inasmuch as our avowed purpose had already
antagonized the Church. He delivered this message in a friendly spirit
from a number of Democrats whose support we had been expecting. And
the warning proved to be well-inspired. Although a number of courageous
Gentiles, like Colonel E. A. Wall of Salt Lake City, gave us material
aid--and although there was no other Democratic daily paper in
Utah (unless it was the Salt Lake Herald, owned by Senator Clark of
Montana)--the most powerful Church Democratic interests stood against
us, and we found it impossible to make any effective headway with the
paper.

After the Prophets began to give their awful testimony at Washington,
the Democratic National Convention of 1904 (which I attended as a
delegate from Utah) considered a resolution in opposition to polygamy
and the Church's rule of the state. This resolution was as vigorously
fought by some Utah Gentiles as by the Mormon delegates, on the grounds
that it would defeat the Democratic party in Utah. It carried in the
convention. Upon returning to Salt Lake City I called a meeting of the
Democratic state committee (of which I was chairman) and urged that we
make our state campaign on the issue of ecclesiastical domination, in
consonance with the party's national platform. Of the whole committee
only the secretary, Mr. P. J. Daly, supported the proposal. The others
considered it "an attempt to establish a quarantine against Democratic
success." Some of them had been promised by members of the hierarchy
that the party was to have "a square deal this time." Others had
fatuously accepted the assurances of ecclesiasts that "it looked like
a Democratic year." In short, the Democratic party in Utah, like the
Republican party, proved to be then, as it is now, less a political
organization than the tool of a Church cabal. We found that we could no
more hope to move the Democratic machine against the hierarchy than to
move the Smoot-Republican machine itself.

But when Joseph F. Smith, before the Senate committee, admitted that he
was violating "the laws of God and man" and tried to extenuate his
guilt with the plea that the Gentiles of Utah condoned it, he issued a
challenge that no American citizen could ignore. The Gentiles of Utah
had been silent, theretofore, partly because they were ignorant of the
extent of the polygamous offenses of the hierarchy, and partly because
they were hoping for better things. Smith's boast made their silence