“Fearless in the Cause of Truth”

A determined Heber J. Grant surveyed American readers from the cover of Time on April 7, 1930. The hand-drawn sketch of the seventh President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints approximated Grant’s real-life visage: thin, bearded, bespectacled, with a fading, snow-white hairline. To mark the centennial of the founding of the American-born faith, Time elected to feature Grant as a bridge between the past and future of the Church. “Tall, bewhiskered, graced with patriarchal kindness,” Grant was not the repressive leader of a backwards sect of religious deviants in Utah. Those largely nineteenth-century caricatures had softened into a more recent American success story presided over by Grant. He still played the role of “divinely authorized President, Prophet, Seer and Revelator,” according to Time, but he also successfully guided the Church to assets exceeding three million dollars. “Mormon wealth . . . is apparent to anyone who studies Salt Lake City commercially,” the author wrote, and “big Mormon names appear on the boards of practically every important enterprise in Utah, but none more often than that of Heber Jedediah Grant.” Grant was a business magnate—a capitalist success story worthy of admiration by his fellow citizens—as he captained an “American religion” of over seven hundred thousand members, so the article reasoned.1

Grant’s arrival on the public scene as an American success story was not inevitable from his youth. Born as Heber Jeddy Grant2 “in Salt Lake City, Utah, on November 22, 1856, to Rachel Ridgeway Ivins and Jedediah M. Grant,” young Heber quickly faced challenges. His father was second counselor in the First Presidency and a fierce defender of then-President Brigham Young’s ambitious reformation of Latter-day Saint religious life across Utah Territory, known eventually as the “Mormon Reformation.”3 An exhausted Jedediah Grant died of pneumonia “just nine days after Heber’s birth.” Grant was now fatherless and impoverished. Yet his father’s religious legacy mixed well with his mother’s determination to cradle Grant in a climate of survival, resilience, and intense adherence to religious truth.4 Rachel raised Grant on her own and worked tirelessly to earn enough to support him.5

Grant developed his own dreams and ambitions, but they were born within the larger Latter-day Saint story as he came of age in the 1870s and ’80s when the Church’s temporal success was far from guaranteed. The financial peril he experienced in his childhood nurtured an interest in business and entrepreneurship that would simultaneously fuel and torture Grant throughout his life. His work ethic and commitment to religious principles was unimpeachable, but he also took financial risks that led to mounting debt and periods of his life where his physical health eroded alongside his financial well-being. In an era where Church leaders often sought outside income sources to supplement their living allowance, Grant exhausted himself working to meet his own expectations.6 There was irony, then, in the 1930 article by Time. Grant never truly arrived as a successful business magnate if measured by his own personal assets but carried aspirations for such throughout much of his Church service.

Navigating the boom-and-bust financial cycles endemic to the nineteenth-century United States (especially the American West) shaped Grant for prolonged Church service. Indeed, many of the qualities Grant displayed later in life were rooted in his early struggles. Though Grant nurtured deep familial ties to the Church’s founding and its religious principles, he presided over the Church during a period of significant transition and modernization (fig. 1). He was called to the apostleship in 1882 and entered polygamy in 1884.7 As he aged, he helped guide the Church’s shift away from the communal economics of the nineteenth century and toward the capitalist ethos of the twentieth century. By the time he became Church President in 1918, Grant was a monogamist. His plural wives Lucy and Emily preceded him in death; only Augusta was still at his side. He devoted the early portion of his presidency to rooting out polygamists who failed to abide the Church’s pivot away from the practice.8 He reasserted the Church’s commitment to the scriptural mandate of the Word of Wisdom as an individual health code.9 He also sought to foster Church growth in other areas outside the Great Basin, like California. Over the course of his twenty-six years as prophet and President of the Church, he weathered the storms of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. With his fellow leaders in the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency, he launched the Church Security Program, the first modern Churchwide welfare system to address the financial effects of the Great Depression on individual members.10 His own sense of religious duty, mixed with memories of his own poverty in childhood, rendered him an advocate for the widow, orphan, and the impoverished. Any depiction then of Grant as simply a model American business leader or the epitome of American financial success misses the personal wrestle that molded Grant into a devoted leader of the Latter-day Saint people and one equipped to guide the Church into the future.

