J. Golden Kimball was a beloved and unconventional leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known for his humor, candor, and tireless devotion to missionary work. From his early struggles after the death of his father to his challenging Southern States missions, Golden balanced deep faith with a famously fiery temperament, earning the nickname “the cussing apostle.” He navigated family tensions, financial hardship, and church controversies while leaving a lasting mark through anecdotes, sermons, and personal insights. In this interview, Andrew Kimball explores the life, personality, and legacy of J. Golden Kimball.
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J. Golden Kimball: Overview and Early Life
Who was J. Golden Kimball?
Jonathan Golden Kimball was born in Salt Lake City in 1853 to Latter-day Saint church leader Heber C. Kimball and plural wife Christeen Golden. Golden was fifteen when his father died. He left off schooling at the time. Not until he was twenty-eight did he return to school and re-embrace his religion.
After graduating, he was called to a proselyting mission in the southern states. Six years after that mission, when he was thirty-seven, he was called back as mission president.
When at thirty-eight he was appointed to the First Council of Seventy, a position of church-wide authority, one of its members observed that Golden was “very much like his father.”
But there, his forward momentum in the church hierarchy stalled. Although Golden seemed an obvious candidate for advancement given his abilities, by 1898, he had been passed over three times as places in the Quorum of the Twelve became available.
His outspoken brother Elias, who succeeded him as president of the Southern States Mission, wondered if “one or two Kimballs being pushed ahead has fully convinced the brethren that they want no more such outspoken men.”
Golden thought that observation “has about hit it.”
Who was J. Golden Kimball’s mother?
Christeen Golden joined the Latter-day Saints at age twenty-two against her mother’s wishes and stole away to Nauvoo, where within months she was sealed to Heber Kimball in plural marriage, a fact she kept concealed in her many letters home to New Jersey.
Christeen maintained the fiction that she was single, even after emigrating with the Latter-day Saints west to Utah.
Why did she keep her polygamous marriage a secret from her family?
It is unclear how long Christeen Golden intended to mislead her family, but at the time, it must have seemed unthinkable to reveal the nature of her marriage, given that her mother had not yet forgiven her for merely joining the Latter-day Saints.
At the time, Mormon polygamy remained secret.
After rumors of her doings reached New Jersey in 1850, she wrote a letter of misdirection home from Utah, claiming that “I am now married to a Gentleman by the name of Chase, in good circumstances surrounded with the comforts of life; a man of high respectability and influence.”
She represented the marriage as monogamous and signed herself Christeen Chase.
Her letters home were usually met with silence.
Deep affection for family seemed to survive the silence with which Christeen’s letters were usually met. “I visited you the other night in a dream,” she wrote in 1851, “and when I came in sight of home, the house, and barn, and orchard, I sat down and wept.”
She assured her mother “that nothing but my faith of religion or a knowledge of Mormonism would have ever caused me to leave you.”
Only after Mrs. Golden died in 1857 did Christeen finally admit to surviving family back east the truth of her marital situation, resulting in a rift that never quite healed.
According to her son, Christeen “often suffered in her feelings over the agony and torture her mother must have suffered.” Perhaps there was some consolation in reminding herself that the truth would not have helped.
What were some of J. Golden Kimball’s lifelong struggles?
“My home is not as I would desire it,” lamented Golden in 1898, after eleven years of marriage and five children. The confusion and disorder, he moaned, would render heaven itself unendurable.
“I am at fault and know it,” he acknowledged, citing his short temper and high-pitched sensitivity, but “under existing circumstances there can be no improvement—I look in the future with sadness.”
J. Golden Kimball struggled to control an acutely nervous temperament. “Went up town feeling blue, cross, and full of cussedness,” he wrote in 1895. “The natural man predominated, I seemed not to have a spark of the Holy Ghost within me. I felt as if I would die.”
Decades later, J. Golden would describe these mood swings to his son Max as feeling “always up, or down and do not run on a level plain.”
But he never stopped struggling to master the negative moods.
“When you stand off and look at yourself and see yourself as you really are,” he lamented in 1926, “no wonder we get disgusted and disheartened. The only way to do is to go into silence and pray – seek God for forgiveness and ask for His Holy Spirit to lift us up out of the depths of hell.”
