[Leonard Arrington]
In our executives meeting this morning Elder [Joseph] Anderson told a story with respect to one of the sermons delivered by J. Golden Kimball. He did not remember the year, but it must have been in the 1930s. In the sermon for some reason Elder Kimball got after the farmers in Idaho. He made all kinds of statements holding them up to ridicule-they didn't have enough sense to pound sand into a rat hole, etc. This was a general conference sermon. President [Heber J.] Grant felt that it was offensive to Idaho farmers and arose and excoriated Elder Kimball-got after him in the strongest language. Brother Anderson took verbatim minutes of the talk and sent it to Elder Kimball for his corrections. Elder Kimball greatly laundered the talk to eliminate the offensive references. When it came in Elder Anderson said to President Grant, "What shall we do? His talk as it is submitted for publication will be quite mild and will make your own remarks seem to be far too strong." President Grant said, "The answer to that is simple. You go to Brother Kimball"-President Grant loved Brother Kimball"and tell him that we will either publish his talk as originally given plus my comments as originally given or we will leave them both out." When Brother Anderson went to Brother Kimball he said, "Well, I guess the best thing, Joseph, is to leave both out," so that was a general conference proceeding which was completely eliminated.
Maybe we could have someone go through the general conference proceedings and find out what year and then look in the Salt Lake Tribune for its summary of Brother Kimball's talk. [[See Joseph Geisner, "Very Careless in His Utterances: Editing, Correcting, and Censoring Conference Addresses," Sunstone, Dec. 2011.]]
[Confessions of a Mormon historian : the diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1997, Gary James Bergera, editor, Signature Books, 2018]
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