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Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft

by Frank J. Cannon · English · Gutenberg #7066 · 538,762 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft

Author: Frank J. Cannon
        Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7066]
                Most recently updated: May 30, 2009

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7066

Credits: Produced by David Schwan, Monique Cameron, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH; THE NATIONAL MENACE OF A POLITICAL PRIESTCRAFT ***




Produced by David Schwan and Monique Cameron









UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH


The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft


By Frank J. Cannon

Formerly United States Senator from Utah

and

Harvey J. O'Higgins

Author "The Smoke-Eaters," "Don-a-Dreams," etc.



Contents



     Chapter

           Note
        Introduction
        Foreword
         I In the Days of the Raid
        II On a Mission to Washington
       III Without a Country
        IV The Manifesto
         V On the Road to Freedom
        VI The Goal--and After
       VII The First Betrayals
      VIII The Church and the Interests
        IX At the Crossways
         X On the Downward Path
        XI The Will of the Lord
       XII The Conspiracy Completed.
      XIII The Smoot Exposure
       XIV Treason Triumphant
        XV The Struggle for Liberty
       XVI The Price of Protest
      XVII The New Polygamy
     XVIII The Prophet of Mammon
       XIX The Subjects of the Kingdom
        XX Conclusion




Note

When Harvey J. O'Higgins was in Denver, in the spring of 1910, working
with Judge Ben B. Lindsey on the manuscript of "The Beast and the
Jungle," for Everybody's Magazine, he met the Hon. Frank J. Cannon,
formerly United States Senator from Utah, and heard from him the story
of the betrayal of Utah by the present leaders of the Mormon Church.
This story the editor of Everybody's Magazine commissioned Messrs.
Cannon and O'Higgins to write. They worked on it for a year, verifying
every detail of it from government reports, controversial pamphlets,
Mormon books of propaganda, and the newspaper files of current record.
It ran through nine numbers of the magazine, and not so much as a
successful contradiction was ever made of one of the innumerable
incidents or accusations that it contains. It is here published in book
form at somewhat greater length than the magazine could print it. It
is a joint work, but the autobiographic "I" has been used throughout,
because it is Mr. Cannon's personal narrative of his personal
experience.




Introduction


This is the story of what has been called "the great American
despotism."

It is the story of the establishment of an absolute throne and dynasty
by one American citizen over a half-million others.

And it is the story of the amazing reign of this one man, Joseph F.
Smith, the Mormon Prophet, a religious fanatic of bitter mind, who
claims that he has been divinely ordained to exercise the awful
authority of God on earth over all the affairs of all mankind, and who
plays the anointed despot in Utah and the surrounding states as cruelly
as a Sultan and more securely than any Czar.

To him the Mormon people pay a yearly tribute of more than two million
dollars in tithes; and he uses that income, to his own ends, without an
accounting. He is president of the Utah branch of the sugar trust, and
of the local incorporation's of the salt trust; and he supports the
exaction's of monopoly by his financial absolutism, while he defends
them from competition by his religious power of interdict and
excommunication. He is president of a system of "company stores," from
which the faithful buy their merchandise; of a wagon and machine company
from which the Mormon farmers purchase their vehicles and implements; of
life-insurance and fire-insurance companies, of banking institutions,
of a railroad, of a knitting company, of newspapers, which the Mormon
people are required by their Church to patronize, and through which they
are exploited, commercially and financially, for the sole profit of the
sovereign of Utah and his religious court.

He is the political Boss of the state, delivering the votes of his
people by revelation of the Will of God, practically appointing the
United States Senators from Utah--as he practically appoints the
marshals, district attorneys, judges, legislators, officers and
administrators of law throughout his "Kingdom of God on Earth"--and
ruling the non-Mormons of Utah, as he rules his own people, by virtue
of his political and financial partnership with the great "business
interests" that govern and exploit this nation, and his Kingdom, for
their own gain, and his.

He lives, like the Grand Turk, openly with five wives, against the
temporal law of the state, against the spiritual law of his Kingdom, and
in violation of his own solemn covenant to the country--which he gave in
1890, in order to obtain amnesty for himself from criminal prosecution
and to help Utah obtain the powers of statehood which he has since
usurped. He secretly preaches a proscribed doctrine of polygamy as
necessary to salvation; he publicly denies his own teaching, so that he
may escape responsibility for the sufferings of the "plural wives" and
their unfortunate children, who have been betrayed by the authority of
his dogma. And these women, by the hundreds, seduced into clandestine
marriage relations with polygamous elders of the Church, unable to claim
their husbands--even in some cases disowning their children and
teaching these children to deny their parents--are suffering a pitiful
self-immolation as martyrs to the religious barbarism of his rule.

Demanding unquestioning obedience in all things, as the "mouthpiece
of the Lord," and "sole vice-regent of God on Earth," he enforces his
demands by his religious, political and financial control of the faith,
the votes and the property of his fellow-citizens. He is at once--as
the details of this story show--"the modern 'money king,' the absolute
political Czar, the social despot and the infallible Pope of his
Kingdom."

Ex-Senator Cannon not only exposes but accounts for and explains the
conditions that have made the Church-controlled government of Utah less
free, less of a democracy, a greater tyranny and more of a disgrace to
the nation than ever the corporation rule of Colorado was in the darkest
period of the Cripple Creek labor war. He shows the enemies of the
republic encouraging and profiting by the shame of Utah as they
supported and made gain of Colorado's past disgrace. He shows the
piratical "Interests," at Washington, sustaining, and sustained by, the
misgovernment of Utah, in their campaign of national pillage. He shows
that the condition of Utah today is not merely a local problem; that it
affects and concerns the people of the whole country; that it can only
be cured with their aid.

The outside world has waited many years to hear the truth about the
Mormons; here it is--told with sympathy, with affection, by a man who
steadfastly defended and fought for the Mormon people when their present
leaders were keeping themselves carefully inconspicuous. The Mormon
system of religious communism has long been known as one of the most
interesting social experiments of modern civilization; here is an
intimate study of it, not only in its success but in the failure that
has come upon it from the selfish ambitions of its leaders. The power of
the Mormon hierarchy has been the theme of much imaginative fiction; but
here is a story of church tyranny and misgovernment in the name of God,
that outrages the credibilities of art. That such a story could come
out of modern America--that such conditions could be possible in the
democracy today--is an amazement that staggers belief.



II


Hon. Frank J. Cannon is the son of George Q. Cannon of Utah, who was
First Councillor of the Mormon Church from 1880 to 1901. After the
death of Brigham Young, George Q. Cannon's diplomacy saved the Mormon
communism from destruction by the United States government. It was his
influence that lifted the curse of polygamy from the Mormon faith. Under
his leadership Utah obtained the right of statehood; and his financial
policies were establishing the Mormon people in industrial prosperity
when he died.

In all these achievements the son shared with his father, and in some of
them--notably in the obtaining of Utah's statehood--he had even a larger
part than George Q. Cannon himself. When the Mormon communities, in
1888, were being crushed by proscription and confiscation and the
righteous bigotries of Federal officials, Frank J. Cannon went to
Washington, alone--almost from the doors of a Federal prison--and,
by the eloquence of his plea for his people, obtained from President
Cleveland a mercy for the Mormons that all the diplomacies of the
Church's politicians had been unable to procure. Again, in 1890, when
the Mormons were threatened with a general disfranchisement by means of
a test oath, he returned to Washington and saved them, with the aid
of James G. Blame, on the promise that the doctrine and practice of
polygamy were to be abandoned by the Mormon Church; and he assisted in
the promulgation and acceptance of the famous "manifesto" of 1890,
by which the Mormon Prophet, as the result of a "divine revelation,"
withdrew the doctrine of polygamy from the practice of the faith.

He organized the Republican party in Utah, and led it in the first
campaigns that divided the people of the territory on the lines of
national issues and freed them from the factions of a religious dispute.
He delivered to Washington the pledges of the Mormon leaders, by which
the emancipation of their people from hierarchical domination was
promised and the right of statehood finally obtained. He was elected the
first United States Senator from Utah, against the unwilling candidacy
of his own father, when the intrigues of the Mormon priests pitted
the father against the son and violated the Church's promise of
non-interference in politics almost as soon as it had been given.

It was his voice, in the Senate, that helped to reawaken the national
conscience to the crimes of Spanish rule in Cuba, when the "financial
interests" of this country were holding the government back from any
interference in Cuban affairs. He was one of the leaders in Washington
of the first ill-fated "Insurgent Republican" movement against the
control of the Republican party by these same piratical "interests;" and
he was the only Republican Senator who stood to oppose them by voting
against the iniquitous Dingley tariff bill of 1897. He delivered the
speech of defiance at the Republican national convention of 1896, when
four "Silver Republican" Senators led their delegations out of that
convention in revolt. And by all these acts of independence he put
himself in opposition to the politicians of the Mormon Church, who were
allying themselves with Hanna and Aldrich, the sugar trust, the railroad
lobby, and the whole financial and commercial Plunderbund in politics
that has since come to be called "The System."

He returned to Utah to prevent the sale of a United States Senatorship
by the Mormon Church; and, though he was himself defeated for
re-election, he helped to hold the Utah legislature in a deadlock that
prevented the selection of a successor to his seat. He fought to
compel the leaders of the Church to fulfill the pledges which they had
authorized him to give in Washington when statehood was being obtained.
After his father's death, when these pledges began to be openly
violated, he directed his attack particularly against Joseph F. Smith,
the new President of the Church, who was principally responsible for the
Church's breach of public faith. Through the columns of the Salt Lake
Tribune he exposed the treasonable return to the practice of polygamy
which Joseph F. Smith had secretly authorized and encouraged. He opposed
the election of Apostle Reed Smoot to the United States Senate, as
a violation of the statehood pledges. He criticized the financial
absolutism of the Mormon Prophet, which Smith was establishing in
partnership with "the Plunderbund." He was finally excommunicated and
ostracized, by his father's successors in power, for championing the
political and social liberties of the Mormon people whom he had helped
to save from destruction and whose statehood sovereignty he had so
largely obtained.

When the partnership of the Church and "the Interests" prevented the
expulsion of Apostle Smoot from the Senate, Senator Cannon withdrew from
Utah, convinced that nothing could be done for the Mormons so long as
the national administration sustained the sovereignty of the Mormon
kingdom as a co-ordinate power in this Republic. For the last few years
he has been a newspaper editor in Denver, Colorado--on the Denver Times
and the Rocky Mountain News--helping the reform movement in Colorado
against the corporation control of that state, and waiting for the
opportunity to renew his long fight for the Mormon people.

In the following narrative he returns to that fight. In fulfillment of
a promise made before he left Utah--and seeing now, in the new
"insurgency," the hope of freeing Utah from slavery to "the System"--he
here addresses himself to the task of exposing the treasons and
tyrannies of the Mormon Prophet and the consequent miseries among his
people.

In the course of his exposition, he gives a most remarkable picture
of the Mormon people, patient, meek, and virtuous, "as gentle as the
Quakers, as staunch as the Jews." He introduces the world for the first
time to the conclaves of the Mormon ecclesiasts, explains the simplicity
of some of them, the bitterness of others, the sincerity of almost
all--illuminating the dark places of Church control with the
understanding of a sympathetic experience, and bringing out the virtues
of the Mormon system as impartially as he exposes its faults. He traces
the degradation of its communism, step by step and incident by incident,
from its success as a sort of religious socialism administered for the
common good to its present failure as a hierarchical capitalism governed
for the benefit of its modern "Prophet of Mammon" at the expense of the
liberty, the happiness, and even the prosperity, of its victims.

For the first time in the history of the Mormon Church, there has
arrived a man who has the knowledge and the inclination to explain it.

He does this fearlessly, as a duty, and without any apologies, as a
public right. "He is not, and never has been an official member of the
Church, in any sense or form," Joseph F. Smith, as President of the
Church, testified concerning him, at Washington in 1904; and though this
statement is one of the inspired Prophet's characteristic perversions of
the truth, it covers the fact that Senator Cannon has always opposed the
official tyrannies of the hierarchs. The present Mormon leaders accepted
his aid in freeing Utah, well aware of his independence. They profited
by his success with a more or less doubtful gratitude. They betrayed him
promptly--as they betrayed the nation and their own followers--as soon
as they found themselves in a position safely to betray. In this book
he merely continues an independence which he has always maintained, and
replies to secret and personal treason with a public criticism, to which
he has never hesitated to resort.

He begins his story with the year 1888, and devotes the first chapters
to a depiction of the miseries of the Mormon people in the unhappy
days of persecution. He continues with the private details of the
confidential negotiations in Washington and the secret conferences in
Salt Lake City by which the Mormons were saved. He gives the truth about
the political intrigues that accompanied the grant of Utah's statehood,
and he relates, pledge by pledge, the covenants then given by the Mormon
leaders to the nation and since treasonably violated and repudiated
by them. He explains the progress of this repudiation with an intimate
"inside" knowledge of facts which the Mormon leaders now deny. And
he exposes the horror of conditions in Utah today as no other man in
America could expose them--for his life has been spent in combating the
influences of which these conditions are the result; and he understands
the present situation as a doctor understands the last stages of a
disease which he has been for years vainly endeavoring to check.

But aside from all this--aside from his exposure of the Mormon
despotism, his study of the degradation of a modern community, or his
secret history of the Church's dark policies in "sacred places"--he
relates a story that is full of the most astonishing curiosities of
human character and of dramatic situations that are almost mediaeval in
their religious aspects. He goes from interviews with Cleveland or Blame
to discuss American politics with men who believe themselves in direct
communication with God--who talk and act like the patriarchs of the Old
Testament--who accept their own thoughts as the inspiration of the Holy
Ghost, and deliver their personal decisions, reverently, as the Will
of the Lord. He shows men and women ready to suffer any martyrdom in
defense of a doctrine of polygamy that is a continual unhappiness and
cross upon them. He depicts the social life of the most peculiar sect
that has ever lived in a Western civilization. He writes--unconsciously,
and for the first time that it has ever been written--the naive,
colossal drama of modern Mormonism.

H. J. O'H.




Forward


On the fourth day of January, 1896, the territory of Utah was admitted
to statehood, and the proscribed among its people were freed to the
liberties of American citizenship, upon the solemn covenant of the
leaders of the Mormon Church that they and their followers would live,
thereafter, according to the laws and institutions of the nation of
which they were allowed to become a part. And that gracious settlement
of upwards of forty years of conflict was negotiated through responsible
mediators, was endorsed by the good faith of the non-Mormons of Utah,
and was sealed by a treaty convention in which the high contracting
parties were the American Republic and the "Kingdom of God on Earth."

I propose, in this narrative, to show that the leaders of the Mormon
Church have broken their covenant to the nation; that they have abused
the confidence of the Gentiles of Utah and betrayed the trust of the
people under their power, by using that power to prevent the state of
Utah from becoming what it had engaged to become. I propose to show
that the people of Utah, upraised to freedom by the magnanimity of the
nation, are being made to appear traitorous to the generosity that
saved them; that the Mormons of Utah are being falsely misled into the
peculiar dangers from which they thought they had forever escaped; that
the unity, the solidarity, the loyalty of these fervent people is being
turned as a weapon of offense against the whole country, for the
greater profit of the leaders and the aggrandizement of their power. I
undertake, in fact, in this narrative, to expose and to demonstrate what
I do believe to be one of the most direful conspiracies of treachery in
the history of the United States.

Not that I have anything in my heart against the Mormon people! Heaven
forbid! I know them to be great in their virtues, wholesome in their
relations, capable of an heroic fortitude, living by the tenderest
sentiments of fraternity, as gentle as the Quakers, as staunch as the
Jews. I think of them as a man among strangers thinks of the dearness of
his home. I am bound to them in affection by all the ties of life. The
smiles of neighborliness, the greetings of friends, all the familiar
devotion of brothers and sisters, the love of the parents who held me
in their arms by these I know them as my own people, and by these I
love them as a good people, as a strong people, as a people worthy to be
strong and fit to be loved.

But it is even through their virtue and by their very strength that they
are being betrayed. A human devotion--the like of which has rarely
lived among the citizens of any modern state--is being directed as
an instrument of subjugation against others and held as a means of
oppression upon the Mormons themselves. Noble when they were weak,
they are being led to ignoble purpose now that they have become strong.
Praying for justice when they had no power, now that they have gained
power it is being abused to ends of injustice. Their leaders, reaching
for the fleshpots for which these simple-hearted devotees have never
sighed, have allied themselves with all the predaceous "interests" of
the country and now use the superhuman power of a religious tyranny to
increase the dividends of a national plunder.

In the long years of misery when the Mormons of Utah were proscribed and
hunted, because they refused to abandon what was to them, at that, time,
a divine revelation and a confirmed article of faith, I sat many times
in the gallery of the Senate in Washington, and heard discussed new
measures of destruction against these victims of their own fidelity,
and felt the dome above me impending like a brazen weight of national
resentment upon all our heads. When, a few years later, I stood before
the President's desk in the Senate chamber, to take my oath of office
as the representative of the freed people of Utah in the councils of the
nation, I raised my eyes to my old seat of terror in the gallery,
and pledged myself, in that remembrance, never to vote nor speak for
anything but the largest measure of justice that my soul was big enough
to comprehend. By such engagement I write now, bound in a double debt
of obligation to the nation whose magnanimity then saved us and to the
people whom I humbly helped to save.

Frank J. Cannon.



UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH



Chapter I. In the Days of the Raid


About ten o'clock one night in the spring of 1888, I set out secretly,
from Salt Lake City, on a nine-mile drive to Bountiful, to meet my
father, who was concealed "on the underground," among friends; and that
night drive, with its haste and its apprehension, was so of a piece with
the times, that I can hardly separate it from them in my memory. We were
all being carried along in an uncontrollable sweep of tragic events. In
a sort of blindness, like the night, unable to see the nearest fork of
the road ahead of us, we were being driven to a future that held we knew
not what.

I was with my brother Abraham (soon to become an apostle of the Mormon
Church), who had himself been in prison and was still in danger of
arrest. And there is something typical of those days in the recollection
I have of him in the carriage: silent, self-contained, and--when he
talked--discussing trivialities in the most calm way in the world. The
whole district was picketed with deputy marshals; we did not know that
we were not being followed; we had always the sense of evading patrols
in an enemy's country. But this feeling was so old with us that it had
become a thing of no regard.

There was something even more typical in the personality of our
driver--a giant of a man named Charles Wilcken--a veteran of the German
army who had been decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery on the field
of battle. He had come to Utah with General Johnston's forces in 1858,
and had left the military service to attach himself to Brigham Young.
After Young's death, my father had succeeded to the first place in his
affections. He was an elder of the Church; he had been an aristocrat
in his own country; but he forgot his every personal interest in his
loyalty to his leaders, and he stood at all times ready to defend
them with his life--as a hundred thousand others did!--for, though the
Mormons did not resist the processes of law for themselves, except by
evasion, they were prepared to protect their leaders, if necessary, by
force of arms.

With Wilcken holding the reins on a pair of fast horses at full speed,
we whirled past the old adobe wall (which the Mormons had built to
defend their city from the Indians) and came out into the purple night
of Utah, with its frosty starlight and its black hills--a desert night,
a mountain night, a night so vast in its height of space and breadth
of distance that it seemed natural it should inspire the people that
breathed it with freedom's ideals of freedom and all the sublimities of
an eternal faith. And those people--!

