her own lucrative book business. For decades book revenue had been filling the Whites' coffers, but this was only yet the beginning. The fourth volume of The Spirit of Prophecy, her account of the great controversy from the fall of Jerusalem to the end of the world, was selling well. She was paid fifteen cents a copy. However, she was not satisfied.

On March 7, 1885, she wrote to J. H. Waggoner and C. H. Jones, the men in charge of the Pacific Press. “I am not complaining because I think the office has been receiving too much for publishing it,” she explained, “but because I am not satisfied with the income it brings to me.” She had never been consulted about the rate. Somebody should have arranged things so that “more than fifteen cents’ royalty per copy would come to me.” The profits of the whole first edition, she said, should have gone to the author. Then came the warning:

I feel more and more convinced that I should never again allow myself to be left at the mercy of my brethren as regards means, if I can avoid it. . . . I will keep on the lookout for a manager; and when I find one who is suitable, I will employ him. I will not trust my book interests with my good brethren.²

This is not the voice of a prophet pleading for souls to repent. It is the voice of a business owner who believes she is being underpaid, and who is ready to hire her own business agent to fix it. She soon had one. By 1892 the church’s own officers were describing her son, W. C. White, as “the son and business agent of Mrs. E. G. White.”³ For the rest of her life, Willie handled the contracts, the printing plates, the territories and the royalty statements. Mother handled the revelations.

“I Know Perfectly Well What I Am About”

The man across the table in most of these fights was A. R. Henry, a former Indiana bank president who managed the money at the Review and Herald office in Battle Creek. A man with brilliant financial insight, Henry deduced that the sect’s books were over-priced and its authors’ royalties should be lower. Ellen White disagreed. Fervently. In March 1886 she wrote to him from Switzerland to set him straight.

“I wish to say that I have no selfish motives in claiming the royalty on my books,” she began. Her royalties from foreign books, she said, were “dedicated to the foreign missions.” That sounds generous until you read the rest of the sentence. She would not let corporate leaders decide how that money was spent: “I dare not leave it for their judgment to apply this means. . . . I know perfectly well what I am about, and I know that I should control the means God has made me steward of.”⁴

Notice how it works. The money is “dedicated” to the cause, but the cause does not get to touch it. The money belongs to God, but God has made Ellen White its steward, so the money stays under White’s control. In a later chapter we will see where that “mission” money actually went. For now, notice what she did next in the same letter. Having settled the royalty question, she turned to the character of the men who had raised it. Brother Sisley had “too much of the cast iron to be a man after God’s own heart,” and Henry had “the same trait.” Then she moved into Henry’s home: “Make no rules, lay no demands on your wife, but treat her with tender compassion.”⁵

A businessman questions her royalty, and he receives a biting testimony about his marriage. It would not be the last time.

A Prophet with Real Estate

By 1891 the money was flowing, and so were the debts. Writing to an invalid friend that February, Ellen White laid out her income with the precision of a bookkeeper: ten cents a copy on her temperance book, fifteen cents on Patriarchs and Prophets, twelve and one-half cents on the fourth volume of The Spirit of Prophecy. She expected the sales to let her “settle my debts and then stop interest on ten thousand dollars.” She also mentioned that she owned real estate she could not sell “without great sacrifice.” And her workers? “My workers have to receive seven dollars and a half per week and board themselves.”⁶

Keep that last figure in mind. In the chapters ahead we will meet the women who did the actual work of turning Ellen White’s scattered writings into books. They were paid wages. The royalties went to the name on the cover.

No Man Can Buy or Sell

In 1896, from Australia, Ellen White sent Battle Creek a stream of testimonies against the publishing house, later printed in a tract. One passage became the battle cry of her royalty war:

No greater dishonor can be done to God than for one finite agent to purchase from men their God-given talent, or the product of such talent, to be absolutely under his control, even though the benefits of the same be used to the advantage of the cause.⁷

On the surface, it reads like a noble defense of the struggling author. But ask two questions. First, who was the biggest author in the SDA sect? Ellen White. Every rule that raised authors’ royalties raised hers more than anyone else’s. Second, who was buying the product of other people’s talent and putting it under her own control? As we will see, White paid assistants to gather, arrange and polish her material, and the books went out under her name alone. The principle God supposedly gave her protected her income, and it did not protect the women who worked for her.

That same year her book designed for european audiences, Life of Christ, was nearing the printer, and she was already bargaining over it. “I am waiting for their decision on royalty,” she wrote to her son Edson in February 1896. “I offered to take twelve and a half cents if they would stand all the cost of plates and publishing. . . . If they do not suit me in terms, I shall give the job to the Pacific Press.”⁸ The book that laid the groundwork for The Desire of Ages was not yet finished, and its author was already shopping around for the highest bidder.