He had endured “that hell hundreds of times and am still alive and have an abiding faith in God and His Son Jesus Christ.”
What experiences did he and his brothers have in the Southern States Mission?
When J. Golden Kimball left Salt Lake in 1883 for a proselyting mission in the southern states, it was a hardship assignment.
Missionary murders
In one memorable instance, his mission president, B. H. Roberts, demonstrated bravado and physical courage.
An elder had been beaten by a mob in Ku Klux Klan garb, and his companion and three others were murdered. Roberts disguised himself and took a back way into the county, exhumed the bodies (already decomposing in the ground), and, with a few sympathizers, hauled the coffins out to the railroad.
Explosive growth—at a cost
Six years after his mission, Golden was called back to the southern states, this time as mission president. He would be succeeded there by his brother Elias, who used his organizational skills to “boom” the mission into explosive growth—though at a cost to the elders, whom he worked single-mindedly despite illness, persecution by locals, and penury.
A dying wife
Dan Kimball, another one of Heber’s sons, also had a challenging experience serving in the same Southern States Mission when receiving word that his wife was dying.
In 1898, he had to hobble out of the back country with an ailing companion, one night carrying the suffering man in drenching rain as far as he physically could before letting him down to stumble a distance on his own and then taking him up again, until finally “God the Eternal Father led us to a home at a large flour mill” and they were offered shelter.
J. Golden as a General Authority
Why was J. Golden Kimball’s calling as a general authority the saving purpose of his life—and a tiresome drudgery?
Although J. Golden Kimball felt “privileged in associating with some of the best men that ever lived upon the earth” as a member of the First Council of Seventy, at times the human crowded the divine. It was the peculiarities he noticed, the “vanity, pride, weakness,” which led him to glumly conclude that “God has chosen the weak and foolish” to run His kingdom.
There were also run-ins with some stake presidents. Golden joked to half-brother Andrew that he felt like “biting them where the chicken got the ax, but being a preacher of righteousness have to turn the other cheek.”
Of certain local leaders, he supposed that “we will have to throw around them the hand of charity, as we have no process whereby we can saw the top of a man’s head off and give him a new set of brains.”
How did other general authorities react to his personality?
Golden’s dyspeptic temperament alternately amused and irritated his colleagues.
During a heated exchange on one of the general church boards, the apostle Joseph F. Smith remarked that Golden reminded him of a certain public figure who “never conveyed an idea, but kicked, found fault,” and thereby sometimes inadvertently triggered a debate that proved fruitful.
The crack brought laughter but left Golden “insulted and highly indignant. Went home and prayed, sorrowed, and felt unhappy.”
J. Golden Kimball: The “Swearing Apostle” (Who Was Never an Apostle)
Why was J. Golden Kimball called the swearing apostle?
J. Golden Kimball was sometimes referred to as the “cussing apostle” because he used profanity during his talks.
For example, during general conference in April 1923, Golden was “rebuked before 10,000 people,” as he later told a son, for a single sentence at the end of his sermon. “I believe Joseph Smith to be a prophet of Almighty God,” he had declared, so why worry about what our enemies say?
Then he added for no particular reason: “As far as I am concerned, they can go to hell, and that is where they belong.” The congregation tittered as Golden took his seat.
Church president Heber J. Grant immediately rose. “Pardon me, but I do not like laughing in our worshiping assemblies.”
The published record of the conference proceedings omitted Golden’s entire sermon.
It was not the first time he had felt “set upon, criticized and made to feel almost heart broken,” he wrote his son, nor would it be the last.
His podium etiquette had been a matter of notoriety for some time. At a Bear Lake stake conference in 1926, he conscientiously “refrained from swearing and used the soft peddle ‘darn’ instead of ‘damn’,” and yet, he complained, someone reported him anyway, leaving him “low spirited and in low gear.”
As he explained to a son, “I haven’t been raised in the same pasture some of these saintly people have and do not speak their language.” Some saints were so tightly wound they “would tumble over a mouse turd.”
