Talk:J. Reuben Clark

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11 Jun 2005[edit]

By mutual consent, entries on this talk page have been deleted due to the copyright violation related to the original article and a dispute between two editors. Thank you for your understanding. WBardwin 00:57, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Fixing an invocation of godwins law[edit]

Hmmm! Interesting. A discussion that starts with an invocation of Godwin's law. Oh goodness.

Okay, here's the deal. Editing wikipedia is a privilege, not a right, so people are well within their rights to censor. Whoa whoa, read on: You see; there's a page history, and every single word and act is kept there. So in practice it's actually impossible to censor. :-P

What is sometimes a good idea though is when people make inflammatory remarks etc. to tone them down a bit. Hey! It's a wiki! Feel free to refactor! The original text is kept in page history, after all.

Just, when you do so, it's always a good idea to mark that some section of text is redacted, so that folks know to actually look in history, if they like. It's the polite thing to do.

So each of you have part of the puzzle, and you're both right in part. How about you cooperate and {{sofixit}}? :-)

Kim Bruning 20:58, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Above is moot anyway - it is a copyvio[edit]

In researching this - I found the order and many phrases to be lifted straight from this article: http://www.law2.byu.edu/Law_Society/pdf_Clark_Memorandum/cmF04.pdf

see right side of page 4 and left side of page 5

Trödel|talk 12:23, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good catch. Re: information for rewrite. The only material I have to hand is D. Michael Quinn's biography of Clark, "J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years." It has a great deal of factual material and good references. The bio was written in 1983, while Quinn was still in the church, and so has an LDS bias, but it also contains Quinn's signature "drama" and omniscient speculation. Would listing the book as a reference cause difficulty for the LDS project as we try to deal with Quinn's other work, i.e. Joseph Smith, Jr.? Will look for other materials. WBardwin 16:18, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Apparently I was the one that entered that information. But I don't remember doing it! If you look at the history of edits, there it is, right as I was editing a bunch of Apostle articles to enter them into the system for the first time. I apologize for this and the sooner we remove the copyrighted material, the better. This was part of a talk given by Boyd K. Packer. I sincerely apologize for this. Jgardner 05:27, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Historian Category[edit]

Should J. Reuben be placed in the Historians of the Latter Day Saint movement category? He did quite a bit of writing -- but mostly in law, legal precident, U.S. history, some theology and, of course, church administration. Opinions. WBardwin 07:42, 17 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Additional Content[edit]

Came upon this page. I have some original unpublished content as well as additional blend of sources on J. Reuben Clark that may help further this piece and fill in some of the stubs--including info on his upbringing and career progression, etc. Will pull together to post in a few days. Krt3388 (talk) 20:58, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Per Wikipedia's Reliable sources guidelines, all sources need be able to be verifiable. Completely unpublished sources cannot be cited as sources. -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 23:36, 18 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Am working on this article in pieces. Will upgrade citations and bibliography ASAP. Krt3388 (talk) 18:59, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Career timeline[edit]

The "Career timeline" list is very long; can we pare this back to a more reasonable length? -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 23:22, 20 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll do that now.Krt3388 (talk) 16:49, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It looks much better now. Good work! -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 17:09, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Image Attribution[edit]

I'm struggling a bit with the attribution of the image I just added, a photograph of J. Reuben Clark taken before 1928. I'd like to know how to appropriately source for a public domain image and share the policy. Can anyone help with that?Krt3388 (talk) 20:10, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just because it was taken before 1928 doesn't necessarily mean it is in the public domain. Was this particular image actually used in any printed publications? If so, which & when? Who was the photographer? If you can't clearly demonstrate the photo is in the pubic domain, you could try to get permission from the presumed rights holder(s) — see wp:Donating copyrighted materials & wp:Requesting copyright permission. Once you have that, maybe a wp:OTRS submission would be the best way to make sure that the image doesn't get deleted again. -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 18:35, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Attitude Toward Minorities Heading[edit]

