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A Book of Mormons Richard S. Van Wagoner and Steven C. Walker Copyright 1982, Signature Books |
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B. H. Roberts (1857-1933)
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B. H. Roberts was president of the First Council of Seventy, a historian and theologian, and a Democrat. Photograph courtesy LDS Church Archives. |
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Family Background 1857. March 13: Brigham Henry Roberts, named after Brigham Young, was born in Warrington, England. His mother emigrated to Centerville, Utah, after separating from her husband, leaving five-year-old Henry in England in the care of friends. Four years later, he emigrated to Utah with his sister Polly. As an adult, Roberts summed up his youth: "My childhood was a nightmare; my boyhood was a tragedy." Roberts married Sarah Louisa Smith in 1878, and later married Celia Ann Dibble (1884) and Dr. Margaret Curtis Shipp (1890). He was the father of fifteen children.
1871. Young Roberts worked for Centerville farmers, made bricks for construction of the Salt Lake ZCMI, and drove an ox-team grader for the Utah Central Railway. At fourteen, he prospected in the Utah mining districts of Ophir, Jacob City, and Metcur. His evenings were spent in gambling houses, where he "manipulated the jack of hearts and spades; learned to drink his coffee black and his liquor straight; learned to bet and bluff and cajole." Bishop Edwin D. Woolley, disapproving Roberts's mining activities, disfellowshipped him. A short time later George A. Smith met Roberts on a Salt Lake street and remarked, "Henry, I understand you've been cut off from the Church." "So?" "Well, what are you going to do about it?" "Nothing! If Bishop Woolley wants me out of the Church, then I'm out of the Church." "Well, then, you're on your way to hell," retorted Smith. Roberts appealed his case and was restored to fellowship. At seventeen, he put his mining camp life behind him and returned to Centerville, where he apprenticed as a blacksmith. The transition was not easy— "The good boys didn't want me; I did not want the bad ones, so I stayed to myself."
1878. Respectably married and ordained a seventy, Roberts attended the University of Deseret, at the time scarcely more than a high school. He was so destitute that he wore the same "brown-sack-suit" every day of the school year. And when he delivered the valedictory speech he wore a secondhand suit made over by his sister.
1880s. Roberts spent most of the decade as a missionary in the Midwest, the Southern States, and Great Britain. He worked first in Iowa and Nebraska, then Tennessee (1880-1882). |
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B. H. Roberts in disguise (1884). Photograph courtesy LDS Church Archives.
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A few months later, he returned as assistant president of the Southern States Mission. Violence against his missionaries was commonplace. When Elders John H. Gibbs and William S. Berry were murdered in Cane Creek, Tennessee, Roberts shaved his beard and mustache, dressed in old, mismatched clothes, and rubbed soot grease from the smokehouse walls over his face. So disguised, he entered the hostile region and recovered the temporarily buried bodies for return to Salt Lake. Exile 1886. December 5: As associate editor of the Salt Lake Herald, Roberts was preparing the daily dispatches when deputy marshals arrested him for "unlawful cohabitation." By six o'clock he was called on a mission to Great Britain, jumped his $2,000 bail, and left for Liverpool. 1888. October 7: Soon after his return from England, he was called to the First Council of Seventy. 1889. April: Tiring of life on the underground, Roberts gave himself up. "I preferred to spare these women all the publicity, all the court inquiry that it was in my power to spare them. So I ended matters by pleading guilty." The customary sentence for "Mormon Cohabs" was "6 by 3"—six months in jail and a fine of $300. Roberts was forced to take a "pauper's oath," becoming, in his words, "an inferior hero," because his sentence was only "4 by 2." During the 1900 Congressional hearings on his right to be seated as a U.S. Representative, he was again charged with "unlawful cohabitation," having fathered polygamous children after 1890. He argued that polygamists "have found it necessary to regard their moral obligations as more binding upon their consciences than their technical obedience to statutory law."
1891. When the Church disbanded the People's Party and encouraged the Saints to divide along national party lines, Roberts became an ardent Democrat. 1894. Drafting Utah's proposed constitution, Roberts argued that woman's suffrage was a privilege rather than a right, and he observed that in his own home he preferred "some asylum, some refuge from the storms and cares of life," not "political argument." His position was widely criticized. One editorial cartoon pictured him as a bull braced on a railroad track to contend with an approaching train. The caption was supplied by Orson F. Whitney: "We can admire your courage, but damn your judgment." 1895. June: Utah Democrats nominated Moses Thatcher for the U.S. Senate and B. H. Roberts for the House of Representatives. October: At conference Joseph F. Smith of the First Presidency remarked that Roberts and Thatcher were out of harmony with the brethren because they had not cleared their political activities in advance. Five weeks later, both Democrats were defeated. Roberts later wrote that "unquestionably … the defeat of Mr. Roberts and the Democratic party in general was more or less influenced by the criticism." 1896. February: Roberts and Thatcher refused to sign a Church "political manifesto" which stipulated that before a general authority could seek political office he must "apply to the proper authorities and learn from them whether he can, consistently with the obligations already entered into with the Church upon assuming his office, take upon himself the added duties and labors and responsibilities of the new position." March 5: The First Presidency, the Twelve, and Seven Presidents of Seventy continued to labor with the Democrat leader. "We spent the whole day here until six o'clock laboring with B. H. Roberts," Wilford Woodruff wrote. "He stood like Adamant and he is going to destruction." Roberts felt that the political manifesto constituted an infringement on basic civil liberties. He was suspended from ecclesiastical duties and given three weeks to recant. Two weeks later Heber J. Grant recorded that Roberts "held all the brethren at bay." March 24: He walked the streets all night, wrestling with the dilemma of sacrificing principle or being stripped of his Church blessings. Just hours before the deadline, he decided to sign and was accepted back into fellowship. 1898. With approval from Quorum of the Twelve President Lorenzo Snow, Roberts ran for the House of Representatives and won by a plurality of 7000 votes. 1900. After a lengthy debate the U.S. House of Representatives refused to seat him because of his plural marriages. "Gentleman," he responded, "I have lived with a good conscience until this very day and am sensible of no act of shame upon my part; you can brand me with shame and send me forth, but I shall leave here with head erect and brow undaunted, and walk the earth as angels walk the clouds. If you violate the Constitution of these United States all the shame will be with you."