Did he make efforts to stop swearing?
J. Golden Kimball periodically labored to govern his speech, reporting at one point that “I am filling my appointments quite regularly and am managing to preach without saying anything to create a disturbance.”
But it never took.
After Golden spoke at a North Weber stake conference, the stake president delivered a sideways reprimand, admonishing the congregation that he hoped “the truths expounded by President Kimball would be remembered and not the humor in which they were clothed.”
To some who admired the unvarnished authenticity of Golden’s speech, that might have seemed to turn the garment inside out.
J. Golden Kimball’s Humor
How did J. Golden’s pulpit manner get him in trouble?
A friend described Golden once in playwright George Bernard Shaw’s words as “one of those rare persons with normal vision.” Golden saw what was before his face and spoke it. “If there is any one thing that I am normal in,” he once said, “it is frankness.” In this, he was like his father.
His podium etiquette became a matter of ongoing notoriety. In 1933, there was a blow-up in a general conference when J. Golden Kimball recalled to the amused congregation that Apostle Lyman once asked him if he loved the authorities, to which he had answered that he did, but loved some “a damn sight better than others.”
Continuing on, Golden advised the saints to have charity and avoid bias against each other, adding somewhat gratuitously, “God, how I hate prejudice.”
That sermon, observed Golden later, “caused more hell than if the Devil had been turned loose” in the tabernacle.
President Heber J. Grant summoned Golden to his office to deliver an ultimatum, declaring he “wouldn’t and couldn’t” sustain him any longer as a general authority of the church unless there were changes.
Golden promised Grant to try his best to reform.
Feeling “castigated reproved and threatened,” Golden promised Grant to try his best to reform. Certainly, he never intended any less. “I have been through the fiery furnace,” he told a son of the episode, “but still live.”
President Grant recounted the incident in his diary, noting that tabernacle organist Edward P. Kimball had thanked him for rebuking “Uncle Golden” for his “humiliating” language.
“I always have liked him,” Grant noted of Golden. “He is fearless and has a strong testimony of the Gospel, but he is as careless in his talk as mortal man can be.”
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J. Golden Kimball’s Relationships
Friendship with B. H. Roberts
How long did J. Golden Kimball and B. H. Roberts know each other?
Golden’s friendship with B. H. Roberts extended over fifty years. As young men in Chattanooga in the Southern States Mission, “we occupied one room—used as office and sleeping quarters. We paid $25 a month for rent and board. It was hotter than hades most of the time. I was his secretary.”
Despite the inevitable irritations of the relationship, the two men would face the years shoulder to shoulder, and ultimately each knew well how to value the other.
What did he think about the political activities of B. H. Roberts?
When B. H. Roberts got the itch for political office in the 1890s, Golden foresaw only trouble for his friend and for the church, as Roberts had three wives in an era when the church had abjured the practice.
By calling attention to its continuing presence in Utah, Roberts was inviting trouble.
But he could not be dissuaded. “Like most men, he is not satisfied” despite his calling as a “servant of the Living God,” mused Golden about his friend, but preferred the “cesspool of politics.” He “doesn’t know when he has got a good thing.”
In the end, Roberts won his election and traveled to Washington, but the House of Representatives refused to seat him after a great deal of negative attention.
When Roberts died in 1933, Golden lamented:
I never felt more lonely or helpless, in a way, than I do now. Brother Roberts has been my mentor; he has been my teacher.
I didn’t have to read a whole library searching for information. When anything troubled me about the history of the Church or scripture, I went to Brother Roberts. He had the most wonderful mind and memory of any human being I have ever known, right up to the very last.
A great light has gone out in my life. I will soon follow.
J. Golden Kimball died four years later.
Family Relationships
What was J. Golden’s domestic life like?
Golden and his wife, Jennie, were both complex personalities who, despite good intentions, seemed unable or unwilling to accommodate each other.
There were five children by 1898, the oldest of them nine. The marital tension seemed to affect the children, who were rambunctious, further exasperating the parents.
Did he recognize his own shortcomings?
