h F. Smith.

Joseph F. Smith! Since the death of the founder of the Mormon Church,
there have been three men pre-eminent in its history: Brigham Young,
who led the people across the desert into the Salt Lake Valley and
established them in prosperity there; George Q. Cannon, who directed
their policies and secured their national rights; and Joseph F. Smith,
who today rules over that prosperity and markets that political right,
like a Sultan. Of all these, Smith is, to the nation now, of most
importance--and sinisterly so.

No Mormon in those years, I think, had more hate than Smith for the
United States government; and surely none had better reasons to give
himself for hate. He had the bitter recollection of the assassination
of his father and his uncle in the jail of Carthage, Illinois; he could
remember the journey that he had made with his widowed mother across the
Mississippi, across Iowa, across the Missouri, and across the unknown
and desert West, in ox teams, half starved, unarmed, persecuted by
civilization and at the mercy of savages; he could remember all the
toils and hardships of pioneer days "in the Valley;" he had seen the
army of '58 arrive to complete, as he believed, the final destruction
of our people; he had suffered from all the proscriptive legislation of
"the raid," been outlawed, been in exile, been in hiding, hunted like a
thief. He had been taught, and he firmly believed, that the Smiths had
been divinely appointed to rule, in the name of God, over all mankind.
He believed that he--ordained a ruler over this world before ever the
world was--had been persecuted by the hate and wickedness of men. He
believed it literally; he preached it literally; he still believes and
still preaches it. I did not then sympathize with this point of view,
any more than I do now; but I did sympathize with him in the hardships
that he had already endured and in the trials that he was still
enduring--in common with the rest of us. The bond of community
persecution intensified my loyalty. I felt for him almost as I felt for
my own father. I went to him with the young man's trust in age made wise
by suffering.

I had been directed to call on him in the President's offices, in Salt
Lake City, where he was concealed, for the moment, under the name of
"Mack"--the name that he used "on the underground"--and I went with my
brother, late at night, to see him there. The President's offices were
at that time in a little one-s