The Desire of Wages

Chapter 16 - Den of Thieves

by Dirk Anderson

On November 8, 1898, in the same month the first copies of The Desire of Ages came off the press, the board of the Review and Herald publishing house met in Battle Creek. The president of the General Conference was there. A stenographer took down every word, and the record was later printed. Elder A. T. Jones had come with a stack of testimonies from Ellen White, and he read them aloud. One of them took the scene from the new book, Jesus cleansing the temple, and turned it on the men in the room:

Were the Lord Jesus upon the earth today, he would reprove the same practises that he reproved in the courts of the temple. To the church-members he would say, ‘Take these things hence. It is written. My house shall be called a house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ These denunciations he has uttered for years against the managers in the Office of publication.¹

What had the managers stolen? Jones made it plain: “the pivot of the whole thing as to this robbery, is in dealing with the authors of books.”² The thieves in God’s house were the men who had cut the royalties paid to writers. And the leading writer of the sect, whose new seven-dollar book was just then reaching the canvassers, was Ellen White.

The Robbery

The testimonies Jones read that day did not mince words. The publishers’ dealings with authors were “defrauding.” “The measures which they have taken to turn those who have prepared books from their rights, the Lord calls dishonest.” “The Lord has declared that He will blow upon the gain they receive from every such work.” Their sins “can never be washed away by the blood of the Lamb until full repentance and restitution show the conversion of the soul.”³ God “would forsake these men, remove his Spirit from those who entered upon this course.”⁴ And the principle behind it all:

God has given to man, talents of influence which belong to him alone, and 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.⁵

Not every board member agreed with White's assessment that they were thieves. When Jones read the charge of restitution, J. I. Gibson objected, “That is only your statement of these things.” “I do not believe it at present.” Jones replied, “You need not believe it; but I will give you items presently.” Later Gibson asked the obvious question: “But who constituted Brother Jones an authority?”⁶ The answer, of course, was the testimonies. The manager, W. C. Sisley, anxious to make peace with his prophetess rather than be forsaken by God, offered to raise the rate: “If you say that five per cent is not enough, why, let us revise it; and let us make it ten, or let us make it fifteen; or whatever you think is enough.”⁷

The Author They Were Hunting

When the testimony was read to the publishing board, it described a calculated campaign to cheat an author out of a fair royalty. The language was unusually specific. Men had made secret arrangements, sent representatives to approach an author while he was away, persuaded him to accept a lower royalty, and then used his reduced rate as leverage to force the same terms on others. The testimony called it a scheme, a confederacy, and an act of fraud:

Men made terms with authors; councils were formed; schemes were entered into. While one author was engaged in the services of a meeting at a distance, the expenses of one man were paid to go and see this brother, and induce him to make the lowest figures on his books. They urged that they wished to get this important matter before as many people as possible, and that the book would have a very much larger sale if it were sold at cheap prices. The royalty was placed at the lowest figures. Then this confederacy held this example up as a rule for others.⁸

C. H. Jones, the Pacific Press manager, was intrigued. He interrupted the reading with a remark that would take on a different meaning as the story unfolded: “I have not been able to find that man yet, but I am hunting for him.”⁹ Who was this author? Some have suggested Uriah Smith, but the testimony does not identify him. There was, however, another author who had been complaining about precisely this sort of treatment. And she had a very good idea who was responsible.

Ellen White had been fighting over royalties for years. In 1895, while she was in Australia, the General Conference Association asked her to reduce the royalty on The Great Controversy and Patriarchs and Prophets from fifteen cents to ten cents a copy so the books could be sold more cheaply. She agreed. But she believed the reduction came with a promise: the books would be pushed vigorously and the increased sales would make up for the smaller payment per copy. In her view, that promise was broken. A few months after the board meeting, she described the arrangement in unmistakable terms: “I accepted the lowest royalty on my books, under a most solemn promise that they would be pushed forward vigorously. This promise was not kept. There was fraud in the management.”¹⁰

Then she identified the man who had pressed her. Writing in February 1899, she complained: “Brother Jones urged me to accept less and less royalty on these books, promising solemnly that they would push them to the very limit.”¹¹ This was C. H. Jones—the very man who had announced to the board that he was hunting for the author whose royalty had been driven down.

