Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft Part 3

Mrs. Sandford, when she entered, certainly looked the very lady to do the thing with gentle skill. She was handsome, with an animated expression, dark-eyed, dark-haired, charming in her costume, a woman of the smiling world, but maturely sincere and unaffected. I took a somewhat distracted impression of her greeting, and heard him begin to explain my proposal to her, as one hears a "silent partner" formally consulted by a man who has already made up his mind. But when I glanced at her, seated, her manner had changed. She was listening as if she were used to being consulted and knew the responsibilities of decision. She had the abstracted eye of impersonal consideration--silent--with now and then a slow, meditative glance at me.

Her first question seemed merely femininely curious as to the domestic aspects of polygamy. How did the women endure it?

I repeated a conversation I had once had with Frances Willard, who had said: "The woman's heart must ache in polygamy." To which I had made the obvious reply: "Don't women's hearts ache all over the world? Is there any condition of society in which women do not bear more than an equal share of the suffering?"

Mrs. Sandford asked me pointedly whether I was living in polygamy?

No, I was not.

Did I believe in it?

I believed that those did who practiced it.

Why didn't I practice it?

Those who practiced it believed that it had been authorized by a divine revelation. I had not received such a revelation. I did not expect to.

Our talk warmed into a very intimate discussion of the lives of the Mormon people, but I supposed that she was moved only by a curiosity to which I was accustomed--a curiosity that was not necessarily sympathetic--the curiosity one might have about the domestic life of a Mohammedan. I took advantage of her curiosity to lead up to an explanation of how the proscription of polygamy was driving young Mormons into the practice, instead of frightening them from it. And so I arrived at another recountal of the miserable condition of persecution and suffering which I had come to ask her husband help us relieve; and I made my appeal again, to them both, with something of despair, because of my failure with him, and perhaps with greater effect because of my despair. She listened thoughtfully, her hands clasped.

It did not seem that I had reached her--until she turned to him, and said unexpectedly "It seems to me that this is an opportunity--a larger opportunity than any I see here--to do a great deal of good."

He did not appear as surprised as I was. He made some joking reference to his income and asked her if she would be willing to live on a salary of--How much was the salary of the Chief Justice of Utah?

I thought it was about $3,000 a year.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars a month," he said. "How many bonnets will that buy?"

"No," she retorted, "you can't put the blame on my millinery bill. If that's been the cause of your hesitation, I'll agree to dress as becomes the wife of a poor but upright judge."

In such a happy spirit of good-natured raillery, my pet.i.tion was provisionally entertained, till I could see the President; and it is one of the curiosities of experience, as I look back upon it now, that a decision so momentous in the history of Utah owed its induction to the wisdom of a woman and was confirmed with a domestic pleasantry.

I left them after we had arrived at the tacit understanding that if President Cleveland should make the appointment, Mr. Sandford would accept it with the end in view that I had proposed. I went to report my progress, in a cipher telegram, to Salt Lake City, and I recall the peculiarly mixed satisfaction with which I regarded my work, as I walked the streets of New York after this interview. In all that city of millions, I knew, there were few if any men who were the equal of my father in the essentials of manhood; and yet, before he could enjoy the liberties of which they were so lightly unconscious, he must endure the shame of a prison. I was rejoicing because I was succeeding in getting for him a sentence that should not be ruinous! I was pleased because a prospective judge had been persuaded to be not too harsh to him!

It did not make me bitter. I realized that the peculiar faith which we had accepted was responsible for our peculiar suffering. I saw that we were working out our human destiny; and if that destiny was not of G.o.d, but merely the issue of human impulsion, still our only prospect of success would come of our bearing with experience patiently to make us strong.

When I went back to Mr. Hewitt, to tell him of my success, I consulted with him upon the best way of approaching Mr. Cleveland. And he was not encouraging. In his opinion of the President, he had, as I could see, the impatient resentment which a quick-minded, nervous, small-bodied man has for the big, slow one whose mental operations are stubbornly deliberate and leisurely. And he was obviously irritated by the President's continual a.s.sumption that he was better than his party.

"He's honest," he said, "by right of original discovery of what honesty is. No one can question his honesty. But as soon as he discovers a better thing than he knew previously, he announces it as if it were the discovery of a new planet. It may have been a commonplace for a generation. That doesn't signify. He announces it with such ponderosity that the world believes it's as prodigious as his sentences!"

