The Desire of Wages

Chapter 4 - Hired Hands

by Dirk Anderson

In February 1894, in Australia, Ellen White had a problem. One of her paid writers was talking. Fannie Bolton had been telling people that she did more than copy White’s writings, that she reworked them, and that the public was not being told. White wrote to her son about it, and she reported that heaven had spoken on the matter: “Again the warning came, ‘Fannie is your adversary, and is misleading minds by entertaining the suggestions of Satan as did Eve in Eden.’”¹

An editor says the books are edited, and God calls her Satan’s tool. That is the story of this chapter. In Chapter 3 we met Marian Davis, the bookmaker. But Davis was not alone. White ran a small workshop of paid writers, editors and copyists, and the books that came out of it, The Desire of Ages among them, carried Ellen's name.

The Workshop

W. C. White never denied the workshop existed. In 1900, when the General Conference president asked how his mother’s writings were prepared, he answered in writing. Her copyists corrected grammar, removed “unnecessary repetition,” and grouped “paragraphs and sections in their best order.” And then:

Mother’s workers of experience, such as sisters Davis, Burnham, Bolton, Peck, and Hare . . . are authorized to take a sentence, paragraph, or section, from one manuscript . . . and incorporate it with another manuscript.²

Davis, Burnham, Bolton, Peck and Hare. Five women, all paid wages, all authorized to cut and recombine the prophet’s words. Add W. W. Prescott, the sect’s leading educator, who compiled Christian Education and read the life of Christ manuscript for her, and the literary staff behind The Desire of Ages is larger than most SDAs have ever imagined.

Fannie Bolton’s letters from the early 1890s show the shop at full speed. In one month she reported sending off “7 articles for Review, 6 for Signs.”³ Most were made from White’s letters and manuscripts: Bolton cut them up, rearranged them, divided them into installments and gave them titles. The sect’s papers had “thousands of readers,” she explained, and it seemed “too bad not to have the papers supplied.”⁴ When the material ran low, the staff told the prophet what to write. “You will have to write more however,” Bolton wrote to White in 1893. “Could you not write on the text, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’?”⁵ And the work was not light. “It takes longer to do the work we have to do than to write originally,” Bolton said. “I know from experience in writing myself.”⁶

Keep this in mind whenever an SDA scholar traces a sentence in The Desire of Ages back to one of White’s magazine articles of the 1890s. Many of those articles were themselves produced in this shop.

“Best You Say Nothing”

Fannie Bolton was no amateur hired to fix a few commas. She was a gifted writer with professional experience long before she joined Ellen White's staff. She had written for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and it was her work polishing White's camp-meeting sermons for that newspaper in 1887 that brought her to White's attention. Bolton later recalled: “She was pleased with the way I made her sermons over for the press and wished me in her employ.”⁷ White knew what Bolton could do. She had seen the results for herself and wanted that talent working for her.

But Bolton eventually came to resent something far more serious than the demands of editorial work. She objected to the secrecy surrounding it. George Starr, who knew her in Australia, recalled her describing the daily routine in unmistakable terms: “Sister White gives the writing to Sister Davis and me morning by morning, in the rough, and we put the polish on, and it all goes out signed ‘Ellen G. White.’”⁸ Bolton said the problem went beyond polishing. Ideas of her own, passed along to Marian Davis, were appearing “in Sr. White’s articles on the Life of Christ, and they are supposed to be her thoughts.”⁹ The work of the assistants was being published under White's name, while the readers were left to believe that the words and thoughts had originated with the prophet.

In 1897, while attempting to make peace with White, Bolton put her grievance in writing. This was not a complaint about having too much work or receiving too little praise. It was an accusation that White was concealing the truth about how her writings were produced:

I thought . . . that it was your withholding of the truth about your writings in not acknowledging your editorial help, that was at the bottom of all the perplexity, and that your work was not as you say the work of God ought to be as open as sunlight. . . . I thought that in justice to yourself, your work, your editors and readers, you should have acknowledged your editor’s work.¹⁰

There is the heart of Bolton's complaint. If White's work was truly the work of God, why hide the people who helped produce it? Why allow readers to believe that the prophet had personally written what her assistants had polished, arranged, and contributed? Bolton believed that such secrecy was unjust not only to the editors, but to the readers who were being kept in the dark. Her demand was simple: tell the truth about who did the work.

But Bolton's letter contained something else—something far more damaging. When asked whether she had ever said that White “copied from books,” Bolton replied: “I do not remember saying anything of this kind to any one except Marian, when we talked over some perplexities together.”¹¹ Stop and consider that admission. Bolton and Marian Davis—the two women intimately involved in preparing White's writings—had privately discussed the problem of White copying from books. This was not a charge invented decades later by some hostile critic. It was a concern discussed by the women inside the operation, while the books were being produced.

When Bolton objected that the arrangement was not “open as sunlight,” she was identifying the very deception that White had every reason to keep hidden.

