The Desire of Wages

Chapter 17 - Mission Money

by Dirk Anderson

When SDAs are shown Ellen White’s royalties, they have an answer ready: she gave the money away. Her foreign royalties, they say, went to missions. She said so herself. In 1903 she told a friend, “Every year thousands of dollars from the royalty on my books goes into new books for this country, and to Europe to help in the translation of books into different languages, and to advance other lines of work. I feel a great satisfaction in this investment.”¹

“Investment” was the right word. This chapter follows the foreign royalties from The Desire of Ages and her other books, and asks three simple questions. Who controlled the money? What was it spent on? And who came out ahead?

Dedicated, But Not Given

Chapter 1 quoted the letter White wrote from Basel in 1886 to A. R. Henry, who had questioned her royalties. It set the pattern for everything that followed:

All that I receive of royalty on foreign books is dedicated to the foreign missions. . . . I dare not leave it for their judgment to apply this means. I do not mean that the means that should come to me justly shall be under control of any board of directors. I know perfectly well what I am about, and I know that I should control the means God has made me steward of.²

Notice what “dedicated” meant. The money was not handed to the mission board. It was not placed under the General Conference. It stayed in her name, under her control, to be spent as she decided. A dedication that can be redirected at the owner’s will is not a gift. It is a budget line.

And it was redirected. In 1893, writing from Australia, she told her daughter-in-law that $1,600 in foreign royalties, money “solemnly pledged to God” for students and foreign fields, had been used to start the school in Australia: “else no school would or could have been started.”³ In 1899 she recalled another case. Brother Lewis Johnson in Europe wrote that he was holding a thousand dollars of her royalty. “I wrote that I needed it to invest in the establishment of a school here in Australia.” Johnson pleaded to keep it for training young ministers, and she let it stay.⁴ Australia was a mission field, and a school is a worthy cause. The point is not that the money was wasted. The point is that “dedicated to the foreign missions” meant whatever Ellen White decided it went that year, and the European workers had to ask her permission to keep it.

The E. G. White Mission Fund

In 1897 the publishing house in Hamburg asked White, more than once, to give up her royalty on the German edition of Christian Temperance. The margins on translated books were thin. W. C. White answered for his mother:

Mother does not feel free to relinquish the author’s royalty and to place all in the hands of the publishers.⁵

He reminded the Germans of what she had told them at Basel years before, when they had argued that books must be sold so cheaply that nothing was left for the author: “You may figure it out that way as often as you like, but the light that I have is, that books can be sold at a price which will pay for their publication, and which will place in the hands of the publishers and authors the necessary funds.” Her author’s share came with a revelation attached.

Then he explained where the foreign royalties would go from now on. In the past they had gone to educate “prospective missionaries,” mainly because the General Conference would pay for translation but not for schools. Now the plan would change. The royalties from translated works “shall be used under the direction of the author to meet the expense of translating other works.” The cost of translating a book would be charged to “the E. G. White mission fund.” If the margin was tight, the royalty would be waived on the first thousand copies; after that the publisher would pay the fund ten per cent of the wholesale price. At the time of writing, the fund held $87.63.⁶

Notice, translation of her books is to be funded. Her royalty on the translations goes into a fund that carries her name and is spent “under the direction of the author.” The fund pays to translate more of her books. Those books sell and pay more royalty into the fund. White put it plainly herself in 1899: the royalty fund “is now being used for the translation of my books into other languages.”⁷ The “mission money” was a machine for multiplying Ellen White’s books around the world.

SDAs will say that spreading her books was the mission. That is exactly the point. The cause she was funding was her own catalogue, and every translation she paid for became a new source of royalty.

“We Are Not Free to Keep It”

The royalties kept growing. Around 1902 L. R. Conradi, the leader of the work in Germany, wrote to White about the money sitting in Hamburg: “the amount is constantly growing, and we are not free to simply keep it here without your consent. In case you desire a part of it we could send it to you by check at any time.” He reminded her that at Basel she had said some of it should go to educating young people, and it had been booked that way at first. “We have not thus booked any of this money here, as we received different instructions, and so have simply booked it to Royalty.” Now Hamburg was training translators for some fifty languages, and Conradi asked whether she would be “pleased to help us in this way.”⁸