As for my own mission: I would have to be persistent, patient, and--lucky. "You'll have to be lucky, if you intend to persuade him to acquire any information. He's been so successful in instructing mankind that it's hard to get him to see he doesn't know all he ought to know about a public question. But he's honest and he's courageous. If you can convince him that your view is right, he'll carry but the conviction in spite of everything. In fact he'll be all the better pleased if it requires fearlessness and defiance of general sentimentality to carry it out."

He gave me a letter to Mr. William C. Whitney, then Secretary of the Navy, explaining my purpose in coming to Was.h.i.+ngton, and asking him to obtain for me an interview with President Cleveland without using Mr.

Hewitt's name. Then he shook hands with me, and wished me success. "I have the faith," he said, "that is without hope."

That expressed my own feeling. The faith that was without hope!

Chapter III. Without A Country

So I came to Was.h.i.+ngton. So I entered the capital of the government that commanded my allegiance and inspired my fear. I wonder whether another American ever saw that city with such eyes of envy, of aspiration, of wistful pride, of daunted admiration. Here were all the consecrations of a nation's memories, and they thrilled me, even while they pierced me with the sense that I was not, and might well despair of ever being, a citizen of their glory. Here were the monuments of patriotism in Statuary Hall, erected to the men whose histories had been the inspiration of my boyhood; and I remember how I stood before them, conscious that I was now almost an outlaw from their communion of splendor. I remember how I saw, with an indescribable conflict of feelings, the ranked graves of the soldiers in the cemetery at Arlington, and recollected that this very ground had been taken from General Lee, that heroic opponent of Federal authority--and read the tablet, "How sleep the brave who sink to rest by all their country's wishes bless'd,"--and bowed in spirit to the nation's benediction upon the men who had upheld its power. I was awed by a prodigious sense of the majesty of that power. I saw with fear its immovability to the struggles of our handful of people. And at night, walking under the trees of Lafayette Park, with all the odors of the southern Spring among the leaves, I looked at the lighted front of the White House and realized that behind the curtains of those quiet windows sat the ruler who held the almost absolute right of life and death over our community--as if it were the palace of a Czar that I must soon enter, with a pet.i.tion for clemency, which he might refuse to entertain!

When I had been in Was.h.i.+ngton, four years before, as secretary to Delegate John T. Caine of Utah, I had felt a younger a.s.surance that our resistance would slowly wear out the Federal authority and carry us through to statehood. Four years of disaster had starved out that hope.

The proposition had been established that Congress had supreme control over the territories; and there was no virtue either in our religious a.s.sumption of warrant to speak for G.o.d, or in our plea of inherent const.i.tutional right to manage our own affairs. Thirty years earlier, my father had been elected Senator from the proposed state of Utah, and he had been rejected. In thirty years so little progress had been made! The way that was yet to travel seemed very long and very dark.

Out of this mood of despondence I had to lift myself by an act of will.

There, Was.h.i.+ngton itself helped me against itself. I made a pilgrimage of courage to its commemorations of courage, and drew an inspiration of hope from its monuments to the achievements of its past. And particularly I went to the house in which my father had lived when he had had his part in the statesman life of the capital, and animated my resolution with the thought that I must succeed in order that he might be restored in public honor.

I narrate all this personal incident of emotion in the hope that it may help to explain a success that might otherwise seem inexplicable.

The Mormon Church had, for years, employed every art of intrigue and diplomacy to protect itself in Was.h.i.+ngton. I wish to make plain that it was not by any superior cunning of negotiation that my mission succeeded. I undertook the task almost without instruction; I performed it without falsehood; I had nothing in my mind but an honest loyalty for my own people, a desire to be a citizen of my native country, and a filial devotion to the one man in the world, whom I most admired.

When I delivered my letter of introduction from Mr. Hewitt to Mr.

William C. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy, I found him very busy with his work in his department--carrying out the plans that established the modern American navy and ent.i.tled him to be called the "father" of it.

He withdrew from the men who were discussing designs and figures at a table in his room, and sat with me before a window that looked out upon the White House and its grounds; and he listened to me, interestedly, genially, but with a thought still (as I could see) for the affairs that my arrival had interrupted. He struck me as a man who was used to having many weighty matters together on his mind, without finding his attention crowded by them all, and without being impatient in his consideration of any.