In February 2025, the Church History Department released the complete journals of Heber J. Grant online through the Church History Library catalog. Grant’s collective journals span sixteen archival boxes (eight linear feet) and over fifty individual volumes, along with other unbound journals. In size, they represent one of the best-kept journals by a Church President of the twentieth century and carry similarities to the comprehensiveness of journals kept by Presidents Wilford Woodruff and Spencer W. Kimball. A detailed read of Grant’s journals unmasks the growth, struggles, and contributions of a critical and transitional figure in the twentieth-century Church.

The Journals

Heber J. Grant’s journals are part of a larger collection of Grant’s papers spanning 197 archival boxes housed at the Church History Library. Most of the papers consist of Grant’s personal, business, and ecclesiastical correspondence.11 Efforts are underway to release the entirety of Grant’s papers digitally. The release of Grant’s journals coincides with a policy change permitting the release of the papers of General Authorities and officers of the Church seventy years after their death (to protect confidentiality and the privacy of individuals mentioned in the journals). Other archival collections released under this policy include the papers of Wilford Woodruff, Emmeline B. Wells, Joseph F. Smith, and Anthon H. Lund.12

The digital release of Grant’s journals included images with redaction applied by staff at the Church History Library according to the library’s access policy.13 Little of the applied redaction pertained to Grant himself; instead, details about the private confessions of others, Church discipline, and temple ceremonies were carefully redacted to be minimally intrusive to the comprehensiveness of the overall record. In many instances, names were redacted while still preserving details about the historical setting. Thus, researchers can view online almost the entirety of Grant’s journals for the first time.

Before the digital release of the journals, scholars who were granted selective access to Grant’s physical journals held by the Church History Department excerpted the records for their own use. The most notable use of the journals was by Ronald W. Walker, who published a series of articles on Grant’s life with intentions to produce a comprehensive biography of the Church President.14 Walker’s initial work on Grant started in the late 1970s at the directive of Church Historian Leonard Arrington, before Walker transferred to Brigham Young University.15 Shifting access policies within the department prevented widespread use of the journals by others, leaving Walker’s research notes within his personal papers (now housed at the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University) as the closest representation of the content in Grant’s journals.16

An abridgement of Grant’s journals was also privately published in 2010. The source text was not verified from the original journals but compiled from excerpts found in the research papers of other scholars like D. Michael Quinn and Scott G. Kenney and only represented a fraction of the total content of the journals.17 Such source trading of typescripts was common practice for the time and has led to the proliferation of approximate versions of Grant’s journals, promoted by the inaccessibility of the originals. Beyond textual verification, examining the original journals presents other advantages, including an understanding of the iterative nature of Grant’s journal composition.

Grant feared his recordkeeping was of little value, yet he persisted in part out of a haunting duty to record his thoughts. Of his early journal-keeping efforts in 1884, Grant remarked: “I sometimes feel almost like stopping the writing of a journal as my grammar is so poor also my spelling that I dislike to leave any such a record as I have to make under the circumstances.” He continued, “I am of the opinion that it is almost a matter of duty that I keep a journal and this is the main reason I am willing to do so.” Grant’s sense of duty was partially born out of his childhood circumstances. “I would be willing to pay any reasonable amount of money for a record of father’s life,” he lamented, “but he never recorded any of his acts, and there is today nothing worthy of mention on record regarding him.”18 He also interacted with and admired men in Church leadership who kept regular journals, including Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Francis M. Lyman. He never outran the feeling that he was failing in his personal promise to keep a better record, despite the volumes of journals that grew out of his daily activities. In 1915, he recorded another personal impression to improve his journal keeping:

I opened the Doctrine and Covenants with a prayer in my heart that I might turn to some passages from which I could gain some comfort. I first opened to section 108, verse 3, which reads as follows: “And arise up and be more careful henceforth, in observing your vows which you have made, and do make, and you shall be blessed with exceeding great blessings.” It impressed me. I really feel that I have been very careless all my life in promising myself to do certain work, especially with reference to my journal. Time and again I have declared that I would keep it up and yet I neglect it often for weeks or even months at a stretch.19

Grant’s uneven early recordkeeping caused his corpus of journals to develop in fits and starts. His recordkeeping was iterative, and his style shifted as he aged (and as he acquired more resources and experience). The extant volumes of Grant’s journals were filed and described by archivists within the Church History Department as bound journals, letterpress copybooks, and unbound journals. The series of bound journals consist primarily of daybooks and pocketbooks numbering thirty-eight volumes from 1880 to 1925. The letterpress journals span eight volumes from 1886 to 1898 and 1921 to 1922. The unbound journals comprise sheets of regular entries from 1886 to May 1945. A textual comparison of all of Grant’s journals shows that his bound journals were later used to produce unbound typewritten and handwritten copies, some of which were subsequently pressed and duplicated into letterpress books.

