Val Holley's tantalizing book recounting the life of Mormon journalist, newspaperman, Congressional delegate, Utah Senator, and anti-polygamy advocate Frank J. Cannon only begins to tell the story of this seminal figure in Mormon history. Most studies of Mormonism focus almost exclusively on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periods, but Holley's book bridges the two centuries using Cannon's life as a springboard to understand Mormonism's transition from a relatively isolated religious community in Utah to the growing international church it would become. It is one of those rare books that allows the reader to probe deep into the inner workings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and understand how Utah achieved statehood while abdicating one of the church's most fundamental teachings: polygamy.
As Holley writes, Frank Cannon was not an ordinary layperson. He was the son of LDS church apostle George Q. Cannon, who served in the governing First Presidency for several decades under four prophet-presidents, first under Brigham Young, followed by John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow. Because of his father's ecclesiastical position in the leading councils of the church, Frank was often apprised of many of the challenging issues the church faced. First and foremost was polygamy, or plural marriage, which Latter-day Saints had been practicing in secret since the 1830s. When Latter-day Saints migrated to the Great Basin in the mid-nineteenth century, Brigham Young began to acknowledge it, first in whispered hushes then in bold declarations. His announcement in 1852 that Latter-day Saints would practice polygamy caught the eye of the federal government, and a number of American presidents expressed a desire to hold Mormon leaders accountable for violating federal law. The Edmunds Act of 1882 made Mormon polygamy a felony.
Frank Cannon displayed a usefulness to his father and his father's associates in church leadership by volunteering to negotiate with then-president Grover Cleveland to get the federal government to leave the Mormons alone. Cannon, who never practiced polygamy himself, told Cleveland that his polygamous father and other polygamous Mormon leaders “would come out of hiding and accept sentence if [they were] assured that the government's end was not to exterminate the Mormon Church or to persecute its ‘prophets’” (74). As Holley states, this was a bold measure to get the government to accept Utah statehood—a reality that would not have occurred as long as Latter-day Saints flouted federal anti-polygamy laws.
By 1890, with scores of Mormon leaders either in prison or in hiding from government prosecutors, Cannon boasted that he advised church president Wilford Woodruff on the text and phraseology of “the Manifesto,” the document stating that Mormons would abdicate the church's sacred marital practice. Holley is skeptical of Cannon's assistance in this regard, claiming that there is no evidence that he helped to draft the phrasing of the text. And yet, even if Cannon's influence on the Manifesto might be overstated, he was a seminal figure in its conception and production. Because of Cannon's closeness to several church leaders, they supported him as both a Congressional delegate and Utah Senator, instructing him to negotiate with government officials to get them to stop arresting Mormon leaders for practicing polygamy. But church leaders, Holley writes, had an ambivalent relationship with Cannon. He was not the morally upright figure they wished him to be. Nor did he demonstrate a propensity to reform despite their counsel to do so. Cannon was frequently drunk, had a gambling habit, and visited brothels. Moreover, he fathered a child out of wedlock—a fate that the family tried to keep secret. When church president Wilford Woodruff died in 1898 and George Q. Cannon died in 1901, the Mormon hierarchy decided that they would no longer use Frank's services. “Woodruff's death was the end of an era for Frank,” Holley writes, because he no longer had a church president who trusted him (190).
Bitter and angry over his lost status, underscored by the fact that church leaders no longer supported him in elective office, Cannon resumed his career as a journalist and moved to Denver, Colorado, to work for the Denver Times. In that capacity, he wrote scathing editorials about the church and its leadership, taking his ire out on then–church president Joseph F. Smith and Apostle Reed Smoot—both of whom still practiced polygamy despite Woodruff's Manifesto declaring that the church had ended the practice. Cannon blamed these two men for his failed reelection attempt in the US Senate, claiming that they had worked against him to support other candidates. He wrote scathing articles about them and he paid a heavy price for it. Under the direction of the apostles, his local church leaders terminated his Mormon church membership. His offense was openly criticizing the church and its top leaders.
For a man who once had the ear of several high-ranking Mormon leaders, including his powerful father as well as various church presidents, Cannon fell out of their favor with meteoric intensity, and Holley narrates this story in fascinating detail. Even more impressively, he has scoured numerous archives, providing important details to flesh out how Cannon had managed to stay in the church's good graces for a number of years, only to see it abruptly end when he had exhausted the leaders’ patience.
Little is said about Cannon's belief in Mormonism, what sustained him theologically, or what compelled him to lose faith in the church's precepts. Holley could have devoted more attention to Cannon's faith, or lack thereof, beyond his disillusionment with church leaders for meddling in his political career.
Still, Holley reminds us that Frank Cannon has been a forgotten figure in Mormon history. This “Saint, Senator, and Scoundrel” is worthy of his due, and Holley has produced an arresting book that adds important insights into Utah's tortuous quest for statehood.