I developed with him an idea which I had been considering: that the President might not only help the Mormons by taking up their case, but might gain political prestige for the coming campaign for re-election, by adjusting the dissentions in Utah. He heard me with a twinkle. He thought an interview might be arranged. He made an appointment to see me in the afternoon and to have with him Colonel Daniel S. Lamont, the President's secretary, who was then Mr. Cleveland's political "trainer."

My meeting with Colonel Lamont, in the afternoon, began jocularly.

"This," Mr. Whitney introduced me, "is the young man who has a plan to use that mooted--and booted--Mormon question to re-elect the President."

"Hardly that, Mr. Secretary," I said. "I have a plan to help my father and his colleagues to regain their citizens.h.i.+p. If President Cleveland's re-election is essential to it, I suppose I must submit. You know I'm a Republican."

They laughed. We sat down. And I found at once that Colonel Lamont understood the situation in Utah, thoroughly. He had often discussed it, he said, with the Church's agents in Was.h.i.+ngton. I went over the situation with him, as I had gone over it with Mr. Sandford, in careful detail. He seemed surprised at my a.s.surance that my father and the other proscribed leaders of the Church would submit themselves to the courts if they could do so on the conditions that I proposed; I convinced him of the possibility by referring him to Mr. Richards, the Church's attorney in Was.h.i.+ngton, for a confirmation of it. I pointed out that if these leaders surrendered, President Cleveland could be made the direct beneficiary, politically, of their composition with the law.

Colonel Lamont was a small, alert man with a conciseness of speech and manner that is a.s.sociated in my memory with the bristle of his red mustache cut short and hard across a decisive mouth. He radiated nervous vitality; and I understood, as I studied him, how President Cleveland, with his infinite patience for [** missing text?**] survived so well in the mult.i.tudinous duties of his office--having as his secretary a man born with the ability to cut away the non-essentials, and to pa.s.s on to Mr. Cleveland only the affairs worthy of his careful deliberation.

I was doubtful whether I should tell Colonel Lamont and Mr. Whitney of my conversation with Mr. Sandford. I decided that their considerateness ent.i.tled them to my full confidence, and I told them all--begging them, if I was indiscreet or undiplomatic, to charge the offense to my lack of experience rather than to debit it against my cause.

They pa.s.sed it off with banter. It was understood that the President should not be told--and that I should not tell him--of my talk with Mr. Sandford. Colonel Lamont undertook to arrange an audience with Mr.

Cleveland for me. "You had better wait," he said, "until I can approach him with the suggestion that there's a young man here, from Utah, whom he ought to see."

I knew, then, that I was at least well started on the open road to success. I knew that if Colonel Lamont said he would help me, there would be no difficulties in my way except those that were large in the person of the President himself.

Two days later I received the expected word from Colonel Lamont, and I went to the White House as a man might go to face his own trial. I met the secretary in one of the eastern upstairs rooms of the official apartments; and after the usual crowd had pa.s.sed out, he led me into the President's office--which then overlooked the Was.h.i.+ngton monument, the Potomac and the Virginia sh.o.r.e. Mr. Cleveland was working at his desk.

Colonel Lamont introduced me by name, and added, "the young man from Utah, of whom I spoke."

The President did not look up. He was signing some papers, bending heavily over his work. It took him a moment or two to finish; then he dropped his pen, pushed aside the papers, turned awkwardly in his swivel chair and held out his hand to me. It was a cool, firm hand, and its grasp surprised me, as much as the expression of his eyes--the steady eyes of complete self-control, composure, intentness.

I had come with a prejudice against him; I was a partisan of Mr. Blame, whom he had defeated for the Presidency; I believed Mr. Blame to be the abler man. But there was something in Mr. Cleveland's hand and eyes to warn me that however slow-moving and even dull he might appear, the energy of a firm will compelled and controlled him. It stiffened me into instant attention.

He made some remark to Colonel Lamont to indicate that our conversation was to occupy about half an hour. He asked me to be seated in a chair at the right-hand side of his desk. He said almost challengingly: "You're the young man they want I should talk to about the Utah question."

The tone was not exactly unkind, but it was not inviting. I said, "Yes, sir."

He looked at me, as a judge might eye the suspect of circ.u.mstantial evidence. "You're the son of one of the Mormon leaders."

I admitted it.