Review: Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel

 

Is there even a statue of Frank Jenne Cannon in Ogden, Utah? Maybe a photo somewhere in a city or Weber County building, or perhaps Union Station, a passion of Frank Cannon's? After all, he was the fellow who helped create today's Ogden Standard-Examiner newspaper (still kicking -- barely -- as the largest Utah -- sort of -- daily newspaper still printing its paper). He was the Standard's first firebrand editor. I am proud of having wrote editorials in a newspaper Frank once penned them for,

He was one of Utah's first U.S. senators. Before that, he was a territorial representative to the U.S. Congress.

His talents for patience, diplomacy, coupled with his Utah elite name, enabled him to travel back east, whether to New York City or Washington D.C., and negotiate with U.S. presidents and congressmen over touchy issues, from how hard Congress would hammer the territory of Utah, which Gentile judges would sentence Utah polygamists, and also the fate of Utah's impending statehood.

When the man spoke in public, he would fill halls beyond capacity. In between bouts of drunkenness, LDS Church leaders pressured him to finish ghost-writing assignments, including "The Life of Joseph Smith," a book credited to his father.

Frank J. Cannon is buried in Ogden. As Val Holley notes in his superb biography of Frank J., "Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel," The University of Utah Press, 2020, his death in 1934, at 74, attracted only a few plaudits, most notably from early Ogden journalist Olin A. Kennedy, who noted that "more than any other man," Cannon "negotiated [the] truce that led to peace between Mormons and Gentiles here in Utah," records Holley.

During the last score years of his life, Utah political and ecclesiastical leaders had other words to describe Frank. They included "unspeakable," "vile," and even "Son of Perdition," a quote allegedly from LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith. 

Frank J. Cannon was born in 1859 to George Q. Cannon and his polygamous wife, Sarah Jenne Cannon. He married in 1878, to Martha Brown, of Ogden. It would last until her death in 1909. Although Frank, a graduate of Deseret University at 19, impressed with his skills in writing, persuasion and business acumen, he was prone to alcoholic binges and, soon after his marriage, adultery. He seduced an immigrant servant woman, impregnating her. The baby was eventually adopted to a relative family. 

Holley doesn't gloss over Frank's problems with inebriation. The alcoholic binges, likely fueled from business, political and family/ecclesiastical stress, were frequent enough that Frank's family, notably half-brother and business partner Abram, would have to search for him through Salt Lake City red-light districts, including brothels. 

In the book, family father and leader George Q. Cannon is pictured as an authority figure, spending little quality time with his sons, preferring to lecture and counsel them through letters. It's fair to wonder if the emotional absence of a father figure contributed to his sons' dysfunctions. Besides Frank, an older, more-favored half-brother, general authority John Q. Cannon, seduced his own wife's sister. The affair ended in tragedy when the woman, Louie Wells -- briefly married to the temporarily excommunicated and divorced John Q. -- suffered a miscarriage and later died. 

Half-brother Abram, who eventually became member of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, followed his father in embracing polygamy. One of the reasons was dad's desire to make sure a deceased son would have an eternal marriage beyond the grave. This kind of stress, including overwork, likely contributed to Abram's early death at 37, from meningitis. He had recently taken a fourth wife, notes Holley.

Although his adverse antics were frequently lamented -- and later in life re-emphasized by his former allies -- Frank largely escaped any long-term ecclesiastical sanction in the first half of his life. Frankly, his talents were needed by the territory of Utah and its dominant faith. He had an abundance of knowledge and eloquence that often impressed financiers and politicians. The LDS Church of the latter half of the 19th century faced real, and frightening possibilities of losing all its economic capital as well as imprisonment of its leaders. 

Over a period of a decade plus, Frank contributed to a gradual reduction of congressional punishment towards Utah. Accomplishments included easing judicial pressure on the state, helping the First Manifesto against polygamy occur and convincing Washington D.C. powers that Utah was ready to be admitted as a state. These happenings, chronicled in detail by Holley's meticulous research, were not easy accomplishments. They were frequent setbacks, including the capture of family patriarch George Q. Cannon. In the biography, Holley details a hare-brained scheme to rescue George Q. via a holdup on a train. Fortunately, the plan never reached a felonious stage. 

Frank was an opponent of polygamy, accurately believing that its eradication was the key to Utah's acceptance. The church's failure to stick to its Manifesto promises for a generation would be integral to his eventual disaffection with church leaders, his criticism of, and excommunication. 

Holley covers well the power struggle between Frank and his father, George Q., to become a Republican U.S. senator in 1896. Frank was the favorite for the seat. His father, backed by LDS Church leadership, ran a coy, shadow campaign, falsely denying he wanted the position. In a long struggle, Frank outlasted the wishes of dad and the First Presidency, winning appointment from the Legislature.