A more despairing situation than theirs, at that hour, has never been
faced by an American community. Practically every Mormon man of any
distinction was in prison, or had just served his term, or had escaped
into exile. Hundreds of Mormon women had left their homes and their
children to flee from the officers of law; many had been behind prison
bars for refusing to answer the questions put to them in court; more
were concealed, like outlaws, in the houses of friends. Husbands
and wives, separated by the necessities of flight, had died apart,
miserably. Old men were coming out of prison, broken in health. A
young plural wife whom I knew--a mere girl, of good breeding, of gentle
life--seeking refuge in the mountains to save her husband from a charge
of "unlawful cohabitation," had had her infant die in her arms on the
road; and she had been compelled to bury the child, wrapped in her
shawl, under a rock, in a grave that she scratched in the soil with a
stick. In our day! In a civilized state!

By Act of Congress, all the church property in excess of $50,000 had
been seized by the United States marshal, and the community faced the
total loss of its common fund. Because of some evasions that had been
attempted by the Church authorities--and the suspicion of more such--the
marshal had taken everything that he could in any way assume to belong
to the Church. Among the Mormons, there was an unconquerable spirit
of sanctified lawlessness, and, among the non-Mormons, an equally
indomitable determination to vindicate the law. Both were, for the most
part, sincere. Both were resolute. And both were standing in fear of a
fatal conflict, which any act of violence might begin.

Moreover, the Mormons were being slowly but surely deprived of all civil
rights. All polygamists had been disfranchised by the bill of 1882, and
all the women of Utah by the bill of 1887. The Governor of the territory
was appointed by Federal authority, so was the marshal, so were the
judges, so were the United States Commissioners who had co-ordinate
jurisdiction with magistrates and justices of the peace, so were
the Election Commissioners. But the Mormons still controlled the
legislature, and though the Governor could veto all legislation he could
initiate none. For this reason it had been frequently proposed that the
President should appoint a Legislative Council to take the place of
the elected legislature; and bills were being talked of in Congress
to effect a complete disfranchisement of the whole body of the Mormon
people by means of a test oath.

I did not then believe, and I do not now, that the practice of polygamy
was a thing which the American nation could condone. But I knew that our
people believed in it as a practice ordained, by a revelation from God,
for the salvation of the world. It was to them an article of faith as
sacred as any for which the martyrs of any religion ever died; and it
seemed that the nation, in its resolve to vindicate the supremacy of
civil government, was determined to put them to the point of martyrdom.

It was with this prospect before us that we drove, that night, up the
Salt Lake valley, across a corner of the desert, to the little town of
Bountiful; and as soon as we arrived among the houses of the settlement,
a man stepped out into the road, from the shadows, and stopped us.
Wilcken spoke to him. He recognized us, and let us pass. As we turned
into the farm where my father was concealed, I saw men lurking here and
there, on guard, about the grounds. The house was an old-fashioned adobe
farm-house; the windows were all dark; we entered through the kitchen.
And I entered, let me say, with the sense that I was about to come
before one of the most able among men.

To those who knew George Q. Cannon I do not need to justify that
feeling. He was the man in the hands of whose sagacity the fate of the
Mormons at that moment lay. He was the First Councillor of the Church,
and had been so for years. For ten years in Congress, he had fought and
defeated the proscriptive legislation that had been attempted against
his people; and Senator Hoar had said of him, "No man in Congress
ever served a territory more ably." He had been the intimate friend of
Randall and Blame. As a missionary in England he had impressed Dickens,
who wrote of him in "An Uncommercial Traveller." The Hon. James Bryce
had said of him: "He was one of the ablest Americans I ever met."

An Englishman, well-educated, a linguist, an impressive orator, a
persuasive writer, he had lived a life that was one long incredible
adventure of romance and almost miraculous achievement. As a youth he
had been sent by the Mormon leaders to California to wash out gold for
the struggling community; and he had sent back to Utah all the proceeds
of his labor, living himself upon the crudest necessaries of life. As
a young man he had gone as a Mormon missionary to the Hawaiian Islands,
and finding himself unable to convert the whites he had gone among the
natives--starving, a ragged wanderer--and by simple force of personality
he had made himself a power among them; so that in later years Napella,
the famous native leader, journeyed to Utah to consult with him upon the
affairs of that distressed state, and Queen Liluokalani, deposed and in
exile, appealed to him for advice. He had edited and published a Mormon
newspaper in San Francisco; and he had long successfully directed the
affairs of the publishing house in Salt Lake City which he owned. He
was a railroad builder, a banker, a developer of mines, a financier of
a score of interests. He combined the activities of a statesman, a
missionary, and a man of business, and seemed equally successful in all.

But none of these things--nor all of them--contained the total of the
man himself. He was greater than his work. He achieved by the force of
a personality that was more impressive than its achievements. If he had
been royalty, he could not have been surrounded with a greater deference
than he commanded among our people. A feeling of responsibility for
those dependent on him, such as a king might feel, added to a sense of
divine guidance that gave him the dignity of inspiration, had made him
majestical in his simple presence; and even among those who laughed at
divine inspiration and scorned Mormonism as the *Uitlander scorned the
faith of the Boer, his sagacity and his diplomacy and his power to read
and handle men made him as fearfully admired as any Oom Paul in the
Transvaal.

When I entered the low-ceilinged, lamplit room in which he sat, he rose
to meet me, and all rose with him, like a court. He embraced me without
effusion, looking at me silently with his wise blue eyes that always
seemed to read in my face--and to check up in his valuation of
me--whatever I had become in my absence from his regard.

He had a countenance that at no time bore any of the marks of the
passions of men; and it showed, now, no shadow of the tribulations of
that troubled day. His forehead was unworried. His eyes betrayed none of
the anxieties with which his mind must have been busied. His expression
was one of resolute stern contentment with all things--carrying the
composure of spirit which he wished his people to have. If I had been
agitated by the urgency of his summons to me, and he had wished to allay
my anxiety at once, the sight of his face, as he looked at me, would
have been reassurance enough.

At a characteristic motion of the hand from him, the others left us.
We sat down in the "horsehair" chairs of a well-to-do farmer's
parlor--furnished in black walnut, with the usual organ against one
wall, and the usual marble-topped bureau against the other. I remember
the "store" carpet, the mortuary hair-wreaths on the walls, the
walnut-framed lithographs of the Church authorities and of the angel
Moroni with "the gold plates;" and none of these seem ludicrous to me to
remember. They express, to me, in the recollection, some of the homely
and devout simplicity of the people whose community life this man was to
save.

He talked a few minutes, affectionately, about family matters, and
then--straightening his shoulders to the burden of more gravity--he
said: "I have sent for you, my son, to see if you cannot find some way
to help us in our difficulties. I have made it a matter of prayer, and
I have been led to urge you to activity. You have never performed a
Mission for the Church, and I have sometimes wondered if you cared
anything about your religion. You have never obeyed the celestial
covenant, and you have kept yourself aloof from the duties of the
priesthood, but it may have been a providential overruling. I have
talked with some of the brethren, and we feel that if relief does not
soon appear, our community will be scattered and the great work crushed.
The Lord can rescue us, but we must put forth our own efforts. Can you
see any light?"

I replied that I had already been in Washington twice, on my own
initiative, conferring with some of his Congressional friends. "I am
still," I said, "of the opinion I expressed to you and President Taylor
four years ago. Plural marriage must be abandoned or our friends in
Washington will not defend us."

Four years before, when I had offered that opinion, President Taylor
had cried out: "No! Plural marriage is the will of God! It's apostasy to
question it!" And I paused now with the expectation that my father would
say something of this sort. But, as I was afterwards to observe, it was
part of his diplomacy, in conference, to pass the obvious opportunity of
replying, and to remain silent when he was expected to speak, so that
he might not be in the position of following the lead of his opponent's
argument, but rather, by waiting his own time, be able to direct the
conversation to his own purposes. He listened to me, silently, his eyes
fixed on my face.

"Senator Vest of Missouri," I went on, "has always been a strong
opponent of what he considered unconstitutional legislation against us,
but he tells me he'll no longer oppose proscription if we continue in
an attitude of defiance. He says you're putting yourselves beyond
assistance, by organized rebellion against the administration of the
statutes." And I continued with instances of others among his friends
who had spoken to the same purpose.

When I had done, he took what I had said with a gesture that at once
accepted and for the moment dismissed it; and he proceeded to a larger
consideration of the situation, in words which I cannot pretend to
recall, but to an effect which I wish to outline--because it not only
accounts for the preservation of the Mormon people from all their
dangers, but contains a reason why the world might have wished to see
them preserved.

The Mormons at this time had never written a line on social
reform--except as the so-called "revelations" established a new social
order--but they had practiced whole volumes. Their community was founded
on the three principles of co-operation, contribution, and arbitration.
By co-operation of effort they had realized that dream of the
Socialists, "equality of opportunity"--not equality of individual
capacity, which the accidents of nature prevent, but an equal
opportunity for each individual to develop himself to the last reach of
his power. By contribution by requiring each man to give one-tenth of
his income to a common fund--they had attained the desired end of modern
civilization, the abolition of poverty, and had adjusted the straps of
the community burden to the strength of the individual to bear it. By
arbitration, they had effected the settlement of every dispute of every
kind without litigation; for their High Councils decided all sorts
of personal or neighborhood disputes without expense of money to the
disputants. The "storehouse of the Lord" had been kept open to fill
every need of the poor among "God's people," and opportunities for self
help had been created out of the common fund, so that neither unwilling
idleness nor privation might mar the growth of the community or the
progress of the individual.

But Joseph Smith had gone further. Daring to believe himself the earthly
representative of Omnipotence, whose duty it was to see that all had the
rights to which he thought them entitled, and assuming that a woman's
chief right was that of wifehood and maternity, he had instituted the
practice of plural marriage, as a "Prophet of God," on the authority of
a direct revelation from the Almighty. It was upon this rock that the
whole enterprise, the whole experiment in religious communism, now
threatened to split. Not that polygamy was so large an incident in the
life of the community--for only a small proportion of the Mormons were
living in plural marriage. And not that this practice was the cardinal
sin of Mormonism--for among intelligent men, then as now, the great
objection to the Church was its assumption of a divine authority to hold
the "temporal power," to dictate in politics, to command action and
to acquit of responsibility. But polygamy was the offense against
civilization which the opponents of Mormonism could always cite in
order to direct against the Church the concentrated antagonism of the
governments of the Western world. And my father, in authorizing me to
proceed to Washington as a sort of ambassador of the Church, evidently
wished to impress upon me the larger importance of the value of the
social experiment which the Mormons had, to this time, so successfully
advanced.

"It would be a cruel waste of human effort," he said, "if, after having
attained comfort in these valleys--established our schools of art and
science--developed our country and founded our industries--we should now
be destroyed as a community, and the value of our experience lost to the
world. We have a right to survive. We have a duty to survive. It would
be to the profit of the nation that we should survive."

But in order to survive, it was necessary to obtain some immediate
mitigation of the enforcement of the laws against us. The manner in
which they were being enforced was making compromise impossible, and
the men who administered them stood in the way of getting a favorable
hearing from the powers of government that alone could authorize a
compromise. It was necessary to break this circle; and my father went
over the names of the men in Washington who might help us. I could
marvel at his understanding of these men and their motives, but we came
to no plan of action until I spoke of what had been with me a sort of
forlorn hope that I might appeal to President Cleveland himself.

My father said thoughtfully: "What influence could you, a Republican,
have with him? It's true that your youth may make an appeal--and the
fact that you're pleading for your relatives, while not yourself a
polygamist. But he would immediately ask us to abandon plural marriage,
and that is established by a revelation from God which we cannot
disregard. Even if the Prophet directed us, as a revelation from God, to
abandon polygamy, still the nation would have further cause for quarrel
because of the Church's temporal rule. No. I can make no promise. I can
authorize no pledge. It must be for the Prophet of God to say what is
the will of the Lord. You must see President Woodruff, and after he has
asked for the will of the Lord I shall be content with his instruction."

Now, I do not wish to say--though I did then believe it--that the First
Councillor of the Mormon Church was prepared to have the doctrine of
plural marriage abandoned in order to have the people saved. It is
impossible to predicate the thoughts of a man so diplomatic, so astute,
and at the same time so deeply religious and so credulous of all the
miracles of faith. He did believe in Divine guidance. He was sincere
in his submission to the "revelations" of the Prophet. But, in the
complexity of the mind of man, even such a faith may be complicated with
the strategies of foresight, and the priest who bows devoutly to the
oracle may yet, even unconsciously, direct the oracle to the utterance
of his desire. And if my father was--as I suspected--considering a
recession from plural marriage, he had as justification the basic
"revelation," given through "Joseph the Prophet," commanding that the
people should hold themselves in subjection to the government under
which they lived, "until He shall come Whose right it is to rule."

We talked till midnight, in the quiet glow of the farmer's lamp-light,
discussing possibilities, considering policies, weighing men; and then
we parted--he to betake himself to whatever secure place of hiding
he had found, and I to return to Ogden where I was then editing a
newspaper. I was only twenty-nine years old, and the responsibility
of the undertaking that had been entrusted to me weighed on my mind. I
waited for a summons to confer with President Woodruff, but none came.
Instead, my brother brought me word from the President that I must be
"guided by the spirit of the Lord;" and, finally, my father sent me
orders to consult the Second Councillor, Joseph F. Smith.

Joseph F. Smith! Since the death of the founder of the Mormon Church,
there have been three men pre-eminent in its history: Brigham Young,
who led the people across the desert into the Salt Lake Valley and
established them in prosperity there; George Q. Cannon, who directed
their policies and secured their national rights; and Joseph F. Smith,
who today rules over that prosperity and markets that political right,
like a Sultan. Of all these, Smith is, to the nation now, of most
importance--and sinisterly so.

No Mormon in those years, I think, had more hate than Smith for the
United States government; and surely none had better reasons to give
himself for hate. He had the bitter recollection of the assassination
of his father and his uncle in the jail of Carthage, Illinois; he could
remember the journey that he had made with his widowed mother across the
Mississippi, across Iowa, across the Missouri, and across the unknown
and desert West, in ox teams, half starved, unarmed, persecuted by
civilization and at the mercy of savages; he could remember all the
toils and hardships of pioneer days "in the Valley;" he had seen the
army of '58 arrive to complete, as he believed, the final destruction
of our people; he had suffered from all the proscriptive legislation of
"the raid," been outlawed, been in exile, been in hiding, hunted like a
thief. He had been taught, and he firmly believed, that the Smiths had
been divinely appointed to rule, in the name of God, over all mankind.
He believed that he--ordained a ruler over this world before ever the
world was--had been persecuted by the hate and wickedness of men. He
believed it literally; he preached it literally; he still believes and
still preaches it. I did not then sympathize with this point of view,
any more than I do now; but I did sympathize with him in the hardships
that he had already endured and in the trials that he was still
enduring--in common with the rest of us. The bond of community
persecution intensified my loyalty. I felt for him almost as I felt for
my own father. I went to him with the young man's trust in age made wise
by suffering.

I had been directed to call on him in the President's offices, in Salt
Lake City, where he was concealed, for the moment, under the name of
"Mack"--the name that he used "on the underground"--and I went with my
brother, late at night, to see him there. The President's offices were
at that time in a little one-story plastered house that had been built
by Brigham Young between two of his famous residences, the "Beehive
House" and the "Lion House" (in which some twelve or fourteen of his
wives had lived). The three houses were within the enclosure of a high
cobblestone wall built by Brigham Young; and at night the great gate of
the wall was shut and locked. We hammered discreetly on its panels
of mountain pine, until a guard answered our knocking, recognized our
voices and admitted us.

"He's in there," he said, pointing to the darkened windows of the
offices--toward which he led us.

He unlocked the front door--having evidently locked it when he went to
the gate--and he explained to a waiting attendant: "These brethren have
an appointment. They wish to see Brother Mack."

The attendant led us down a dimly-lighted hall, through the public
offices of the President into a rear room, a sort of retiring room,
carpeted, furnished with bookcases, chairs, a table. The window blinds
had all been carefully drawn.

Joseph F. Smith was waiting for us--a tall, lean, long-bearded man of
a commanding figure standing as if our arrival had stopped him in some
anxious pacing of the carpet. His overcoat and his hat had been thrown
on a chair. He greeted us with the air of one who is hurried, and sat
down tentatively; and as soon as we came to the question of my trip to
Washington, he broke out:

"These scoundrels here must be removed--if there's any way to do it.
They're trying to repeat the persecutions of Missouri and Illinois. They
want to despoil us of our heritage--of our families. I'm sick of being
hunted like a wild beast. I've done no harm to them or theirs. Why can't
they leave us alone to live our religion and obey the commandments of
God and build up Zion?" He had begun to stride up and down the floor
again, in a sort of driven and angry helplessness. "I thought Cleveland
would stop this damnable raid and make them leave us in peace--but he's
as bad as the rest. Can't they see that these carpet baggers are only
trying to rob us? Make them see that. The hounds! Sometimes it seems to
me that the Lord is letting these iniquities go on so that the nation
may perish in its sins all the sooner!"

He sneered at John W. Young who had gone to Washington for the Church.
(I had met Smith himself there, earlier in the year.) "I thought
he'd accomplish something," he said, "with his fashionable home and
his--[**missing text?**] He's using money enough! He's down there,
taking things easy, while the rest of us are driven from pillar to
post." He attacked the Federal authorities, Governor West, the "whole
gang." He cried: "I love my wives and my children--whom the Lord
gave me. I love them more than my life--more than anything in the
world--except my religion! And here I am, fleeing from place to place,
from the wrath of the wicked--and they're left in sorrow and suffering."

His face was pallid with emotion, and his voice came now hard with
exasperation against his enemies and now husky with a passionate
affection for his family--a man of fifty, graybearded, quivering in a
nervous transport of excitement that jerked him up and down the room,
gesticulating.

When he had worn out his first anger of revolt, I brought the
conversation round to the question of polygamy, by asking him about a
provisional constitution for statehood which the non-polygamous
Mormons had recently adopted. It contained a clause making polygamy a
misdemeanor. "I would have seen them all damned," he said, "before I
would have yielded it, but I'm willing to try the experiment, if any
good can come."

He had, I gathered, no aversion to "deceiving the wicked," but he was
opposed to leading his people away from their loyalty to the doctrine of
plural marriage, by conceding anything that might weaken their faith in
it. And yet this impression may misrepresent him. He was too agitated,
too exasperated, for any serious reflection on the situation.

My brother had gone--to keep some other engagement--and I stayed late,
talking as long as Smith seemed to wish to talk. He rose at last and
"blessed" me, his hands on my head, in a return to some larger trust in
his religious authority; and I left him--with very doubtful and mixed
emotions. His natural violence and his lack of discipline had been
matters of common gossip among our people, and I had heard of them from
childhood; but I had supposed that tribulations would, by this time,
have matured him. There was something compelling in his unsoftened
turbulence, but nothing encouraging for me as a messenger of
conciliation. I felt that there would be no help come from him in my
task, and I dropped him from my reckoning.

I had made up my mind to a plan that was almost as desperate as the
conditions it sought to cure--a plan that was in some ways so absurd
that I felt like keeping it concealed for fear of ridicule--and I went
about my preparations for departure in a sort of hopeless hope. As the
train drew out from Ogden, I looked back at the mountains from my car
window, and saw again, in the spectacle of their power, the pathos of
our people--as if it were the nation of my worship that bulked there
so huge above the people of my love--and I, puny in my little efforts,
going out to plot an intercession, to appeal for a truce! It was almost
as if I were the son of a Confederate leader journeying to Washington,
on the eve of the Civil War, to attempt to stand between North and South
and hold back their opposing armies, single-handed.

These are the things a man does when he is young.



