http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7066The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Prophet in Utah
by Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7066Snippets:
"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."
...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.
...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.
...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."
-------------------------------------------------------------
"...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....."
---------------------------------------------------------------
"...
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..."
------------------------------------------------------------
"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...."