I read Michael Quinn's LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages when it appeared (Dialogue, Spring 1985), and have just finished reading Julie Hemming Savage's Hannah Grocer Hegsted and Post-Manifesto Plural Marriage (Dialogue, Fall 1993).

I am constantly amazed how the current generation is rediscovering matters that never were a mystery. Frank J. Cannon, son of George Q. Cannon, First Counselor to Brigham Young, John Taylor, and Wilford Woodruff, and brother of Apostle Abraham Cannon, wrote all anyone ever needed to know about the Church's continued practice of plural marriage not only in Canada and Mexico, but here in the United States. And Samuel W. Taylor, a frequent Dialogue contributor has also told the story of his own Apostle father's several plural marriages well after the Official Declaraton.

Cannon, an attorney, attended to Church business in Washington, D.C. for many years, being instrumental in mediating between the U.S. Senate and Church Authorities to obtain statehood. (Interesting sidebar for Political Scientists and Historians -- he'd all but achieved his objective when Grover Cleveland was defeated for a second term. As some may remember, Cleveland became the only U.S. President re-elected after an interval of four years out of office. He needed no further convincing that Utah should become a state when he reassumed office and saw to Utah's admission to the union as one of his first items of business in his new Administration. (Cleveland was a Democrat and for many years Utah's voted Democratic in gratitude for Cleveland's understanding and in retaliation for the Republican Party which, with the exception of the two Cleveland Administrations had ruled the United States since the Civil War and had deliberately kept Utah out of the union, lumping Mormonism's polygamy with the slavery of the South as "the two relics of barbarism).

Frank Cannon was thereupon named by the new State Legislature as Utah's first Senator to Washington (this was before the Constitutional amendment providing for direct election of Senators).

Neither Cannon nor his book are cited in either Quinn's or Savage's articles, leaving the impression that it remained for contemporary scholars to reveal the fascinating story of polygamy's having continued (with the approval of high Church authorities) for another thirty years following the Manifesto. For goodness sakes I remember as a child men in good standing visiting plural wives up and down the street where I was reared. And these weren't "Fundamentalist" types, either. I dare say many others can remember similar events.

In his book With the Prophet in Utah published in 1909, Ex-Senator Cannon, by the publisher of a newspaper in Boulder, Colorado (he'd been publisher of a paper in Ogden until life in Utah became too uncomfortable) tells the intriguing secular side of the Woodruff Manifesto story.

It's often been stated by enemies of the Church (and super-sophisticated scholar members) that the Manifest was drafted by outside lawyers with no inspiration whatever and foisted on an elderly President Woodruff as an act of desperation to save the properties and temples of the Church. (Some have charged Cannon himself with having drafted the Declaration as a sop to Congress). Cannon assures us in his book that this just wasn't so. He says that he talked with President Woodruff personally shortly after the Manifesto was read in Conference and the President, with whom he'd been close since childhood (and whom he characterizes in his book as a sweet, if naive soul, of towering integrity) assured him that the Declaration was received just as Church history has it. The Lord said, in effect, "Enough, my good and faithful servant. What has been done will be counted as righteousness, and my Church will continue on a slightly different track."

According to Cannon, the entire original redaction, which he was shown, was in President Woodruff's own handwriting -- with which Cannon was familiar. This is the best ammunition I've ever seen against Fundamentalist pretensions who count the Manifesto as nothing more than a political document conjured up by lawyers and foisted on a senile Church leader.

The sad part is Cannon's assertion that it was Joseph F. Smith and his Smith kid (today most curiously place the blame on John Taylor who was dead before the Manifest was received) who insisted on re-interpreting the Woodruff Declaration as not affecting continued, underground plural marriages during the next twenty (thirty?) years in defiance of the U.S. Government and the pledged word of previous Church leaders. Sad, because the successors of these leaders were eventually compelled to return to the original pledge of giving up the practice in absoluto, as Cannon asserts President Woodruff originally intended (confirmed by his meeting with Woodruff as cited above), and repeated to the U.S. Senate by Cannon as the essential quid pro quo for statehood. (He also tells in passing the fascinating, and eventually tragic, tale of how his brother Abraham the Apostle, was among the first to be called to take a plural wife following the death of Presidents Woodruff and Snow. Cannon maintains, and it isn't difficult to accept, that if we'd acted in good faith as originally agreed, we wouldn't be plagued by Fundamentalism today. Indeed, it has been argued that Fundamentalism took its rise during this twenty or thirty years of equivocation. Straightforward post-Woodruff acceptance of the Manifesto might also have saved the careers and reputations of Apostles Matthias Cowley, John W. Taylor, and Abraham Cannon -- each of whom had married with approval, but had to be cast overboard when sacrificial lambs were required. That the Church recognized they'd done nothing contrary to Church order is sustained by the facts that at least Matthias Cowley was accorded a posthumous "restoration of Blessings". I don't know about Apostles Cannon and Taylor. Perhaps author Sam W. can tell us about his father.

It must be acknowledged that Frank Cannon has come down in LDS history as an apostate, a scalawag, and an enemy of the Church; that he'd been repudiated as Senator because he'd become venal and self-seeking. And his book, whenever infrequently referred to, is counted as "anti-Mormon" literature.

I've reviewed the book carefully and cannot agree with either characterization. Cannon himself insists that he always felt close to the Church, its rich history, its leaders, and his heritage -- though he himself never received a personal testimony of, or practices, plural marriage.

As a result, in a day when accepting "The Principle" was a test of faith, he never held high priesthood office (though, as noted, he served the Church well for many years, carrying out sensitive and often secret legal and political commissions for top Church officials). It was when a new generation of Church leaders insisted on repudiating the Church's (and his) pledged word to national political leaders, that he no longer felt he could represent the Church even in a secular capacity, and absented himself to Colorado.