The cycles of partisan power had prevented his election to the House -- as a Republican -- a few years earlier, although he briefly served there just prior to becoming a senator. His nearly three-year tenure in the Senate was rocky. Although his pro-silver politics and opposition to a single gold standard was popular, Holley writes that his opposition to a trade bill that favored sugar interests sunk his popularity in Utah. Frank's attempts to grow a "Silver Republican" party were not successful and he was not re-elected in 1899, although his seat would remain vacant until 1901. He eventually became a Democrat.

George Q. Cannon's death in 1901 initially reinforced Frank's Mormon faith, which he had severely tested with criticisms of church leaders, including Heber J. Grant. Holley notes that his tithing was far, far more impressive than his long church-reinstated brother John Q's offerings, for example.

Yet his break with the church was imminent. The ascendency of Joseph F. Smith as president, as well as clandestine LDS polygamy despite two Manifestos, hastened his withdrawal. He also opposed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot's election to the U.S. Senate. During a short tenure as editor with the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune, Frank's harsh editorials against the LDS Church leadership, notably Joseph F. Smith, led to his excommunication. It was an ugly split, one that contributes to Frank's diminished status in history today. 

In 1909 his wife Martha died. Soon after he married her younger sister, May. That union lasted until his death. 

He would move to Denver, work as a journalist. He used his skills there to help bring down a corrupt municipality and prevent a corrupt mayor from becoming a U.S. senator. He later moved further in muckraking, with Mormonism as his target. He co-authored two books. The more successful was "Under the Prophet in Utah," which led Frank to a several-year success on the lecture circuit, condemning Mormonism, its prophet, and extolling Christianity as a solution to the nation's ills. The book even led to a Broadway play, "'Polygamy."

During this period of anti-Mormon activism, Frank would occasionally be followed and challenged by LDS missionaries and other church leaders while on the lecture circuit. He became a permanent major villain within the church. Nevertheless, he was a still popular draw when he visited Utah to lecture or promote his books, which were also serialized in magazines.

The final dozen years of his life were quieter, although he still retained enough prominence to appear before Congress and lobby presidents for a pro-silver policy. Bimetallism, silver, was likely his biggest passion. Late in life he pitched a plan to revive China's economy through a massive loan of silver to that nation. He advocated silver policies in writing up to his death, notes Holley.

A promising business venture in ores, including lead, was hampered by the Great Depression. His once fervent faith in Christianity cooled during the Roaring 20s. Holley recounts that late in life Frank considered himself an agnostic. Two of his three children died before him; his son months before his own death. Holley surmises that Frank's death from an abdominal condition may have resulted in part from grief over his son's death. 

I have omitted much of Frank's business ventures in this review. They do involve a substantial portion of Holley's research. They vary from bookselling ventures with his brothers to newspaper startups and acquisitions, as well as frequent times Frank represented the Mormon leadership in business. He encountered businesspeople of principle as well as charlatans. He invested in power companies, as well as fads including "liquid air" and "vapor light." He published books and invested in a planned film adaptation of "Under the Prophet in Utah." It turned out to be a scam that landed the swindler a felony conviction.

Holley accurately presents the paradox that was Frank J. Cannon. He's a difficult man to judge. Perhaps we shouldn't. He was imperfect in morals, and in his anger exaggerated claims against the faith he had once espoused. But, as Holley notes, his detractors exaggerated his claims, and withdrew any merit he had earned. Frank J. Cannon was also accurate in a chief charge -- that church leaders were not truthful -- for a long time -- in repudiating polygamy. 

It's well past time that Frank J., the scoundrel of the Cannons, get some notice for his many achievements. Holley's biography is a valuable, interesting read. Maybe it will lead to a statue for Frank J. (You can buy the biography via Amazon here).

-- Doug Gibson

Enjoy the Cal Grondahl cartoon below.

Isaac Russell, New York Times journalist, PR specialist for the Mormon Church

(Originally published at StandardBlogs in 2012)

At this year’s Mormon History Association conference in Calgary, two contributors, Michael Harold Paulos and Kenneth L. Cannon II, continued an annual practice of producing a keepsake booklet for attendees. This year’s booklet provided an abridgement of the Reed Smoot U.S. Senate hearings from Feb. 20, 1907, as well as a short feature on essays and correspondence provided by newspaperman Isaac Russell, both a Mormon and leading journalist in the first 20 years of the 20th century. In the booklet, the authors recount how Russell used his influence to recruit former President Theodore Roosevelt to harshly criticize a much publicized “magazine crusade” against the Mormon Church.