Jones was not unaware of the history. After reading the published report of the meeting, he wrote to Sisley to explain why White's recent communications had become so bitter. He traced the dispute back to the years when A. R. Henry managed the Review office and had made it his “avowed purpose, not only to get royalty reduced, but to dispense with it entirely.” Jones recalled the General Conference of 1893, when book prices and royalties were cut. He had never forgotten it: “I have always felt that the Devil had a hand in that work.”

Jones also pointed to two books for which White believed she had never been properly paid. Christian Education had been compiled by Prescott from her writings, but no royalty had been paid. Jones asked, “Has there ever been any restitution?” He also raised Christian Temperance, quoting White's complaint: “I want a royalty on that book.” Had she ever received it?¹² Chapter 1 already showed how bluntly she had put the matter herself: “give me my due. I have need of it.”

A. R. Henry, for his part, had no doubt where the conflict with White began. In testimony read into the record at the same meeting, he recalled calling her royalty “a pretty heavy embargo on the canvassers.” He said she had written to him repeatedly, “most always” giving him “a dig on that question.” The issue, he admitted, had been “rankling in her mind for at least ten or twelve years.” Then came his blunt conclusion: “I am sure that the seed of discord, the seat of trouble with me, starts there.”¹³

The pieces now fall into place. The testimony about the secret campaign to force authors into accepting lower royalties was read at the very meeting where Jones was hunting for the man responsible. White had been fighting over royalties for years, and she specifically accused C.H. Jones of pressuring her to accept less. Henry traced his own long-running conflict with her to the same issue. The evidence does not establish that White was the unnamed author in the testimony. But it does establish that the “den of thieves” language was being deployed in the middle of a bitter fight over what the publishers owed her.

And that is the point. The issue was not simply whether the publishers had treated an author fairly. It was that a dispute over royalties had been elevated into a matter of divine justice, with the publisher's conduct condemned in the language of a revelation from God. When Ellen White wanted more for her books, the question was no longer merely what royalty the market could bear or what a financially-troubled publishing house could afford. It became a question of whether men were robbing the Lord's messenger. Not surprisingly, the "Lord" and the testimonies "He" gave to White always seemed to side with White and her business interests.

Half a Million Dollars

White had warned the publishers that their sins could not be washed away without restitution. If those messages really came from God, the publishers could hardly dismiss them as an author's personal grievances. And they didn't. Other writers and former employees began coming forward, demanding the money they believed they were owed.

Within months, C. H. Jones reported that “claims have been presented to the Review & Herald for royalties on books published thirty or forty years ago, and amounting in all to over $500,000.00.... if these claims should be paid just as they have been presented, it will certainly swamp the institution.”¹⁵ That would amount to roughly twenty million dollars in 2025. The floodgates had opened.

The leaders of the publishing houses were teetering between financial ruin and spiritual ruin—disobeying their beloved prophet. In desperation, Sisley reached out to White with a thirteen-page letter in February 1899, admitting that the board had long been at a loss to understand “what the Lord has meant by the frequent messages that have come to us stating that there was dishonesty and robbery going on in this institution.”¹⁶ He then laid out the claims. One former employee had sued for $50,000. A minister demanded $10,000 for a book he said he had written. The financial consequences of the testimonies were becoming impossible to ignore.

One claim was especially awkward. Sisley reported that Mary Steward, one of White's own writers, “claims that she should have a royalty on ‘Sunshine at Home’, as she was hired to compile this book, and wrote some of the articles, receiving for her work only ordinary wages.” He also acknowledged that the publishing house was “paying some persons a royalty on books which they did not themselves write.... In other cases men were hired to write the book, and paid for their labor.”¹⁷

The case of Mary Steward hit close to home. She was hired to compile a book, contributed articles, received ordinary wages, and then watched someone else collect the royalty. The arrangement was now being challenged as a possible injustice. However, it was the exact arrangement behind The Desire of Ages. Marian Davis did the painstaking work of gathering, organizing, editing, and preparing White's material for publication. She was paid for her labor. White held the author's name and the financial interest. As White herself explained, “I have to pay my workers to prepare the books that I get before the public.”¹⁸

So where was White's outrage for her own worker, Marian Davis? Where was the restitution? White had declared that there was “no greater dishonor” than to “purchase from men their God-given talent, or the product of such talent.” Yet when another woman's literary labor helped produce a book under White's name, ordinary wages were apparently sufficient. The principle was invoked with thunder when publishers owed money to authors. It became silent when the author collecting the royalties was Ellen White.