Chapter II. On A Mission to Washington



I went discredited, as an envoy, by an incident of personal conflict
with the Federal authorities; and I wish to relate that incident before
I proceed any farther. I must relate it soon, because it came up for
explanation in one of my first interviews with President Cleveland; and
I wish to relate it now, because it was so typical of the day and the
condition from which we had to save ourselves.

In the winter of 1885-6, the United States Marshals had been pursuing my
father from place to place with such determined persistence that it was
evident his capture was only a matter of time. We believed that if
he were arrested and tried before Chief Justice Zane--with District
Attorney Dickson and Assistant District Attorney Varian prosecuting--he
would be convicted on so many counts that he would be held in prison
indefinitely--that he might, in fact, end his days there. There was
the rumor of a boast, to this effect, made by Federal officers; and we
misunderstood them and their motives, in those days, sufficiently to
accept the unjust report as well-founded.

My father, as First Councillor of the Church, had proposed to President
Taylor that every man who was living in plural marriage should surrender
himself voluntarily to the court and plead: "I entered into this
covenant of celestial marriage with a personal conviction that it was an
order revealed by our Father in Heaven for the salvation of mankind. I
have kept my covenant in purity. I believed that no constitutional law
of the country could forbid this practice of a religious faith. As the
laws of Congress conflict with my sense of submission to the will of the
Lord, I now offer myself, here, for whatever judgment the courts of my
country may impose." He believed that such a course would vindicate the
sincerity of the men who had engaged in polygamy and defied the law
in an assumption of religious immunity; and he believed that the world
would pause to reconsider its judgment upon us, if it saw thousands
of men--the bankers, the farmers, the merchants, and all the religious
leaders of a civilized community--marching in a mass to perform such an
act of faith.

But President Taylor was not prepared for a movement that would have
recommended itself better to the daring genius of Brigham Young. Taylor
had given himself into the custody of the officers of the law once--in
Carthage, Illinois--with Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum Smith; and
Taylor had been wounded by the mob that broke into the jail and shot
the Smiths to death. This, perhaps, had cured him of any faith in the
protecting power of innocency. He decided against voluntary surrender;
and now that my father's liberty was so seriously threatened, he ordered
him to go either to Mexico or to the Sandwich Islands--his old
mission field--where he would be beyond the reach of the United States
authorities.

My father believed that if he left Utah, his recession might tend to
placate the government and soften the severity of the prosecutions of
the Mormons; and accordingly, on the night of February 12, 1886, he
boarded a west-bound Central Pacific train at Willard. The Federal
officers in some way learned of it; he was arrested, on the train, at
Humboldt Wells, Nevada, and brought back to Utah. Near Promontory he
fell from the steps of the moving car, at night, in the midst of an
alkali desert, and hurt himself seriously. He was recaptured and brought
to Salt Lake City on a stretcher, in a special car, guarded by a squad
of soldiers from Fort Douglas, with loaded muskets, and a captain with
a conspicuous sword. He was taken to Judge Zane's chambers and placed
under bonds of $25,000. Immediately two bench warrants were issued by a
United States Commissioner, and these were served upon him while he lay
on a mattress on the floor of Zane's office. Two more bonds of $10,000
each were given. He was then taken to his home.

Later--(President Taylor still insisting that he must not stand
trial)--he disappeared again, "on the underground," and his bonds
were declared forfeited. But in the meantime, while the grand jury was
hearing testimony against him, one of the beloved women of his family
was called for examination, and District Attorney Dickson asked her
some questions that deeply wounded her. She returned home weeping. My
brothers and I felt that the questions had been needlessly offensive,
and after an indignant discussion of the matter, I undertook to
remonstrate personally with Mr. Dickson.

If I had been as wise, then, as I sometimes think I am now, I should
have realized that a meeting between us was dangerous; that the feeling,
on our side at least, was too warm for calm remonstrances. And I should
not have taken with me a younger brother, about sixteen years old, with
all the hot-headedness of youth. Fortunately we did not go armed.

We sought Dickson in the evening, at the Continental Hotel--the old,
adobe Continental with its wide porches and its lawn trees--and we found
him in the lobby. I asked him to step out on the porch, where I might
speak with him in private. He came without a moment's hesitation. He was
a big, handsome, black-bearded man in the prime of his strength.

We had scarcely exchanged more than a few sentences formally, when my
brother drew back and struck him a smashing blow in the face. Dickson
grappled with me, a little blinded, and I called to the boy to
run--which he very wisely did. Dickson and I were at once surrounded,
and I was arrested.

Ordinarily the incident would have been trivial enough, but in the
alarmed state of the public mind it was magnified into an attempt on the
part of George Q. Cannon's sons to take the life of the United States
District Attorney. Indictments were found against my brother and myself,
and against a cousin who happened to be in another part of the hotel at
the time of the attack. Some weeks later, when the excitement had rather
died down, I went to the District Attorney's office and arranged with
his assistant, Mr. Varian, that the indictments against my brother (who
had escaped from Utah) and my cousin (who was wholly innocent) should
be quashed, and that I should plead guilty to a charge of assault and
battery. On this understanding, I appeared in court before Chief Justice
Zane.

But Mr. Varian, having consulted with Mr. Dickson, had learned that I
had not struck the blow--though, as the elder brother, I was morally
responsible for it--and he suggested to the court that sentence be
suspended. This, Justice Zane seemed prepared to do, but I objected. I
was a newspaper writer (as I explained), and I felt that if I criticized
the court thereafter for what I believed to be a harshness that amounted
to persecution, I could be silenced by the imposition of the suspended
sentence; and if I failed to criticize, I should be false to what I
considered my duty. I did not wish to be put in any such position; and I
said so.

Justice Zane had a respect for the constitution and the statutes that
amounted to a creed of infallibility. He was the most superbly rigid
pontiff of legal justice that I ever knew. A man of unspotted character,
a Puritan, of a sincerity that was afterwards accepted and admired
from end to end of Utah, he was determined to vindicate the essential
supremacy of the civil law over the ecclesiastical domination in
the territory; and every act of insubordination against that law was
resented and punished by him, unforgivingly. He promptly sentenced me to
three months in the County jail and a fine of $150.

My imprisonment was, of course, a farce. I was merely confined, most of
the time, in a room in the County Court House, where I lived and worked
as if I were in my home. But the sentence remained on my record as a
sufficient mark of my recalcitrance; and I knew that it would not aid me
in my appeal to Washington, where I intended to argue--as the first wise
concession needed of the Federal authorities--that Chief Justice
Zane should no longer be retained on the bench in Utah, but should
be succeeded by a man more gentle. He was the great figure among our
prosecutors; the others were District Attorney Dickson and the two
assistants, Mr. Varian and Mr. Riles. The square had only seemed to
be broken by the recent retirement of Mr. Dickson; the strength of his
purpose remained still in power, in the person of Judge Zane.

And let me say that whatever my opinion was of these men, at that time,
I recognize now that they were justified as officers of the law in
enforcing the law. If it had not been for them, the Mormon Church
would never have been brought to the point of abating one jot of its
pretensions. All four men, as their records have since proved, were much
superior to their positions as territorial officers. Utah's admiration
for Judge Zane was shown, upon the composition of our differences with
the nation, by the Mormon vote that placed him on the Supreme
Court bench. Indeed, it is one of the strange psychologies of this
reconciliation, that, as soon as peace was made, the strongest men of
both parties came into the warmest friendship; our fear and hatred
of our prosecutors changed to respect; and their opposition to our
indissoluble solidarity changed to regard when they saw us devoting our
strength to purposes of which they could approve. But now, in the midst
of our contentions, the aspect of splendor in their legal authority had
something baleful in it, for us; and we saw our own defiance set with a
halo of martyrdom and illumined by the radiance of a Church oppressed!

There was more than a glimmer of that radiance in my thoughts as I made
the railroad journey from Utah to the East. The Union Pacific Railway,
on which I rode, followed the route that the Mormons had taken in their
long trek from the Missouri; and I could look from my car window and
imagine them toiling across those endless plains--in their creaking
wagons, drawn by their oxen and lean farm cows--choked with dust, burned
by the sun of the prairies, their faces to the unknown dangers of an
unknown wilderness, and behind them the cool-roomed houses, the moist
fields, the tree-shaded streets, all the quiet and comfort of the
settled life of homekeeping happiness that they had left. My own mother
had come that road, a little girl of eight; and my mind was full of
pictures of her, at school in a wagon-box, singing hymns with her elders
around the camp fires at night, or kneeling with the mourners beside the
grave of an infant relative buried by the roadside. Our train crossed
the Loup Fork of the Platte almost within sight of the place where my
father, a lad of twenty, had led across the river at nightfall, had been
lost to his party, and had nearly perished, naked to the cold, before
he struggled back to the camp. I could see their little circle of wagons
drawn up at sunset against the menace of the Indians who snaked through
the long grass to kill. I could feel some of their despair, and my heart
lifted to their heroism. Never had such a migration been made by any
people with fewer of the concomitants of their civilization. Their arms
had been taken from them at Nauvoo; they had bartered their goods for
wagons and cattle to carry them; even the grain that they brought,
for food, had to be saved for seed. They felt themselves devoted to
destruction by the people with whose laws and institutions they had come
in conflict, and they went forth bravely, trusting in the power of the
God whom they were determined to worship according to their despised
belief.

Now they had built themselves new homes and meeting-houses in the
fertile "Valley;" and the civilization that they had left, having
covered the distance of their exile, was punishing them again for their
law-breaking fidelity to their faith. Surely they had suffered enough!
Surely it was evident that suffering only made them strong to resist!
Surely there must be somebody in power in Washington who could be
persuaded to see that, where force had always failed, there might be
some profit in employing gentleness!

This, at least, was the appeal which I had planned to make. And I had
decided to make it through Mr. Abraham S. Hewitt, then mayor of New
York City, who had been a friend of my father in Congress. He was not
in favor with the administration at Washington. He was personally
unfriendly to President Cleveland. I was a stranger to him. But I had
seen enough of him to know that he had the heart to hear a plea
on behalf of the Mormons, and the brain to help me carry that plea
diplomatically to President Cleveland.

When I arrived in New York I set about finding him without the aid of
any common friend. I did not try to reach him at his home, being aware
that he might resent an intrusion of public matters upon his private
leisure, and fearing to impair my own confidence by beginning with a
rebuff. I decided to see him in his office hours.

I cannot recall why I did not find him in the municipal buildings, but I
well remember going to and fro in the streets in search of him, feeling
at every step the huge city's absorption in its own press and hurry of
affairs, and seeing the troubles of Utah as distant as a foreign war.
It was with a very keen sense of discouragement that I took my place, at
last, in the long line of applicants waiting for a word with the man
who directed the municipal activities of this tremendous hive of eager
energy.

He was in the old Stewart building, on Broadway, near Park Place; and
he had his desk in what was, I think, a temporary office--an empty shop
used as an office--on the ground floor. There must have been fifty men
ahead of me, and they were the unemployed, as I remember it, besieging
him for work. They came to his desk, spoke, and passed with a rapidity
that was ominous. As I drew nearer, I watched him anxiously, and saw
the incessant, nervous, querulous activity of eyes, lips, hands, as
he dismissed each with a word or a scratch of the pen, and looked up
sharply at the next one.

"Well, young man," he greeted me, "what do you want?"

I replied: "I want a half hour of your time."

"Good God," he said, in a sort of reproachful indignation, "I couldn't
give it to the President of the United States."

I felt the crowd of applicants pressing behind me. I knew the man's
prodigious humanity. I knew that if I could only hold them back long
enough--"Mr. Hewitt," I said, "it's more important even than that. It's
to save a whole people from suffering--from destruction."

He may have thought me a maniac; or it may be that the desperation of
the moment sounded in my voice. He frowned intently up at me. "Who are
you?"

"I'm the son of your old friend in Congress, George Q. Cannon of Utah,"
I said. "My father's in exile. He and his people are threatened with
endless proscriptions. I want time to tell you."

His impatience had vanished. His eyes were steadily kind and interested.
"Can you come to the Board of Health, in an hour? As soon as I open the
meeting, I'll retire and listen to you."

I asked him for a card, to admit me to the meeting, having been
stopped that morning at many doors. He gave it, nodded, and flashed his
attention on the man behind me. I went out with the heady assurance that
my first move had succeeded; but I went, too, with the restrained pulse
of realizing that I had yet to join issue with the decisive event and do
it warily.

I do not remember where I found the Board of Health in session. I recall
only the dark, official board-room, the members at the table,
and--as the one small spot of light and interest to me--Mr. Hewitt's
white-bearded face, as an attendant opened the door to me, and the
Mayor, looking up alertly, nodded across the room, and waved his hand to
a chair.

As soon as he had opened the meeting, we withdrew together to a settee
in some remote corner, and I began to tell him, as quickly as I could,
the desperateness of the Mormon situation. "Yes," he said, "but why
can't your people obey the law?"

I explained what I have been trying to explain in this narrative--that
these people, following a Church which they believed to be guided by
God, and regarding themselves as objects of a religious persecution,
could not be brought by means of force to obey a law against conscience.
I explained that I was not pleading to save their pride but to spare
them useless suffering; their history showed that no proscription, short
of extermination outright, could overcome their resistance; but what
force could not accomplish, a little sensible diplomacy might hope to
effect. No first step could be made, by them, towards a composition of
their differences with the law so long as the law was administered
with a hostility that provoked hostility. But if we could obtain some
mitigation of the law's severity, the leaders of the Church were willing
to surrender themselves to the court--such of them as had not already
died of their privations or served their terms of imprisonment--and a
sense of gratitude for leniency would prepare the way for a recession
from their present attitude of unconquerable antagonism.

He listened gravely, knowing the situation from his own experience
in Congress, and checking off the items of my argument with a nod of
acceptance that came, often, before I had completed what I had to say.
He asked: "Do you know President Cleveland?"

I told him that I had seen the President several times but was not known
to him.

"Well," he said, "I may be able to help you indirectly. I don't care
for Cleveland, and I wouldn't ask him for a favor if I were sinking.
But tell me what plan you have in your mind, and I'll see if I can't aid
you--through friends."

I replied that I hoped to have some man appointed as Chief Justice in
Utah who should adopt a less rigorous way of adjudicating upon the cases
of polygamists; but that before he was selected--or at least before he
knew of his appointment--I wished to talk with him and convert him to
the idea that he could begin the solution of "the Mormon question"
by having the leaders of the community come into his court and accept
sentences that should not be inconsistent with the sovereignty of the
law but not unmerciful to the subjects of that sovereignty.

"The man you want," Mr. Hewitt said, "is here in New York--Elliot F.
Sandford. He's a referee of the Supreme Court of this state--a fine man,
great legal ability, courageous, of undoubted integrity. Come to me,
tomorrow. I'll introduce you to him."

It was the first time that I had even heard the name of Elliot F.
Sandford; and I had not the faintest notion of how best to approach him.

I did not find him in Mr. Hewitt's office, on the morrow; but the Mayor
had communicated with him, and now gave me a letter of introduction to
him; and I went alone to present it.

He received me in his outer office, with a manner full of kindliness but
non-committal. He glanced through my letter of introduction, and I tried
to read him while he did it. He was not on the surface. He was a tall,
dignified man, his hair turning gray--thoughtful, judicial--evidently
a man who was not quick to decide. He led me into his private room, and
sat down with the air of a lawyer who has been asked to take a case and
who wishes first to hear all the details of the action.

I began by describing the Mormon situation as I saw it in those days:
that the Mormons were growing more desperately determined in their
opposition, because they believed their prosecutors were persecuting
them; that the District Attorney and his assistants were harsh to the
point of heartlessness, and that Judge Zane (to us, then) acted like
a religious fanatic in his judicial office; that nearly every Federal
official in Utah had taken a tone of bigoted opposition to the people;
and that the law was detested and the government despised because of the
actions of Federal "carpet-baggers."

I was prejudiced, no doubt, and partisan in my account of the state of
affairs, but I did not exaggerate the facts as I saw them; I believed
what I said.

I did not really reach his sympathy until I spoke of the court system
in Utah--the open venire, the employment of "professional jurors"--the
legal doctrine of "segregation," under which a man might be separately
indicted for every day of his living in plural marriage--and the result
of all this: that the pursuit of defendants and the confiscation of
property had become less an enforcement of law than a profitable legal
industry.

After two hours of argument and examination, I ended with an appeal to
him to accept the opportunity to undertake a merciful assuagement of
our misery. After so many years of failure on the part of the Federal
authorities, he might have the distinction of calling into his court the
Mormon leaders who had been most long and vainly sought by the law;
and by sentencing them to a supportable punishment, he could begin the
composition of a conflict that had gone on for half a century.

He replied with reasons that expressed a kindly unwillingness to
undertake the work. It would mean the sacrifice of his professional
career in New York. He would be putting himself entirely outside the
progression of advancement. His friends, here, would never understand
why he had done it. The affairs of Utah had little interest for them.

I saw that he was not convinced. His wife had been waiting some minutes
in the outer office; he proposed that he should bring her in; and I
gathered from his manner, that he expected her to pronounce against his
accepting my solicitation, and so terminate our interview pleasantly,
with the aid of the feminine social grace.

Mrs. Sandford, when she entered, certainly looked the very lady to
do the thing with gentle skill. She was handsome, with an animated
expression, dark-eyed, dark-haired, charming in her costume, a woman
of the smiling world, but maturely sincere and unaffected. I took a
somewhat distracted impression of her greeting, and heard him begin to
explain my proposal to her, as one hears a "silent partner" formally
consulted by a man who has already made up his mind. But when I glanced
at her, seated, her manner had changed. She was listening as if she were
used to being consulted and knew the responsibilities of decision. She
had the abstracted eye of impersonal consideration--silent--with now and
then a slow, meditative glance at me.

Her first question seemed merely femininely curious as to the domestic
aspects of polygamy. How did the women endure it?

I repeated a conversation I had once had with Frances Willard, who had
said: "The woman's heart must ache in polygamy." To which I had made the
obvious reply: "Don't women's hearts ache all over the world? Is there
any condition of society in which women do not bear more than an equal
share of the suffering?"

Mrs. Sandford asked me pointedly whether I was living in polygamy?

No, I was not.

Did I believe in it?

I believed that those did who practiced it.

Why didn't I practice it?

Those who practiced it believed that it had been authorized by a divine
revelation. I had not received such a revelation. I did not expect to.

Our talk warmed into a very intimate discussion of the lives of the
Mormon people, but I supposed that she was moved only by a curiosity
to which I was accustomed--a curiosity that was not necessarily
sympathetic--the curiosity one might have about the domestic life of
a Mohammedan. I took advantage of her curiosity to lead up to an
explanation of how the proscription of polygamy was driving young
Mormons into the practice, instead of frightening them from it. And so
I arrived at another recountal of the miserable condition of persecution
and suffering which I had come to ask her husband help us relieve; and
I made my appeal again, to them both, with something of despair, because
of my failure with him, and perhaps with greater effect because of my
despair. She listened thoughtfully, her hands clasped.

It did not seem that I had reached her--until she turned to him, and
said unexpectedly "It seems to me that this is an opportunity--a larger
opportunity than any I see here--to do a great deal of good."

He did not appear as surprised as I was. He made some joking reference
to his income and asked her if she would be willing to live on a salary
of--How much was the salary of the Chief Justice of Utah?

I thought it was about $3,000 a year.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars a month," he said. "How many bonnets will
that buy?"

"No," she retorted, "you can't put the blame on my millinery bill. If
that's been the cause of your hesitation, I'll agree to dress as becomes
the wife of a poor but upright judge."

In such a happy spirit of good-natured raillery, my petition was
provisionally entertained, till I could see the President; and it is
one of the curiosities of experience, as I look back upon it now, that
a decision so momentous in the history of Utah owed its induction to the
wisdom of a woman and was confirmed with a domestic pleasantry.

