Chapter I. In the Days of the Raid

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.