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Show Page 272 might be in sight - he preached often and radiantly these days about the coming millennium. The day he offered the dedicatory prayer for the 11 huge new Z.C.M.I. building on Main Street, he could look out over one of the largest warehouses in America and see nothing but the "City of Enoch." The mi ILennium was to be long in coming, however, and the fight between federal government and Church over polygamy was intensifying. The Mormons had little wherewithal to carry on the battle. A few Church leaders hoped for a political solution - Utah was solidly anti-Republican, given the offensive crusades against the Saints carried on by the Radicals, and a Democratic government might permit Utah to join the Union and gain her sovereignty. As expected, the 1876 Democratic platform of Samuel Tilden preached forbearance toward the Mormons, and the Utahns dared to hope for statehood once again. But Tilden, who had grown up in Orson Pratt's boyhood town of New Lebanon, New York, was barred from the White House by an incredibly shameful bargain falsifying the election results of three Southern States. The Saints despaired another four years under the pharasaical eye of the Republican Stalwarts. Congress soon found ways of enforcing the bigamy statutes, moving the religious controversy into the courtrooms of Utah. Orson was interrogated several times by the grand jury, as the grand defender of "the principle," but stayed laconically within the bounds of the questions put to him; when asked if he knew anything about the marriages of George Q. Cannon, he replied that he wouldn't know the Cannon family if he met them on the street. Another time, the prosecution questioned him about his advocacy of "theocracy" in the pamphlet Kingdom of God. Here was an inquisition of a different sort! He answered that he meant it as a purely ecclesiastical concept, with no disobedience to civil government implied or intended. Over the pulpit, however, he continued his flaming vindication |