Bound Journals

Heber J. Grant’s first extant journal begins in October 1880 when Grant was just twenty-three, shortly after his call to serve as Tooele stake president. As a teenager, Grant worked in an insurance office where he developed excellent penmanship and communication skills.20 Written in flowing, legible script, Grant’s semifrequent early entries reflect a mixture of business and religious duties and are often disrupted by figures and calculations.21 The ink and Grant’s own handwriting shift from day to day in some of the early volumes, suggesting that Grant may have carried the journals with him as he traveled.22 These early leather-bound volumes were more comprehensive than the daybooks and pocketbooks Grant used during the 1890s and onward (fig. 2). Collectively, the leatherbound journals, pocketbooks, and daybooks represent the best approximation of Grant’s day-to-day activities from 1880 to 1925.

Grant’s bound journals are numbered sequentially in consistent pencil markings, suggesting that someone labeled the volumes to chronologize and organize them after they were written.23 Markings in later daybooks suggest copying entries for other iterations of the journal (fig. 3).24 Grant utilized employees and family to do the work of copying his notes into more readable entries. His bound journals are not comprehensive. For example, typewritten, unbound entries exist for his journals from 1893 to 1896 where no corresponding bound journal survived.25

In another instance, on January 1, 1883, Grant recorded that he had “been so busy of late” that he “neglected [his] journal” and “concluded to start a new journal today and fill this one up from Nov 27/82 to January 1/83 as opportunity will allow.” He had “pencil memorandums for most of the data” and could recover some of his daily happenings from November to December 1882. Outside of recording the revelation from President John Taylor calling him to the apostleship in October 1882, Grant left the rest of his 1882 journal blank, never returning to record the missing information for the first few months of his apostolic service.26

Letterpress Journals

Grant also reproduced journal entries in letterpress copybooks beginning in the 1880s. Letterpress books, composed of bound pages of thin tissue paper, were mostly used for transferring correspondence through a process requiring moisture and a press. Authors were able to retain a copy of their writings for filing in their offices or homes. Grant duplicated some of his journal entries to circulate them among his fellow members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. When Apostle Anthon H. Lund was serving as president of the European Mission from 1893 to 1896, for example, Grant sent Lund entries containing important minutes and decisions by the Twelve to keep him apprised of Church business.27 These copies were direct reproductions from his letterpress journals. Only eight volumes of letterpress copybooks exist in Grant’s collection of papers. Four volumes span the years 1886 to January 1898 while two volumes span 1921 to 1922. Grant maintained his correspondence in a similar fashion, but far more robustly, producing over eighty volumes of handwritten and typewritten letterpress correspondence. Most of Grant’s letterpress entries are typed and copied over from Grant’s series of unbound journals.

Unbound Journals

The byproduct of producing letterpress copies of his journals was a series of unbound pages that Grant initially thought of destroying after he duplicated them. In July 1887, Grant began the production of his letterpress volumes retroactively, hoping such efforts would tidy his journal-keeping process. He failed to keep a journal for 1886 and sought to recover his daily activities from his own correspondence and from his “friends” in the Quorum of the Twelve, including Francis M. Lyman.28 Once pages were copied into the letterpress journal, Grant saw little reason to retain the copy but could not bring himself to destroy the pages. He stored the source material for his 1886 letterpress journal in his “desk at home.”29 This set off a process that would influence Grant’s recordkeeping for the remainder of his life.

Most of Grant’s letterpress and unbound journals are typed. His record-keeping process formalized as he aged and as he acquired resources to assist him. In the 1880s, he deployed the use of a typewriter in the management of his businesses and eventually adopted the technology in 1887 to aid his journal keeping (using his own clerks to produce dictated journal entries).30 Grant loathed the time expended to record his own entries. “I [like] to work,” he wrote in 1911, “but do not like to sit down and write a record of what I have been doing no matter how brief it is.”31 He often elected to draft quick notes of his entries which he then had typed by his wife Augusta.32 Occasionally, his entries were typed in bulk from dictation. For years, he used his associate at Grant and Co., Frederick Barker, to type dictated entries, including in 1911 when he initially neglected to produce a journal from the beginning of the year until the end of June.33

