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Approach toward minorities
As noted in D. Michael Quinn's 2002 biography, J. Reuben Clark's life spanned a period that saw "enormous changes in the attitudes and conduct of Western society, the United States, and the LDS church toward the races and ethnic peoples of the world." As a young man, writes Quinn, Clark possessed "the full endowment of racism characteristic of late nineteenth-century America." Clark's nativist views were evident in his 1898 valedictory speech at the University of Utah, in which he declared that "America must cease to be the cess-pool into which shall drain the foul sewage of Europe." Clark eventually changed some of his racial and ethnic views; others he maintained to the end of his life.

Speaking to a church audience in 1956 about his service as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Clark admitted that he had gone to Mexico "with a great prejudice against the Mexican people." However, as he learned their history and lived among them, he came to develop a great affection for them. Clark's views of the Japanese softened after he performed legal work on behalf of the Japanese embassy in 1913. Although his son-in-law, Mervyn Bennion, was killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Clark "neither felt nor manifested any bitterness toward the Japanese," according to Quinn. Clark wrote to an LDS serviceman on 3 August 1945: "I have nothing but kindness for the [Japanese] race."

During Clark's lifetime, Utah had de facto segregation policies and males of African descent were excluded from the LDS priesthood. As a church leader, Clark resisted the social integration of whites and blacks and strongly opposed interracial marriage, explaining in an 1949 letter: "Since they are not entitled to the Priesthood, the Church discourages social intercourse with the negro race, because such intercourse leads to marriage, and the offspring possess negro blood and is therefore subject to the inhibition set out in our Scripture." Clark nevertheless expressed support for Brown v. Board of Education and in 1963 the First Presidency issued a formal statement endorsing civil rights.

Quinn notes that "there was one ethnic group, however, for whom Reuben expressed lifelong dislike and distrust—the Jewish people." According to Quinn, Clark kept several copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his personal library and shared this and other anti-Jewish publications with colleagues and acquaintances. Clark's anti-Semitism seems to have derived at least in part from his ardent anti-Communism. As Quinn notes, "although not all American anti-Communists were anti-Semitic, the more intense tended to be. Reuben's own fusion of anti-Communism and anti-Semitism was representative of this tendency." Clark's anti-Semitism put him at odds with LDS Church president David O. McKay, who's "positive attitudes toward the Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel were more representative of Mormons generally than were President Clark's anti-Semitic attitudes and administrative actions."