At times, family life seemed all rag ends. Golden acknowledged his part in the disharmony. “Being excessively orderly,” he self-diagnosed, “confusion causes me annoyance, and perplexes me so that I sin against my family and myself,” by losing his temper.
He would arrive home after a day of meetings, ordinations, and preaching to find “everything at wrong ends.”
They were too cash-pinched to hire help, leaving Jennie with “a house full of small children, and everybody cross” and disorder rampant, which was “not a desirable haven of rest” for anyone.
What ultimately happened?
Despite its tatters, their marriage endured. Golden felt their incompatibility but never assigned more than a proportionate share of blame to his partner.
As he conceded to a son years later about his various complaints:
mother tells her own story to you in her own way. She is a wonderful mother and darn good woman even if she and I can’t see through the same key hole. It must needs be that there is opposition and I sure get my share, but remember, father is no quiet sedate, gentle angel.
Plural Marriage
To what extent did J. Golden consider practicing polygamy?
As political pressure built on the saints in the early 1900s for failing to completely dissociate from polygamy, Golden’s instinct was to double down and trust in God.
He blamed the tight spot they were in partly on failing to properly honor plural marriage according to God’s command, forfeiting divine protection.
The 1890 manifesto relieved them of the intolerable burden.
The commandment had always been beyond reason to many members, and Golden supposed that most saints were only too “glad and happy” when the 1890 manifesto relieved them of the intolerable burden.
Yet his father, Heber C. Kimball, had once prophesied that unless “that holy principle” were upheld, “the time will come when your daughters will run these streets as common harlots.”
How did he privately feel about not practicing polygamy?
As late as 1903, J. Golden Kimball felt the tug of guilt over his failure to obey the principle and continued to discuss polygamy privately with friends and several half-brothers.
The Church had disavowed the practice. The danger of imprisonment was substantial. His wife, Jennie, was “not converted to my obeying” the principle.
Yet like several other highly-placed Latter-day Saints, he felt
troubled in my mind, and cannot free myself from the thought that I should in some inconceivable way obey the same. My father entered into that principle under very much more trying circumstances, and why should I be cowardly and not meet death for that principle if necessary?
In the end, he never acted on these views.
J. Golden Kimball and Finances
What financial struggles did he have?
Financial pressures plagued Golden all his life, adding stress to his marriage.
In 1888, Golden and his brother Elias set up in Logan, selling farm implements and then real estate. “Our hearts were set upon getting rich,” was Golden’s blunt admission.
The brothers were worth $50,000 on paper at one point. Even after property prices collapsed, they might have stayed afloat had they not foundered on the formidable reef of Apostle John W. Taylor, who had persuaded them to invest in his land development scheme for Latter-day Saint colonists in Canada.
Charming and persuasive, John W. was an inveterate optimist given to the long chance, “a plunger and a speculator,” as one of his sons put it.
The brothers borrowed money and bought in, endorsing several blank promissory notes to be in Taylor’s name and backed by collateral. Instead, the apostle sold the notes as Kimball credit to a speculator for cash, nudging Golden and Elias on a slow slide into insolvency.
They were in no position to work their way out of their fiscal hole.
Both brothers were working for the Church without salary: Elias as a mission president and Golden as a member of the First Council of the Seventy. They were in no position to work their way out of their fiscal hole.
The Barnes Banking Co. had lent them $5,000 against a farm valued at twice that before the market fell, and the boys had used the cash to buy shares in Taylor’s venture.
The bank hounded the brothers, seized their farm, sold it at distressed value, and held a deficiency judgment for the shortfall.
“This worries me, and makes me grow old and cross,” Golden noted in 1895. “My feelings cannot be described.”
As their fortunes ebbed, Golden cracked that they would soon be left with nothing and could say, “as the tramp did when a dog run away with his loaf of bread, Thank God I have my appetite left.”
Golden declared bankruptcy in 1899.
What was the Koyle Relief Mine, and what was J. Golden’s involvement with it?
Former bishop John Koyle sold shares in a mining venture based on angelic beings who, in a vision, revealed to him a vast buried treasure in a mountain near Spanish Fork, which he was to unearth and use to ensure the temporal salvation of the church. Golden had invested in mining stocks for decades, was perennially disappointed, but seemed to cling to the faith that this one might pay out.
