The Mormon Church was, and is, a business enterprise, and one of the largest in the West. As such, it went to war against unions and the I.W.W., murdering Joe Hill on November 19, 1915 along with innumerable other crimes. Forrest Edwards reads the working class indictment of the church’s activities.

‘The Mormon Church Again–A Review Of Its Activities’ by F.H.E. from Solidarity. Vol. 7 No. 318. February 12, 1916.

Of all the proverbs current amongst mankind, one of the most trite, is the saying that has come down to modern time from the days of Ancient Greece and Rome. “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” And of no institution is that ultra-bromide more true today than of that religio-economic corporation known as the Mormon Church, which has its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, its feelers out in every country in the Old World for an unending supply of husky and simple minded male laborers, and female breeding-machines; its tentacles ever extending in the direction of profits, and then more profits.

This Corporation, known to the world outside the Rocky Mountain States as a proselytizing pseudo-religious institution, and, looked upon with more or less suspicion because of some of the views it used to officially advocate, as distinct from the unofficial practice of the rest of the upholders of Christian (?) civilization–wears a totally different aspect to those who are directly familiar with its workings.

For, just like any other religious organization that has been established for any length of time, from the Roman Catholic Church down to the Salvation Army, the Mormon Church today uses the guise of a purveyor of religion to hide the fact that in reality it ranks with the Rockefeller interests of Colorado, as one of the most astute accumulators of profit and property, i.e. one of the most intense and relentless exploiters of labor power, west of the Mississippi river.

On its industrial side, it is directly interested in the following companies, the names of which speak for themselves: Utah Copper, Utah Fuel, Utah Construction, Denver & Rio Grande R.R., and other subsidiary companies. In agriculture, it has complete control of the beet-raising and beet-sugar refining industry throughout the Rocky Mountain States. And also by its strangle hold on innumerable water-sources throughout the same States, it holds in its hands not only the key to the development of abundant electrical energy, but also the very existence of thousands of small farmers and orchardists who are dependent on irrigation for the success of their crops. Nor is its hold on water sources confined to Utah.

For wherever there is irrigation in the West, there is a tentacle of the Mormon Church. New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, see it already well established as a land-holding, and what is still more vital, a water-right owning corporation. Along the flank of the Rockies it has pushed its way southwards into Old Mexico, where first the jealousy of its oldest rival in the fleecing business, the Roman Catholic Church, and lastly the revolution, rudely disturbed its peaceful process of acquisition. Northward it has extended over the Canadian line into Southern Alberta, where the growth of irrigation affords it another opportunity for golden grab, behind the propagation of its curious medley of borrowed and distorted superstitions and beliefs. Thus while wine and olives have for centuries contributed to the revenues of the Roman Catholic Church; while the connection of the Church of England with beer and whiskey is part of its Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, The Mormon Church, like a true Prohibitionist, pins all its agricultural hopes on precious water.

Now to return to its purely industrial aspect,–the Mormon Church, like all other big and far-reaching labor-skinning corporations, is remarkable on the one hand for the ruthlessly grinding conditions of toil it imposes on its slaves, and on the other hand for its deadly hatred of any proletarian organization that is likely to crystallize the suppressed discontent of those slaves into conscious revolt.

In its mining camps, conditions of labor are every bit as intolerable as in those of Colorado. Long hours, poor pay, the spy, the slugger, the gun-man, the blacklist, the scrip-system the company-owned or subsidized store, saloon, church, school and political machine, flourish as well under the ægis of the water-loving Mormon Church, as under the benevolent patronage of Oily John, the Baptist. On a par with the conditions that it imposes on the miner, semi-skilled and unskilled, are the conditions that the Construction worker has to meet. And every migratory worker in the West that has worked on big construction will testify that the worst camps that are to be met with, are in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, those of the Utah Construction Company and its subsidiaries, backed financially by the Mormon Church.

In the case of revolt in the form of a strike in the State of Utah itself on any of the companies in which the Church is interested, not only have the strikers to face as usual, the militia and the Burns and Pinkerton thug, but the Mormon Church itself sends out to the country districts, through the agency of its bishops, bidding the “faithful” to send in to the affected area some of their numerous male progeny, either to carry arms for the defense of the Church-in-the-guise-of-the-company, or to get in and scab the rebellious slaves back into Slavery. This “the faithful” faithfully do. And the sons, even where they have become Jack-Mormons in point of religious belief, are still sufficiently like the Native Sons of California, or the Hoosiers of the Middle West, like rustic scissor-bills anywhere and everywhere, foolish enough to rally to the aid of the exploiting company against the hard-pressed slaves that have been lured into the State by the workers’ everlasting rainbow hope of a steady job, at good wages.

Now hardly had the I.W.W. got a local (No. 69) nicely established in Salt Lake City, before the inevitable happened. It came into direct conflict with the Mormon Church in its exploiting capacity.

In the year 1913, the Utah Construction Company, with a string of its dependents, had a constantly changing swarm of migratory workers fulfilling for it a contract it had made with the D. & R.G.R.R. to alter the grade in Tucker Canyon (about ninety miles out of Salt Lake City) where the railroad had a steep climb to the top of Soldier’s Summit. The camp conditions were rotten. Driving foremen, bad grub, lousy bunks with night and day shifts using them, total absence of sanitation, hard work and poor pay.

