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This eBook was 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.

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