I left them after we had arrived at the tacit understanding that if
President Cleveland should make the appointment, Mr. Sandford would
accept it with the end in view that I had proposed. I went to report
my progress, in a cipher telegram, to Salt Lake City, and I recall the
peculiarly mixed satisfaction with which I regarded my work, as I
walked the streets of New York after this interview. In all that city
of millions, I knew, there were few if any men who were the equal of my
father in the essentials of manhood; and yet, before he could enjoy the
liberties of which they were so lightly unconscious, he must endure the
shame of a prison. I was rejoicing because I was succeeding in getting
for him a sentence that should not be ruinous! I was pleased because a
prospective judge had been persuaded to be not too harsh to him!

It did not make me bitter. I realized that the peculiar faith which we
had accepted was responsible for our peculiar suffering. I saw that we
were working out our human destiny; and if that destiny was not of God,
but merely the issue of human impulsion, still our only prospect of
success would come of our bearing with experience patiently to make us
strong.

When I went back to Mr. Hewitt, to tell him of my success, I consulted
with him upon the best way of approaching Mr. Cleveland. And he was not
encouraging. In his opinion of the President, he had, as I could see,
the impatient resentment which a quick-minded, nervous, small-bodied
man has for the big, slow one whose mental operations are stubbornly
deliberate and leisurely. And he was obviously irritated by the
President's continual assumption that he was better than his party.
"He's honest," he said, "by right of original discovery of what honesty
is. No one can question his honesty. But as soon as he discovers a
better thing than he knew previously, he announces it as if it were
the discovery of a new planet. It may have been a commonplace for a
generation. That doesn't signify. He announces it with such ponderosity
that the world believes it's as prodigious as his sentences!"

As for my own mission: I would have to be persistent, patient,
and--lucky. "You'll have to be lucky, if you intend to persuade him to
acquire any information. He's been so successful in instructing mankind
that it's hard to get him to see he doesn't know all he ought to know
about a public question. But he's honest and he's courageous. If you can
convince him that your view is right, he'll carry but the conviction
in spite of everything. In fact he'll be all the better pleased if it
requires fearlessness and defiance of general sentimentality to carry it
out."

He gave me a letter to Mr. William C. Whitney, then Secretary of the
Navy, explaining my purpose in coming to Washington, and asking him to
obtain for me an interview with President Cleveland without using Mr.
Hewitt's name. Then he shook hands with me, and wished me success. "I
have the faith," he said, "that is without hope."

That expressed my own feeling. The faith that was without hope!



Chapter III. Without A Country



So I came to Washington. So I entered the capital of the government that
commanded my allegiance and inspired my fear. I wonder whether another
American ever saw that city with such eyes of envy, of aspiration, of
wistful pride, of daunted admiration. Here were all the consecrations
of a nation's memories, and they thrilled me, even while they pierced me
with the sense that I was not, and might well despair of ever being,
a citizen of their glory. Here were the monuments of patriotism
in Statuary Hall, erected to the men whose histories had been the
inspiration of my boyhood; and I remember how I stood before them,
conscious that I was now almost an outlaw from their communion of
splendor. I remember how I saw, with an indescribable conflict
of feelings, the ranked graves of the soldiers in the cemetery at
Arlington, and recollected that this very ground had been taken from
General Lee, that heroic opponent of Federal authority--and read the
tablet, "How sleep the brave who sink to rest by all their country's
wishes bless'd,"--and bowed in spirit to the nation's benediction upon
the men who had upheld its power. I was awed by a prodigious sense
of the majesty of that power. I saw with fear its immovability to the
struggles of our handful of people. And at night, walking under the
trees of Lafayette Park, with all the odors of the southern Spring
among the leaves, I looked at the lighted front of the White House and
realized that behind the curtains of those quiet windows sat the
ruler who held the almost absolute right of life and death over our
community--as if it were the palace of a Czar that I must soon enter,
with a petition for clemency, which he might refuse to entertain!

When I had been in Washington, four years before, as secretary to
Delegate John T. Caine of Utah, I had felt a younger assurance that
our resistance would slowly wear out the Federal authority and carry us
through to statehood. Four years of disaster had starved out that hope.
The proposition had been established that Congress had supreme control
over the territories; and there was no virtue either in our religious
assumption of warrant to speak for God, or in our plea of inherent
constitutional right to manage our own affairs. Thirty years earlier, my
father had been elected Senator from the proposed state of Utah, and he
had been rejected. In thirty years so little progress had been made! The
way that was yet to travel seemed very long and very dark.

Out of this mood of despondence I had to lift myself by an act of will.
There, Washington itself helped me against itself. I made a pilgrimage
of courage to its commemorations of courage, and drew an inspiration
of hope from its monuments to the achievements of its past. And
particularly I went to the house in which my father had lived when he
had had his part in the statesman life of the capital, and animated my
resolution with the thought that I must succeed in order that he might
be restored in public honor.

I narrate all this personal incident of emotion in the hope that it may
help to explain a success that might otherwise seem inexplicable.
The Mormon Church had, for years, employed every art of intrigue and
diplomacy to protect itself in Washington. I wish to make plain that
it was not by any superior cunning of negotiation that my mission
succeeded. I undertook the task almost without instruction; I performed
it without falsehood; I had nothing in my mind but an honest loyalty
for my own people, a desire to be a citizen of my native country, and a
filial devotion to the one man in the world, whom I most admired.

When I delivered my letter of introduction from Mr. Hewitt to Mr.
William C. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy, I found him very busy with
his work in his department--carrying out the plans that established the
modern American navy and entitled him to be called the "father" of it.
He withdrew from the men who were discussing designs and figures at a
table in his room, and sat with me before a window that looked out upon
the White House and its grounds; and he listened to me, interestedly,
genially, but with a thought still (as I could see) for the affairs that
my arrival had interrupted. He struck me as a man who was used to having
many weighty matters together on his mind, without finding his attention
crowded by them all, and without being impatient in his consideration of
any.

I developed with him an idea which I had been considering: that the
President might not only help the Mormons by taking up their case, but
might gain political prestige for the coming campaign for re-election,
by adjusting the dissentions in Utah. He heard me with a twinkle. He
thought an interview might be arranged. He made an appointment to see
me in the afternoon and to have with him Colonel Daniel S. Lamont, the
President's secretary, who was then Mr. Cleveland's political "trainer."

My meeting with Colonel Lamont, in the afternoon, began jocularly.
"This," Mr. Whitney introduced me, "is the young man who has a plan to
use that mooted--and booted--Mormon question to re-elect the President."

"Hardly that, Mr. Secretary," I said. "I have a plan to help my father
and his colleagues to regain their citizenship. If President Cleveland's
re-election is essential to it, I suppose I must submit. You know I'm a
Republican."

They laughed. We sat down. And I found at once that Colonel Lamont
understood the situation in Utah, thoroughly. He had often discussed
it, he said, with the Church's agents in Washington. I went over the
situation with him, as I had gone over it with Mr. Sandford, in careful
detail. He seemed surprised at my assurance that my father and the other
proscribed leaders of the Church would submit themselves to the courts
if they could do so on the conditions that I proposed; I convinced
him of the possibility by referring him to Mr. Richards, the Church's
attorney in Washington, for a confirmation of it. I pointed out that if
these leaders surrendered, President Cleveland could be made the direct
beneficiary, politically, of their composition with the law.

Colonel Lamont was a small, alert man with a conciseness of speech
and manner that is associated in my memory with the bristle of his red
mustache cut short and hard across a decisive mouth. He radiated nervous
vitality; and I understood, as I studied him, how President Cleveland,
with his infinite patience for [** missing text?**] survived so well in
the multitudinous duties of his office--having as his secretary a man
born with the ability to cut away the non-essentials, and to pass on to
Mr. Cleveland only the affairs worthy of his careful deliberation.

I was doubtful whether I should tell Colonel Lamont and Mr. Whitney of
my conversation with Mr. Sandford. I decided that their considerateness
entitled them to my full confidence, and I told them all--begging them,
if I was indiscreet or undiplomatic, to charge the offense to my lack of
experience rather than to debit it against my cause.

They passed it off with banter. It was understood that the President
should not be told--and that I should not tell him--of my talk with
Mr. Sandford. Colonel Lamont undertook to arrange an audience with Mr.
Cleveland for me. "You had better wait," he said, "until I can approach
him with the suggestion that there's a young man here, from Utah, whom
he ought to see."

I knew, then, that I was at least well started on the open road to
success. I knew that if Colonel Lamont said he would help me, there
would be no difficulties in my way except those that were large in the
person of the President himself.

Two days later I received the expected word from Colonel Lamont, and I
went to the White House as a man might go to face his own trial. I
met the secretary in one of the eastern upstairs rooms of the official
apartments; and after the usual crowd had passed out, he led me into the
President's office--which then overlooked the Washington monument, the
Potomac and the Virginia shore. Mr. Cleveland was working at his desk.
Colonel Lamont introduced me by name, and added, "the young man from
Utah, of whom I spoke."

The President did not look up. He was signing some papers, bending
heavily over his work. It took him a moment or two to finish; then he
dropped his pen, pushed aside the papers, turned awkwardly in his swivel
chair and held out his hand to me. It was a cool, firm hand, and its
grasp surprised me, as much as the expression of his eyes--the steady
eyes of complete self-control, composure, intentness.

I had come with a prejudice against him; I was a partisan of Mr. Blame,
whom he had defeated for the Presidency; I believed Mr. Blame to be the
abler man. But there was something in Mr. Cleveland's hand and eyes
to warn me that however slow-moving and even dull he might appear, the
energy of a firm will compelled and controlled him. It stiffened me into
instant attention.

He made some remark to Colonel Lamont to indicate that our conversation
was to occupy about half an hour. He asked me to be seated in a chair at
the right-hand side of his desk. He said almost challengingly: "You're
the young man they want I should talk to about the Utah question."

The tone was not exactly unkind, but it was not inviting. I said, "Yes,
sir."

He looked at me, as a judge might eye the suspect of circumstantial
evidence. "You're the son of one of the Mormon leaders."

I admitted it.

And then he began.

He began with an account of what he had done to compose the differences
in Utah. He explained and justified the appointments he had made
there--appointments that had been recommended by Southern senators and
representatives who, because they were Southerners, were opposed to the
undue extension and arbitrary use of Federal power. He had made Caleb
W. West of Kentucky governor of Utah on the recommendation of Senator
Blackburn of Kentucky, my father's friend. He had made Frank H. Dyer,
originally of Mississippi, United States Marshal. He had appointed a
District Attorney in whom he had every confidence. He had a right to
believe that these men, recommended by the statesmen of the South, would
execute and adjudicate the laws in Utah according to the most lenient
Southern construction of Federal rights. He dwelt upon Governor West's
charitable intentions towards the Mormon leaders, went over West's
efforts at pacification in accurate detail, and told of West's chagrin
at his failure--with an irritation that showed how disappointed he
himself was with the continued recurrence of the Mormon troubles.

I had to tell him that the situation had not improved, and his face
flushed with an anger that he made no attempt to conceal. He declared
that the fault must lie in our obstinate determination to hold ourselves
superior to the law. He could not sympathize with our sufferings, he
said, since they were self-inflicted. He admitted that he had once been
opposed to the Edmunds-Tucker bill, but felt now that it was justified
by the immovability of the Mormons. All palliatives had failed. The
patience of Congress had been exhausted. There was no recourse, except
to make statutes cutting enough to destroy the illegal practices and
unlawful leadership in the Mormon community.

"Mr. President," I pleaded, "I've lived in Utah all my life. I know
these people from both points of view. You know of the situation only
from Federal office holders who consider it solely with regard to their
official responsibility to you and to the country. Why not learn what
the Mormons think?"

He replied that it was not within the province of the President--his
power or his duty--to consider the mental attitude of men who were
opposing the enforcement of the law.

It was an inexcusable offense against the general welfare that one
community should be rising continually against the Federal authority
and occupying the time and attention of Congress with a determined
recalcitrance.

For an hour, he continued, with vigor and dignity, to describe the
situation as he saw it; and he chilled me to the heart with his
determination to concede nothing more to a community that had refused to
be placated by what he had already conceded. I listened without trying,
without even wishing, to interrupt him; for I had been warned by Mr.
Whitney and Colonel Lamont that it would be wise to let him deliver
himself of his opinion before attempting to influence him to a milder
one; and I could not contradict anything that he said, for he made no
misstatements of fact.

Colonel Lamont had entered once, and had withdrawn again when he saw
that Mr. Cleveland was still talking. At the end of about an hour, the
President rose. "Mr. Cannon," he said, "I don't see what more I can do
than has already been done. Tell your people to obey the law, as all
other citizens are required to obey it, and they'll find that their
fellow-citizens of this country will do full justice to their heroism
and their other good qualities. If the law seems harsh, tell them that
there's an easy way to avoid its cruelty by simply getting out from
under its condemnation."

His manner indicated that the conference was at an end. He reached out
his hand as if to drop the subject then and forever, as far as I was
concerned. "Mr. President," I asked, with the composure of desperation,
"do you really want to settle the Mormon question?"

He looked at me with the first gleam of humor that had shown in his
eyes--and it was a humor of peculiar richness and unction. "Young man,"
he asked, "what have I been saying to you all this time? What have I
been working for, ever since I first took up the consideration of this
subject at the beginning of my term?"

"Mr. President," I replied, "if you were traveling in the West, and came
to an unbridged stream with your wagon train, and saw tracks leading
down into the water where you thought there was a ford, you would
naturally expect to cross there, assuming that others had done so before
you. But suppose that some man on the bank should say to you: 'I've
watched wagon trains go in here for more than twenty years, and I've
never yet seen one come out on the other side. Look over at that
opposite bank. You see there are no wagon tracks there. Now, down the
river a piece, is a place where I think there's a ford. I've never got
anybody to try it yet, but certainly it's as good a chance as this one!'
Mr. President, what would you do? Would you attempt a crossing where
there had been twenty years of failure, or would you try the other
place--on the chance that it might take you over?"

He had been regarding me with slowly fading amusement that gave way to
an expression of grave attention.

"I've been watching this situation for several years," I went on, "and
it seems to me that there's the possibility of a just, a humane, and
a final settlement of it, by getting the Mormon leaders to come
voluntarily into court--and it can be done!--with the assurance that the
object of the administration is to correct the community evil--not to
exterminate the Mormon Church or to persecute its 'prophets,' but to
secure obedience to the law and respect for the law, and to lead Utah
into a worthy statehood."

I paused. He thought a moment. Then he said: "I can't talk any longer,
now. Make another appointment with Lamont. I want to hear what you have
to say." And he dismissed me.

Colonel Lamont told me to come back on the following afternoon; and I
went away with the dubious relief of feeling that if I had not yet won
my case I had, at least, succeeded in having judgment reserved. I went
to work to arrange my arguments for the morrow, to make them as concise
as possible and to divide them into brief chapters in case I should have
as little opportunity for extended explanations as the President had
been giving me. I saw that the whole matter was gloomy and oppressive
to him--that his responsibility was as dark on his mind as our
sufferings--and I took the hint of his amused interest, in order to work
out ways of brightening the subject with anecdote and illustration.

I saw Colonel Lamont on the morrow, and he beamed a congratulation on
me. "You've aroused his curiosity," he said. "You've interested him."

He had made an appointment some days ahead; and when I entered the
President's office to keep that appointment, I found Mr. Cleveland at
his desk, as if he had not moved in the interval, laboriously reading
and signing papers as before. It gave me an impression of immovability,
of patient and methodical relentlessness that was disheartening.

But as soon as he turned to me, I found him another man. He was
interested, receptive, almost genial. He gave me an opportunity to cover
the whole ground of my case, and I went over it step by step. He showed
no emotion when I recited some of the incidents of pathetic suffering
among our people; and at first he seemed doubtful whether he should
be amused by the humorous episodes that I narrated. But I did not wish
merely to amuse him; I was trying to convey to his mind (without saying
so) that so long as a people could suffer and laugh too, they could
never be overcome by the mere reduplication of their sufferings. He
looked squarely at me, with a most determined front, when I told him
that the Mormons would be ground to powder before they would yield.
"They can't yield," I warned him. "They're like the passengers on a
train going with a mad speed down a dangerous grade. For any of them to
attempt to jump is simple destruction. They can only pray to Providence
to help them. But if that train were to be brought to a stop at some
station where they could alight with anything like self-respect, there
would be many of them glad to get off--even though the train had not
arrived at its 'revealed' destination."

I do not remember--and if I did, it would be tedious to relate--the
exact sequence and progression of argument in this interview and the
dozen others that succeeded it. Mr. Cleveland became more and more
interested in the Mormon people, their family life, their religion, and
their politics. He was as painstaking in acquiring information about
them as he was in performing all the other duties of his office. I might
have been discouraged by the number and apparent ineffectiveness of
my interviews with him, had not Colonel Lamont kept me informed of the
growth of the President's good feeling and of his genuinely paternal
interest in the people of Utah. It became more than a personal desire
with Mr. Cleveland to benefit politically by a settlement of the Mormon
troubles, if indeed he had ever had such a desire. His humanity was
enlisted, his conscience appealed to.

He asked me, once, if I knew anything of Mr. Sandford, and I replied
that I knew him and believed in him. He told me, at last, that he
was going to appoint Mr. Sandford Chief Justice of Utah, and added
significantly, "I suppose he will get in touch with the situation." I
accepted this remark as a permission to confer with Mr. Sandford, and
I journeyed to New York to see him and to renew the understanding I had
with him.

He was appointed Chief justice on the 9th day of July, 1888, and--as the
Mormon people expressed it--"the backbone of the raid was broken."
On August 26, 1888, he arrived in Salt Lake City. On September 17, my
father came before him in court and pleaded guilty to two indictments
charging him with "unlawful cohabitation." He was fined $450 and
sentenced to the penitentiary for one hundred and seventy-five days. His
example was followed by a number of prominent Mormons, including Francis
Marion Lyman, who is today the President of the Quorum of the twelve
Apostles and next in rank for the Presidency. It is true that not many
cases, relatively speaking, came to Justice Sandford; but the leader
whom the authorities were most eager to subjugate under Federal power
was judged and sentenced; and the effect, both on the country and on the
Mormon people, was all that we had expected.

There are memories in a man's life that have a peculiar value. One
such, to me, is the picture I have in mind of my father undergoing
his penitentiary sentence, wearing his prison clothes with an
unconsciousness that makes me still feel a pride in the power of the
human soul to rise superior to the deformities of circumstance. Charles
Wilcken (whom I have described driving us to Bountiful) was visiting
him one day in the prison office, when a guard entered with his hat on.
Wilcken snatched it from his head. "Never enter his presence," he said,
"without taking it off." And the guard never did again.... I salute the
memory. I come to it with my head bare and my back stiffened. I see in
that calm face the possibilities of the human spirit. He was a man!

He spent his time, there, as he would have spent it elsewhere, writing,
conferring with the agents of his authority, planning for his people. I
saw he was aware that he would emerge from his imprisonment a free man,
personally, but still enslaved by the conditions of the community; and
I knew that he would use his freedom to free the others. I knew that he
had accepted his sentence with this end in view. In plain words, I knew
now--though he never said so--that he was looking toward the necessary
recession from the doctrine of polygamy, and that he may have counted
on the spectacle of his imprisonment to help prepare his people for a
general submission to the law.

