[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Scott Black: Today we have a very special episode of the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center that delves into our own history. We are recording this in March, 2025 at a time when there is widespread debate and public doubt about the importance of education, the role of the university, and the value, and even the very point of the humanities.

I am Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and it's my job to advocate, explain and demonstrate the worth of what we do in the humanities. I'm privileged to do so at the generously endowed Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center. Today I am joined by Mark Matheson to talk about Obert Tanner, his family, his legacy, and his vision for the centrality of education and the humanities for everyone.

Dr. Mark Matheson is Professor Lecturer in English at the University of Utah. He earned his D Phil at Oxford and has taught at the U for the past 34 years. His courses on Shakespeare are legendary and have been among the most popular indeed beloved classes in the English department for generations of students.

When I meet people across the state and tell them that I work in the English department at the U, more often than not they light up and tell me how much they enjoy Professor Matheson's classes and how meaningful they were to their development, both personally and professionally. Mark regularly teaches in the Honors College and he is director of the Tanner Lecture on human values Today.

However, mark is not joining us as a scholar and professor of Shakespeare, but as a lifelong Utah resident and one of our best local historians to talk about obt and Grace Tanner and their family. Welcome Mark.

Mark Mattheson: Thank you so much, Scott. It's really an honor to be with you, my, my longtime colleague and chair in your earlier work in the English department.

I so appreciate what you're doing for the Tanner Humanities Center, which was very central to OB and Grace and to their daughter Carolyn Tanner Irish, whose name Grace is the building we're in. And I also want to thank my longtime colleague and friend with the Tanner lectures on human values. Beth James, who's here.

Ness with technical matters that are certainly beyond my scope.

Scott Black: So Obert Tanner tells his own story in his autobiography, A Man's Search for Freedom, and he tells his mother's equally remarkable story in the classic, A Mormon mother, his edition of her autobiography. I'd like to start with a passage from Over's introduction to his mother's autobiography.

There was her deep satisfaction in learning her joy with books and lectures and her search for knowledge about the world, the causes of events, the motives of people, and scientific explanations with religious devotion. She loved and sought the truth with all her mind and all her soul, and in this quest for truth, her children came to believe with her.

A university was the noblest creation of man. That's a wonderful passage.

Mark Mattheson: I couldn't agree more, Scott. I think it's also a very central passage toward an understanding of both. Annie Clark Tanner and her 10th and last child, Obert Clark Tanner. I just wanna say at the beginning that in that same forward to the 1973 publication of Annie Clark Tanner's Autobiography of Mormon Mother Obert also says, I think very movingly.

This is 32 years after his mother's death that he writes this, that his mother is in fact a great mystery to him. I certainly share the son's sense about Annie Clark Tanner. I think she's one of the most remarkable people about whom I've ever read, but I just wanted to say at the beginning of our conversation, which I'm so happy to be engaged in, that Tolbert is a mystery to me in many profound ways.

And so I'm very honored to be talking about his life in its extraordinary, all of its extraordinary dimensions today. But I want to. Strike the humble Tanner note by suggesting that understanding Obert and his life from my own perspective, and there are certain limits to

Scott Black: that. I definitely appreciate that and I think that's probably true of anyone else, but especially someone as complicated and interesting as him.

Could you give us just some basic background? You had mentioned that he is the 10th and I believe youngest child of his mother, who has had a very complicated life as. A second, plural wife at the end of the 19th century in a polygamous marriage, which she interestingly believed in, or at least she writes about it in complicated ways.

She, herself was struggling with this. She leaned heavily on her own faith to come to terms with it. That's one very interesting aspect of her very difficult life. She raised a lot of children and very difficult circumstances, and they were remarkably successful. Give us a little bit of a background on, I, I

Mark Mattheson: think that your observation about Annie Clark's life as a very important and indispensable point for a beginning point for a discussion about Obert life is very important.

Annie was a very bright woman, and Obert was always grateful for that. Grateful for their conversations about books and ideas and lectures all his life. And in the early 1880s, she went to Brigham Young Academy, became Brigham Young University later. Carl Maer was a German Mormon immigrant who was an educator in Germany and who ran the Bergham Young Academy at the time.