As the authors mention, Russell, whose jobs included a stint at the New York Times, was frustrated enough to write letters to magazines such as “Pearson’s,” “McClure’s,” and “Everybody’s,” who engaged in muckraking against the Mormons. In 1911, Russell, in what proved to be a brilliant public relations stroke, recruited the still very popular former President Theodore Roosevelt to criticize the muckrakers. In a long letter to Roosevelt, Russell claimed that the attacks against Mormonism in the magazines, which largely dealt with allegations of polygamy and theological power, originated from older stories, promoted by the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune, which had circulated the accusations that Roosevelt — while president — backed Sen. Reed Smoot’s continued tenure in the Senate in exchange for the Mormons delivering the electoral votes of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming to Republicans in 1908.

Russell’s letter, carefully crafted, was designed to strike nerves within Roosevelt that were still boiling. The former president had always been angered by the allegations that he had bartered Smoot’s tenure for votes. For Roosevelt, Smoot not being a polygamist was enough for him to stay in the Senate. He was not convinced by charges from the Salt Lake Tribune and others that Smoot would be a puppet for Mormon President Joseph F. Smith while in the Senate.

To add pepper to Roosevelt’s anger, Russell reminded the former president that the current round of muckraking against Mormons in 1911 derived largely from charges made by Frank J. Cannon, who edited the Salt Lake Tribune when the corruption charges against Roosevelt were aired. At the time, Cannon, an excommunicated Mormon from a very prominent church family, was the leading critic of Utah, Joseph F. Smith and the Mormon Church. His series of charges in “Everybody’s” magazine would become a best-selling book and later he would make a fortune as a traveling anti-Mormon lecturer.

Roosevelt was no fan of Cannon, so placement of his name worked well for Russell’s purposes. The former president penned two letters to Russell. One was eventually published, as a letter to Russell, in “Collier’s Weekly” magazine, edited by Russell’s “good friend and sometimes-mentor, Norman Hapgood,” quotes the keepsake.

In the letter, Roosevelt, fervently and with outrage denies the accusations made in the muckraking pieces, calls the writers slanderers and also writes, “The accusation is not merely false, but so ludicrous that it is difficult to discuss it seriously. Of course, it is always possible to find creatures vile enough to make accusations of this kind. The important thing to remember is that the men who give currency to this charge, whether editors of magazines or the presidents of colleges, show themselves in their turn unfit for association with decent men when they secure the repetition and encouragement of such scandals, which they perfectly well know to be false.”

In an explanatory note after Roosevelt’s letter, Russell was able to get some digs in at the Salt Lake Tribune, which he accused of being run by a small group of persons feeding defamatory information about the Mormons to muckraking magazines across the country.

It was a brilliant feat of public relations produced by Russell, a very public limited approval of the Mormons by a popular former president and a public slap in the face to major magazines as well as to Cannon and other opponents of Russell’s church. As the authors of the keepsake write, it wasn’t all true. “Although Reed Smoot worried that Colonel Roosevelt would turn on the Mormons if he knew the truth about the continuation of polygamy, almost all other church leaders embraced” the Roosevelt letter.

The reaction from the muckrakers were less cordial. In Collier’s Weekly,” Harvey J. O’Higgins, who co-wrote Cannon’s anti-Mormon book, “Under the Prophet in Utah,” wrote a response to Roosevelt. It includes, “The machinery and discipline of the Mormon Church make the most perfect and autocratic church control of which we have any exact record. Because of this perfection of control, the new polygamy has been successfully hidden for these many years,” wrote O’Higgins.

With Roosevelt as an ally, however, Russell, and the Mormons had scored a battle victory over their adversaries. Church leaders were so pleased with Russell’s contacts and influence that he became, as the authors put it, a “secret press bureau” for the LDS Church in New York City, all while a full-time reporter for the New York Times. The keepsake provides examples of Russell’s Mormon press duties, including a couple of letters to his own newspaper, the Times, that he ghosted under the names of Eastern States LDS Mission presidents Ben E. Rich and Walter P. Monson.

In 1915, Russell received a personal letter from Joseph F. Smith, where the prophet tells Russell, “It is my sincere desire that you should continue as you are doing in defense of the truth and justice and the honor of your people, and always remember from whence you came while mingling with men who know not the truth but are given to following the customs and sins of the world.”

What a fascinating bit of history. Paulos and Cannon merit credit for bringing these candid tales, warts and all, of history, theology, journalism, spin and otherwise to interested readers.