“She Can Hurt Me as No Other Person Can”

White’s response to Bolton was not to increase transparency. It was to get rid of the person reporting the problem. Merritt Kellogg, Dr. J. H. Kellogg’s half-brother, told White what Bolton had said to him. White’s reply was immediate: “Fannie Bolton shall never write another line for me,” White declared. “She can hurt me as no other person can.”¹²

Bolton was dismissed, taken back, and dismissed again: three times in all, by her own count, each time “because of relating my trouble.”¹³ Visions marked each turn. In 1894 the warning came that Fannie was “your adversary.” Later, White said, the Spirit of the Lord told her to “give her another trial.”¹⁴ And years afterward White explained why heaven had told her to take Bolton back:

I now see why I was directed to give Fannie another trial. . . . If I had disconnected from her, they would have made the most they possibly could of the way in which I had abused poor Fannie Bolton.¹⁵

By White’s own explanation, the reason God told her to rehire Bolton was to protect White’s reputation. Elder Starr later told a story that is even stranger. White, he said, woke him one morning to describe a vision of Jesus in a chariot of gold, calling down from the clouds three times, “Fannie Bolton is your adversary!” White added that she had seen “this same vision about seven years ago,” when her niece Mary Clough was working on her writings and complained, “Aunt Ellen gives me the writings in the rough and I put the polish on, but get no recognition for it.”¹⁶ Starr was writing many years later, and even the White Estate notes that his memory may not be exact. But the pattern is the same one the letters show. When an assistant said the books were polished by others, a convenient vision arrived to convict the assistant of being the enemy.

Shut Out of the Papers

Bolton went back to America in 1896 in poor health. In Battle Creek she began writing articles of her own for the Review and Herald and the Youth’s Instructor, and the editor, G. C. Tenney, accepted some of them because, he said, “she was depending upon the articles for a little means.”¹⁷ One was a story serial about a family in Australia. When it was pointed out to her, White recognized the family, took offense, and wrote to the editors. “Fannie claimed to make most of my books,” she reminded Tenney, and she had told others “that Sister White did not know how to write or put two sentences together.”¹⁸

The editors fell into line. Tenney cut her off, promising to be “fully in harmony with your suggestions in regard to her writings appearing in the paper.”¹⁹ In London, W. W. Prescott told White, “On the strength of what you have written I have requested our editor here not to use her articles,” and passed her advice on to A. T. Jones, the new editor of the Review.²⁰ White made sure that her enemy, a sick former employee, writing for “a little means,” was shut out of the Review in America and Present Truth in England.

That summer, under pressure from friends, a doctor and W. C. White, Bolton signed a confession that she had misjudged White. Four years later she took it back: “I have confessed to Brother Prescott and others that I had misrepresented Sister White, not because I was convicted, but because Sister White had said so, and because I was urged to do so.”²¹ In her later years Bolton suffered mental illness and spent time in a state hospital, and SDA defenders have used that to dismiss her. But her charges were made in the 1890s, fifteen years before her illness, and as we have seen, the letters of Davis, W. C. White and White herself confirm the substance of them.

Maggie’s First Chapter

Bolton was the one who talked. Others simply did the work. Consider the first chapter of The Desire of Ages, “God with Us,” the chapter every reader meets first. When we compared it with White’s earlier writings on the life of Christ, almost none of it could be traced to them. Marian Davis explains why. In April 1897 she wrote to W. C. White:

A considerable part of the first chapter was compiled from articles which Maggie had prepared for the Review and Signs. The matter was so good that I seized upon it. The ‘Signs’ articles will not be published until after the book comes out. It will be great help to the book to start out with something fresh.²²

Maggie was Margaret Hare, a young stenographer and editor on White’s staff. Articles she had “prepared” became the opening chapter of the most celebrated book in SDA literature. And the matching magazine articles were held back so the book could “start out with something fresh.”

The Professor’s Theology

The help went beyond words. It reached into doctrine. In February 1896 White asked Professor Prescott, then visiting Australia, to read the entire life of Christ manuscript critically. A young teacher named H. Camden Lacey, White’s relative by marriage, watched what happened next. Davis, he said, was struggling with the first chapter, and both he and Prescott helped her extensively.²³ Prescott was preaching that Christ was the great “I AM” of the burning bush. Lacey remembered:

Sr. Marian Davis seemed to fall for it, and lo and behold, when The Desire of Ages came out, there appeared that identical teaching on pages 24 and 25, which I think can be looked for in vain in any of Sr. White’s published works prior to that time.²⁴

Open The Desire of Ages to page 24 and there it is: “It was Christ who from the bush on Mount Horeb spoke to Moses saying, ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ . . . So when He came ‘in the likeness of men,’ He declared Himself the I AM.”²⁵ When Lacey told this story to an SDA historian in 1936, the reward for his honesty was a whispering campaign: “rumors that were damaging to Lacey’s reputation and questions about his orthodoxy circulated widely around the field.”²⁶

Marian Davis contributed theology too. In October 1893 she sent White a suggestion for the chapter on Christ’s temptation. Set her letter beside the finished book:

We searched White’s earlier life of Christ writings, including the European edition, for this argument. It is not there. It first appears in the historical record as the bookmaker’s idea, “I wish it might be brought out,” and five years later it appears in The Desire of Ages as the prophet’s teaching.

The Product of Their Talent

In 1896, while these women were cutting, pasting, polishing and preparing her books, White sent Battle Creek the testimony we met in Chapter 1:

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.²⁹

She aimed those words at publishers who cut authors’ royalties. But they describe her own workshop exactly. She purchased the talent of Davis, Bolton, Burnham and Hare for wages. She took the product of that talent and put it under her own control and her own name. Prescott’s free labor became her royalty. Hare’s articles became her first chapter. Davis’s idea became her doctrine. And when one of the hired hands objected, the prophet saw a vision declaring her an adversary of God’s work and had her shut out of the papers.

The paid workers had no royalties and no credit. Their names appear nowhere in The Desire of Ages. But they were not the only uncredited contributors to the book. Before we meet the others, the authors on White’s library shelves, we need to look at one more source: what White herself had written about Christ before the workshop went to work.