With the entry of these leaders into prison, the Mormons felt for them
a warmer admiration, a deeper reverence; but it was mingled with a
gratitude to the nation for the leniency of the court and an awed sense,
too, of the power of the civil law. President Woodruff secretly and
tentatively withdrew his necessary permission, as head of the Church,
to the solemnization of any more plural marriages; and he ordered the
demolition of the Endowment House in which such marriages had been
chiefly celebrated. Many of the non-Mormons, who had despaired of any
solution of the troubles in Utah, now began to hope. The country had
been impoverished; the Mormons had been deprived of much of their
substance and financial vigor; and reasons of business prudence among
the Gentiles weighed against a continuance of proscription. Some of
them distrusted the motives of their own leaders more than they did the
Mormon people. Some were weary of the quarrel. For humane reasons, for
business reasons, for the sake of young Utah, it was argued that the
persecution should end.

But in the years 1888 and 1889, thousands of newcomers arrived in Utah
with a strong antagonism to the religion and the political authority
of the Mormon Church; and, with the growth of Gentile population, there
came a natural determination on their part to obtain control of the
local governments of cities and counties. In opposing this movement,
the power of the Church was again solidified. By 1889, the Gentiles
had taken the city governments of Ogden and Salt Lake City, had elected
members of the legislature in Salt Lake County, and had carried the
passage of a Public School Bill, against the timid and secret opposition
of the Church. President Cleveland had been defeated and succeeded by
President Harrison; and Chief Justice Sandford had been removed and
Chief Justice Zane reinstated. (He did not adjudicate with his previous
rigor, however, because of the success of Justice Sandford's policy of
leniency.) The Church made no move publicly to repudiate polygamy, and
its silent attitude of defiance, in this regard, gave a battle cry to
all its enemies.

The crisis was precipitated by a movement that had begun in the
territory of Idaho, where the Mormons had been disfranchised by means
of a test oath--(a provision still remaining in the Idaho state
constitution, but now nullified by the political power of the Mormon
leaders in Salt Lake City.) A bill, known as the Cullom-Struble bill,
was introduced at Washington, to do in Utah what had been done in Idaho.

The Church was then directed by President Woodruff and his two
Councillor's, George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith. But President
Woodruff was as helpless in the political world as a nun. He was a
gentle, earnest old man, patiently ingenuous and simple-minded, with a
faith in the guidance of Heaven that was only greater than my father's
because it was unmixed with any earthly sagacity. He had the mind, and
the appearance, of a country preacher, and even when he was "on the
underground" he used to do his daily "stint" of farm labor, secretly,
either at night or in the very early morning. He was a successful
farmer (born in Connecticut), of a Yankee shrewdness and industry. He
recognized that in order to get a crop of wheat, it was necessary to do
something more than trust in the Lord. But in administering the affairs
of the Church, he seemed to have no such sophistication.

I can see him yet, at the meetings of the Presidency, opening his mild
blue eyes in surprised horror at a report of some new danger threatening
us. "My conscience! My conscience!" he would cry. "Is that so, brother!"
When he was assured that it was so, he would say, resignedly: "The Lord
will look after us!" And then, after a silence, turning to his First
Councillor, he would ask: "What do you think we ought to do, Brother
George Q.?"

The Second Councillor, Joseph F. Smith, sat at these meetings, in a
saturnine reserve and silence, either nursing his concealed thought or
having none. When a decision had been suggested, he was appealed to and
added his assent. It always seemed to me that he was sulkily sleepy;
but this impression may have come from the contrast of the First
Councillor's mental alertness and the bright cheerfulness of the
President--who never, to my knowledge, showed the slightest bitterness
against anybody. President Woodruff believed that all the persecutions
of the Mormons were due to the Devil's envy of the Lord's power as it
showed itself in the establishment of the Mormon Church: and he assumed
that the Gentiles did the work they were tempted to do against us,
because the Holy Spirit had not yet ousted the evil from their souls.
He had no fear of the ultimate triumph of the Church, because he had no
fear of the ultimate triumph of God. Whenever he could escape for a day
from the worldly duties of his office, he went fishing!

When the progress of the Cullom-Struble bill began to make its
threatening advance, my father went secretly to Washington; and a short
time afterwards, word came to me in Ogden, through the Presidency, that
he wished me to arrange my business affairs for a long absence from
Utah, and follow him to the capital.

I found him there, in the office of Delegate John T. Caine of Utah--the
cluttered office of a busy man--and he explained, composedly, why he had
sent for me. The Cullom-Struble bill had been favorably considered by
the Senate Committee on Territories, and the disfranchisement of all the
Mormons of Utah seemed imminent. Every argument, political or legal,
had been used against the measure, in vain. Since I, a non-polygamous
Mormon, would be disfranchised if the bill became law, he thought I
might be a good advocate against it. He said: "I have not appeared in
the matter. None of our friends know that I am here. If it were known,
it might only increase our difficulties. Say nothing of it. We have been
at a disadvantage with a Republican administration because most of our
prominent men are Democrats. You were so effective with the Democrats,
let us see what you can do now with your own party friends."

After taking his advice, I went to see Senator Henry M. Teller, of
Colorado, who was a friend of my father and of the Mormon people. He
admitted that the situation was desperate. He proposed that I should
speak before the committees of both houses; they might listen to me as
a Republican who had no official rank in the Church and no political
authority. He offered to introduce me to any of the Senators and members
of Congress, but advised that I should rather go unintroduced, without
influence, and make my appeal as a private citizen.

This sounded to me depressingly like the call to lead a "forlorn hope."
I reported to my father again, and was not altogether reassured by a
tranquility which he seemed to be able to maintain in the face of any
desperation. Other agencies of the Church had reached the end of their
resources. There was no help in sight. And I went, at last, to throw our
case upon the mercy of the Secretary of State, Mr. James G. Blaine,
my father's friend, the friend of our people, the statesman whom I--in
common with millions of other Americans--regarded with a reverence that
approached idolatry.

He received me in the long room of the Secretary's apartments, standing,
a striking figure in black, against the rich and heavy background of the
official furnishing. He was very pale--unhealthily so--perhaps with the
progress of the disease of which he was to die in so short a time. In
contrast with his usual brilliancy of mind, he seemed to me, at first,
depressed and quiet--with a kindly serenity of manner, at once gracious,
and intimate, but masterful.

He was instantly and deeply interested in what I had to say; he seated
himself--on a sofa, near the embrasure of a window--motioned me to bring
a chair to his side, and heard me in an erect attitude of thoughtful
attention, re-assuring me now and then by reaching out to lay a hand
on my knee when he saw from my hesitancy that I feared I might be too
candid in my confidences; and the look of his eye and the touch of
his hand were as if he said: "I'm your friend. Anything you may say is
perfectly safe with me."

I told him of my father's imprisonment.

"It is dreadful," he said. "You shock me to the soul." He spoke of their
friendship, of his admiration for my father's work in Congress, of his
personal regard for the man himself. "Of course," he said, "I have no
sympathy with your peculiar marriage system, and I'll never be able to
understand how a man like your father could enter it." I reminded him
that my father believed it a system revealed and ordained by God. "I
know," he replied. "That is what they say. And I suppose they have
scriptural warrant for polygamy. But it is a thing that would be 'more
honored in the breach than the observance.' Tell me, is the rule of the
Church absolute over you younger men?"

I told him that it was, in respect of political control; that the
situation in Utah had placed us where there was no possibility of
compromise; that we must be of, with, and for our own people, or against
them.

He asked me whether I intended to address myself to the President. I
replied, "Not yet"--since the bills were still pending in Congress
and were not being urged from the White House. He seemed pleased. As I
afterwards learned, there was a strong rivalry between the President and
the Secretary of State; and though I knew that Mr. Blaine's interest
in Utah was almost wholly one of responsible statesmanship, warmed by
a personal kindliness for our people, still it remains a fact that he
expected the support of the Utah Republican delegation in the convention
of 1892, and that it had been promised him by national Republicans who
were now laboring at Washington in our behalf.

He encouraged me with an almost intimate emotion of pity and
friendliness; and I felt the largeness of the man as much in the warmth
of his humanity as in the breadth of his view. He approved, of my
appearing before the committees. "Go and tell them your own story,
yourself," he said. "Make your plea independently of all the formal and
official arguments that have been used. These have been exhausted.
They have been ineffective. We must use the personal and"--he added it
significantly--"the political appeal. If you find difficulty, let me
know. I shall not be idle in your behalf. If you meet any insuperable
obstacle, I'll see if I can't help you run over it."

He rose to terminate the interview. He looked at me with a smile. "'The
Lord giveth,'" he said, "'and the Lord taketh away.' Wouldn't it be
possible for your people to find some way--without disobedience to
the commands of God--to bring yourselves into harmony with the law and
institutions of this country? Believe me, it's not possible for any
people as weak in numbers as yours, to set themselves up as superior
to the majesty of a nation like this. We may succeed, this time, in
preventing your disfranchisement; but nothing permanent can be done
until you 'get into line.'"

He accompanied me toward the door, giving me friendly messages of regard
to deliver to my father. He put his arm around my shoulders, at last,
and said: "You may tell your father for me--as I tell you, young
man--you shall not be harmed, this time."

I parted from him with an almost speechless relief and gratitude, and
hurried to my father with the news of hope. I had not told Mr. Blaine
that he was in Washington; for, without feeling that he saw himself
marked by his imprisonment, I was aware that his friends might pity him
for it, if they did not condemn him; and neither sentiment (I knew) was
he of the personal temper to encounter.

I told him every detail of my talk with the Secretary of State; he heard
me, silently, meditatively. When I concluded with Mr. Blaine's assurance
that we should not be harmed "this time," but must "get into line,"
he looked up at me with a significant steadiness of eye. "President
Woodruff," he said, "has been praying.... He thinks he sees some
light.... You are authorized to say that something will be done."

I asked no question. His gaze conveyed assurance, but forbade inquiry. I
had to understand, without being told, that the Church was preparing to
concede a recession from the doctrine of polygamy.

With this assurance to aid me, I began the work of reaching the
committees--warm work in a Washington summer, but hopeful in the new
prospect of a lasting success. The bill for disfranchisement had been
reported out by the committees and was on the calendar for passage. It
was necessary to have the question reopened before the committees
for argument. In soliciting the opportunity of a re-hearing, from
the Chairman of the Senate Committee, Senator Orville H. Platt, of
Connecticut, I made my argument in a private conversation with him in
his rooms in the Arlington Hotel. When I had done, he chewed his cigar
a moment, looked at me quizzically, and asked: "Do you know Abbot R.
Heywood, of Ogden?"--and, as he asked it, he drew a letter from his
pocket.

I replied that I knew Mr. Heywood well.

"I have a letter here from him, on this same subject," he said. "Tell
me. What kind of man is he? And to what extent do you think I ought to
depend on his views?"

I was never more tempted in my life to tell a lie. I knew Mr. Heywood
to be a man of truth and high ideals; but he had been Chairman of the
Anti-Church party in Weber County, and he had been one of the Gentile
leaders for several years. I knew the intensity of his feelings against
the rule of the Church in politics and the Mormon attitude of defiance
to the law. I was sure that he would be strong in his demand for the
passage of the disfranchisement act.

I hesitated a moment. Senator Platt was watching me. Then, with a
resolve that our cause must stand or fall by the truth, I said: "Mr.
Heywood is a man of integrity. I think he would write exactly what he
believed to be true. But you know, Senator, intense feeling in politics
sometimes sways a man's judgment. In view of Mr. Heywood's long
controversy, I hope that if he has taken a view adverse to mine, his
antagonism may be mitigated in your mind by your own knowledge of human
feelings."

Senator Platt held out the letter to me. "You've won your motion for a
re-hearing," he said. "I think we may be able to get the truth out of
you. We have not always had it in this Utah question. Read that."

I read it. It was Mr. Heywood's solemn protest, as an American
citizen--on behalf of himself and the other members of the
perfunctory Republican Committee of his County--against the wholesale
disfranchisement of the Mormons, on the ground that it would only delay
a progressive American settlement of the territory!

Then I went to the other members of the Senate committee privately,
and told them that the Mormon Church was about to make a concession
concerning its doctrine of polygamy. I told them so in confidence,
pointing out the necessity of secrecy, since to make public the news
of such a recession, in advance, would be to prevent the Church from
authorizing it. Not one of the Senators betrayed the trust. I was less
confidential with the members of the House Committee, because I realized
that nothing could be done against us unless the bill passed the Senate.
But I gave the news of the Church's reconsideration of its attitude
to Colonel G. W. R. Dorsey, the member from Nebraska, and he used his
influence to get me a rehearing from the House Committee. Finally I
appeared once before each committee, and argued our case at length. The
bills did not become law. Aided by Mr. Blaine's powerful friendship, we
were saved "for the time."

It remained to make our safety permanent, and I took train for Utah, on
my father's counsel, to see President Woodruff. I had given my word that
"something was to be done." I went to plead that it should be done--and
done speedily.



Chapter IV. The Manifesto



I found him in the office of the Presidency--in the little one-story
house that I have described in my early interview with Joseph F
Smith--and he received me with the gracious affectionateness of a
fatherly old man. He asked me, almost at once: "What are they going to
do to us in Washington?"

"President Woodruff," I replied, "we've been spared--temporarily. The
axe will not fall for a few moments. It depends on ourselves, now,
whether it shall fall or not."

"Come into the other room," he said, under his voice, in an eager
confidentiality, like a child with a secret. And pattering along ahead
of me, quick on his feet, he signed to me to follow him--with little
nods and beckonings--into the retiring room where I had talked with
Smith.

There he sat down, on the edge of his chair, his elbows supported on the
broad arms, leaning forward, partly bowed with his age, and partly with
an intentness of curiosity that glittered innocently in his guileless
eyes. A dear old character! Sweet in his sentiments, sweet in his
language, sweet in the expression of his face.

I told him, in detail, of the events in Washington, and of the men who
had helped us in them--particularly of Mr. Blaine, who was apparently
a new character in his experience, and of Senator Orville H. Platt, in
whom he discovered an almost neighborly interest when I told him that
the Senator came from Connecticut, his native state. I warned him that
the passage of the measure of disfranchisement had been no more than
retarded. I pointed out the fatal consequences for the community if the
bill should ever become law--the fatal consequences for the leaders of
the Church if the non-polygamous Mormons, deprived of their votes, were
ever left unable to control the administration of local government. I
repeated the promise that my father had authorized me to carry to the
Senators and Congressmen who still had the Cullom-Struble bill in hand;
and I emphasized the fact that because of this promise the bill had been
held back--with the certainty that it would never become law if we met
the nation half way.

I was watching him to see if he sensed the point I wished him to get.
When I touched the matter of my father's promise, his face became softly
reverent; and when I had done--looking at me without a trace of cunning
in his benignity, with an expression, rather, of exalted innocence
and faith,--he said: "Brother Frank, I have been making it a matter of
prayer. I have wrestled mightily with the Lord. And I think I see some
light."

In order that there might be no misunderstanding, I put into plainer
words what I meant and what the prominent men in Washington had been led
to look for: since, by a "revelation" of the Church we were ordered
to give obedience to the government of the nation, and since we had
exhausted all our legal defenses, it was hoped that the Prophet, Seer,
and Revelator of the Church would find a way, under the guidance of God,
to bring our people into conformity with the law.

As he accepted this calmly, I added: "To be very plain with you,
President Woodruff, our friends expect, and the country will insist,
that the Church shall yield the practice of plural marriage."

His eyelids quivered a little, but he showed no other sign of flinching.
I saw that the counsels of his advisers and the comfort that he had
derived from his prayers had prepared him for an immolation that was
more serious to him than any personal sacrifice that he could make. He
said sadly: "I had hoped we wouldn't have to meet this trouble this way.
You know what it means to our people. I had hoped that the Lord might
open the minds of the people of this nation to the truth, so that
they might be converted to the everlasting covenant. Our prophets have
suffered like those of old, and I thought that the persecutions of Zion
were enough--that they would bring some other reward than this." If I
had been the bearer of a new edict of proscription, I think he could not
have been more profoundly oppressed by the sense of his responsibility.
"Did your father tell you," he asked, "that I had been seeking the mind
of the Lord?"

I replied that he had.

He reflected silently. "I shall talk with you again about it," he said,
at last. "I hope the Lord will make the way plain for his people."

I do not wish to idealize the polygamous relation--but in monogamy a man
is not persecuted for his marriage, and sometimes he does not appreciate
the tie. In polygamy, the men and women alike had been compelled to
suffer on its account by the grim trials of the life itself and by the
hatred of all civilization arrayed against it. They had grown to value
their marriage system by what it had cost them. They had been driven by
the contempt of the world to argue for its sanctity, to live up to their
declarations, and to raise it in their esteem to what it professed to
be, the celestial order that prevailed in the Heavens! I knew, as well
as President Woodruff did, the wrench it would give their hearts to have
to abandon, at last, what they had so long suffered for.

In the days of anxious waiting that followed, I saw Joseph F. Smith and
sounded him for any hint of progress. He said: "I'm sure I don't know
what can be done. Your father talked with President Woodruff and me
before he went to Washington, but I'm sure I can't see how we can
do anything." When my father returned home, I went to him many
times--without however learning anything definite. I knew that the men
in Washington would demand some tangible evidence of our good faith
before Congress should reconvene; and I repeatedly urged the necessity
of action.

At length he sent me word, in Ogden, that President Woodruff wished to
confer with me, and he suggested that it would be permissible for me to
speak my opinions freely. I hastened to Salt Lake City, to the offices
of the Presidency. President Woodruff took me into a private room and
read me his "manifesto."

It was the same that was issued on September 24, 1890, and ratified by a
General Conference of the Mormon Church on October 6, following. It
was the proclamation that freed the oppressed of Utah; for, by the
subsequent "covenant"--and its acceptance by the Federal government--the
nation did but confirm their freedom and accord them their
constitutional rights. Here, shaking in the hand of age, was a sheet of
paper by which the future of a half million people was to be directed;
and that simple old man was to speak through it, to them, with the awful
authority of the voice of God.

He told me he had written it himself, and it certainly appeared to me
to be in his handwriting. Its authorship has since been variously
attributed. Some of the present-day polygamists say that it was I who
wrote it. Chas. W. Penrose and George Reynolds have claimed that they
edited it. I presume that as Mormons, "in good standing," believing in
the inspiration of the Prophet, they appreciate the blasphemy of their
claim!

I found it disappointingly mild. It denied that the Church had been
solemnizing any plural marriages of late, and advised the faithful
"to refrain from contracting any marriages forbidden by the law of the
land." In spite of this mildness, President Woodruff asked me whether
I thought the Mormons would support the revelation--whether they would
accept it.

I replied that there could be no proper anxiety on that point. The
majority of the Mormon people were ready for such a message. It might
be very much stronger without arousing resistance. With the exception
of the comparatively few men and women who were living in polygamy, the
community would accept it gratefully. Rather, I made bold to say,
my anxiety was as to whether the nation would believe that such an
equivocally-worded document meant an absolute recession from the
practice of plural marriage.

It was plain that his advisers had not pointed out this danger to him.
He asked me how I thought the nation would take it.

I asked him, point blank, whether it meant an absolute recession from
polygamy.

He answered that it did.

Then (I said) with such an interpretation of it, and a formal and public
acceptance of it by the Church authorities, I did not doubt that we
could convince the nation of its sufficiency. I reminded him--as I am
now glad to remember--that the word of the Mormon people had passed
current in the political and commercial circles of the country; that
I had several times been the bearer of messages from them to prominent
men; that we had been taken on faith and the faith had been
always vindicated. Finally, in order that I might carry away no
misapprehension, nor convey any, I asked him if it was the intention of
the manifesto to inhibit any further plural marriage living.

