them--notably in the obtaining of Utah's statehood--he had even a
larger part than George Q. Cannon himself. When the Mormon communities,
in 1888, were being crushed by proscription and confiscation and the
righteous bigotries of Federal officials, Frank J. Cannon went to
Washington, alone--almost from the doors of a Federal prison--and, by
the eloquence of his plea for his people, obtained from President
Cleveland a mercy for the Mormons that all the diplomacies of the
Church's politicians had been unable to procure. Again, in 1890, when
the Mormons were threatened with a general disfranchisement by means of
a test oath, he returned to Washington and saved them, with the aid of
James G. Blame, on the promise that the doctrine and practice of
polygamy were to be abandoned by the Mormon Church; and he assisted in
the promulgation and acceptance of the famous "manifesto" of 1890, by
which the Mormon Prophet, as the result of a "divine revelation,"
withdrew the doctrine of polygamy from the practice of the faith.

He organized the Republican party in Utah, and led it in the first
campaigns that divided the people of the territory on the lines of
national issues and freed them from the factions of a religious dispute.
He delivered to Washington the pledges of the Mormon leaders, by which
the emancipation of their people from hierarchical domination was
promised and the right of statehood finally obtained. He was elected the
first United States Senator from Utah, against the unwilling candidacy
of his own father, when the intrigues of the Mormon priests pitted the
father against the son and violated the Church's promise of
non-interference in politics almost as soon as it had been given.

It was his voice, in the Senate, that helped to reawaken the national
conscience to the crimes of Spanish rule in Cuba, when the "financial
interests" of this country were holding the government back from any