The question was never simply whether writers deserved fair compensation. Of course they did. The question was whether White was willing to apply her own standard to her own publishing operation. She demanded restitution from the institution while benefiting from the very arrangement that Mary Steward was challenging. The prophet had a message about the rights of authors. What she did not seem to have was a message about the rights of her own bookmaker.

Pass the Sponge

Ellen White was known as the backpedaling prophet because she had to walk back so many of her testimonies from "God." One of those was her ill-advised testimony about the need for publishers to make restitution to authors in order to demonstrate their repentance for robbing them of royalties. It sounded good on paper. But the devil was in the details.

By March 1899, the campaign for restitution had become a financial disaster. Claims exceeding half a million dollars threatened to overwhelm the Review and Herald. The testimonies that had stirred up the controversy were now coming back with a steep price tag. On March 11, White wrote again. This time, the message from heaven sounded very different:

I have not had light that there was to be a restitution of royalties according to the ideas of the writers of books. . . . Let the sponge be passed over the board containing the figures, and let all say, Amen. . . . I would not receive an additional penny on any back royalties.¹⁹

Just like that, the demand for restitution disappeared. No investigation. No accounting. No repayment. Pass the sponge over the figures and pretend the whole affair never happened. Astonishingly, the same prophet who had declared that dishonesty and robbery could not be made right without restitution now announced that she had received no light requiring it. Apparently, heaven's instructions had changed when the bill became too large.

But White was not finished. She had a few words for the other authors whose claims had helped create the crisis: “The little story books written are not a great tax on the writers, neither are books of this character of vital consequence to the world.” Their work was apparently of little consequence, and their claims could be swept aside. Yet she made certain that no one misunderstood who had suffered most: “No one can have been hurt financially more than I was hurt.”²⁰

Think about that. The woman whose testimonies had condemned the publishers for robbing authors was now telling those same publishers to wipe the slate clean. The claims of other writers could be forgotten. The institution could be spared. And she would accept not another penny in back royalties. It was a remarkable display of generosity—especially after insisting that she had been hurt more than anyone else.

The publishers were delighted. Jones wrote to W. C. White: “If the authors will be as generous as your mother has been, the houses will not be swamped.”²¹ Of course they would be delighted. The financial catastrophe had been averted, and the woman whose testimonies had helped unleash it was now being praised for calling off the crisis she started.

There is something deeply revealing about this episode. When the publishers resisted her demands, White unsheathed the sword of divine justice. When other authors began demanding what they believed they were owed, the institution faced ruin. Realizing if she got back royalties then every author would need to get them, the "Lord" suddenly lost interest in restitution. The sponge was passed, the figures were White-washed, and the publishers breathed a sigh of relief. But the question remains: if the original accusations were truly messages from God, what gave White the authority to wipe them away when the consequences became inconvenient?

Except for Edson

The sponge did not wipe every slate clean. There was one account that Ellen White was not prepared to forgive. Her son Edson had written a little book called the Gospel Primer for his mission work among Black Americans in the South, and he believed the Review and Herald had cheated him. Edson was constantly getting into dept and his mother repeatedly bailed him out. It was to White's advantage that Edson got paid so she wouldn't need to bail him out yet again. Whatever the merits of his claim, this was not an account she wanted erased.

In August 1899, Sisley asked White the obvious question: did the sponge apply to the Primer? Her answer was immediate:

I write to you now to say that the Gospel Primer was an exception. ... I heard a voice saying, “That book is bringing in more money than the ones who brought it out should have.” ... I heard the statements made, and saw the different persons engaged in this work. You need not consult Edson White in regard to it. Those who have diverted the means that should have come to the Southern Field will not be clear until they make full restitution.²²

There it was. The sponge was not for Edson. While other authors were being told to forgive and forget their claims, a voice from heaven had announced that his book had been underpaid. To no one's surprise, the mysterious "voice" sided with the White empire's financial interests.

Two weeks later, she clarified the arrangement. The sponge, she explained, “was given for the authors themselves to act upon. It was not intended that the men in the publishing houses were to sponge off all the figures regarding their unjust dealings.” The amount owed for the Primer must be “carefully reckoned up, both principal and interest.”²³ So the other authors were expected to forgive their claims, but Edson was to be made whole—with interest.