She was there from about 1881 to 1883, and he made the comment that she was the most outstanding student in her class and even in his 1973 introduction to a Mormon Mother Annie story overt mentions that he was very proud of his mother's intellectual. Gifts and achievements, and she did enter into a polygamist marriage with Joseph Marian Tanner, and he was a very prominent person in early Mormon Mormonism as well, and really had a career within the church and within Utah institutions of higher learning as as a very notable educator.

And Annie Clark was his second wife. He went on. To marry three more wives and including a wife whom he married about six months after he married Annie Clark Tanner. And it needs to be said that that to Joseph Marion Tanner's. Obert. Wrights was a great success in life, but by no means a great success in his role in Obert's family.

Joseph Marion Tanner did not provide economically. For the family, or did so only very sporadically. And this meant that Annie Clark had to do menial work to support her family. Obert mentions in his autobiography that she scrubbed other people's floors four 15 cents an hour, and those years overt was born in 1904, as we mentioned the 10th and last of Annie Clark's children.

And the bond between. The youngest child and his mother was, I think, rich and profound from the very beginning. And I think that the mystery of Annie Clark's life, as Obert calls it, and is, I think, I think as I've said elsewhere, is in many ways the perpetual surprise of OB Tanner's story that, you know, growing up in very conservative institutions in late 19th century, Utah.

Annie Clark emerged in her life as, uh, a remarkably independent thinker, someone who cherished the freedom of her children and supported it. She ran her home on the basis of John Stewart Mills great classic of Anglo American liberalism on liberty. She talks about that herself and over talks about it, and her home was a impoverished, but not a, a home in which.

As Obert said, the humiliations of poverty were felt because of the remarkable strengths of his mother. And she clearly inspired him from his own early childhood with a vision of the importance of education, and specifically the importance of the humanities in human experience, and in the work of holding societies together and making them better and more just.

Scott Black: And he does describe either he or she, I can't remember, describe their book of their house as full of books. Mm-hmm. And clearly she inspired in him, as you said, a love, a curiosity, a love of education, a sense that they should be thinking for themselves and trying to make up their own minds even about received conventional wisdom.

Mark Mattheson: Yeah, no, I think he said later in his life that as his mother. Grew and through great trials, both practical and emotional and spiritual, as she grew, she became remarkably independent of the authorities, uh, as he said, institutional and domestic that had been in place during her growing up years. And that had, in many ways dictated the terms of her marriage.

And I think one of the things that, that Obert finds very mysterious about. Annie's life, his mother's life, is that somehow she was able to achieve this kind of emancipation of her own spiritual and intellectual life. And I do think it, it's very much the case that Obert saw her early experience in higher learning, which she regarded herself as transformative, as really a very empowering, sustained moment in her life, which she really maintained through.

Conversations well into the 20th century with her Dear son, Obert about learning and about teaching. And Obert, as we know, is, is famous for two things, being an educator and being an extraordinary businessman. And, uh, he would say very frankly, that in fact it was always far more important to his mother that he succeed as an educator and as a teacher, and as a thinker, than as a businessman.

She appreciated his success in that regard. Learning and teaching in the humanities always came first and Obert said, and I imbibe that and it was always first for me too.

Scott Black: Nevertheless, I do wanna talk about his business career, which wasn't quite remarkable. He was coming from very poor, materially poor background.

That's right. Actually, spiritually rich, it sounds like. And he was encouraged and supported as a child. But he was starting from nothing, and yet he became an extraordinarily successful businessman. Could you give us the outlines of his careers

Mark Mattheson: when he was still a young man? He started as an itinerant salesman of recognition pins that he did not yet have a company to produce for high school graduates and graduates from LDS seminary courses, and he learned a lot in that process.

He, I think, discovered though he wasn't always successful and he is the first one to say that, that he really did have gifts as a salesman, and those early successes led him to establish the OC Tenner company in 1927 in his mother's home, which was down on the corner of Fenway Avenue and 12th East. A couple of stones throws away from where we are now, and he.

Started working on manufacturing jewelry on a bench in that home. Then his mother's home, who was then in by then in Salt Lake and things took off and it wasn't always a kind of steady rise, but he devoted himself to this. And I think he had a couple of really active and profound motives for becoming the business success that in fact, he became, and one is, I think he wanted to help his mother and.

He knew that she had lived in really a kind of miserable state from the standpoint of her material surroundings, and I think he was deeply motivated to become successful in business so that he could provide her with the material support that she hadn't had since her marriage, and he successfully did that.

