Romney Burke introduces his new biography, Susa Young Gates: Daughter of Mormonism, published by Signature Books.
Church history has held a lifetime fascination for me. My widowed Grandmother Romney had seven sons and only one daughter, my mother. Consequently, Grandmother spent every summer except one during my first 21 years in our home. She was the first child of her polygamous father (post-Manifesto), Anson Bowen Call, the leader of the Mormon community in Colonia Dublán, Mexico. I found that I could learn a lot, especially if I remained quiet and didn’t interrupt with questions. Grandmother was a wealth of information.
My wife and I met in 1966, just after I returned from my mission to Peru, and we 
married two and a half years later. She has as fascinating a family history as I do. We were somewhat daunted to find out that we are fifth cousins, but it has not impacted a fabulous marriage. In fact, our great-great-grandfathers had an interesting standoff in the 1870s in St. George. Miles Romney, an early English convert and expert carpenter, was “master builder” of the St. George Tabernacle, the St. George Temple, and the Brigham Young Winter Home in St. George. At the rear of the Tabernacle, he had constructed two perfectly circular staircases (his specialty) going upstairs. The second floor was accordingly constructed, and Brigham Young came down for his annual visit. He sat in a chair on the second floor and realized that he could not see the pulpit on the first floor. He instructed Miles Romney to cut the top four feet off the circular staircases, which Miles Romney stoutly refused to do. It appeared to be a standoff. Both sides eventually compromised. The staircases of Miles Romney remained intact. After reaching the second level, one then descends 4 feet to Brigham Young’s lowered second floor, where one can see perfectly the first-floor podium. I have told our children it is no wonder they are so stubborn–their third-great-grandfathers squared off against each other in St. George in the 1870s!
I fell in love with my wife’s Grandfather, Franklin Young Gates, the last surviving child of Susa Young Gates, arguably Brigham Young’s best-known child. He regaled us with stories of his mother, and I was hooked. My wife extracted a promise from me that I would write her biography if nobody else did. Well, nobody else did. Forty years after our marriage with a very busy life as a surgeon, bishop, husband and father of 10 children, I retired. That was eleven years ago, and since that time I have either been on foreign assignments or missions in China, Brazil, and Hong Kong (5 years), or I have been plugging away 40-60 hours a week working on this biography.
Interestingly, the family thought that Susa had destroyed her personal records after her unhappy divorce from her first husband. There was a paucity of material to work with. A few vignettes were written about Susa; they were incomplete and riddled with dubious information, particularly related to her first marriage. Everybody assumed that Susa had either destroyed the pertinent information, or it had been spirited away to Hollywood by her famous scriptwriter son Hal Gates, who had proposed writing a biography–and been lost. To the family’s great surprise, after Franklin Young Gates died in 1979, 113 boxes of Susa’s materials were found in his garage. These boxes were donated shortly thereafter to the Church History Library by Franklin’s daughters, who include my mother-in-law, Lurene Gates Wilkinson. They form virtually all of the Susa Young Gates information available at the Church History Library. I regret that I was unable to finish my work until five years after Lurene’s death at age 102.
Susa was an inveterate writer. Starting as a youngster, she wrote constantly. She used to rock her babies in the cradle in the evenings with her feet while she was writing with her hands. She wrote everywhere she went, whether by candlelight as a young missionary wife in Hawaii in the 1880s or with electric lights later in Salt le Lake City. She led an incredibly busy life, and the wonder for me is that she was able to do everything she did in 77 years.
Susa wrote in multiple genres–short stories, serials, editorials, essays, novels, poems, newspaper columns, plays, lyrics, etc. Her two novels, John Stevens’ Courtship (1909) and The Prince of Ur (1915), were moralistic with prose that was often florid and over the top. Her dozens of short stories were likewise moralistic, dramatic, and sentimental. Because many of them were written under pseudonyms, we will probably never know how many there were. Susa’s poetry was not particularly noteworthy, since she “had only a limited familiarity with poetry and poets.”[1] Susa’s strength as a writer lay in her editorials, which were clear, straightforward, almost always leaving little room for doubt about her true feelings. She wrote editorials on a monthly basis for the Young Woman’s Journal (1889-1900) and for the Relief Society Bulletin and Relief Society Magazine (1914-1922), both of which she instituted. She was always interested in improving her writing. For example she left her husband and young family in 1892 to attend a summer writing program at Harvard University. As late as 1913, she was taking correspondence classes in short story writing. Her tour-de-force was the biography of her father, The Life Story of Brigham Young (1930).
Susa’s life was punctuated by highs, including associating with her prominent family, meeting three US presidents and Queen Victoria, and counting among her friends the best female minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Susan B. Anthony, Peggy Pulitzer [aka Margaret Leech], Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Fanny Brice. But there were also lows, including the early death of her father, a painful divorce, and the childhood deaths of eight of her thirteen children. Altogether, her story presents a fascinating tour of 19th and 20th-century womanhood. We will not see her like again soon.
[1] Cracroft, Richard P. 1951. “Susan Young Gates: Her Life and Literary Work.” Master’s thesis, University of Utah.
Romney Burke is a retired surgeon. He holds degrees from Stanford University and Yale University School of Medicine. Since retirement he has taught English at Ocean University of China in Qingdao under the auspices of Brigham Young University for two years, and served in Brazil as a medical advisor for LDS missionaries there. He and his wife, Mary Sue, a great-granddaughter of Susa Young Gates, recently completed a mission to Hong Kong.