Grant favored a dictation machine to help him produce correspondence and journal entries, often remaining awake into the early morning hours to record his thoughts. Such nighttime thoughts ranged from the unguarded and vulnerable to the routine enumeration of his daily schedule. He accumulated wax cylinders that could be played and transcribed by others.34 Grant’s journals after 1922 represent the best efforts of Joseph Anderson, his personal secretary, to capture his day-to-day life from dictation.35

These unbound journals from 1922 until his death in 1945 are the only daily record of Grant’s service as Church President. Unlike the unbound draft copies used for Grant’s letterpress volumes, his later journals were written on high quality, personalized paper that explicitly identified the compilation as Grant’s personal journal and featured stamped, sequential numbering (fig. 4).36

Beginning in July 1943, due to Grant’s diminishing health, his entries began documenting his daily correspondence rather than his daily activities. They relied more on the office knowledge of Grant’s secretary rather than regular input of Grant himself.37 The entry dated May 9, 1945, written just five days before his death, recorded the correspondence signed and sent out by the First Presidency after which his journal fell silent.38 As his journals had long since acquired a third-party narrator, they revealed very little about the final days of Grant’s life. Taken cumulatively, however, Grant’s journals are a remarkable record into the daily life of a Church leader as he witnessed the transition and growth of the Church from the nineteenth century to nearly the mid-twentieth century.

Insights into the Life of Heber J. Grant

Call as an Apostle

By twenty-three years old, Grant had already shown initiative and drive, accumulating a lifetime of hard-earned lessons in just a handful of years as he aged into adulthood. In 1872, ever fearful he would lapse into poverty, Grant found employment at age fifteen as a clerk at H. R. Mann and Co., a fire insurance firm. By age nineteen, Grant owned his own firm with financial assistance from his mother, Rachel.39 He began to make headway when his call as Tooele stake president in 1880 heaped ecclesiastical responsibilities upon his entrepreneurial priorities and divided his time. His new assignment took him out of Salt Lake City, the location of most of his business opportunities. Upon his appointment, Grant’s childhood friend Richard W. Young, a grandson of Brigham Young, noted candidly to him that he was “financially . . . perhaps not to be congratulated but . . . finances sink into the most abject insignificance compared with the great compliment that has been paid your ability and the reward with which your faithfulness and integrity have met.” Young predicted that the new responsibilities would be a “crusher to many of [Grant’s] business plans.”40 His prediction swiftly proved correct as Grant’s financial investments went sideways, and he found himself on the verge of a nervous breakdown within a year into his service.41

Still, others admired in Grant a strict adherence to virtue and obedience despite the crushing weight of his personal circumstances. In October 1881, another acquaintance, photographer Charles R. Savage, confided to Grant that he felt a call to the apostleship was in Grant’s near future. “Put it down,” he told Grant, “that within one year” his friend “would be a member of the Twelve Apostles.” “I must confess,” Grant recorded in his journal, “there is no honor in this world that I consider half so great as to be an apostle of God, and while it would fill my heart with joy that I can not possibly expressed [sic] to be considered by God as worthy [to] be one of his apostles, I must confess that my past life has not been such as to merit any such an honor.” In a moment of private vulnerability, Grant wrote down his perceived weaknesses:

I have endeavor[ed] to live an honorable and a true life, that I have done many little things wrong. I am free to confess—I think the greatest wrong of my life has been the neglect to study the work of our Father in Heaven. I am comparitively [sic] ignorant of the principles of truth and the many things pertaining to the work of God on the Earth. I have an abiding faith in my heart of the truth of the gospel and have had many testimonies of God’s goodness. I can not but think that my knowledge is so limited that I am hardly worthy to be a Pres[ident] of a stake in Zion let alone being one of God’s apostles.42

Business was paramount in Grant’s early life, and he felt inadequate in his gospel knowledge when compared to the respected Church leaders he interacted with. Grant was just twenty-four at the time of Savage’s prediction. Still, his strict adherence to gospel principles rendered him an option for the apostleship in the minds of others.