And interestingly, Obert. Continued to, and I think this is also coming right out of his relationship with his mother to support single women, often single older women throughout his life. And they would find one day that their mortgage had been paid off, and it turned out that Obert had paid off their mortgage and things like that, and Obert did that, as Carolyn said, for the other wives of Joseph Marion Tanner, who survived him.

He paid off their mortgages. There was this great sense of respect. And love, and also of a kind of warm and warmly accepted obligation to help his mother and the people she cared about who didn't have the material means to live as abundantly as they might. So I think that helping his mother was fundamental to his drive to be successful in business.

I also think that he really understood making money and having a secure income. For which he was not dependent on others. I think that it was very important for him from an intellectual standpoint because he didn't want to be obliged to go along with the beliefs of an employer with which he fundamentally disagreed.

And so putting together his own company enabled him to create that freedom for himself. And freedom is in some ways the central value of his life, and he wanted the intellectual freedom that comes with. Material stability in one's life. And he, uh, started the OC Tanner Company the same year that Virginia Wolf gave the lectures at Cambridge that became a room of one's own, and they both had the same thesis.

We need material wellbeing of a certain level so that we can have and claim our intellectual independence and our own creativity. And so I like the idea of Obert and Virginia Wolf reaching that understanding on their own paths, as it were. Thank you, mark. That is a

Scott Black: remarkable connection. I really appreciate hearing that.

I love Virginia Wolf and it's also worth noting that DOC Tanner Company is a famously great place to work. He really in that sort of, that sense of support, that is his ethos with his own family and with his community. Is also something he made central to his company as well. He has very loyal employees who he's taking care of their whole lives and people who've worked there really enjoyed working there.

Mark Mattheson: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that was a matter of the very first and importance for Obert. I think one thing that he carried into his adult life from his upbringing in the LDS church in Farmington, in the. Early decades of the 20th century was the value of community. Obert greatly valued communities, and I know that he wanted to build a community at his business, a community of employees that was respected, appreciated, and rewarded.

And he did that. And it's still, as I think all three of us in the room know, it's still very much the ethos of the OC Tanner Company to. To make sure that employees come first and to provide the means they need for wellbeing at work and a kind of high standard of material wellbeing in their lives.

Scott Black: So. The other important leg of his life was his work as a writer, as an intellectual, as a researcher, could you give us just a brief overview of his books and his work for the church?

Mark Mattheson: Yes, he, he really did enjoy writing and was really engaged in both a scholarly and a humanistic way in writing books over the course of his life as a young scholar, he was a very genuine New Testament scholar.

I've read some of his early work on the New Testament, which is tremendously well informed and insightful. And it's also true that he did work within the eldest church as an educator and as a writer in the twenties, 1920s. And he so impressed people in the church that he was, made an extraordinary offer in 1931.

And that was, and this was by the church and a letter. From the LDS Church President promised all these things formerly to Hobert. They said, we will pay for you to go get a PhD at the University of Chicago, and then we will hold the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Brigham Young for you until you get back.

Wow. That's a remarkable testament. It was an extraordinary offer, and Obert loved studying religion. He was a New Testament scholar and. He loved having discussions about religion and philosophies of religion and so on, and he was very attracted to the idea, as one can understand. But he, after a lot of soul searching, he declined it because he didn't feel that his views were orthodox enough.

Though in many ways, he always remained loyal to the wellbeing of the church, but he didn't feel at that point in his life that his views were orthodox enough to really sustain him through this. Career of working as a religious scholar for the church, but he says in his autobiography that it was a moment of great sadness when he declined, and it was obviously a, a tremendous moment of decision for him.

There was also an earlier one where he was working for William Beck at Jeweler here in Salt Lake in the twenties when he was going to the university, and they had a colorful relationship. But after a couple of years, Beck said. I want you to come and work with me and run the store with me and I'll give you half its profits.

This to a young man whose mother scrubbed other people's floors for 15 cents an hour. And in that moment, the decision was between going fully into the jewelry business or continuing his education. He thought about it and he chose his education. Wow.

Scott Black: I want to turn now to his own family and what he's known for his philanthropy, and I wanna start with something he says at the end of his autobiography.