Into these camps Local 69 sent delegates, to do the work of organizing the slaves, but before this important work was anywhere near accomplished, a premature call, combined with the intolerable conditions, brought the men streaming out of the camps to the tune of some thirteen hundred.

At this point the lack of completed organization became ap parent, for instead of staying on the job to do the necessary work of picketing, the great majority of the slaves streamed down to the nearest job-market, leaving the job of picketing in a death-trap of a canyon, to a comparatively small handful of rebels, who were finally deported by main force, and shipped in to Salt Lake City. The strike was a partial success in so far as the Construction Company, was compelled to clean up its camps, and make some improvement in the general conditions of the same.

But its chief importance lies in the fact that it was the opening skirmish in the war between the I.W.W. and the Mormon Church. The latter, in its capacity of Utah Copper Co. had only just recovered its breath after a battle with the skilled and semi-skilled miners in Bingham Canyon in the preceding year, when it found itself face to face with a new situation that was likely to cause a deeper dint in its pocket-book in the shape of an organization that could appeal to the hitherto unorganized migratory, workers who had afforded such easy picking for years.

Then followed the usual course of brutal procedure, that marks capitalism wherever it is found. The “wise” sheriff of Provo seized and railroaded to jail the fellow-workers who were held most responsible for the strike at Tucker. When their jail sentence was over, one of them, J.F. Morgan, was set upon and brutally beaten when attempting to hold a street meeting within 24 hours of his return to Salt Lake City. For firing a shot in self-defense in the fracas, another fellow-worker was railroaded to jail for a year. Twice also did the minions of Mormonism attempt a frame-up of a similar kind to the present charge against Secy. Lawrence, in the case of former Secy. Scarlett who was in office at the time of the Tucker strike. But in each case, owing to the obvious nature of the frame-up, they were unable to make the charge stick, and, greatly to their disgust, were compelled to release him from their clutches.

But the Mormon, Church by no means rests contented with mere clubbings and beatings of those who dare to spread the doctrine of discontent amongst its slaves. For true to its own murderous traditions, as the perpetrator of the most dastardly and wantonly cruel massacre ever committed on American soil–that of the emigrants at Mountain Meadow–that Church today does not stop short of assassination, legal or otherwise whether through the agency of its regular officials with all the formalities of law-court procedure, or through the agency of its fanatical adherents by cold-blooded and unpunished slaughter, in its desperate resolve to be rid of those who in any way are likely to interfere with the flow of profits to its coffers.

The “legalized” murder of Joe Hill on an unproven charge, in the teeth of the protests of the “Great American Federation of Labor” in convention assembled, and regardless of the direct appeals of both a minister of a foreign power and the President of the United States himself, alone is enough to stamp it with the same everlasting infamy that marks the Roman Catholic Church for its murder of Francisco Ferrer–acts which shall make the names of these two institutions that profess religion and piety, bywords of obloquy that men shall spit from their mouths with deadly loathing, so long as human tongues can tell the story of two unspeakable crimes.

But even while the ghastly long-drawn tragic farce of torture was still being practiced on Hill, one of the hero descendants of the Angelic Destroyers of Mountain Meadow had to feel it incumbent on himself to shoot down in cold blood an unarmed” man, for the terrible crime of expressing his honest opinion about the Church’s conduct of the Joe Hill case. Nor is there any jury in Salt Lake City, or in the whole State of Utah that dare convict that ruffian coward. Thus are the constitutional guarantees (?) of “Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness” and the inestimable boon of Freedom of Speech, observed by the Mormon Church and its satellites in the State of Utah. Nor have either the Jew-baiting Georgians or the Negro-lynching Texans any room to crow in point of atavistic cruelty, over the petit-bourgeois “respectable citizenry,” be it Mormon or Gentile, of Salt Lake City.

Now comes this latest frame-up of that precious gang in the shape of another burglary charge against a new Secretary of Local 69, Fellow Worker Lawrence. And the Mormon Church’s political tool, Governor Spry-worthy mate of Ammons, late of Colorado and Hatfield the “whitewashed” of West Virginia, says that he will drive the I.W.W. out of the State. Somehow, one hears in that statement the echo of the braying of that blat- ant and pompous ass, Holy Hiram Johnson of California. But just as a temporary lull in activity along the western front (how’s that for an A.P. war report?) betokens only the forging of newer and more effective weapons for a renewed drive on the entrenchments of the unctuous Southern-Pacific-Dragon-Slayer, Hiram of Pickhandle fame, so it might be as well for the Governor of Utah to remember that though he may be Spry in all reality as an arch-assassin, yet there are means of making a great light to shine in the dark places of the earth, that all the Dicks and thugs and “Destroying Agens” of Mormonism cannot combat, and that the sources of profit of the Mormon Church are not confined to gunman-guarded Salt Lake City or to the buzzing rustic “Bee-hives” of the State of Utah.

Drive the I.W.W. out of the State, indeed! The I.W.W. should worry. KEEP THE I.W.W. OUT of the State? Ah, that’s a totally different story. And today that is the worry of the Mormon Church, its devotees and dependents, its tools and satellites alike.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1916/v7-w318-feb-12-1916-solidarity.pdf