So the head of the SDA work in Europe had to ask permission to use the “mission” money for missions. A year later he thanked her for leaving it with them as working capital, “so long as you see fit to do it.” In the same letter he mentioned what his own workers earned: between $4.10 and $7.25 a week.⁹

In 1903 W. C. White wrote to Conradi in a very different tone about the royalties from Scandinavia: “Mother ought to have at her control the money which has accrued as royalties from her books sold in Scandinavia.” She had let Elder Olsen use the Scandinavian plates “largely against her own judgement,” and the money had gone to help a few young men through college. If the brethren there did not start “dealing squarely with mother,” her son warned, the family would move her books to a publisher who would.¹⁰

And what was the Hamburg royalty fund to pay for? “The translating, typesetting, and plate making of her Testimonies and other books.” W. C. White added: “Mother tells me that she regards it as her duty to own the plates to her books so far as possible and I know of no better use that could be made of her royalty fund.”¹¹ The mission fund was buying printing plates, and the plates belonged to Ellen White.

The Echo’s Markup

Chapter 15 showed that White’s share of The Desire of Ages included her own set of plates, which carried the right to print the book outside the United States and Canada. Those plates went to the Echo Publishing Company in Melbourne. White explained the arrangement in 1903: “I paid for plates of this book to send to Australia, that the Echo office might publish an edition. The money that I paid out for these plates will slowly come back to me as the office there disposes of the books.”¹²

The British office in London wanted to sell the book too. In March 1900 W. W. Prescott, then in London, wrote to W. C. White about the terms the Australians had offered. Printed sheets of The Desire of Ages would cost London three shillings and sixpence a copy. Prescott’s board had worked out what it would cost to print the book themselves from a set of plates: about one shilling and sixpence. “The Echo Company,” he concluded, “were therefore charging us something over 100 per cent profit.” Renting the plates was no better; the terms “would put a tax upon such an edition as we should be able to print that we could not possibly carry it.” London gave up on the subscription edition and settled for the cheap American trade edition.¹³ The Australians wanted even more for the plates of White’s children’s life of Christ, Christ Our Saviour: £150, which Prescott called “beyond all reason.”

The same letter protested a decision made in Australia, where W. C. White lived, to take India and South Africa from the London office’s territory and give them to the Echo. London had been left with nothing but Britain and fields that “simply run in debt for books.” But Prescott knew he could not stop it: “Of course you can carry out your decision because you own the books.”¹⁴

“You own the books.” Not the sect, not the mission board, not the publishers. The Whites.

What She Did Give

It would be unfair to suggest that Ellen White kept all the money she received from her books. She gave generously to the SDA work and to individuals in need. In the same 1903 letter in which she described her foreign royalties as an “investment,” she itemized some of her contributions: a thousand dollars to the Avondale school, fourteen hundred dollars to the work in Australia, and assistance for a poor family. “While I was in Australia, I was a bank for the workers there,” she wrote.¹⁵ Nor was this her only substantial gift. She turned the royalties from Christ’s Object Lessons over to the effort to relieve the debts of the sect’s schools, a contribution SDAs rightly regard as one of her most generous acts.

Her commitment to Australia was especially strong. She regarded the work there as part of her legacy and committed herself to establishing its institutions, even going into debt to help purchase land and construct buildings. For a time, much of the royalty income from her books went toward those projects and the interest on the money she had borrowed.

These contributions deserve to be acknowledged. But generosity does not erase the questions raised by the way the money was earned, the way the books were produced, or the financial arrangements she insisted upon. A person can give generously and still practice questionable ethics. The question is not whether Ellen White ever gave money away. Clearly, she did. The question is whether those gifts settle the questions of authorship, royalties, commercial advantage, and the use of prophetic authority. They do not.

Follow the Money

Here, then, is where the “mission money” went. It was pledged to God and then moved where the prophet needed it. It stayed under “the direction of the author” in a fund bearing her name. It paid to translate her books into more languages, so they would earn more royalty. It bought printing plates that she owned. It sat in Hamburg as working capital until she decided otherwise. And when the Echo office in Melbourne printed her life of Christ from her plates, it offered the sheets to fellow believers in London at twice the cost.

Jesus told His disciples, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth” (Matthew 6:19). White did not hoard in the ordinary sense. She did something more lasting. She built a worldwide publishing estate, owned the plates, controlled the territories, and called it mission. The next chapter turns to the defenses SDAs offer for all of this.