A year later, on Sunday evening, October 15, 1882, Grant received a telegram from Francis M. Lyman inviting him to travel from Tooele to Salt Lake City to meet in President Taylor’s office the next day. What he did not seem to know about were the scheduled meetings the day before the telegram arrived announcing his call as an Apostle by revelation.43 Grant, who was tending to prearranged business in the Tooele Stake, was absent Saturday morning when his fellow stake presidents heard a John Taylor revelation read aloud appointing Grant and George Teasdale to the Quorum of the Twelve and Seymour B. Young to the Presidency of the Seventy. The appointments were a preamble to a longer revelation about the organization of the priesthood. The revelation finally settled simmering differences about who should fill two vacancies in the Quorum of the Twelve that lingered past the recent October general conference where such appointments were customarily announced.44

When Grant arrived at President Taylor’s office on October 16, 1882, the First Presidency (John Taylor, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith) were present along with seven members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, among others. George Reynolds, who served as secretary to the First Presidency, read the revelation to Grant and to the others assembled. Grant recorded the entirety of the revelation at the end of his 1882 journal and promised to record more thoughts on his call to the apostleship alongside the revelation but neglected to do so.45

Grant would later recall publicly on multiple occasions (most notably in general conference) that the early months of his service were marked by self-doubt: “I can truthfully say that from October, 1882, until February, 1883, that spirit followed me day and night telling me that I was unworthy to be an Apostle of the Church, and that I ought to resign. When I would testify of my knowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Redeemer of mankind, it seemed as though a voice would say to me: ‘You lie! You lie! You have never seen Him.’”46

If Grant struggled initially in the early months of his apostolic service, he made little note of it in his journal (with no extant entries from November to December 1882). Part of Grant’s initial call to serve included a command to preach the gospel to the American Indians. Heeding the revelatory injunction in January 1883 (fig. 5), Grant left his home to fulfill a mission to the Southwestern United States and Mexico. Grant encountered trials on his first apostolic mission, including frigid winter weather, poor sleep, and the general taxing conditions inherent to long-distance travel in this era. His day-to-day log in his journal notes these conditions for early 1883.

However, retrospective accounts of his mission added a notable vision not found in his journal entries for the time that reassured him of the divinity of his call as an Apostle. In his April 1941 general conference address, Grant recollected that as he was “riding along” on Navajo land in February 1883, he “seemed to see, and . . . seemed to hear . . . a Council in Heaven.” He continued:

I listened to the discussion with a great deal of interest. The First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles had not been able to agree on two men to fill the vacancies in the Quorum of the Twelve. . . . In this Council the Savior was present, my father was there, and the Prophet Joseph Smith was there. They discussed the question that a mistake had been made in not filling those two vacancies and that in all probability it would be another six months before the Quorum would be completed, and they discussed as to whom they wanted to occupy the positions, and decided that the way to remedy the mistake that had been made in not filling those vacancies was to send a revelation. It was given to me that the Prophet Joseph Smith and my father mentioned me and requested that I be called to that position. I sat there and wept for joy. It was given to me that . . . I had lived a clean, sweet life. It was given to me that because of my father having practically sacrificed his life in what was known as the great Reformation, so to speak, of the people in early days, having been practically a martyr, that the Prophet Joseph and my father desired me to have that position, and it was because of their faithful labors that I was called, and not because of anything I had done of myself of any great thing that I had accomplished. It was also given to me that that was all these men, the Prophet and my father, could do for me; from that day it depended upon me and upon me alone as to whether I made a success of my life or a failure.47

While the above prompting did not seem to answer any explicit anxiety contemporaneously noted by Grant in his 1883 journal about his calling, it aligns with his 1881 sentiments written after meeting C. R. Savage, when he concluded that he had amounted to nothing notable in life that would render him worthy of a higher ecclesiastical calling.48 Grant lived constantly in the specter of his own father’s apostolic service and hoped to build a similar legacy of obedience and Church service. He also possessed an anxious personality that constantly measured the fruits of his life against the self-imposed measuring stick of his own lofty expectations. In later years, his physical and mental health suffered from the daily rhythms of a taxing schedule, from financial insecurities, sometimes of his own creation, and from a well-intentioned sense of urgency to wear himself out in the service of the Lord.

Finances and Health

By the late 1880s, Grant had staked out a reputation among Church leaders as a knowledgeable and savvy businessman. The deteriorating finances of the Church, exacerbated by federal antipolygamy legislation and enforcement in the 1880s and by a nationwide financial panic in the 1890s, forced President Wilford Woodruff to deploy Grant to save the Church from its mounting debts. In 1893, financial conditions nationwide reached a precarious peak that precipitated runs on banks resulting in closures. With Church credit already stretched, Grant headed east to New York City to negotiate new loan terms to spare the Church from defaulting on its debts.49

