Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel by Val Holley (review)

Frank Cannon’s twenty-fifth year of life perhaps encapsulates the variegated and paradoxical career chronicled in this elegantly written new biography from Val Holley, a biographer of actor James Dean and historian of Ogden, the rough-and-tumble railroad town in northern Utah. In 1885, Cannon’s father, George Q. Cannon, was one of the most prominent and most pursued leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a careful and charismatic apostle hunted by U.S. marshals for his practice of polygamy. In the spring of that year, he was accidentally injured in custody. Infuriated, his hot-tempered son Frank and Frank’s brothers set upon U.S. Attorney William Dickson in a fracas at a Utah hotel.

Having been arrested and sentenced for battery, Cannon spent his days in custody but his nights, thanks to a lenient sheriff, sampling the saloons of Salt Lake City. By day he obediently returned to jail and worked on a project his father had assigned him: writing a hagiography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon movement. At nights Cannon went out and got drunk.

In such contrasts stands the life of the firebrand Frank J. Cannon. He later played a pivotal role in securing statehood for the territory of Utah as a journalist and a lobbyist, and served as the delegate of the Utah Territory to Congress in the year before Utah achieved statehood in 1896. Cannon developed a wide range of contacts in the financial and political world of the East Coast, and several times secured financial arrangements that helped the church out of tight spots. In 1895 he was elected Utah’s first senator, to serve a term through the 1898 election.

At the same time, Cannon was a noted carouser with a temper, and his bad habits often undermined his gifts as a writer and politician. To his credit, Holley, who clearly admires his subject’s independent streak, is generally candid about his shortcomings. For the most part he offers us a complex portrait of a talented man handicapped by the high and narrow expectations of his family and by his own weaknesses.

But Holley does underplay one serious incident. Cannon spurned his father’s advice to take on more wives after he married Mattie Brown in 1878, but a month after she gave birth to their daughter he “overcame” a servant in his household, according to her family’s ecclesiastical leader. Maud Baugh later bore Cannon a son, but he informed her that he was “not Mormon enough” to take her as a second wife. Those around Cannon seem to have interpreted the incident as adultery, and he was required to undergo church discipline for that infraction. Perhaps following this interpretation, Holley refers to the episode as a “situation” or “indiscretion,” and treats it as an affair, an interpretation that minimizes other troubling possibilities. Holley’s primary concern is for how the event nearly derailed Cannon’s promising career (19–20, 27).

Fairly or not, the problem hardly slowed Cannon. The bulk of the book deals with the fifteen or so years between 1885 and 1900, giving us an exhaustive account of Cannon’s journalistic, political, and financial dealings during Utah’s halting acquisition of statehood in 1896. There is little here about his private life, for clearly Holley is more interested in his wheelings and dealings.

And what wheelings and dealings they were! Cannon founded a number of businesses, wrote books, ran several newspapers, and of course became a senator. His political metamorphoses were frequent and dramatic. While in Congress he was a Republican of the “silver” sort—one who sought to balance his party’s East Coast financial leadership with the interests of the largely western and agrarian people who made up the membership, though less the leadership, of his church. Most notably, he clashed with Heber J. Grant, a rising member of the Church’s apostolate, a staunch prohibitionist...