After warning church members against Koyle with indifferent success, church authorities dispatched Charles Woodward to ask him up to Salt Lake to discuss the matter.
Calling at Koyle’s house, Woodward discovered a meeting of nine supporters in progress on the back lawn, including Golden Kimball.
After introductions, Golden rose to his feet to inform Woodward that Koyle had served under him in the Southern States Mission, where he had many spiritual manifestations “which I can testify to you were of God. I therefore do not question his dreams and visions in regard to the dream mine.”
Report of the encounter made its way to Church president Heber J. Grant.
When Woodward persisted in delivering the summons from Salt Lake, Golden lost patience and “gave me about the worst Scotch Blessing I have ever listened to by any man.”
Woodward’s report of the encounter made its way to Church president Heber J. Grant, who summoned Golden to his office and, as Woodward heard it related, “told Brother Kimball that he could remain on as one of the seven Presidents of Seventy, providing he would then and there promise to dis-associate himself with Koyle and the Dream Mine activity,” to which Golden agreed, and “this was the last I heard of the Kimball matter.”
Golden once confided to a congregation that at times he felt “like a little girl I heard of that did wrong. Her mother importuned her and labored with her” until in weariness she cried, “Mother, don’t try to make me good; shoot me.”
The Death and Legacy of J. Golden Kimball
How did J. Golden Kimball die?
In 1938, Golden’s wife, Jennie, insisted on a car trip to visit their oldest daughter, Jane, and family in San Francisco. As was his way, Golden set his affairs in order first, grousing that “I’ll probably get killed before I get back.”
When it came time to return to Salt Lake, they arranged for a nineteen-year-old grandson to drive them and were “travelling fast” just outside Reno when their car went into a skid and crashed down an embankment.
Asleep in the back seat . . . he was instantly killed.
Asleep in the back seat, Golden was thrown from the car, his skull fractured and a leg broken, and was instantly killed. The others in the car lay in shock until a passing motorist spotted the wreck.
Golden had told a congregation in 1921 that “when I die, I have made arrangements for a brass band. I like the idea of lots of noise and confusion, people inquiring, ‘Who is that?’ ‘Why Kimball’s dead.’ Then the people won’t worry any more about me.”
Whether spoken in earnest or jest, the instructions were ignored. He was ushered into the next life with a tabernacle service of hushed mourners and traditional hymns.
“I do not want a rosewood casket,” Golden had told the saints once. “I am willing to be buried among the people in a plain casket, and all I want inscribed on the headboard of my grave is that I have been true to this Church and to the Priesthood of God, and have walked in the footsteps of my father.”
What was his attitude toward death?
Golden thought much about death and his place on the other side. “If Golden Kimball can’t be saved in the flesh, after all the struggles and efforts he has made—and I have made a few sacrifices,” he mused once in a sermon, “then I believe God will save him on the other side, and it may be that his earthly father will come to his rescue, and lift up his voice to God in behalf of his child and plead for his salvation.”
Golden felt he had fallen short a thousand times, and the job was not done yet. He joked once that “I am not as clay in the hands of the potter,” a reference to his father’s favored metaphor of obedience to divine law.
“Oh! how I desire to be a good man,” Golden wrote on New Year’s Day 1900, yet “the weaknesses of the flesh cling to me as tenaciously as death to the human race.”
Every failure and weakness would have to be worked out, if not in this life, then in the next.
Every failure and weakness would have to be worked out, if not in this life, then in the next. “I frankly confess that my anger, passions and appetites are such that I seem not able to live anywhere near the requirements of the Gospel,” he lamented in his diary.
But he clung to the same assurance he had once extended to his sister May, that “your father and mother are pleading your case before the throne of Grace and all will be well with you.”
With that backing, he wished only “to finish my work, deliver my message, get through with this business, and if God can see fit in his mercy to give me salvation, that is all I want; it is a mighty big thing to ask for.”
His departed mother had “started out for a celestial glory,” he recalled, but “it is too big a climb for me. If I can get salvation, I will be happily surprised.”