I'm gonna read this passage. As I look back over my life, I see three values at work. I did not invent them. I did not achieve them. They were recurrent challenges, lights to live by and graces to enjoy. I. They're known by the labels, freedom, kindness, and beauty. Freedom is the most familiar and continuous theme of this narrative, his autobiography.

It was there for my early days in Farmington, Utah, and it remains a major value today. I try to encourage it. For others. I have stressed my belief that a good family is one in which children are encouraged to claim their freedom, and that a good society allows expansiveness change and variety, entrenched powers, whether in authority roles, accepted ideologies, or institutional structures are common and necessary to every culture.

Yet these powers often work against our finding the best solutions to our problems, the best answers to our questions because they limit freedom to search.

Mark Mattheson: I think that's, I actually read that this morning, Scott, and I think it's, it's tremendously important in understanding over and note the humility with which he speaks about.

Those values of freedom and kindness and beauty. And I think it's interesting that Obert wrote this book the year before he died. He, and it was published in the year he died in 1993. And this was kind of a, a backward glance or traveled roads as, as Walt Littman would say. And I think it's very interesting that he was always, as a scholar and as an educator, a great, uh, advocate of the platonic trinity of truth and goodness and beauty.

I think it's interesting that right at the end of his life, the Trinity becomes freedom, kindness, and beauty. And I think that that subtle but important change might reflect what he was had learned and how he had been shaped by his life experience. I even hear some of John Stewart Mills specific vocabulary in that passage that you, that you just read.

And I think Obert, and again, his mother is probably the, I was gonna say the fountain, but that gets us towards Obert's philanthropies. But she was the source of his commitment to freedom of thought and freedom of speech, and a kind of classic Anglo-American liberal ideal. And I think the passage you just read has immediate bearing on the hostility that exists culturally and governmentally to universities and higher education in our own.

Historical moment

Scott Black: right now. Yes, and I think we're very lucky that we are part of his legacy in the Humanity Center here at the University of Utah is one of the important institutions he endowed along with the Tanner Lecture on human values, which maybe you could give us a brief overview about along with the support for other educational institutions as well as ton's.

As I said

Mark Mattheson: it, it over Love fans. He loved the sentence. I think it's in the first chapter of Moby Dick. Meditation and water are wedded forever. And he certainly found a truth of his own experience in Melville's line. And, uh, I think he, he wanted people to have meditative moments. He, he valued reflection later in life.

He said, I like fountains because they're non-controversial. Everybody likes Fountain. So he was happy to exercise his philanthropy in that way. There was a moment going toward the your point about the Tanner lectures on human values when he and Grace, and we really need to talk about grace. I pass her Alvin Gittens portrait every day walking to the English department from the alumni parking lot.

It's in the alumni house and one can see it from the walkway outside. And Grace was equally extraordinary in her own life and her own support for Obert and her. Resilience, frankly, in, in the face of tragedy. And that's a very big part of Bert's story. And as you have no doubt noted Obert dedicates his autobiography to his mother and to Grace.

So at any rate, in 1975, Obert was down for a identification of, of Fountain at what is now Utah Tech University in St. George. And he was there with OB and Grace were there with their great friends, Sterling McMurrin, extraordinarily eminent person in the history of this university and of national education.

Natalie McMurrin and they had dedicated the fountain and were walking back to their motel and Sterling said over, I think I have an idea about how you might spend your money better. And the whole idea of, of a national, indeed international lectureship sponsored by over and Grace took flight immediately over said, I think that's a great idea.

Obert didn't wait to do things that he thought were of great value, and when the four of them had that conversation in St. George. He came back, contacted David Gardner immediately, who was president of the University of Utah at that time, and who was tremendously helpful and important in the process through which the Tanner lectures were established.

And they kicked off with lectures in 1976, in the 19 76, 77 academic year. And here we are approaching the 50th anniversary of this remarkable series, which since I've been involved with it, a number of people have told me and I can't. Find a way to disagree with him that, you know, it's the most significant academic lecture series in the world.

Scott Black: Yeah, it's remarkable. And of course, the Tanner Humanity Center, one of the disappointments I had with his autobiography is that he doesn't mention his creation of the center. I think he must have been doing it just as he was writing before.

Mark Mattheson: It did happen very late in his life. I had the pleasure of knowing Lowell Durham.

