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

by Frank J. Cannon; Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins

If the tempted girl turned to one of her women friends, and besought her to say, on her honor, whether she thought that plural marriage was right, the other was likely enough to answer: "Yes, yes. Indeed it is. Promise me you won't tell a living soul. Tell me you'll die first.... I'm married to Brother I,——, the leader of the ward choir."

If she asked her mother: "Tell me. Is plural marriage wrong?" the mother could only reply: "Oh—I don't know—I don't know. Your father said it was right, and I accepted it—and we practiced it—and you have always loved your other brothers and sisters, and it seems to me it can't be wrong, since we have lived it. But—Oh, I don't know, daughter. I don't know."

The man who is tempting her knows. He has the word of an apostle, the example of the Prophet, the secret teaching of the Church. He courts her as any other religious young girl might be courted—with little attentions, at the meetings, over the music books—and he has, to aid him, a religious exaltation in her, induced by his plea that she is to enter into the mystery of the holy covenant, to become one of the most faithful of a persecuted Church, to defy the wicked laws of its enemies. She is just as happy in her betrothal as any other innocent girl of her age. Even the secrecy is sweet to her. And then, some evening, they saunter down a side street to a strange house—or even to a back orchard where a man is waiting in a cowl under a tree (perhaps vulgarly disguised as a woman with a veil over his face)—and they are married in a mutter of which she hears nothing.

Such a case was related to me by a horrified mother who had discovered that the marriage ceremony had been performed by an accomplice of the libertine who had seduced her daughter and since confessed his crime. But whether the ceremony be performed by a priest of the Church or by a more unauthorized scoundrel, the girl is equally at the mercy of her "husband" and equally betrayed in the world. Even in this case of the pretended marriage, the elders of the ward hushed up the threatened prosecution because the authorities of the Church objected to a proceeding that might expose other plural marriages more orthodox.

Hundreds of Mormon men and women personally thanked me by letter or in interviews at the Tribune office, for our editorial attacks upon the hierarchy for encouraging these horrors. Strangers spoke to me on railroad trains, thanking me and telling me of cases. Three Mormon physicians, themselves priests of the Church, told me of innumerable instances that had come to them in their practice, and said that they did not know what was to become of the community. One Mormon woman wrote me from Mexico to say that she had exiled herself there with her husband and his two plural wives, and that she felt she had worked out sufficient atonement for all her descendants; yet she saw girls of the family on the verge of entering into plural marriage—if they had not already done so—and she begged us to continue our newspaper exposures, so that others might be saved from the bitter experiences of her life.

President Winder met me on the street in 1905, towards the close of the year, and said: "Frank, you need not continue your fight against plural marriage. President Smith has stopped it." "Then," I replied, "two things are evident: I have been telling the truth when I said that plural marriage had been renewed—in spite of the authorized denials—and if President Smith has stopped it now, he has had authority over it all the time."

To me, or to any other well-informed citizen of Utah, President Winder's admission was not necessary to prove Smith's responsibility. In the April conference of 1904, Smith had read an "official statement," signed by him, prohibiting plural marriages and threatening to excommunicate any officer or member of the Church who should solemnize one; and this official statement was carried to the Senate committee by Professor James E. Talmage, and offered in proof that the Church was keeping its covenant.

For us, in Utah, the declaration served merely to illuminate the dark places of ecclesiastical bad faith. We knew that from the year 1900 down, there had never been a sermon preached in any Mormon tabernacle, by any of the general authorities of the Church, against the practice of plural marriage, or against the propriety of the practice, or against the sanctity of the doctrine. We knew, on the contrary, that upon numerous occasions, at funerals and in public assemblages, Joseph F. Smith and John Henry Smith and others of the hierarchy, had proclaimed the doctrine as sacred. We knew that it was still being taught in the secret prayer meetings. Practically all the leading authorities of the Church were living in plural marriage. Some of them had taken new wives since the manifesto. None of them had been actually punished. All were in high favor. And though Joseph F. Smith denied his responsibility, every one knew that none of these things could be, except with his active approval.

Perhaps, for a brief time, while Smoot's case was still before the Senate, some check was put upon the renewal of polygamy. But, even then, there were undoubtedly, occasional marriages allowed, where the parties were so situated as to make concealment perfect. And all checks were withdrawn when Smoot's case was favorably disposed of, and the Church found itself protected by the political power of the administration at Washington and by a political and financial alliance with "the Interests."

Today, in spite of the difficulty of discovering plural marriages, because of the concealments by which they are protected, the Salt Lake Tribune is publishing a list of more than two hundred "new" polygamists with the dates and circumstances of their marriages; and these are probably not one tenth of all the cases. During President Taft's visit to Salt Lake City, in 1909, Senator Thomas Kearns, one of the proprietors of the Tribune, offered to prove to one of the President's confidants hundreds of cases of new polygamy, if the President would designate two secret service men to investigate. I believe, from my own observation, that there are more plural wives among the Mormons today than there were before 1890. Then the young men married early, and were chiefly monogamists. Now the change in economic conditions has raised the age at which men marry; it has made more bachelors than there were when simpler modes of life prevailed. The young women have fewer offers of marriage, and more of these come from well-to-do polygamists. The girls are still taught, as they have always been, that marriage is necessary to salvation; and they are betrayed into plural marriage by natural conditions as well as by the persuasions of the Church.