Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft Part 6

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

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

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

He answered, firmly, that it did; that the brethren in Was.h.i.+ngton found it imperative; that it was the will of the Lord; that we must submit.

I saw their faces flush and then slowly pale again--and the storm broke.

One after another they rose and protested, hoa.r.s.ely, in the voice of tears, that they were willing to suffer "persecution unto death" rather than to violate the covenants which they had made "in holy places"

with the women who had trusted them. One after another they offered themselves for any sacrifice but this betrayal of the women and children to whom they owed an everlasting faith. And a manlier lot of men never spoke in a manlier way. Not a petty word was uttered. Their thought was not for themselves. Their grief was not selfish. Their protests had a dignity in pathos that shook me in spite of myself.

When they had done, my father rose again with a face that seemed to bear the marks of their grief while it repressed his own. He dwelt anew on the long efforts of our attorney and our friends in Congress to resist what we believed to be unconst.i.tutional measures to repress our practice of a religious faith. But we were citizens of a nation. We were required to obey its laws. And when we found, by the highest judicial interpretation of statute and const.i.tution, that we were without grounds for our plea of religious immunity, we had but the alternative either of defying the power of the whole nation or of submitting ourselves to its authority. For his part he was willing to do the will of the Lord. And since the Prophet of G.o.d, after a long season of prayer, had submitted this revelation as the will of the Lord, he was ready for the sacrifice.

The leaders of the Church had no right to think of themselves. They must remember how loyally the people had sacrificed their substance and risked their safety to guard their brethren who were living in plural marriage. Those brethren must not be ungrateful now. They must not now refuse to make their sacrifice, in answer to the sacrifices that had been made for them so often. The people had long protected them. Now they must protect the people.

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

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

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

I had felt my brother strong under my hand. He rose, when I concluded.

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

Joseph F. Smith was one of the last to speak. With a face like wax, his hands outstretched, in an intensity of pa.s.sion that seemed as if it must sweep the a.s.sembly, he declared that he had covenanted, at the altar of G.o.d's house, in the presence of his Father, to cherish the wives and children whom the Lord had given him. They were more to him than life.

They were dearer to him than happiness. He would rather choose to stand, with them, alone--persecuted--proscribed--outlawed--to wait until G.o.d in His anger should break the nation with His avenging stroke. But--

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

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

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

Chapter V. On the Road to Freedom

In any discussion of the public affairs that make the subject matter of this narrative, a line of discrimination must be drawn at the year 1890.

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

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

I, have described the promulgation and acceptance of "the manifesto"

with such circ.u.mstance and detail, because of what has since occurred in Utah. Let me add that some two weeks later the General Conference of the Church endorsed the President's p.r.o.nouncement as "authoritative and binding." And let me point out that it was the first and only law of the Mormon Church ever so sustained by triple sanct.i.ties--"revealed" as a command from G.o.d, accepted by the prophets in solemn fraternity a.s.sembled, and ratified by the vote of the entire "congregation of Israel" before it was declared to be binding upon men.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His humorous idea of my undertaking gave its color to my beginnings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it was all theory! I recognize, now, that I preached a Republicanism that was an ideal of what it should be, rather than any modern faith of the "practical politician." I had gathered it from my reading, from hearing the speeches in Congress, from sympathetic conferences with the great men who were responsible for the dogmas of the party; and every a.s.surance of grace that their ability could give and my credulity accept, I proclaimed religiously as a political salvation to our people.

I built up an ideal, and then judged the party thereafter according to the measure of that ideal. When I found that some of the charges against the Republican party were true--charges which I had indignantly repelled--I was as shocked as any pious wors.h.i.+pper who ever found that his idol had feet of clay. Our people, having accepted the faith with as simple a hope as it was offered, were as easily turned from it when they found that it was false. The political moods of Utah, for its first few years of statehood, were a puzzle to the "practical" leaders of the parties; but to us who understood the impulses of honesty that moved the changes, things were as clear as they were encouraging.

During the previous summer in Was.h.i.+ngton, I had met General James S.

Clarkson, then president of the National League of Republican Clubs; and now, on his invitation, in the Spring of 1891, Rich and I went to Louisville to speak before the national convention of the league.

Through the kindness of General Clarkson, I was given the official recognition of a perfunctory place on the executive committee of the league's national committee, and came into touch with many of the party leaders. It was about this time, I imagine, that they conceived the idea of using the grat.i.tude of the Mormons in order to carry Utah and the surrounding states in which the Mormon vote might const.i.tute a balance of political power. I know that the idea was old and established when I came upon it, in 1894, during the campaign for statehood. As I also found, still later, the Republican leaders and the business interests with which they were in relation, had their eyes on a distant prospect of fabulous financial schemes in which the secret funds of the Church were to help in the building of railroads and the promoting of other enterprises of a.s.sociated capital. But at the time of which I am writing, I had not had sufficient experience to suspect the motives of the men who encouraged our work in Utah; and I accepted in good faith their public declarations that the sole aim of the party was to serve the needs of the people of the United States--and therefore of the people of Utah!

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

The People's Party (the Church Party) had been dissolved (June, 1891) by the formal action of the executive committee, under the direct instruction of the leaders of the Church. The tendency was for its members to organize themselves immediately as a Democratic party.

They were led by such brilliant and trusted defenders of the Church as Franklin S. Richards, Chas. C. Richards, Wm. H. King, James H. Moyle, Brigham H. Roberts and Apostle Moses Thatcher; and a group of abler advocates could not have been found in any state in the Union. It was against the sentiment of the Mormon people, vivified by such inspiring Democracy as these men taught, that our little organization of Republicans had to make headway; and an anxiety began to show itself among the Church authorities for a less unequal division, and consequently a greater appearance of political independence, among the faithful.

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

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

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

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

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

The campaign proved, however, that if the Church leaders would only keep their hands off, there was ample strength in either party to make a presentation of national issues of sufficient appeal to divide the people on party lines; and it was evident that the people would choose the party that made the best showing of principles and candidates.

"Nuggets of Truth" left us with a nasty sense that at no hour were we a.s.sured of safety from ecclesiastical interference--or the nefarious attempt to make an appearance of such interference--in our political affairs. But the disaster that followed, in this instance, was so prompt that we could hope it would prove a lesson.

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

They could foresee that their dissolution as a separate force meant statehood for Utah--a sovereignty in itself that would leave the Gentiles in the minority and without any appeal to the nation. Under territorial conditions, although the non-Mormons were less than one-third of the population, they had two-thirds of the political power.