He answered, quaintly: "Why, of course, Frank--because that's what
they've been persecuting us for." There was not even a shrewdness in his
voice when he added: "You know they didn't get our brethren in prison
for polygamy, but for living with their plural wives."

Perhaps no other man in Utah could have said such a thing without
sarcasm. The fact was that the United States authorities had been
practically unable to prove a case of polygamy (which was a felony)
because the marriage records were concealed by the Church; but they
could prove plural marriage living (a mere misdemeanor) by repute and
circumstance. It was part of President Woodruff's unworldliness that he
did not see the satire of his words; and I was the more convinced of his
good faith.

I was convinced also, by several of his remarks, that he had consulted
with the Church's attorney, Mr. Franklin S. Richards; and while I
trusted the President's unworldly faith, I trusted more the sagacity
of his more worldly advisers. I began to see, with a sure hope, the
beginning of the end of all our miseries.

Some days later I was summoned to attend a meeting of the Church
authorities in the President's offices; and I knew that the test had
come. The Church was governed by the Presidency, composed of President
Woodruff and his two Councillor's, with the Quorum of the Twelve
Apostles, the Presidents of Seventies, and the presiding Bishopric,
composed of three members. These quorums aggregate twenty-five men; and
to their number may be added the Chief Patriarch of the Church, making a
body of twenty-six general authorities--the Hierarchy. It was from these
latter men, polygamists and (I feared) parochial in their ignorance of
the nation and their trust in the protection of their followers--it was
from them (and the other practicers of polygamy) that any opposition
would come to the acceptance and publication of the manifesto.

They met--something less than a score of them, with two or three of
their most trusted advisers--in one of the general offices of the
Presidency, sitting in leather chairs along its walls, with a sort of
central skylight illuminating subduedly the anxiety of their silent
faces. President Woodruff and his two Councillor's entered to them;
and this insignificant-looking apartment--of such tremendous community
significance, because of the memories of its past--seemed to take on the
gravity of another momentous crisis in the destiny of its people. The
portraits in oils of the dead presidents, martyrs, and prophets of
the Church, looked down on us from the facade of a little gallery, and
caught my eyes almost hypnotically with the imperturbability of their
gaze. No word from them! In the midst of the broken utterance of
emotion--when the tears were wet on faces to whose manliness tears
were the very sweat of martyrdom--I saw those immovable countenances as
placid as the features of the dead.

President Woodruff stood under them, so old and other-worldly, that he
seemed already of their circle rather than ours; and he spoke in a
voice of feeling for us, but with a simple and courageous finality that
sounded the very note of fate. He had called the brethren together (he
said) to submit a decision to their consideration, and he desired from
them an expression of their willingness to accept and abide by it. He
knew what a trial it would be to the "whole household of Israel." "We
have sought," he said, "to live our religion--to harm no one--to perform
our mission in this world for the salvation of the living and the dead.
We have obeyed the principle of celestial marriage because it came to us
from God. We have suffered under the rage of the wicked; we were driven
from our homes into the desert; our prophets have been slain, our holy
ones persecuted--and it did seem to me that we were entitled to
the constitutional protection of the courts in the practice of our
religion."

But the courts had decided "against us." The great men of the nation
were determined to show us no mercy. Legislation was impending that
would put us "in the power of the wicked." Brother George Q. Cannon,
Brother John T. Caine, and the other brethren who had been in
Washington, had found that the situation of the Church was critical.
Brother Franklin S. Richards had advised him that our last legal defense
had fallen. "In broken and contrite spirit" he had sought the will of
the Lord, and the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that it was necessary
for the Church to relinquish the practice of that principle for which
the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives.

A sort of ghastly stillness accepted what he said as a confirmation
of the worst fears of the men who had evidently come there with some
knowledge of what they were to hear. I glanced at the faces of those
opposite me. A set and staring pallor held them motionless. I was
conscious of a chill of heart that seemed communicated to me from them.
My brother Abraham was sitting beside me; I knew his deep affection for
his family; I knew with what a clutch of misery this edict of separation
was crushing his hope; I felt myself growing as pale and tense as he.

The silence was broken by President Woodruff asking one of the brethren
to read the manifesto. When it was concluded, he said: "The matter is
now before you. I want you to speak as the Spirit moves you."

There was no reply, except a sort of general gasp of low-voiced
interjections and a little buzz of whisperings that sounded like emotion
taking its breath. He called on my father to speak. The First Councillor
rose to make a statesmanlike review of the crisis; and I understood that
with his usual diplomacy he was putting aside from him the authority of
leadership until he could see whether an opposition was to develop that
should make it necessary for him to front it.

That opposition made a rustle of stirring in the pause that followed. I
saw it in the changed expressions of some of the faces. Several of the
men--including my brother Abraham, and Joseph F. Smith--asked whether
the manifesto meant a cessation of plural marriages: whether no more
such marriages were to be allowed.

President Woodruff answered that it did; that the Lord had taken back
the principle from the children of men and that we would have no power
to restore it.

Then they asked whether it meant a cessation of plural marriage
living--whether they would be required to separate from the wives whom
they had taken in the holy covenant.

He answered, firmly, that it did; that the brethren in Washington found
it imperative; that it was the will of the Lord; that we must submit.

I saw their faces flush and then slowly pale again--and the storm broke.
One after another they rose and protested, hoarsely, in the voice of
tears, that they were willing to suffer "persecution unto death" rather
than to violate the covenants which they had made "in holy places"
with the women who had trusted them. One after another they offered
themselves for any sacrifice but this betrayal of the women and children
to whom they owed an everlasting faith. And a manlier lot of men never
spoke in a manlier way. Not a petty word was uttered. Their thought was
not for themselves. Their grief was not selfish. Their protests had a
dignity in pathos that shook me in spite of myself.

When they had done, my father rose again with a face that seemed to bear
the marks of their grief while it repressed his own. He dwelt anew on
the long efforts of our attorney and our friends in Congress to resist
what we believed to be unconstitutional measures to repress our practice
of a religious faith. But we were citizens of a nation. We were
required to obey its laws. And when we found, by the highest judicial
interpretation of statute and constitution, that we were without grounds
for our plea of religious immunity, we had but the alternative either of
defying the power of the whole nation or of submitting ourselves to its
authority. For his part he was willing to do the will of the Lord. And
since the Prophet of God, after a long season of prayer, had submitted
this revelation as the will of the Lord, he was ready for the sacrifice.
The leaders of the Church had no right to think of themselves. They
must remember how loyally the people had sacrificed their substance and
risked their safety to guard their brethren who were living in plural
marriage. Those brethren must not be ungrateful now. They must not now
refuse to make their sacrifice, in answer to the sacrifices that had
been made for them so often. The people had long protected them. Now
they must protect the people.

Under the commanding persuasion of his voice I saw the determination of
their resistance begin to falter and relax. President Woodruff called on
me to speak, and I felt that it was my duty to represent the needs,
the hopes, and the opportunities of the hundreds of thousands of the
undistinguished mass who would make no decision for themselves, but
whose fate was trembling on the event. I rose to speak for them, with
my hand on my brother's shoulder, knowing that my every word would be a
stab at his heart, and hoping that my grasp might be a touch of sympathy
to him--knowing that I must urge these elders to sacrifice themselves
and their families for a redemption of which I was to share the
benefits--but sustained by the remembrance of the solemn pledge which
I had been authorized to give in Washington to honorable men who had
trusted in our honor--and strengthened by the thought of all those dear,
to me, whose sufferings would be multiplied, with no hope of relief, if
the few would not now yield to save the many.

I described the situation as I had seen it in Washington and as I knew
it in Utah from a more intimate personal experience than these leaders
could have of the sufferings of the people. I told them how cheerfully
and bravely the non-polygamists had borne the brunt of protecting them
in the practice of their faith, and yet how patient a hope had been
always with us that the final demand might not be made upon us for the
sacrifice of a citizenship which we valued more because it shielded them
than because it armed us.

Encouraged by the face of President Woodruff, I reminded them that the
sorrow and the parting, at which they rebelled, could only be for a
little breath of time, according to their faith; that by the celestial
covenant, into which they had entered, they were assured that they
should have their wives and children with them throughout the endless
ages of eternity. The people had given much to them. Surely they could
yield the domestic happinesses of the little remaining day of life in
this world, in order to save and prosper those who were not to enjoy
their supreme exaltation of beatitude in the world to come.

I had felt my brother strong under my hand. He rose, when I concluded.
And with a manful brevity he replied that he submitted because it was
the will of the Lord, and because he had no right to interpose his
selfish love and yearnings between the people of God and their worldly
opportunity. The others followed. Not one referred to the equivocal
language of the manifesto or questioned it. They accepted it--as it was
then and afterwards interpreted--as a revelation from God made through
the Prophet of the Church; and they subscribed to it as a solemn
covenant, before God, with the people of the nation.

Joseph F. Smith was one of the last to speak. With a face like wax, his
hands outstretched, in an intensity of passion that seemed as if it must
sweep the assembly, he declared that he had covenanted, at the altar
of God's house, in the presence of his Father, to cherish the wives and
children whom the Lord had given him. They were more to him than life.
They were dearer to him than happiness. He would rather choose to stand,
with them, alone--persecuted--proscribed--outlawed--to wait until God in
His anger should break the nation with His avenging stroke. But--

He dropped his arms. He seemed to shrink in his commanding stature like
a man stricken with a paralysis of despair. The tears came to the pained
constriction of his eyelids.

"I have never disobeyed a revelation from God," he said. "I cannot--I
dare not--now."

He announced--with his head up, though his body swayed--that he would
accept and abide by the revelation. When he sank in his chair and
covered his face with his hands, there was a gasp of sympathy and
relief, as if we had been hearing the pain of a man in agony. And my
heart gave a great leap; for, in these supreme moments of feeling,
things come to us that are larger than our knowledge, more splendid than
our hopes; and I saw, as if in the blinding glisten of the tears in my
eyes, a radiant vision of our future, an unselfish people freed from
a burden of persecution, a nation's forgiveness born, a grateful state
created. I saw it--and I looked at Smith and loved him for it. I knew
then, as I know now, that he and those others were at this moment
sincere. I knew that they had relinquished what was more dear to them
than the breath of life. I knew the appalling significance, to them,
of the promise which they were making to the nation. And in all the
degraded after-years, when so many of them were guilty of breach of
covenant and base violation of trust, I tried never to forget that in
the hour of their greatest trial, they had sacrificed themselves for
their people; they had suffered for the happiness of others; they had
said, sincerely: "Not my will, O Lord, but Thine, be done!"



Chapter V. On the Road to Freedom



In any discussion of the public affairs that make the subject matter of
this narrative, a line of discrimination must be drawn at the year 1890.
In that year the Church began a progressive course of submission to
the civil law, and the nation received each act of surrender with
forgiveness. The previous defiance's of the Mormon people ceased to give
grounds for a complaint against them. The old harshnesses of the Federal
government were canceled by the new generosity of a placated nation. And
neither party to the present strife in Utah should go back, beyond the
period of this composition, to dig up, from the past, its buried wrongs.

In relating, here, some of the events of 1888 and 1889, I have tried
neither to justify the Mormons nor to defend their prosecutors. I have
wished merely to make clear the situation in Utah, and to introduce to
you, in advance, some of the leaders of the distracted community, so
that you might understand the conditions from which the Mormons escaped
by giving their covenant to the nation and be able to judge of the
obligations and responsibilities of the men who gave it.

I, have described the promulgation and acceptance of "the manifesto"
with such circumstance and detail, because of what has since occurred in
Utah. Let me add that some two weeks later the General Conference of
the Church endorsed the President's pronouncement as "authoritative and
binding." And let me point out that it was the first and only law of the
Mormon Church ever so sustained by triple sanctities--"revealed" as
a command from God, accepted by the prophets in solemn fraternity
assembled, and ratified by the vote of the entire "congregation of
Israel" before it was declared to be binding upon men.

At first, because of the somewhat indefinite promise of the message
itself, many of the non-Mormons of Utah remained suspicious and in
doubt of it. But it was recognized by Judge Zane, in court--on the
day following the close of the Conference--as an official declaration,
"honest and sincere." The newspapers throughout the whole country so
received it. The Church authorities sent assurances to Washington that
convinced the statesmen, there, of the completeness and finality of the
submission. And the good faith of the covenant was at last admitted by
the non-Mormons of Utah and endorsed by their trust. I do not know
of any change in human affairs dependent on human will--more speedy,
effective and comprehensive than this recession. Within the space of a
few days a revolution was completed that had been sought by the power
of our nation and of the civilized world, for a generation, with stripes
and imprisonment, death, confiscation and the ostracism of the country's
public contempt. It had been obtained, I knew, chiefly by the sagacity
of the First Councillor using the pressure of circumstances to enforce
the persuasions of diplomacy. I felt that a miracle of change had been
brought to pass. He had placed us on the road to freedom; and I trusted
his guidance to lead us to our goal.

That goal, to me personally, was the honor of American citizenship--an
ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I
had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to
vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy;
for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark of inferiority. The patriotic
reading of my boyhood had made the American republic, to me, the noblest
administration of freemen in the history of government and the exercise
of its franchise literally the highest dignity of human privilege. I
would have been as proud--I was as proud when the day came--to vote for
the President of the United States as he could have been to take his
oath of office. I do not believe that any poor serf, escaped from the
tyranny of Russia, ever saw the American shore with a more grateful eye
than I looked to the prospect of being admitted, with the citizens of
Utah, into the enfranchisement of the Republic.

But it was evident that the Church's recession from polygamy would not
be enough to free us, so long as its control of politics remained. Its
other practices had flourished and been sheltered under its political
power; and now that the Church had ceased to be a lawbreaker, our
friends in Washington were properly expecting that it would cease to
interfere with its members in the exercise of their citizenship. For
this reason, when I was notified that I had been selected as a member of
the advisory committee of the People's Party (the Church party), I went
at once to my father and told him that I would not take the place;
that I intended to work, personally, and through my newspaper, for the
political division of Utah on the lines of the national parties. He held
that until Gentile solidarity was dissolved, it would be dangerous to
divide the allegiance of the Mormons; but he did not stand against
my protest; he contented himself--diplomatically--with sending me to
consult with President Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith.

To them, I argued that the political emancipation of the Mormon people
from ecclesiastical direction was as necessary as the recession from
polygamy had been. We must be set free to perform our duty to the
country solely as citizens of the country, before we could expect to be
given the right to perform it at all. And, for my part, the only action
I would consent to take as a member of the advisory committee of the
People's Party would be to vote for the dissolution of the party.

President Woodruff referred me to my father, and advised me to be guided
by him. Joseph F. Smith urged that a division of the Mormon people on
national party lines would enable the Liberal (the Gentile) party to
march in between. I argued in reply that we must divide at some time,
and the sooner the better, since every year was increasing the Gentile
population. They would never split as long as we remained solid. And if
we were ever to be permitted to nationalize ourselves, it would not be
until we had dissolved the party organizations whose very names were a
proof of the continued rule of the Church in politics.

When he had no more arguments to advance, he gave a reluctant assent to
mine. I reported back to my father and he approved of my plans. He asked
me humorously with whom I expected to affiliate, since he knew of no one
who was likely to go with me; but I could see that he was pleased with
my independence and hoped I might succeed in doing something to break
the deadlock-grapple of Mormon and Gentile that held Utah apart from the
rest of the country in politics.

His humorous idea of my undertaking gave its color to my beginnings.
It was rather a spirited adventure, as I look back upon it now. When we
organized a Republican Club at Ogden, my intimate friend, Ben E. Rich,
and another friend named Joseph Belnap, were the only Mormons, so far
as I know, who joined me in becoming members. Outside of us three, I did
not know of another Mormon Republican in the whole territory.

Indeed, the status of the Mormon people, in their fancied relation to
the two great parties of the country, was almost identical with that of
the people of the South after the Civil War. Practically every Mormon
believed himself to be a Democrat. Among the young men of the Church
there had been occasional attempts to form Democratic Clubs. Mr. John
T. Caine, delegate in Congress from the territory, was a Democrat. My
father had sat on the Democratic side of the House. Almost all the men
who had braved the sentiments of their own states, to speak for us in
Congress, had been Democrats. And, of course, the administration of the
laws that had been so cruel to the feelings of the Mormons had been in
Republican hands.

Two years earlier, in Ogden, I had spoken in a meeting of Republicans
that had been called to rejoice over the election of Benjamin Harrison
to the Presidency; and I was still being taunted by my Mormon friends
with having clasped hands with "the persecutors of the Prophets." When
I came out, now, as an advocate of Republicanism, I was met everywhere
with this charge--that I had joined the enemies of the Church, that
I was assisting the persecutors of my father. The fact that my father
approved of what I was doing, relieved the seriousness of the situation
for me; and the humorous assistance of Ben Rich in our political
evangelism gave a secret chuckle to many of the incidents of our
campaign.

We went from town to town, from district to district, up the
mountain valleys, across the plains, into mining camps and farming
communities--using the meeting-houses, the school-rooms, the town
halls--taking the afternoon to coax the tired workers of the fields or
of the mines to come and hear us in the evening, and watching them fall
asleep in the light of our borrowed kerosene lamps while we talked. They
came eagerly. Indeed, my own ambition for citizenship--for a right to
participate in the affairs of the nation--was probably no keener than
theirs; and they had an innocent curiosity about the questions of
national politics, of which they had never before been invited to know
anything. They listened almost devoutly.

"Brethren and sisters," a bishop exhorted them at a meeting in which one
of our party was to speak, "we have come to listen to this man, and I
hope we will be guided in all our reflections by the Spirit of God
and that we will do nothing to offend that Spirit. Let there be no
commotion, no whispering, and, above all, no hand clapping."

In a life that had as few diversions as theirs, a political meeting was
an exciting event. The whole family came, and the mothers brought their
babies. Surely in no other American community did politics ever have
such a homely and serious consideration. Certainly no other community
would have so quickly understood the theories of the two parties or
accepted them so implicitly.

But it was all theory! I recognize, now, that I preached a Republicanism
that was an ideal of what it should be, rather than any modern faith
of the "practical politician." I had gathered it from my reading, from
hearing the speeches in Congress, from sympathetic conferences with the
great men who were responsible for the dogmas of the party; and every
assurance of grace that their ability could give and my credulity
accept, I proclaimed religiously as a political salvation to our people.
I built up an ideal, and then judged the party thereafter according to
the measure of that ideal. When I found that some of the charges
against the Republican party were true--charges which I had indignantly
repelled--I was as shocked as any pious worshipper who ever found that
his idol had feet of clay. Our people, having accepted the faith with as
simple a hope as it was offered, were as easily turned from it when they
found that it was false. The political moods of Utah, for its first
few years of statehood, were a puzzle to the "practical" leaders of the
parties; but to us who understood the impulses of honesty that moved the
changes, things were as clear as they were encouraging.

During the previous summer in Washington, I had met General James S.
Clarkson, then president of the National League of Republican Clubs;
and now, on his invitation, in the Spring of 1891, Rich and I went
to Louisville to speak before the national convention of the league.
Through the kindness of General Clarkson, I was given the official
recognition of a perfunctory place on the executive committee of the
league's national committee, and came into touch with many of the party
leaders. It was about this time, I imagine, that they conceived the idea
of using the gratitude of the Mormons in order to carry Utah and the
surrounding states in which the Mormon vote might constitute a balance
of political power. I know that the idea was old and established when
I came upon it, in 1894, during the campaign for statehood. As I also
found, still later, the Republican leaders and the business interests
with which they were in relation, had their eyes on a distant prospect
of fabulous financial schemes in which the secret funds of the Church
were to help in the building of railroads and the promoting of other
enterprises of associated capital. But at the time of which I am
writing, I had not had sufficient experience to suspect the motives of
the men who encouraged our work in Utah; and I accepted in good faith
their public declarations that the sole aim of the party was to serve
the needs of the people of the United States--and therefore of the
people of Utah!