The booklet keepsake, “Mormonism and the Politics of the Progressive Era,” is privately published by DMT Publishing, Salt Lake City. Copies are being provided to university libraries in Utah and other parts of the nation as well as to the LDS Church Historical Department.

--Doug Gibson

Frank J. Cannon a thorn in Mormonism's side 100-plus years ago

Frank J. Cannon, son of the LDS leader, George Q. Cannon, Mormonism’s most famous apostate, led the Salt Lake Tribune’s editorial assault on the LDS Church, Sen. Reed Smoot, and particularly President Joseph F. Smith from the years 1904 to 1907.

Historians Michael Harold Paulos and Kenneth L. Cannon II have done a great job preserving Cannon’s contributions. Even those Latter-day Saints who agree with his most fervent critics should acknowledge FJC’s many contributions to LDS history.

He was more than a writer and editor. FJC was a paradox: An educated, accomplished advocate and diplomat, editor and founder at the Ogden Standard, missionary to the Sandwich Islands, LDS Church authorities utilized his many talents to negotiate statehood for Utah. Later, FJC served as the Utah territory’s U.S. senator.

However, FJC also was a man of many personal weaknesses. His vices included drinking and patronizing brothels. These weaknesses in following LDS Church laws were tolerated, or at least partially forgiven, while his dad, George Q. Cannon lived. But after his father died, FJC saw his influence within the church’s hierarchy wane quickly. The result was an antipathy toward his longtime faith’s leaders that would last the rest of his life. In fact, his anger, while always eloquent, would sometimes be so over the top as to backfire and generate sympathy for his targets.

FJC’s editorials during the Smoot hearings, between 1904 and 1907, are masterful polemics, designed to amuse, humiliate, sneer, attack, moralize and infuriate LDS Church supporters. One who was very often infuriated was then-LDS Prophet Joseph F. Smith, who not surprisingly, seethed at the savage pen of FJC, which accused the LDS leader of being a traitor to the United States, a traitor to the original LDS Church, a dictator in Utah, and an unrepentant polygamist. In public, Smith mostly avoided mentioning FJC. In private, he called him many names, including a “son of Perdition,” which is an LDS term for those consigned to hell.

Besides attacking Senator Smoot, FJC also enjoyed taunting Deseret News editor — and LDS apostle — Charles W. Penrose, as a toady for the LDS Church. An example: “Probably the only person in Utah who doesn’t know the Mormon Church is in politics up to its very eyebrows, is Apostle [Charles W.] Penrose, of the Deseret News. The Church has to keep things secret from Penrose. He is a new apostle, and, like President Smith blats out everything he knows. … Penrose ought to wash windows. He takes to soapsuds.”

But FJC saved his harshest criticism for the prophet. He mocked the LDS leader’s claim on Capitol Hill that he had never received revelation and later called him “God’s Appointed Liar” after Smith justified his testimony to many perplexed Latter-day Saints as a way to avoid being trapped by hostile questioners. For example, FJC editorialized: “Gentiles and Mormons, you are front to front with the proposition. Either you must accept Joseph F. Smith as the prophet of God, ordained to speak falsehoods or truth at his pleasure, ratified by God as a liar or a truth teller to meet the prophet’s needs; or, you must consider him a false, deceiving, lying, hypocritical old man, who clings to his power with selfish hands, and who fain would live out the balance of his life with his five wives …”

Why FJC hated Joseph F. Smith so fiercely is still debated by historians. FJC’s father, George Q. Cannon, whom Frank loved, had a long in-depth business relationship with the prophet. Historians opine that JC may have blamed President Smith for cutting him off from the church’s hierarchy after his dad’s death.

I favor the theory that FJC blamed President Smith for the death of his brother, apostle Abraham H. Cannon, who died in the mid-1890s shortly after marrying another wife, years after polygamy was abolished. In FJC’s opinion, stress from the secret marriage harmed his brother’s health.

Cannon was excommunicated by the LDS Church long before the Smoot hearings concluded. His barbed editorials continued until Smoot was eventually cleared by the U.S. Senate. Soon afterwards, Cannon left Salt Lake City and worked at the Post and the Rocky Mountain News.

His sabbatical as an anti-Mormon crusader would resume soon, and “Round 2″ would continue for a generation, both as author of a best-selling “expose” on Mormonism and his longstanding gig at chautauquas, a series of lectures, dances, debates, plays and music offerings then popular across the country that Paulos and Cannon describe as the forefront to modern adult education. At one chautauqua event where Cannon lectured, he was confronted by a group of outraged LDS priesthood holders.  (To read more about FJC's editorials, read this Journal of Mormon History article by Paulos).

-- Doug Gibson

This essay was originally published at StandardBlogs.