During an intense period of financial negotiations, Grant failed to keep a consistent daily record in his journal but recovered his activities through correspondence, which he reproduced in his unbound and letterpress journals for 1893. The entries reflected the escalating anxieties of Church leadership over their tenuous financial position. Church leaders wrote to Grant, hoping to reassure him in his efforts. For example, First Presidency counselor Joseph F. Smith wrote to Grant in July 1893, after months of attempts to secure loans, articulating his optimism that the Church would survive financially. He wrote, “For the first time, this month the Church could not pay its employees, nor the Presidency and Twelve. Well do not think I have lost hope—for I have not. I believe that Providence has something better in store for us than bank-ruptcy [sic] and ruin, but it will be a close shave in my opinion. May the Lord help us.”50 Grant’s own debts amounted to well over one hundred thousand dollars, which compounded his stress.51

His work came to a head in September when Utah’s banks faced certain closure if Grant did not secure the necessary resources to keep them open. Upon his return to Utah in October, Grant relayed to his fellow Apostles the razor-thin margins and stress he was operating under. He recorded his remarks in his journal.

I had had [a] telegram that [the banks in Salt Lake City] could not hope to survive until the following Wednesday when I had some prospects of making a loan of $100.000. I did not tell the brethren that I had shed some bitter tears when I thought of the humiliation that was sure to come on the Church and aon [sic] the leading brethren in case the State and Zion’s banks had to close, but such was the case. Saturday morning Septr. 2nd. I got up after but two or three hours sleep and I recalled the blessing that I had had from Prest. Joseph F. Smith in which he had promised me that I should meet with success far beyond what I had expected and as I had not met with any sucess I told the brethren that I knelt down by my bed and asked the Lord [w]ith faith for a fulfillment of the promise of the servant of the Lord to me. I got up feeling cheerful and with an assurance that I should be blessed in getting the money that was needed and a feeling that it would be the mind and will of the Lord that our banks should close in case I was not able to get the money we needed.52

Grant’s ability to secure loans amid a nationwide panic proved one of the major successes of his apostolic service, at least in the immediate context of the Church’s pressing financial distress. Grant stayed disaster for a season, but the consequences of his hefty borrowing on behalf of the Church would linger for years.53 For Grant personally, the episode underscored his reoccurring commitment to obedience and success, his capacity to make social connections and negotiate, and an inner desire to put the affairs of the Church before his own. These tendencies would aid and afflict Grant the remainder of his life. Grant constantly sought to balance his own personal ambitions for longstanding financial security with his desire to seek the kingdom of God first.

Even though Grant felt firsthand the crushing weight of debt as he negotiated for the Church, he continued to chase personal financial relief and stability. The aftermath of 1893 continued to take a toll on his personal net worth. He wrote optimistically in 1895:

I do hope and pray that I shall be able to so live that the Lord will see fit to make an instrument in His hands of me to get wealth to build up His Kingdom with. I told the Lord in my prayers this evening all that I hoped to be able to do and how much I desired to be able to live so that I would be able to meet the Prophet Joseph Smith and my father, whom I have never seen, and who I am informed killed himself working for the cause of truth. . . . I do feel the testimony of the spirit that I shall be greatly blessed of the Lord in the near future in financial matters, and I am indeed thankful for this testimony. I cannot think of anything that would give me so much cause for gratitude as to have the Lord bless me so that I could get out of debt and to have Him magnify me so that I would be an instrument in His hands in assisting the Church to do the same.54

Six years later, Grant’s finances were in no better shape as he began to anticipate a mission call. At a meeting of the Quorum of the Twelve in February 1901, President George Q. Cannon announced the First Presidency’s intention to open a mission in Japan. “The moment he made this re mark [sic],” Grant wrote in his journal, “I felt that I would be called to open up this mission.”55 Cannon then announced that the First Presidency had settled on Grant for this call with the understanding that he was “free from his financial embarrassments.” On the spot, Grant felt to interject to correct the record about his indebtedness before “a spirit came over me to the effect that if I would only get up and state to the brethren I was considerably more than $100,000 in debt . . . that I was about this . . . worse off than nothing, that the brethren undoubtedly would release me from this mission. But I rejected these impressions.” When President Snow asked him if he could accept the call, Grant simply promised to arrange his finances to do so.56 After a sleepless night, he set out to extract himself from his personal debts.57 By the time he departed for his mission, his major debt obligations were resolved, and he felt that God had intervened on his behalf because of his willingness to serve the Lord (fig. 6).