The board tried to calculate it. Sisley later described the farce. A committee of five was appointed, but the members “found themselves unable to figure the thing out.” Each man wrote down what he thought was the nearest amount, they added the figures together, and divided by five. The result was $1,060. A joint meeting with the General Conference Committee dragged on for more than three hours, with estimates ranging from $30,000 to less than $1,000. Finally, the board voted to pay the authors of the Primer $1,000, hoping it was “as near right as men could make it.” One of those authors was the prophet's son. Sisley captured the board's predicament: “If it is left with the authors to pass the sponge over the figures or not, just as they please, then so far as we can see we are still at their mercy.”²⁴

Shelving The Coming King

The Gospel Primer was not the only time heavenly light appeared to protect Edson's interests. In May 1899, White intervened in another publishing dispute involving his book The Coming King. A new book by A. O. Tait, Heralds of the Morning, covered much of the same ground and threatened to compete with Edson's sales. White admitted she had not even seen Tait's book, but that did not stop her from issuing a warning: “I have not seen this new book, but from the light given me, I know that it will cut directly across the path of the book preceding it. . . . These movements bear not the marks of the Spirit of God.”²⁵

Edson made sure that message reached the people who mattered. In July, Jones complained to W. C. White that “your brother is sending extracts from this late communication from your mother, to conference presidents, state agents, canvassers, and others; and would seem to be doing all he can to kill ‘Heralds’.” Edson wanted his own books to receive the presses' “first and best attention.” Jones protested that “it would seem strange if our publishing houses are to be run in the interests of one or two individuals.”²⁶ The Pacific Press eventually stopped advertising Tait's book.

Now compare the two sides of this affair. When other authors demanded back royalties, White told the publishers to pass the sponge. When the claim belonged to her son, the sponge was withdrawn, principal and interest were demanded, and a heavenly voice supplied the authority. When a competing book threatened his sales, another message from heaven branded the competition as contrary to the Spirit of God. The pattern is obvious: the prophetic warnings consistently landed on the side of the White family's financial interests.

This was more than a family member receiving favorable treatment. Edson could use his mother's supposed revelations to pressure the publishing houses, collect money, and obstruct a competing publication. The publishers were left wondering whether they were operating a denominational institution or a family business in which divine authority could be invoked whenever the family's interests were threatened. The question practically asks itself: when the voice from heaven speaks so consistently in favor of the prophet's own household, how is anyone supposed to distinguish revelation from self-interest?

A Cook Book for the Royalty

One more episode shows how the royalty question had swallowed everything else. In 1899 White asked the Review and Herald to publish a cook book by the Colcords, so that its authors could have the royalty. The board declined, and wrote back with a question that went to the heart of the matter: “Should we not govern our actions in publishing by the merits of the manuscript, rather than the need of the author?”²⁷ White had told them the cook book would be as profitable as other books “which have been published and highly exalted, but which mean simply nothingness.” Sisley complained to W. C. White that “if we are to publish books for profit, and not for merit, and because the author wishes them published... we ought to understand it.”²⁸

Then came the punch line. Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Sisley reported a few months later, “declared that it was taken largely from ‘Science in the Kitchen,’” Mrs. Kellogg’s cook book. “He has a copy marked showing where it had been taken verbatim from that book.”²⁹ The prophet had pressed a publisher to print a plagiarized book so that its authors could collect royalties on it. That was business as usual for White.

Who Were the Money-Changers?

Return to the temple. In The Desire of Ages, Jesus drives out the merchants who have turned the worship of God into a business. He condemns those who make merchandise of divine things. Yet when Ellen White invoked that same scene against the publishers, she was fighting over her own royalties. When the resulting claims threatened the institution, restitution suddenly became unnecessary—unless the money was owed to her son. Then came the voice from heaven, the demand for principal and interest, and the prophetic warning against a competing book. The same divine authority that condemned commercial exploitation was now being invoked to defend the financial interests of the White family.

The money-changers in the temple at least had no claim to speak for God. Ellen White did. She used that claim to turn a publishing dispute into a divine judgment, to accuse others of robbery, and to protect the interests of her own household. Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers. White accused the publishers of being behind those tables. However, the evidence reveals that she was the one making merchandise of the gospel.