There was a humanity center at the university that had been founded, but not for long, that Lowell Durham was the director of, and the offices were down in Carlson Hall, a building now, no longer standing. And I had some meetings with Lowell at the time and just really respected him very much. And I know Obert did too.

And, and I know that Lowell helped Obert with, uh, the autobiography and in terms of reading chapters and so on, and. I'm not exactly sure how the change was initiated, but OB and Grace did get involved and the person who really became involved was of course their daughter, Carolyn Tanner Irish. And, uh, she was a tremendous advocate for this and OB and Grace supported it.

And because OB and Grace were getting older and a bit frail, and indeed over passed away shortly after this happened, Carolyn really led the charge and it's been a wonderful landmark of the Tanner families. Philanthropy. And even more specifically, as you started off by saying today, the Tana Humanities Center is a reflection of how Obert and Carolyn and the whole family have been dedicated to the humanities as, as an essential part of the human experience, both for the individual and for the collective.

And I'm very happy to say that O bring Grace's grandson and Carolyn's son, Stephen Tanner Irish, Dr. Stephen Tanner Irish is. Now teaching philosophy here at the U in addition to running the company down on State Street. And so I, I, I like that very much because he's doing exactly what Obert did between 1945 and 1974.

He taught here at the university in the philosophy department for 29 years, and he would teach here in the morning and then go downtown to build up his business in the afternoon. And Sterling McGuire once said that there were people including, uh, professors at the U who did not know. That Professor Obert Tanner and Oc Tanner, the jeweler were the, in fact the same person.

Scott Black: It's hard to believe. It makes me tired just to think about It does. It does indeed. Quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, is that right about Yeah. His mother's book. Do you wanna tell this story?

Mark Mattheson: Yeah. Obert really felt a great commitment politically to the United Nations after World War ii, and I think that this, that his commitment to.

A kind of international organization which could resolve conflicts before they became matters of open warfare. It was, I think it really was his deepest political commitment. I think it came in part from his experience in Germany where he went on a Mormon mission in the years after World War I, and he writes about that and writes about.

How in speaking with German people in the early twenties, he was struck by how collectively damaged they were in the spirit as well as, as practically and in practical terms and material terms. And it disturbed him very much and he felt great sympathy for the people who, who felt alienated from life and religion and spirituality because of the experience of World War I.

Then in the aftermath of World War ii, particularly with the advent of nuclear weapons, he felt very strongly that there needed to be a kind of rational and good faith effort on the part of all nations to preserve a future for humanity. And during his work, very extended work. But during his work, immediately after World War ii, I became very good friends with Eleanor Roosevelt who.

I was also of course, a great advocate of the UN and Obert loaned her his personal copy of the first edition of a Mormon Mother Annie's autobiography, which came out in dear of her death actually in 1941. And she did read it and returned the book to over and said, I am just emotionally exhausted at having read.

That book because of its portrayal of, and certainly not in any kind of an indulgent way by Annie Clark Tanner, but its portrayal of the hard facts of her personal history. So that was very important. And Obert won the, OR was awarded the UN Medal for Peace in 1978. Great honor, and based on what I know about the heartfelt nature of over it's commitment to peace, I think.

Richly deserved, and it's a footnote of history that two awards were given that year. One to over and one to the Bee Gees who had given a concert, all of the proceeds from which went to unicef. That's part of over's story. He also, through his philanthropies, was recognized with the National Medal of the Arts in 1988 and went to the White House, the Reagan White House, and was honored with Ipe another.

Great artists and patron of the arts, and it meant a great deal to him to have that experience.

Scott Black: Thank you. Marcus is a remarkable legacy and I'm very happy that we ended with his work on diplomacy on the UN as well as recognizing that this is all coming from his mother. I think that's really important.

It is a remarkable legacy. We are the beneficiaries of that. Our audiences are the beneficiaries of that. I really appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us about Obert c Tanner.

Mark Mattheson: Scott, thank you so much. What a, again, what an honor for me and what a pleasure that you've sent me back through some of over's speeches from the 1950s and things like that in preparation for today.

And my great thanks to Beth James as well. I'm just deeply grateful to be affiliated with the Tanner Humanities Center and with the Tanner Lectures on human values, and I just appreciate what both of you're doing. To further the Tanner Legacy,

Scott Black: you've been listening to the Virtual Jewelbox Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our theme music is Jelly Roll Morton's Perfect Rag. Thanks for joining us.