1902. Utah Democratic Chairman B. H. Roberts wrote a letter criticizing Senator Reed Smoot for seeking re-election instead of magnifying his office as an apostle. The letter was published and caused an uproar. Fellow Democrat Heber J. Grant recorded that in a meeting of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve, "the general feeling was that after having run for Congress himself twice, that it came with very poor grace for [Roberts] to take the position that no high church official should hold any high office politically." 1910. Roberts stunned the Mormon community during the 1910 campaign when he accused Smoot of being "content to be the tool of the trusts and a trickster in the politics of his own state." Smoot did not publicly reply to his political and ecclesiastical subordinate, but in private he observed that B. H. Roberts "is a very contemptible man and dishonest in his life and utterances." Roberts continued to advocate causes not favored by Republican general authorities, notably the League of Nations and Roosevelt's "New Deal."
Roberts was recognized as the greatest Mormon orator [p.245] since Sidney Rigdon. Preston Nibley described his style: "How often have we seen him arise and face an audience, beginning at first to talk in a modulated tone, so low that he could scarcely be heard, increasing gradually in volume, making a point here and there, and then approaching his climax with a perfect Niagara of words, that left us almost breathless, and ending finally in a voice that was scarcely audible. There is power in oratory, and nature never lavished this gift more freely than she did on B. H. Roberts."
1917. During World War I Roberts served, at the age of sixty, as chaplain of the 145th Utah Light Field Artillery in France. p.246] During an influenza epidemic near Bordeaux, "he was unafraid of the vicious malady. He never hesitated to go into the sick rooms and never seemed to worry about the risk of getting the disease himself. Many times, especially when visiting the Latter-day Saint men, he would administer to them and the blessings Brother Roberts would give were tremendous and would kindle encouragement and hope to the men." |
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| B. H. Roberts—World War I. Photograph courtesy LDS Archives. | ||||
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President of the First Council of Seventy Roberts's non-ecclesiastical activities created friction between himself and other members of the First Council of Seventy. In 1899, commenting on Roberts's lack of Church involvement, J. Golden Kimball commented, "No man can be inactive in the Church and have much faith." And even Kimball cringed when Roberts referred to a political opponent as a "son of a bitch." In 1901 another member of the Council, Joseph W. McMurrin, "took Bro. Roberts to task for not doing his part in filling appointments," and the senior president of the Council, Seymour B. Young, noted that when "Bro. Roberts was asked if he could find time to devote a little more time to his Seventies duties, he said no and seemed offended that such a question should be asked." Roberts's weakness for alcohol seems to have put another barrier between him and other members of the Council. In 1908 Seymour B. Young recorded that Roberts "has been many times much worse for liquor in so much that his brethren of the council have had to take up a labor with him." 1924. Became senior president of the First Council of Seventy. From 1922 to 1927 he served as president of the Eastern States Mission.
Although he had no professional training in history, Roberts ranks among the most productive historians of Mormonism. Appointed assistant Church historian in 1901, he was author of many historical works, including The Life of John Taylor, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History,, Succession in the Presidency, New Witnesses for God, Missouri Persecutions, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, Joseph Smith—Prophet, Teacher, and the six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church. He also edited the History of the Church in seven volumes.
His numerous theological works include Defense of the Faith and the Saints, Seventys' Course in Theology, "Man's Relationship to Deity, Man's Need of God," and "The Immortality of Man." When, in 1921, James E. Talmage forwarded several pointed questions about the Book of Mormon, Roberts prepared for the Quorum of the Twelve "Book of Mormon Difficulties" and "A Book of Mormon Study." "I am thoroughly convinced of the necessity of all the brethren herein addressed becoming familiar with these Book of Mormon problems, and finding the answer for them, as it is a matter that will concern the faith of the Youth of the Church now as also in the future, as well as such casual inquiries that may come to us from the outside world." Released from the presidency of the Eastern States Mission in 1927, Roberts devoted his full efforts to "The Truth, the Way, the Life"—a systematic theology of Mormonism. He had worked intermittently on the project for more than thirty years. But when the manuscript was completed in 1928, objections from Joseph Fielding Smith and others prevented Church publication. Opposition centered around Roberts's contention that a race of men existed before Adam. Additional concerns were expressed over his attempts to reconcile the "scientific theory of catastrophism" with the scriptures. Roberts's observation in 1931 that "Doctrinal questions before the Twelve and the First Presidency in connection with my book… [have] little prospect of settlement," proved correct. "The Truth, the Way, the Life" has never been published.
1933. September 27: Died in Salt Lake City from complications of diabetes at the age of seventy-six. Buried in Centerville, Utah.
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