It seemed to me that such a noble principle should win the support of
Mormon and Gentile alike, and it was on this principle that I appealed
for the support of both. I was so sure of winning with it that I
resented and fought against the aid of the Church that came to us as our
campaign succeeded.

The People's Party (the Church Party) had been dissolved (June, 1891)
by the formal action of the executive committee, under the direct
instruction of the leaders of the Church. The tendency was for its
members to organize themselves immediately as a Democratic party.
They were led by such brilliant and trusted defenders of the Church as
Franklin S. Richards, Chas. C. Richards, Wm. H. King, James H. Moyle,
Brigham H. Roberts and Apostle Moses Thatcher; and a group of abler
advocates could not have been found in any state in the Union. It was
against the sentiment of the Mormon people, vivified by such inspiring
Democracy as these men taught, that our little organization of
Republicans had to make headway; and an anxiety began to show
itself among the Church authorities for a less unequal division, and
consequently a greater appearance of political independence, among the
faithful.

Apostle John Henry Smith came out as a Republican stump speaker in
rivalry with Moses Thatcher, the Democratic Prophet. Joseph F. Smith
announced himself a Republican descendant of Whigs. Apostle Francis
Marion Lyman, in his religious ministrations, counselled leading
brethren to withhold themselves from the Democratic party unless they
had gone too far to retreat. Men of ecclesiastical office in various
parts of the territory--who were regarded as being safe in their wisdom
and fidelity--were urged to hold themselves and their influence in
reserve for such use on either side of politics as the future might
demand.

Against this ecclesiastical direction of the people's choice, I objected
again and again to the Presidency, and my objections seemed to meet with
acquiescence. It required no prescience on my part to foresee that the
growing dislike and distrust of Moses Thatcher at Church headquarters
would lead to a strife in the Church that might be carried into our
politics; and I knew how small would be the hope of preserving any
political independence, if once it were involved in the intrigues of
priests and their rivalries for a supremacy of influence among the
people. I was resolved that not even a Church, ruling by "divine
right," should interpose between my country and my franchise; and an
encroachment that I would not permit upon my own freedom, I would not
help to inflict upon others.

The men with whom I had been working proposed me as the candidate for
Congress of the new Utah Republicans; and I was supported by a strong
delegation from my own country and from other parts of the territory;
but I found that I was not "satisfactory" to some of the Mormon leaders,
and in the convention (1892) Apostle John Henry Smith and my cousin
George M. Cannon led in an attempt to nominate Judge Chas. Bennett, a
Gentile lawyer. After a bitter fight of two days and nights, we carried
the convention against them, and I was nominated.

The Democrats selected, as their candidate, one of the strongest
characters in the territory, Joseph L. Rawlins. He was the son of a
Mormon bishop, but he had left the Church immediately upon reaching
manhood. He was a great lawyer, a staunch Democrat, and wonderfully
popular. There followed one of the swiftest and most exciting campaigns
ever seen in Utah. The whole people rose to it with enthusiasm. Our
party chairman, Chas. Crane, had a genius for organization; our speakers
drew crowded meetings; and though charges of Church influence were
made by both sides, the question of religion was no longer the one that
divided Utah.

We were getting on famously, when an incident occurred that was at once
disastrous and salutary. While I was away from headquarters, stumping
the districts, Chairman Crane (who was a Gentile), Ben Rich and Joseph
F. Smith, issued a pamphlet in Republican behalf called "Nuggets of
Truth." It gave a picture of Joseph Smith, the original Prophet, on
the first page and a picture of me on the last one. (They issued also
a certificate, obtained by Joseph F. Smith and given out by him, that
I was a Mormon "in good standing.") As soon as I heard of the matter,
I wired Chairman Crane that unless the pamphlet were immediately
withdrawn, I should return to Salt Lake City and publicly denounce such
methods. It was withdrawn, but the damage was done, I was defeated, as
I deserved to be--though I was the innocent victim of the atrocity--and
Mr. Rawlins was elected.

The campaign proved, however, that if the Church leaders would only
keep their hands off, there was ample strength in either party to make
a presentation of national issues of sufficient appeal to divide the
people on party lines; and it was evident that the people would choose
the party that made the best showing of principles and candidates.
"Nuggets of Truth" left us with a nasty sense that at no hour were we
assured of safety from ecclesiastical interference--or the nefarious
attempt to make an appearance of such interference--in our political
affairs. But the disaster that followed, in this instance, was so prompt
that we could hope it would prove a lesson.

Most important of all, the campaign had made it evident that there
was now no political mission in Utah for the Liberal (the Gentile)
party--assuming that the retirement of the Mormon priests from politics
was sincere and permanent. Accordingly, the organization formally met
some months later, and formally dissolved; and, by that act, the
last great obstacle to united progress was removed from our road to
statehood, and the men who removed it acted with a generosity that
makes one of the noblest records of self-sacrifice in the history of the
state.

They could foresee that their dissolution as a separate force meant
statehood for Utah--a sovereignty in itself that would leave the
Gentiles in the minority and without any appeal to the nation. Under
territorial conditions, although the non-Mormons were less than
one-third of the population, they had two-thirds of the political power.
They held all the Federal offices, including executive and judicial
positions. They had the Governor, with an absolute veto over the acts
of the Mormon legislature. They had the President and Congress who could
annul any statute of the territory; and they had with them almost the
entire sentiment of the nation. It was in their power to have protracted
the Mormon controversy, and to have withstood the appeal for statehood,
to this day.

They yielded everything; they accepted, in return, only the good faith
of the Mormons. Was it within the capacity of any human mind to foresee
that in return for such generosity the Church would ever give over its
tabernacles to teaching its people to hold in detestation the very,
names of these men who saved us? Was it to be suspected that the
political power surrendered by them would ever be used as a persecution
upon them?--that the liberty, given by them to us, would ever afterward
be denied them by us? It was inconceivable. Neither in the magnanimity
of their minds nor in the gratitude of ours was there a suspicion of
such a catastrophe.

During 1891, President Woodruff's manifesto had been ratified in local
Church conferences in every "stake of Zion;" and a second General
Conference had endorsed it in October of that year. President Woodruff,
Councillor Joseph F. Smith and Apostle Lorenzo Snow went before the
Federal Master in Chancery--in a proceeding to regain possession of
escheated Church property--and swore that the manifesto had prohibited
plural marriages, that it required a cessation of all plural marriage
living, and that it was being obeyed by the Mormon people. These facts
were recited in a petition for amnesty forwarded to President Harrison
in December, 1891, accompanied by signed statements from Chief Justice
Zane, Governor Thomas and other non-Mormons who pledged themselves that
the petitioners were sincere and that if amnesty were granted good faith
would be kept. "Our people are scattered," President Woodruff and his
apostles declared in their petition. "Homes are made desolate. Many are
still imprisoned; others are banished and in hiding. Our hearts bleed
for these. In the past they followed our counsels, and while they are
still afflicted our souls are in sackcloth and ashes.... As shepherds
of a patient and suffering people we ask amnesty for them and pledge our
faith and honor for their future."

At Washington, the Church's attorney, Mr. Franklin S. Richards, and
delegate John T. Caine supported the petition with their avowals of
the sincerity of the Church leaders, the genuineness of our political
division, and the sanctity with which we regarded the promise to obey
the laws. The Utah Commission, a non-Mormon body, favored amnesty in an
official report of September, 1892. And when I went to Washington, in
the winter of 1892-3, the changed attitude of the Federal authorities
toward us was strikingly evident.

President Harrison issued his amnesty proclamation, early in January,
1893, to all persons liable to the penalties of the Edmunds-Tucker Act,
but "on the express condition that they shall in the future faithfully
obey the laws of the United States... and not otherwise." The
proclamation concluded: "Those who fail to avail themselves of the
clemency hereby offered will be vigorously prosecuted." Not a polygamist
in Utah, to my knowledge, declined to take advantage of the mercy, by
refusing the expressly implied pledge.

Meanwhile the campaign had been continued for the return of the
escheated Church property and for the passage of an Enabling Act that
should permit the territory to organize for statehood.

[FOOTNOTE: Statehood seemed still very faraway. There was a
Trans-Mississippi Congress held at Ogden in 1892, and though the
delegates--coming from all the states and territories "west of the
river," were the guests of the people of Utah, so hopeless was our
status in the consideration of mankind that the delegates from the
territories of New Mexico and Arizona would not let our names be joined
to theirs in a resolution for statehood which we wished the committee
on resolutions to propose to the Congress. Governor Prince of New Mexico
replied, to our plea for a share in the resolution, that he did not
intend to damn New Mexico by having her mixed up with Utah. We appealed
to the Congress, and we were saved by a speech made by Thos. M.
Patterson of Colorado, subsequently senator from Colorado, who carried
the day for us. At a recent Trans-Mississippi Congress held in Denver,
I sat with ex-Senator Patterson to hear Mr. Prince still proposing
resolutions in support of statehood for New Mexico. Twenty years later!]
Joseph L. Rawlins, Democratic delegate from Utah, worked valiantly among
the Democrats, and he was assisted by the influence of Mr. Franklin S.
Richards and John T. Caine and others among their old associates in that
party. But, in the very midst of the fight, we were advised that,
unless the Republican leaders would let the Enabling Act go through, the
Democratic leaders would falter in our advocacy.

I had been urged to go to Washington by the Presidency to do what I
might to allay Republican antagonism, and I found that a number of
self-appointed lobbyists (who expected political preferment's and other
rewards from the Church in the event of statehood) had been using the
most amazing arguments in our behalf. For example, they told some of
the "financial Senators" that the Church had fourteen million dollars in
secret funds with which to help build a railroad to the coast as soon
as statehood should be granted. They cited the number of the Church's
adherents in all the states and territories of the Pacific Coast and as
far east as Iowa and Missouri, and predicted that the gratitude of these
people to the Republicans who were helping to free Utah would enable the
Republican party to control a balance of political power in the several
states. They declared positively that plural marriages and plural
marriage living had utterly ceased among the Mormons for all time. And
they made such statements with great particularity to Senator Orville H.
Platt, of Connecticut, who was too wise a man to credit them.

As soon as I returned to Washington, he summoned me to a private
meeting, in his parlor in the Arlington Hotel, and confronted me with
one of the Republican lobbyists who had been soliciting his personal
favor and his almost controlling influence. "Now, Mr. Cannon," he said,
in his dry way, "have the Mormons stopped living with their plural
wives? And will there never be another case of plural marriage among
them?"

I remembered the lesson of my interview with him at the time of the
campaign against the disfranchisement bill, and I answered: "No. Not
all the men of the Church have complied fully with the law. So far as
I know, all the general authorities of the Church--with two or three
exceptions--are fulfilling the covenant they gave; and so far as I can
judge there will never be another plural marriage ceremony with the
consent or connivance of the leaders of the Church. But human nature is
very much the same in Utah as it is in Connecticut. Here and there, no
doubt, a man feels that he's under an obligation to keep his covenant
with his plural wives in preference to the covenant of his accepted
amnesty; and there and here, possibly, in the future, some man will
break the law and defy the orders of the Church and take a plural wife.
But the leaders of the Church do not countenance either proceeding, and
any man who violates the law, in either respect, offends against the
revelations of the Church and, I believe, will be dealt with as an
apostate. I come direct from the Presidency of the Church, and I am
authorized to pledge their word of honor that they will themselves obey
the law and do all in their power as men and leaders to bring their
people into harmony with the institutions of this country as rapidly as
possible."

Senator Platt had slowly unwrapped himself, rising from his chair to his
full height of more than six feet, in a lank and alarming indignation.
"There," he said, striding up and down the room. "That's it! That's just
it. These people have been telling us that you were obeying the law--all
of you--in every instance--and would always obey it. And now you come
here and admit, openly, that some of you, to whom we have granted
amnesty, are breaking your word--and that 'possibly' others, in the
future, will do the same thing!"

"Senator," I pleaded, "what confidence could you have in me if I were to
tell you the Mormons were so superhuman that in a single day they could
eliminate all their human characteristics? I'm asking you to recognize
that the tendency imparted to a whole community is more important
than any one man's breach of the law. Believe me, if you grant us our
statehood, there will never be any lawbreaking sanctioned or protected
by the Church leaders, and just as speedily as possible the entire
system will be brought into harmony with the institutions of the nation.
I'm telling you the truth."

He turned on me to ask, abruptly, how the polygamists had adjusted their
family affairs.

I answered that in nearly all cases within my personal knowledge, the
polygamist had relinquished conjugal relations with his plural wives
with the full acquiescence of them and their children. He supported
them, cared for the children, and in all other ways acted as the
guardian and protector of the household. In a few cases men had gone,
to an extreme. For instance, my uncle, Angus M. Cannon--president of the
Salt Lake "stake of Zion," a man of most decided character--had declared
that he had entered into his marriage relations with his wives under a
covenant that gave them equality in his regards; and in order that he
might not wound the sensibilities of any, he had separated himself from
all.

I reminded Senator Platt that with such examples on the part of the
leaders, there could be no general law-breaking among the Mormons, and
that gradually the polygamous element would accommodate itself to the
demands of law and the commands of God.

He waved us away with a curt announcement that he would have to think
the matter over. If I had not known the essential justice and common
sense under his dry and irascible exterior, I might have been alarmed.
The lobbyist's concern was almost comic. As soon as we were out of
hearing of the Senator's apartment, shaking both fists frantically at
me, he cried: "You've ruined everything! We had him. We had him--all
right--until you came down here and let the cat out of the bag! You knew
what we'd been telling him. Why didn't you stick to it?"

I replied with equal warmth: "You may lie all you please; but if we have
to win Utah's statehood with lies I don't want it. Senator Platt has
been generous to us in our time of need, and I don't intend to deceive
him--or any other man."

As a matter of fact, this was not only common honesty; it was also the
best policy. Senator Platt was, from that time to the day of his death,
a good friend and wise counselor of the people of Utah. And I wish to
lay particular stress upon this conversation with him, because it was
a type of many had with such men as he. Fred T. Dubois, delegate in
Congress from the territory of Idaho and subsequently Senator from that
state, had been perhaps the strongest single opponent, in Washington, of
the Mormon Church; he took our promises of honor, as Senator Platt did,
and he pacified Senator Cullom, Senator Pettigrew and many others among
our antagonists, who afterwards told me that they had accepted the
pledges given by Senator Dubois in our behalf.

They recognized that the Church and the community ought not to be
held responsible for a few possible cases of individual resistance or
offense, so long as there should be a strict adherence by the Church and
its leaders to their personal and community covenant. I emphasize the
nature of this generous appreciation of our difficulties, because
the present-day polygamists in Utah claim that there was a "tacit
understanding," between the statesmen in Washington and the agents
of the Church, to the effect that the polygamists of that time might
continue to live with their plural wives. This is not true. There never
was any such understanding, to my knowledge. And there could not have
been one, in the circumstances, without my knowledge. For though I
did not know what delegate Rawlins, and former delegate Caine, and our
attorney, Mr. Richards, were saying in their private interviews with
senators and congressmen, I know that in all the frequent conversations
I had with them I never heard an intimation of any "tacit understanding"
beyond the one which I have defined.

For my part I was more than eager to have all our political disabilities
removed, the Church property restored, and the right of statehood
accorded--believing implicitly in the sincerity of the Mormon leaders. I
knew President Woodruff too well to doubt the pellacid character of his
mind and purpose. I knew from my father's personal assurance--and from
his constant practice from that time to the day of his death--that he
was acting in good faith. I knew that the community was gladly following
where these men led. I saw no slightest indication that any reactionary
policy was likely to be entered upon in Utah, or that our people would
accept it if it were.

The Church's personal property was restored by an Act of Congress
approved October 25, 1893, but it was stipulated in the Act that the
money was not to be used for the support of any church buildings in
which "the rightfulness of the practice of polygamy" should be taught.
Similarly, when the Enabling Act was approved, in July 16, 1894,
it, too, provided that "polygamous or plural marriage" was forever
prohibited. A constitutional convention was held at Salt Lake City under
the provisions of that act, and a constitution was adopted in which
it was provided that "polygamous or plural marriages" were forever
prohibited, that the territorial laws against polygamy were to be
continued in force, that there should be "no union of church and state,"
and that no church should "dominate the state or interfere with its
functions." Upon no other basis would the nation have granted us our
statehood; and we accepted the grant, knowing the expressed condition
involved in that acceptance.

But there was one other gift that came to us from the nation--by
Congressional enactment and later by Utah statute as a consequence of
statehood; and that gift was the legitimizing of every child born
of plural marriage before January, 1896. The solemn benignity of the
concession touched me, as it must have touched many, to the very heart
of gratitude. By it, ten thousand children were taken from the outer
darkness of this world's conventional exclusion and placed within
the honored relations of mankind. It was a tribute to the purity
and sincerity of the Mormon women who had borne the cross of plural
marriage, believing that God had commanded their suffering. It
recognized the holy nature and honorable intent of the marriages
of these women, by according their children every right of legal
inheritance from their fathers. If all other covenants could be
forgotten and their proof obliterated, this should remain as Utah's
pledge of honor--sacred for the sake of the Mormon mothers, holy in the
name of the uplifted child.






Chapter VI. The Goal--And After



Here we were then (as I saw the situation) assured of our statehood,
rid of polygamy, relieved of religious control in politics, and free to
devote our energies to the development of the land and the industries
and the business of the community. The persecutions that our people had
borne had schooled them to co-operation. They were ready, helping one
another, to advance together to a common prosperity. They were under
the leadership chiefly of the man who had guided them out of a most
desperate condition of oppression toward the freedom of sovereign
self-government. In that progress he had saved everything that was
worthy in the Mormon communism; he had discarded much that was a curse.
I knew that he had no thought but for the welfare of the people; and
with such a man, leading such a following, we seemed certain of a future
that should be an example to the world.

But both the Church and the people had been involved in debt by
confiscation and proscription; and it was necessary now to free
ourselves financially. This work my father undertook in behalf of the
Presidency--for the President of the Mormon Church is not only the
Prophet, Seer and Revelator of God to the faithful; he is also "the
trustee in trust" of all the Church's material property. He is the
controller, almost the owner, of everything it owns. He is as sacred in
his financial as in his religious absolutism. He is accountable to no
one, The Church auditors, whom he appoints, concern themselves merely
with the details of bookkeeping. The millions of dollars that are paid
to him, by the people in tithes, are used by him as he sees fit to use
them; and the annual contributors to this "common fund" would no more
question his administration of it than they would question the ways of
divinity.

In the early days there had been a strongly animating idea that among
the divinely-authorized duties of leadership was the obligation to
develop the natural resources of the country in order to meet the
people's needs. As the immigrants poured into Utah, these needs
increased; and the Church leaders used the Church funds to develop coal
and iron mines, support salt gardens, build a railway, establish a sugar
factory (for which the people, through the legislature, voted a bounty),
conduct a beach resort, and aid a hundred other enterprises that
promised to be for the public good. These undertakings were not financed
for profit. They were semi-socialistic in their establishment and
half-benevolent in their administration.

But during "the days of the raid" they were neglected, because the
Church was involved in debt. And now it became pressingly necessary to
obtain money to restore the moribund industries and to meet the payments
that were continually falling due upon loans made to the Presidency.
President Woodruff called on me to aid in the work. So I came into touch
with a development of events that did not seem to me, then, of any great
importance; yet it drew as its consequence a connection between the
Mormon Church and the great financial "interests" of the East--a
connection that is one of the strong determining causes of the
perversion of government and denial of political liberty in Utah today.