“Give Me My Due”

Nothing shows her mind more clearly than the case of Christian Education. In 1893 Professor W. W. Prescott, one of the leading educators in the church, gathered Ellen White’s writings on education into a book. He did the work, he later reminded her, “without special pay from anyone,” and he had the book “copyrighted in your name so that all your rights would be protected.”⁹ The book was published by the General Conference Association, and no royalty was paid.

Four years later Ellen White was anxious to profit from his labor. On September 12, 1897, she wrote to A. O. Tait and asked him to lay her demand before “the proper ones”:

I want a royalty on Christian Education. If Brother Prescott wanted to help the cause of God, I think he could have done so better by donating his work to this foreign mission field than by giving it to the publishing association. But I must begin to do justice to others. I do not want any more of my writing handled in the manner Christian Education has been handled. I now ask my brethren to take the book, with the additions I shall send them, and allow me a royalty on the books they have sold. . . . give me my due. I have need of it.¹⁰

Consider the audacity. A man compiles her book for nothing. She does not offer to pay him. She complains that his free labor went to the publishing house instead of to her own mission in Australia, and then she demands back royalties on every copy sold. She closes with a threat: “They need not publish any more books [like] Christian Education, unless they will do something about this. Right is right.” And in a postscript she adds that she has “been warned that the Lord is displeased” with those at the office who were “as guilty in wrong doing as Brother Henry.”¹¹

A royalty demand, a threat to pull her books, and a warning from the Lord, all in one letter. That is how the SDA prophet did business.

“The Lord Desires You to Be a Steward of Means”

Which brings us back to Elder Loughborough and the voice from heaven. In that letter of February 1899, Ellen White looked back on her battles with the publishers. They had refused to push The Great Controversy and Patriarchs and Prophets. “Brother Jones urged me to accept less and less royalty on these books,” she complained. The men on the book committee “were a fraud, and their endeavor was to get all they could from authors by underhand schemes.” Then she quoted what she said the Lord had told her:

Make no large concessions. There are those who will not appreciate any sacrifice you might make. You must maintain principle. Take your books out of the hands of those who are not right with God. . . . The Lord desires you to be a steward of means; He will be your counsellor. . . . You are not to be led into poverty and left there.¹²

Once again, the Lord has a keen interest in the profitability of White's book business. She is told to make no large concessions. Do not accept less. Take your books out of their hands. This is the “word of the Lord” on a royalty dispute, and every word of it was in the prophet’s financial favor. Two months later she admitted as much to Elder A. T. Jones: “The matter of royalties will affect me more than any other person.”¹³

Compare that with the prophets of the Bible. When Naaman the Syrian pressed a fortune on Elisha, the prophet refused it: “As the LORD liveth, before whom I stand, I will receive none” (2 Kings 5:16). It was his servant Gehazi who ran after the money, and he went out from Elisha’s presence a leper. Paul, who could have claimed support from the churches, told the Ephesian elders, “I have coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered unto my necessities” (Acts 20:33–34). No prophet of the Bible ever claimed that God told him to hold out for a better royalty.

“A Little Gain Every Year”

Ellen White never stopped running her business. In the fall of 1908, now past eighty, she received a letter from Marion Stowell-Crawford, a believer in Wisconsin who had about five thousand dollars on loan to the Battle Creek Sanitarium and wanted the prophet’s advice. Ellen White gave it. “From all that has been shown me in regard to the Battle Creek Sanitarium,” she wrote, “I cannot advise you to leave your money there.” Pull it out, she said, and put it somewhere better. Then she named the place:

I will mention another place where you can place two or three thousand dollars at six per cent interest, and that is with me. . . . My business is not running behind. There is a little gain every year. I have been instructed that it is best for me to own the plates of my books. . . . If you feel free to do so, I wish you would lend me two thousand dollars on long time at six per cent interest. . . . Your letter of inquiry I shall treat as confidential. Please treat this answer in the same way.¹⁴

“From all that has been shown me”: the prophet’s gift steered a believer’s savings out of an institution whose leaders she had broken with. “I have been instructed”: heaven wanted her to own the plates of her books. “My business”: her own word for it. And “please treat this answer in the same way”: keep it quiet.

The Businesswoman Behind the Book

This is the woman who gave the world The Desire of Ages. Not a cloistered mystic who wrote down what angels dictated and left the money to others, but an author who bargained over cents per copy, hired a business agent, owned the plates, borrowed and lent at interest, and repeatedly told the men who opposed her that God had taken her side. When SDAs picture their prophet writing her life of Christ, they imagine her alone with her Bible and her visions. The letters show her surrounded by contracts.

None of this by itself proves that The Desire of Ages is not inspired. But it tells us what to look for. A woman who heard the Lord say “Make no large concessions” about her royalties was not going to let her most ambitious book become a charity project. In the next chapter we will see how the life of Christ was planned from the start: not as one book, but as a product line.