Joshua Reuben Clark Jr. (September 1, 1871 – October 6, 1961) was an American attorney, civil servant, and a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Born in Grantsville, Utah Territory, he was an attorney in the Department of State and was Undersecretary of State for U.S. President Calvin Coolidge until 1930, when he was appointed United States Ambassador to Mexico. In 1933, Clark was called to the LDS Church's First Presidency, serving as counselor to three of its presidents.
Clark received a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah, where he was valedictorian and student-body president. Clark received a law degree from Columbia University, where he also became a member of Phi Delta Phi, a prominent international legal fraternity in which he remained active throughout his life. Clark became an associate professor at George Washington University. Both the J. Reuben Clark Law Society and the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University (BYU) are named in his honor.
Clark was the first of ten children born to Joshua R. and Mary Louisa Woolley Clark. He was born and raised in Grantsville, Utah, 33 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in Tooele Valley. At the time, it was a four-hour trip by buggy and train from Grantsville to Salt Lake City. The LDS Church members who settled the area were industrious and community-oriented.
As a break from farmwork, Clark participated in dramatic productions from his youth. He displayed a talent for public speaking, comedy, and humor at a young age. He also participated in the childhood diversions available on the frontier, sledding in the winter and swimming in the summer.
Clark's grandfather had been a minister in the Dunker Faith (Church of the Brethren). Clark's father, Joshua, had worked his way west through Utah as a trapper and freighter and felt drawn to the LDS Church after attending his first Sunday service, being baptized a month afterward. Education and culture were important in the Mormon communities in Utah Territory. Clark's father, although accustomed to hard physical labor, was also reputed to be a knowledgeable, culturally-oriented man. He was hired soon after his baptism to teach school in Grantsville.
Shortly after moving there from Salt Lake City, Clark's father married Mary Louisa Woolley, who was born on the plains as her parents made their way west with the Mormon pioneers. Clark's father was the sort of man who, while doing business in Salt Lake City, would sleep in a hay loft to afford to see a Shakespearean play, and he would make great sacrifices to afford to buy a good book. The small library in the Clark home was made up of history books, classics, an encyclopedia, the Bible, plus other religious works of the LDS Church. Although the younger Clark's education was spotty in his youth because of the demands of farm life and meager family resources, he was able to take music lessons and to play with various bands. He played the piccolo and then the flute.
Clark's father became the clerk, then superintendent, of the Grantsville educational co-operative, was elected the Tooele County Superintendent of Schools in 1878, became president of the Tooele County Education Association, and by 1879 was assessor and tax collector, with his two eldest sons helped with the accounting and record-keeping.
When his father later taught at a local private school, Clark was able to be formally educated for the first time. He was ten years old and had been schooled by his mother. Clark was not at school every term; sometimes, financial difficulties and farm work kept him at home. His father once related that Clark would "rather miss his meals than to miss a day from school." After completing the eighth grade, the highest grade offered at the Grantsville school, Clark repeated it two more times.
College education and early career
In 1890, at age 19 and with his father’s consent, Clark was taken to Salt Lake City to enter Latter-day Saints' University. Clark lived at the home of an aunt to save money, and he earned extremely high grades. The principal of the school was James E. Talmage, the foremost scholar and scientist in the LDS Church. Talmage hired Clark to be the assistant curator (and later, curator) for the Deseret Museum. It was a paid position and helped immensely to support Clark during his higher education. The curator position was also considered a mission and relieved Clark of being called to serve a formal full-time LDS Church mission. When Talmage was released as principal and called to create a new college for the LDS Church, he brought Clark with him as his chemistry lab assistant and clerk. While Clark would still curate at the museum, this helped Clark with his financial support and enabled him to finish six years of advanced schooling in four. Two of the years were intended to finish his unmet high school requirements. It was Talmage who called Clark "the greatest mind ever to leave Utah" and who encouraged him to attend an eastern university.
In 1894, Clark entered the University of Utah. He lived frugally and was even able to partially support his father, who had been called to serve as a missionary in the church's Northern States Mission, then as the mission president.
Talmage later became the president of the University of Utah and was also the first recipient of the recently endowed Deseret Professorship of Geology. Clark graduated in 1898 as valedictorian of his graduating class, while still serving as clerk to Talmage and on the faculty of the university. He had met Luacine ("Lute") Annetta Savage, the youngest daughter of Charles Roscoe Savage of Salt Lake City, in 1894, but he could not afford to marry her. She taught kindergarten and then worked at her father's store while dating Clark for four years. They married on September 14, 1898, in the Salt Lake Temple. Talmage performed the sealing, the first he performed. The couple had a modest reception by Lute's choice, owing to Clark's small means, but she came from a prosperous family. A few days later, Clark left for Heber, Utah, to find a place for them to live and start his first career position as a teacher and principal of the new Heber City High School.
The next year, Clark signed on as a teacher at Latter-day Saints' University, but he resigned in February to teach at Salt Lake Business College. Joseph Nelson headed the college and became an important benefactor to Clark. In the fall of 1900, Clark went to Cedar City, Utah, to become the principal of the Branch Normal School. The following year, Clark was an instructor in Commercial Law, Principal of the Shorthand Department, and Secretary of the Faculty at Salt Lake Business College. In 1903, Nelson was named cashier of the Utah National Bank, and Clark assumed most of his duties at the college. That year, Nelson offered to pay for law school for Clark, and Clark applied to Columbia University. He was accepted, and he received his entire education in law at Columbia.
In the beginning of Clark's second year of law school at Columbia, he was elected to the editorial board of the Columbia Law Review. He was the oldest on the board, the only one married, and the only Latter-day Saint in the law school. In 1905, at the end of his second year of law school, he was admitted to the New York bar. He was granted a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1906. Clark had worked with James Brown Scott on the 772-page book Cases on Quasi Contracts (1905) during his schooling. Scott recommended him as Assistant Solicitor of the Department of State, and Clark received the appointment on September 5, 1906.
Government service and law career
Clark began his government service in 1906, when he was appointed Assistant Solicitor to the State Department. During his tenure in Washington, the Clark family (consisting of Clark, his wife and four children) was in the wake of the controversy over the Reed Smoot hearings in the US Senate.
In his position as Assistant Solicitor and then as Solicitor in the State Department, Clark was often confronted with critical issues of international consequence. For example, when the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1911, he was called upon to make crucial decisions and recommend courses of action to the secretary of state and Howard Taft. Of particular concern to Clark was the plight of the Latter-day Saints who lived in the Mexican colonies and were often caught in the middle of the conflict and whose presence in Mexico was resented by the revolutionaries.