The allure of prospective business opportunities that could alleviate his indebtedness continued to chase Grant late in his apostolic service and into his presidential years. In 1915, his son-in-law George J. Cannon warned him “to avoid further debt.” “Trembling with emotion,” he nearly “rebuked [Grant] for going on getting into debt for new things in order to make money” and wished him to “be freed from care and anxiety” so that Grant could actually sleep at night.58

Grant regularly noted his financial successes and challenges in his journal. In August 1917, he wrote, “To-day I bought five thousand shares of the Sunset Mining Company stock. I feel almost condemned to run in debt for mining stock in view of my financial distress, but I am quite strongly impressed that this property is a valuable one and that my investment there may be the means of assisting to meet some of my financial obligations.”59 To those he knew well and trusted, Grant talked openly about his investments and the health challenges that resulted.

His frankness largely stemmed from his early morning habit of dictating letters, which caused him to be more forthright in his disclosures. He remarked to his cousin around this time: “My own health is good, but I am troubled some on account of failing to get as much sleep as I feel I should have. I can’t get along on 4 or 5 hours, all that many men feel is enough. I am still suffering in the flesh on account of my debts of more than $100,000. I shall be grateful if I ever get out.”60 While Grant acquired acumen at business from years of working in the banking and insurance industries and from sitting on the boards of Church enterprises, he often was his own worst enemy when it came to personal investments, ever optimistic he had backed the right enterprise or institution. His private intentions were never to accumulate the lifestyle of the upper class, but to reach a level of financial security where money no longer occupied his mind.

By January 1926, Grant reported to his daughter Rachel that he had finally put his remaining debts behind him. “My heart is full and running over with thanks to our Father in Heaven,” he wrote, “that I am free from the bondage of debt.”61 As the United States entered the Great Depression of the 1930s, Grant decried speculative financing and the accumulation of personal debt. He was not afraid to use his own experience to urge Latter-day Saints to avoid debt at all costs. He declared to the Relief Society in 1932:

If the people known as Latter-day Saints had listened to the advice given from this stand by my predecessor, under the inspiration of the Lord, calling and urging upon the Latter-day Saints not to run in debt, this great depression would have hurt the Latter-day Saints very, very little. . . . To my mind, the main reason of the depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people. . . . We have mortgaged our future without taking into account the incidents that may happen—sickness, operations, etc. . . . There is a peace and a contentment which comes into the heart when we live within our means, there is no question about it. I know all about it, because years ago I did not pay any attention to the talk about running into debt. I ran into debt everlastingly. . . . If there is any many living who is entitled to say, “Keep out of debt,” his name is Heber J. Grant.62

Born out of his own personal experience, Grant imagined a Latter-day Saint membership equipped to meet the needs of the most downtrodden and needy among them because they ascribed to sound financial principles. Few needed to repeat Grant’s own path if they avoided debt and saved. Eventually, Grant enshrined his perspective in a new Church-wide welfare program (first called the Church Security Program) to address the oppressive economic conditions of the Great Depression. When he reported on the first results of the program at the October 1936 general conference, he reminded the Saints that the primary purpose of the program was “to set up, in so far as it might be possible, a system under which the curse of idleness would be done away with, the evils of a dole abolished, and independence, industry, thrift, and self respect be once more established amongst our people. . . . Work is to be re-enthroned as the ruling principles of the lives of our Church membership.”63 Tutored by his own life experience, Grant was then equipped to navigate the Church through the greatest financial crisis of a generation. His journals document these hard-earned lessons and reveal some of the costs on him personally.

As Grant worked to balance business and ecclesiastical demands over the course of his apostolic service, those closest to him worried his health would not be able to withstand the inherent stress. Since his young adulthood, Grant had exhibited anxiety and sleeplessness that could be exacerbated by a pressing schedule and obstacles endemic to life. As he aged, his prolonged periods of insomnia made him prolific in his correspondence, but he expressed frequent concerns in his journal about his ability to withstand the demands of his daily schedule on little sleep.64 He developed strategies to cope over time, but none were foolproof.

