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.