Today I removed the phrase, "...and the sense was that such a mixing of blood would invalidate the white recipient's priesthood status." This phrase was unsourced and speculative, without any certain relationship to J. Reuben Clark. It supposes the attitude of Mormons and Mormon leadership, where there was no absolute agreement on the subject in the church. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Krt3388 (talkcontribs) 21:30, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is not unsourced—the source is the Needle review of Quinn's book. It can also be cited to Quinn's book itself. The sources are describing Clark's reasoning, not any "official position" of Clark's church. The issue of blood separation in hospitals was never the subject of official LDS Church policy. Good Ol’factory (talk) 22:25, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]


The statement "In his 1898 valedictory, Clark spoke of 'the foul sewage of Europe,' a phrase that Quinn interprets as referring to Jews" is inaccurate. Quinn interprets this as a reference to "new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe"--which included Jews to be sure, but also many others. Here is the context:

"Although the United States has always been a land of immigrants, by the 1880s the native-born Americans who descended from North European immigrants had added one further distinction to humanity. The millions of 'new immigrants' after 1870 were 'undesirables' because they were primarily Roman Catholic, Jews, Asians, Slavic East Europeans, or swarthy South Europeans. Even though many Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Balkan Muslims, and Italians were as blue-eyed and blondish as the stereotypical Scandinavian or German, they were regarded as inferior due to their cultural and linguistic differences from even brown-eyed, dark-haired people in the North European countries east of Poland, west of Spain, and north of Italy....

In rural Utah, young Reuben's experience with aliens was limited to Mormon immigrants from northern Europe. He had virtually no personal contact with anyone outside of what he called the 'pure white race.' Still, this LDS youth had the full endowment of racism characteristic of late nineteenth-century America. This included xenophobia, a fear and dislike of people who are different from one's own group, and nativism, a preference for native-born Americans.

His father recorded that the University of Utah audience gave a wild ovation when Reuben's 1898 valedictory talk made the thundering statement: 'America must cease to be the cess-pool into which shall drain the foul sewage of Europe.' This reflected the prevelant [sic] hostility of the native-born of the 1890s toward new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe" (D. Michael Quinn, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002], 318-319).

To highlight this phrase as an early example of Clark's antisemitism is misleading, since it did not specifically refer to Jews but to European immigrants generally. The next sentence in this section is also inaccurate: "'There is nothing in their history which indicates that the Jewish race have either free-agency or liberty,' Clark argued in reply to a 1941 book on Hitler." The quotation should read: "There is nothing in their history which indicates that the Jewish race loves either free-agency or liberty" (335). Needle got the quote wrong in his review.

I find it troubling that Jeffrey Needle's review of Quinn's book is the main source for this section of the article, rather than the book itself. Quinn does indeed portray Clark as a lifelong anti-Semite, but he provides a context for these beliefs that is missing from Needle's review. Quinn attributes Clark's anti-Jewish bias to his personal experiences while living in New York (325), to his two defeats for a Senate nomination at the hands of a Jewish opponent (325-26), and to his strong anti-Communist views (326-28). Clark's antisemitism should not be overlooked, but neither should it be given undue prominence. Clark's views were probably the norm in the State Department when he served there, and they were unfortunately shared by a significant proportion of his countrymen through at least the 1930s.

Standrew4 (talk) 07:55, 18 March 2012 (UTC)Standrew4[reply]

jreubenclark.co source[edit]

I'm not sure that the recent additions of citations to the website http://jreubenclark.co/ constitute a reliable source. There's no information on that website about who wrote the text or who is running the website or anything. It is a .co domain name from Colombia, registered in Orem, Utah. With a number of published biographies out there about Clark, surely there are better sources than using this largely anonymous source/site. Good Ol’factory (talk) 04:02, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, and actually took care of this before I noticed this converstion thread. -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 20:54, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Quorum of the Twelve Apostles | October 11, 1934 – October 11, 1934[edit]

I think these dates are incorrect as at each dissolution of the 1st Pres Clark resumed his place in the 12 until called into the next 1st Pres as a counselor. It is unusual that he spent his entire time as a member of the 12 in the 1st Pres but that does not mean he was not a member of that quorum the entire time. --Trödel 17:01, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]