Why has J. Golden’s story taken up a life of its own after his death?
A hundred anecdotes and tall tales attached to him, some of them irreverent, exaggerated, apocryphal, all informed by his honesty of vision and a certain quality that people responded to.
Golden said of his father, Heber C. Kimball, that he “had the superb gift of living in the hearts of the people” and possessed “the priceless gift of a forgiving and loving heart.”
The words were equally true of the son. J. Golden Kimball had experienced weakness and despair and accepted it in others. Leaning in to set apart a seventy, he noticed a cigar in the man’s suit pocket. Without faltering, he proceeded: “By all the power invested in me, I ordain you a Seventy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—cigar and all.”
A “knock-down argument”
Visiting Ocean Park, California, in 1908 and noticing a sailor looking on as three warships left the harbor, he asked why he was not aboard.
“I was fifteen minutes late,” explained the young man grimly, adding that now the Navy “will place me in chains and feed me on bread and water.”
Why had he been so careless? Golden pressed. “Look here Mister,” objected the sailor, “I did it and it is done, and I am trying to get a little sunshine out of this thing.”
That was a “knock-down argument” to J. Golden. “I never said another word. If he could get any sunshine out of it I was willing for the poor fellow to have it.”
“Their attention was his.”
At a stake conference one Sunday, while reading through an interminable list of officers for the sustaining vote, Elder Kimball was said to have noticed the congregation responding mechanically.
He changed course.
“It has been proposed,” he continued, “that Mount Nebo be moved from its present site in Juab County and placed on the Utah-Idaho border. All in favor manifest by raising the right hand; opposed, by the same sign.”
When hands went up, he slammed his fist on the pulpit, and their attention was his. Unlike many stories attributed to him, that one was probably approximately true.
“There isn’t 1 woman in 999”
Also, probably true was an account of Elder Kimball at a stake conference, chiding the saints for complacency. “You good people build farms and sheds and take wonderful care of your animals,” he started, yet “there isn’t one man in a thousand knows how to be good and kind to his wife.”
He paused as a ripple of smiles spread among the women, then added, “now, ladies, there isn’t one woman in 999 that knows when she is well-treated.”
What is one of your favorite J. Golden Kimball stories?
Ruth May Fox, president of the Young Ladies Association, recalled traveling with Golden on a preaching assignment in southern Utah in 1903 and wondering aloud how they would ever find a team to carry them out of the small settlement when they had done.
Unperturbed, Elder Kimball observed, in his characteristic way, that local authorities always seemed particularly adept at ensuring that visitors from Salt Lake found their way home.
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About the Scholar
Andrew Kimball is a historian and scholar specializing in Latter-day Saint history, with particular focus on church leadership, family networks, and the social and religious dynamics of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mormonism. He is the author of The Blood in Their Veins: The Kimballs, Polygamy, and the Shaping of Mormonism, which explores the lives of Heber C. Kimball, J. Golden Kimball, and their descendants in the context of church doctrine and cultural change. His research provides detailed historical insight, offering readers a nuanced understanding of J. Golden Kimball’s life, personality, and enduring legacy within Latter-day Saint history.
Further Reading
Explore more From the Desk articles about J. Golden Kimball and his associates:
- Insights From Andrew Kimball on Heber C. Kimball’s Life and Family
- What Did J. Golden Kimball Say About the Angel Moroni Statue?
- What Did Spencer W. Kimball Write About in His Journal?
- Heber J. Grant Quotes
- B. H. Roberts and Utah Politics in the Early 1900s
J. Golden Kimball Resources
Read what top scholars and publishers say about J. Golden Kimball:
- The Blood in Their Veins: The Kimballs, Polygamy, and the Shaping of Mormonism (Signature Books)
- 5 Funny Stories About “the Swearing Apostle” J. Golden Kimball (LDS Living)
- The J. Golden Kimball Stories (BYU Studies)
- Book Review: The Blood in Their Veins: The Kimballs, Polygamy, and the Shaping of Mormonism, by Andrew Kimball (Times and Seasons)
- From the Notebook of J. Golden Kimball (Keepatitchinin: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