I wish, here, simply to foreshadow, this connection. It will reappear in
the story again and again; and it is necessary to have the significance
of the recurrence understood in advance. But, at the time of which
I write, there was no more than an innocent approach on our part to
Eastern financiers to obtain money for the Church and to concentrate our
debts in the hands of two or three New York banks.

For example, the Church had loaned to, or endorsed for, the Utah Sugar
Company to the amount of $325,000; and my father had personally endorsed
the general obligations for this and other sums, although he owned
only $5,000 of the company's stock. He supported the factory with his
personal credit and assumed the risk of loss (without any corresponding
possibility of gain) in order to benefit the whole people by encouraging
the beet sugar industry. A vain attempt had been made to sell the bonds
in New York. Finally, the Church bought all the bonds of the company
for $325,000 (of a face value of $400,000), and we sold them, for the
Church, to Mr. Joseph Bannigan, the "rubber king," of Providence, Rhode
Island, for $360,000, with the guarantee of the First Presidency, the
trustee of the Church, and myself.

Similarly, the First Presidency led in building an electric power plant
in Ogden, after Chas. K. Bannister, a great engineer, and myself had
persuaded the members of the Presidency that the work would benefit the
community. The bonds of this company, too, were bought by Mr. Bannigan,
with the guarantee of the trustee of the Church, the Presidency and
myself. Both the power plant and the sugar factory were financially
successful. They performed a large public service beneficently. The fact
that Mr. Bannigan held their bonds was no detriment to their work and
wrought no injury to the people.

I single out these two enterprises because Joseph F. Smith has since
sold the power plant to the "Harriman interests," and the control of the
sugar factory to the sugar trust; and he has explained that in making
the sales he merely followed my father's example and mine in selling
the bonds to Mr. Bannigan. The power plant is now a part of the merger
called the Utah Light and Railway Company, which has a monopoly right
in all the streets of Salt Lake City and its suburbs, besides owning
the electric power and light plants of Salt Lake City and Ogden, the gas
plants of both these cities, and the natural gas wells and pipe
lines supplying them. The Mormon people whose tithes aided these
properties--whose good-will maintained them--whose leaders designed them
as a community work for a community benefit--these people are now being
mercilessly exploited by the Eastern "interests" to whom the Prophet
of the Church has sold them bodily. The difference between selling
the bonds of the sugar company to Bannigan, in order to raise money to
support the factory, and selling half the stock to the sugar trust, in
order to make a monopoly profit out of the Mormon consumers of sugar,
has either not occurred to Smith or has been divinely waived by him.

However, this is by the way and in advance of my story. In 1894 we had
no more fear of the Eastern money power than we had of the return of
the Church to politics or to polygamy. Throughout 1893 and 1894 I was
engaged in the work of re-establishing the Church's business affairs
with my father and a sort of finance committee of which the other two
members were Colonel N. W. Clayton, of Salt Lake City, and Mr. James
Jack, the cashier of the Church. In the summer of 1894 I heard various
rumors that when Utah should gain its statehood, my father would
probably be a candidate for the United States Senate. Since this would
be a palpable breach of the Church's agreement to keep out of politics,
I took occasion--one day, on a railroad journey--to ask him if he
intended to be a candidate.

He told me that he was being urged to stand for the Senatorship, but
that for his part he had no desire to do so; and he asked me what I
thought about it. I replied that if I had felt it was right for him
to take the office and he desired it, I would walk barefoot across the
continent to aid him. But I reminded him of the pledges which he and I
had made repeatedly--on our own behalf, in the name of his associates in
leadership, and on the honor of the Mormon people--to subdue thereafter
the causes of the controversy that had divided Mormon and Gentile in
Utah. He replied with an emphatic assurance of his purpose to keep those
pledges, and dismissed the subject with a finality that left no doubt in
my mind.

I know that he might have desired the Senatorship as a public
vindication, since, in the old days of quarrel, he had been legislated
out of his place in the House of Representatives; and, for the first
and only time in my life, I undertook to philosophize some comfort for
him--out of the fact that to the position of authority which he held in
Utah a Senatorship was a descent. He replied dryly: "I understand, my
son--perfectly." The fact was that he needed no comfort from me or any
other human being. He seemed all--sufficient to himself, because of the
abiding sense he had of the constant presence of God and his habit of
communing with that Spirit, instead of seeking human intercourse or
earthly counsel. He did not need my affection. He did not need, much
less seek, the approbation of any man. In the events to which this
conversation was a prelude, he acted without explaining himself to me or
to anyone else, and apparently without caring in the slightest what my
opinion or any other man's might be of his course or of the motives that
prompted it.

Some months later, in the office of the Presidency (at a business
meeting with him, Colonel Clayton and Joseph F. Smith), I excused myself
from attending any further sittings of the committee for that day,
because I had to go to Provo to receive the Republican nomination for
Congress.

My father said: "I am sorry to hear it. I thought Judge Zane--or someone
else would be nominated. I wished you to be free to help with these
business matters. Why have you not consulted us?"

I reminded him that I had told him, some weeks before, that I expected
to be nominated for Congress this year--and that I was practically
certain, if elected, of going to the Senate when we were granted
statehood. "I talked with you, then, as my father," I said. "But I'm
sure you'll remember that I have not consulted you as a leader of the
Church, or any of your colleagues as leaders of the Church, on the
subject of partisan politics since the People's Party was dissolved."

He accepted this mild declaration of political independence without
protest, and I went to Provo, happily, a free man. The Republicans
nominated me by acclamation, and the chairman of the committee that came
to offer me the nomination was Colonel Wm. Nelson, then managing editor
of the Salt Lake Tribune, a Gentile, a former leader of the Liberal
Party, an opponent of Mormonism as practiced, who had fought the Church
hierarchy for years. Here was a new evidence that we were now beyond
the old quarrels--a further guarantee that we were prepared to take
our place among the states of the Union, free of parochialism and its
sectarian enmities.

The campaign gave every proof of such political emancipation. The
people divided, on national party lines, as completely as any American
community in my experience. The Democrats, having nominated Joseph L.
Rawlins, had the prestige that he had gained in helping to pass the
Enabling Act; a Democratic administration was in power in Washington;
Apostle Moses Thatcher, Brigham H. Roberts, and other members of the
Church inspired the old loyalty of the Mormons for the Democracy. But
the Republicans had been re-enforced by the dissolution of the Liberal
Party, whose last preceding candidate (Mr. Clarence E. Allen) went
on the stump for us. The Smith jealousy of Moses Thatcher divided the
Church influence; and though charges of ecclesiastical interference were
made on both sides, such interference was personal rather than official.
Mr. Rawlins was defeated, and I was elected delegate in Congress from
the territory--with the United States Senatorship practically assured to
me.

In the spring of 1895 the constitutional convention at Salt Lake City
formulated a provisional constitution for the new Utah; and, in the Fall
of the year, a general election was held to adopt this constitution and
to elect officers who should enter upon their duties as soon as Utah
became a state. The election was marked by a most significant and
important incident.

The Democrats, in their convention, nominated for Congress, Brigham H.
Roberts, one of the first seven "presidents of the seventy," and for
the United States Senate, Joseph L. Rawlins and Apostle Moses Thatcher.
Immediately, at a priesthood meeting of the hierarchy, Joseph F. Smith
denounced the candidacies of Roberts and Thatcher; and the grounds for
the denunciation were subsequently stated in the "political manifesto"
of April, 1896, in which the First Presidency announced, as a rule of
the Church, that no official of the Church should accept a political
nomination until he had obtained the permission of the Church
authorities and had learned from them whether he could "consistently
with the obligations already entered into with the Church, take upon
himself the added duties and labors and responsibilities of the new
position."

This action, I knew, was the result of the old jealousy of Thatcher
which the Smiths had so long nursed. But it was also in line with
the Church's pledge, to keep its leaders out of politics. By it,
the hierarchy bound themselves and set the people free. The leaders,
thereafter, according to their own "manifesto," could not enter politics
without the consent of their quorums; and, therefore, by any American
doctrine, they could not enter politics at all. Thatcher and Roberts
revolted against the inhibition as an infringement of their rights as
citizens, and it was so construed by the whole Democratic party; but
everyone knew that a Mormon apostle had no rights as a citizen that were
not second to his Church allegiance, and the political manifesto
simply made public the fact of such subservience, authoritatively. We
Republicans welcomed it, with our eyes on the future freedom of politics
in Utah; Thatcher and Roberts refused to accept the dictation of their
quorums, and what was practically an "edict of apostasy" went out
against them. They were defeated. The Republican candidates (Heber M.
Wells, as governor, and Clarence B. Allen, as member of Congress)
were elected. Thatcher, subsequently refusing to accept the "political
manifesto," was deposed from his apostolic authority, and deprived of
all priesthood in the Church. Roberts recanted and was reconciled with
the hierarchy.

[FOOTNOTE: He was afterwards elected to the House of Representatives and
was refused his seat as a polygamist.]

The Republicans elected forty-three out of sixty-three members of the
legislature, and everyone of these had been pledged to support me, for
the United States Senate, either by his convention, or by letter to me,
or by a promise conveyed to me by friends; and none of these pledges had
I solicited.

The rumors of my father's candidacy now became more general--although
he was a Democrat, although the new "political manifesto" bound him,
although it was doubtful whether the Senate would allow him to be
seated. Two influences were urging his election. One was the desire
of the Smith faction to have the First Councillor break the ice at
Washington for Apostle John Henry Smith, who was ambitious to be a
Senator and was disqualified by the fact that he was a Church leader and
a polygamist. The other was the desire of some Eastern capitalists to
have my father's vote in the Senate to aid them in the promotion of a
railroad from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. A preliminary agreement
for the construction of the road had already been signed by men who
represented that they had close affiliations with large steel interests
in the East, as one party, and my father as business representative of
a group of associates, including the Presidency of the Church. The
Church's interest in the project was communistic, and so was my
father's. But his vote and influence in the Senate would be valuable to
the promotion of the undertaking, and he had received written assurances
from Republican leaders, senators and politicians, that if he were
elected he would be allowed his seat.

As a result of our Republican success in the two political campaigns
that had just ended, I felt that I represented the independent votes
of both Mormons and Gentiles; and I decided to confront the First
Presidency (as such a representative) and try to make them declare
themselves in the matter of my father's candidacy. Not that I thought
his candidacy would be so vitally important for I did not then believe
the Church authorities had power to sway the legislature away from its
pledges. But every day, at home or abroad, I was being asked: "Are you
sure that the Church's retirement from politics is sincere?" My friends
were accepting my word, and I wished to add certainty to assurance that
the Church leaders intended to fulfill the covenant of their personal
honor and respect the constitution of the state by keeping out of
politics.

Without letting them know why I wished to see them, I procured an
appointment for the interview. When we were all seated at the table I
explained: "I'm going to Washington to attend to my duties as delegate
in Congress. Before I return, Utah will be admitted to statehood, and
the legislature will have to elect two United States Senators. As you
all know, I've been a candidate for one of these places. It has been
assured to me by the probably unanimous vote of the Republican caucus
when it shall convene." I laid my clenched hand on the table, knuckles
down, with a calculated abruptness. "The first senatorship from Utah is
there," I said.

"If it's to be disturbed by any ecclesiastical direction, I want to know
it now, so that the men who are supporting me may be aware of what
they must encounter if they persist in their support. I ask you, as
the Presidency of the Church: what are you going to do about the
Senatorship?" And I opened my hand and left it lying open before them,
for their decision.

It was evident enough, from their expressions, that this was a degree of
boldness to which they were unaccustomed. It was, evident also that
they were unprepared to reply to me. My father remained silent, with his
usual placidity, waiting for the others to fail to take the initiative.
President Woodruff blinked, somewhat bewildered, looking at my hand
as if the sight of its emptiness and the assumption of what it held,
confused him. Joseph F. Smith, frowning, eyed it askance with a darting
glance, apparently annoyed by the mute insolence of its demand for a
decision which he was not prepared to make.

My father, at length, looking at me imperturbably, asked: "Are you
inquiring of our personal view in this matter, Frank?"

The question contained, of course, a tacit allusion to my refusal to
consult the Church leaders about politics. I answered: "No, sir. I
already have your personal view. That is the only personal view I have
ever asked concerning the Senatorship. And I have purposely refrained
from any allusions to it of late, with you, because I wished to lay it
before the Presidency, as a body, formally, in order that there might be
no possible misunderstanding."

"In that case," he said, "the matter rests with President Woodruff."

The President, thus forced to an explanation, made a very characteristic
one. Several of the Church's friends in the East, he said, had urged
father's name for the Senatorship, but it was impossible to see how he
could be spared from the affairs of the priesthood. Zion needed him--and
so forth.

Apparently, to President Woodruff, the question of the Senatorship was
resolvable wholly upon Church considerations. His mind was so filled
with zealous hope for the advancement of "the Kingdom of God on Earth,"
that he seemed quite unaware of the political aspects of the case, the
violation of the Church's pledge, and the difficulties in the Senate
that would surely attend upon my father's election.

In the general discussion that ensued, both Joseph F. Smith and my
father spoke of the appeal that had been made to them on behalf of the
business interests of the community, with which the financial interests
of the East were now eager to co-operate. But both followed the
President's example in dismissing the possibility of the First
Councillor's candidacy as infringing upon his duties in the Church. I
pointed out to them that such a candidacy would be considered a breach
of faith, that it would raise a storm of protest. They accepted the
warning without comment, as if, having decided against the candidacy,
they did not need to consider such aspects of it. I kept my hand open
before them until my father said, with some trace of amusement: "You'd
better take up that senatorship, Frank. I think you're entitled to it."

I took it up, satisfied that there would be no more Church interference
in the matter. The decision seemed to me final and momentous. I
felt that the new Utah had faced the old and had been assured of
independence.

About this same time (although I cannot place it accurately in my
recollection), President Woodruff, speaking from the pulpit, declared
that it was the right of the priesthood of God to rule in all things on
earth, and that they had in no wise relinquished any of their authority.
The sermon raised a dangerous alarm in Salt Lake City, and I
was immediately summoned from Ogden (by a messenger from Church
headquarters) to see the proprietor and the editor of the Salt Lake
Tribune--which paper, it was feared, might oppose Utah's admission to
statehood, construing President Woodruff's remarks to mean that the
Church's political covenants were to be broken.

I found Mr. P. H. Lannan, the proprietor of the paper, anxious,
indignant and ready to denounce the Church and fight against the
admission to statehood. "When I heard of that sermon," he said, "my
heart went into my boots. We Gentiles have trusted everything to the
promises that have been made by the leaders of the Church. If the
Tribune had not supported the movement for statehood, the Gentiles would
never have taken the risk. I feel like a man who has sold his brethren
into slavery."

I assured him (as I was authorized to do) that President Woodruff
was not speaking for our generation of the Mormon people nor for his
associates in the leadership of the Church. I pleaded that it was the
privilege of an old man (and President Woodruff was nearly ninety) to
dream again the visions of his youth; his early life had been spent in
the belief that a Kingdom of God was to be set up in the valleys of
the mountains, governed by the priesthood and destined to rule all the
nations of the earth; he had planted the first flag of the country over
the Salt Lake Valley; he was still living in days that had passed for
all but him, and cherishing hopes that he alone had not abandoned. But
if the Tribune and the Gentiles would be magnanimous in this matter,
they would add to the gratitude that already bound the younger
generations of the Church to the fulfillment of its political promises.

Mr. Lannan responded instantly to the appeal to his generosity, and
after consultation with the editor-in-chief (Judge C. C. Goodwin) and
the managing editor (Colonel Wm. Nelson) the Tribune continued to trust
in Mormon good faith.

I reported the result of my conference to Church headquarters. The news
was received with relief and gratitude. And, in a long conversation
with the authorities, I was told that it would be incumbent on us of the
younger generation to see that all the Church's covenants to the nation
should be scrupulously observed.

I accepted my part of the charge with a light heart, and late in
November, 1895, I took train for Washington for convening of Congress.
Of the incidents of my brief services as delegate I shall write nothing
here, since those incidents were merely introductory to matters which
I shall have to consider later. But I was greeted with a great deal
of cordiality by the Republicans who credited me with having brought
a state and its national representation into the Republican party, and
they assured me that my own political future would be as bright as that
of my native state!

President Cleveland, on January 4, 1896, proclaimed Utah a sovereign
state of the Union, and its admission to statehood ended, of course, my
service as a territorial delegate. I stood beside his desk in the White
House to see him sign the proclamation--the same desk at which he had
received me, some eight years before, when I came beseeching him to be
merciful to the proscribed people whose freedom he was now announcing.
Perhaps the manumission that he was granting, gave a benignity to his
face. Perhaps the emotion in my own mind transfigured him to me. But
I saw smiles and pathos in the ruggedness of his expression of
congratulation as he said a few words of hope that Utah would fulfill
every promise made, on her behalf, by her own people, and every happy
expectation that had been entertained for her by her friends. His
enormous rigid bulk, a little bowed now by years of service, seemed
softened, as his face was, to the graciousness of clement power. He gave
me the pen with which he had signed the paper, and dismissed me to some
of the happiest hours of my life.

I walked out of the White House dispossessed of office, but now, at
last, a citizen of the Republic. I stood on the steps of the White
House, to look at the city through whose streets I had so many times
wandered in a worried despair, and I saw them with an emotion I would
not dare transcribe. I do not know that the sun was really shining, but
in my memory the scene has taken on all the accumulated brightnesses of
all the radiant days I ever knew in Washington. And I remember that
I saw the Washington Monument and the Capitol with a sense of almost
affectionate personal possession!

In an excited exultation I went to thank the men who had helped us
in the House and the Senate--to wire jubilant messages home--to
send Governor Wells the pen with which the President had signed his
proclamation, and to procure from friends in the War Department the
first two flags that had been made with forty-five stars--the star of
Utah the forty-fifth. Wherever I went, some sinister aspect seemed to
have gone out of things; and I remember that I enjoyed so much the sense
of their new inhostility, that I planned to delay my return to Utah
until I had made a pilgrimage to every spot in Washington where I had
despaired of our future.

All this may seem almost sentimental to you, who perhaps accept your
citizenship as an unregarded commonplace of natural right. But, for me,
the freeing of our people was an emancipation to be compared only to the
enfranchisement of the Southern slaves and greater even than that,
for we had come from citizenship in the older states, and we could
appreciate our deprivation, smart under our ostracism, and resent the
rejection that set us apart from the rest of the nation as an inferior
people unfit for equal rights.

I sat down to my dinner, that evening, with the appetite that comes
from a day of fasting and emotional excitement; and I recall that I was
planning a visit of self-congratulation to Arlington, for the morrow,
when one of the hotel bell-boys brought me a telegram. I opened it
eagerly--to enjoy the expected message of felicitation from home.

It was in cipher, and that fact gave me a pause of doubt, since the
days of political mysteries and their cipher telegrams were over for us,
thank God! It was signed with President Woodruff's cipher name.

I went to my room to translate it, and I did not return to my dinner.
The message read: "It is the will of the Lord that your father shall be
elected Senator from Utah."

I do not need to explain all the treacherous implications of that
announcement. As soon as I had recovered my breath, I wired back, for
such interpretation as they should choose to give: "God bless Utah. I am
coming home,"--and packed my trunk, for trouble.






Chapter VII. The First Betrayals



Before I reached Utah, my friends, Ben Rich and James Devine, met me, on
the train. The news of President Woodruff's "revelation" had percolated
through the whole community. The 

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