As was the tradition of many General Authorities, Grant found respite by heading to southern California for its temperate climate. While visiting California in 1917, Grant was introduced to the game of golf, which eventually became an outlet for him when he felt overwhelmed. In Santa Monica, Grant visited President Joseph F. Smith and Presiding Bishop Charles W. Nibley while they were on the golf course. He recorded in his journal, “They were playing what is known as a nine-hole game. They had just finished eight holes and I was requested to join them in the game and make the last hole, which I did in eight hits. This is the first time I have ever hit a golf ball. The game does not appeal to me, but I believe that the pleasure of visiting with friends would make it an interesting game, and I am sure that walking around, from hole to hole, and hitting the little ball would be excellent exercise.”65

Over the next few years Grant evolved from skeptical participant to devotee of the game. When he traveled to Santa Monica, California for rest, he often played every day.66 When he was in Salt Lake City and in good health, he tried to “go to the golf links three or four mornings each week and play nine holes, prior to going to [his] office.” Golf he felt was “very materially strengthening . . . physically” and “the most restful game” he had ever encountered because it caused him to “forget all his troubles.”67 Golf added routine to Grant’s schedule, forcing him outside into the fresh air to exercise regularly. During his tenure as prophet and president of the Church, his financial burdens were largely relegated to the past, but he continued to use golf as a means of maintaining his physical and mental health.

The Legacy of the Heber J. Grant Journals

To outsiders and admiring Latter-day Saints alike, Heber J. Grant appeared to epitomize American success. He took the reins of a Church institution in 1918 that was in far better financial shape than when he joined the Quorum of the Twelve in 1882. He presided over a rapid period of institutional growth, founded the Church Security Program, and guided the Church through the Great Depression as its prophet and president (fig. 7). His business acumen appeared to suit him in a position that placed him at the intersection of Church enterprise and ecumenical outreach. As one member of the Quorum of the Twelve assessed of Grant, “His energies were abundant, his ambitions high, his business insight keen. It was America in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Men were making fortunes by seizing opportunities. Before him lay the alluring world of business. He knew he had business genius. He yearned to make himself a master in that realm, and move among the great ones. . . . Business had become with him a real passion.”68 Time magazine had printed a similar appraisal of Grant; such acumen was part and parcel with the highest values an American could possess. Executive leadership and discipleship at this level, however, carried hidden costs few could externally appraise.

Grant wrote his journal reluctantly but persistently as an exercise in personal recordkeeping. His efforts left archivists, historians, and general readers an artifact of his character. Taken cumulatively, his journals attest to his personal wrestle with faithful discipleship amid the beating challenges of life. Grant was unflinchingly obedient to prophetic and scriptural command, loyal to his friends and family, engrossed in his labors and responsibilities, and fiercely determined to further the work of the Church (fig. 8). Behind his public labors and accomplishments was a man both made by and often afflicted by the circumstances of his life.

Examining a comprehensive private journal offers readers a chance to assess a life from beginning to end. The arc of Grant’s life could have sent him many directions. The circumstances of his childhood might have been too much for others. But with the love and guidance of his mother, his circumstances transformed into a critical component of his identity. He routinely took stock of his religious commitment through the lens of his father’s public legacy. Those that simply identify Grant as a fearless business and Church leader miss a more private legacy, one that saw Grant meet his ecclesiastical and personal responsibilities head on in the face of intermittent mental and physical health challenges. Through his presidential years, he remained a friend to the orphan and impoverished. He sent money to inquirers who needed assistance, particularly during the Great Depression. His journal notes these private moments of generosity with little fanfare.69 He remained fixed on the personal experiences that rendered him sympathetic and compassionate to those less fortunate.

Researchers can now plumb the depths of Grant’s corpus of journals for significant episodes in his own life and in the development of the Church. Grant documented meetings of the Quorum of the Twelve,70 his mission to Japan in 1901,71 and his European Mission presidency from 1903 to 1906 among a host of other episodes worthy of study.72 But the daily rhythm of his life found between these events reveals the essence of a Latter-day Saint prophet—his values, vulnerabilities, aspirations, and quiet discipleship, the trends of which only become discernible after a careful reading of a lifetime of journal keeping. Those that knew him best, like Apostle John A. Widtsoe, assessed his overall character accordingly, “He is a man possessed of a determined will for righteousness, progressive, fearless in the cause of truth, generous in thought and action, loving in friendship, true, wise and forgiving. Throughout his nature runs the love and beauty, truth, and intelligence, culminating in a mighty spiritual character. He is a friend of God, and his divine Father has been his friend.”73

Grant shared details about himself as much as he described his world in building the pages of his journals. And while many of his entries fail to rise above a daily listing of his activities and meetings, the steady march of the mundane within the pages of his journal cumulatively divulges a predictable wrestle with the common human experience. Readers can pass their judgment on how Grant held up to his own humanity, but they should do so using the sharper lens his entire corpus of journals provides. In his resiliency, determination, and adherence to truth, Grant triumphs. Future studies of his journals will perhaps find that such an outcome ought not be taken for granted.