Funeral oration

FUNERAL ORATION BY JUDGE O.N. HILTON IN MEMORIAM OF JOE HILL AT THE WEST SIDE AUDITORIUM, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25TH, 1915.

Mr. Chairman, men and women of Chicago:

It gives me unqualified pleasure to be with you here today and to join my tribute to yours for this dead man, and I think as I look into your faces that I read a determination, and a grim one too, to know about this matter and what the facts and circumstances are attendant thereon, and while, as the Chairman has stated to you, I was not familiar as an actor with the trial of the case resulting in his conviction, I only entered the case afterwards, still I have been thoroughly conversant with it since that time, and I want to tell it, all of it to you today.

I am going to do that without rancor, without prejudice, without malice. The cold facts as I understand them to be, and I want anyone of you here if you feel so disposed, to ask any questions. I shall be glad to answer; it will not interfere with me at all, I assure you.

Standing here in the precincts of the City of Chicago that has been broadened by the learning of David Swing, and holds in loving memory the tendereness and broad humanity of Robert Ingersol, I feel that it becomes us here to reverently and earnestly speak upon the serious matter before us today, and without prejudice to see if we can gather from the facts of their tragic occurrence something, somehow that will aid the onward march of humanity.

Men are born into the world and die out of it generation upon generation. A distinguised orator once said, "Man the noblest work of creation, is the sport of every wind that blows, of every tied that flows. In the morning he rises up and flourishes; in the evening he is cut down,

-2the individual withering but the world growing more and more."

But occasionally, my friends, a life is taken away from our midst under such circumstances as makes us pause and brings to mind with distinctness the bitter truth that man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. The personality of men like Leo Frank down in Georgia or Joe Hillstrom in Salt Lake City is not a matter of so great importance, but the communities' spirit of injustice, of intolerance and despotism that ultimately wipes out that personality from existence, - that is a matter of inquiry, and that is what is interesting us today.

The genesis of this transaction and of this tragedy out in Salt Lake City took its rise in that bureaucratic power that the pioneer fathers of Illinois detected in the early attitude of the Mormons towards cherished and established principles, and which lead to the expulsion of the Mormons from the State of Illinois, not because of their religious belief, my friends, not that, but because of those peculiar tenents and practices that threatened to undermine a well ordered community; to deprive the individual of his liberty and to lash him and whip him into submission by threats of the power of vengeance by the leaders of the Church, a spirit that resulted in the Danites, and execution of the commands of the Mormon Church, a power that adopts any means to accomplish its own personal ends.

And so when they were expelled from Illinois they sought a theatre in the far West for the peculiar practices of the Mormon Church. It was arranged with Bridgeman, the discoverer of the Great Salt Lake, and with Wiggins, a scout, his companion, who died only a few years ago in Denver, - with these two men as guides of these pilgrims that went out from Illinois, - that they should start for that region piloted by these two men, Bridgeman and Wiggins and they were lead by Brigham Young, and they were after a new land that they might go in and possess it, and after they had passed the

summit of the Rocky Mountains upon their pilgrimage and had gone down into the peaceful slopes of the beautiful Weber Canyon, Brigham Yound told these two guides that their destination must remain a secret, and that they must appear to some suddenly into the promised land, and so Wiggins told him that just around that Mountain in the distance he would see the beautiful Salt Lake, and so he said to Wiggins and to Bridgeman, "I will hold the body of the pilgrims here and I will go forward and I will strike upon the ground three times with my staff and then the Lake will suddenly appear as a revelation from the Almighty," and that was agreed upon, and so Brigham Young goes back to his people and he says, "Beloved, see what I through the Lord have brought to you," and they raised up their eyes, and there, with a firm belief that it was created by the omnipotent power of their leader, when they saw the great Salt Lake spread its beauty before their almost enchanted eyes. When they looked upon the summits of the mighty Wasatch Mountains clad with forests of pine and fir, and lifting their crowns into the eternal fields of snow, the long tramp through the dry and dusty desert was forgotten and the people believed that they had at last come into a veritable promised land, one flowing with milk and honey.

Now this is history. It must be conceded that Brigham Young was one of the greatest executive men of the world; that as an empire builder he was without a peer, but the moral slant of the man, his great selfishness, his lust for individual aggrandizement, and his destruction of the family ties and of womanhood narrowed and scarred his work, and today over and above that mighty empire there is a bureaucracy dominated by greed, selfishness and a plentitude of power that has defied the government of the United States decade after decade, and today teaches the followers that supreme power resides in the Church, and that it will visit with vengeance upon and questioning of that power.

Don't let anybody, my friends, fool you into the belief with the lying story that this power is diminishing. It was never as powerful as it

is today, never before as dangerous, and remember right here and now that Governor William Spry is a Mormon of the Mormons.

Oh, ladies and gentlemen, that I had the time and that this was the appropriate occasion to tell you more fully of that hideous, slimy monster, the Mormon Church, which made this crime here possible.

Don't you know that it is the vilest thing in our national life today, the admitted menace to every institution worth preserving, -Mormonism. Do you realize that like a filthy, rotting cancer, it holds the states of Utah, Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico utterly powerless today in its strangling grasp, and is sweeping down into Colorado like a prairie fire.

A Mormon jury to convict him and a Mormon Governor to deny him the poor boon of a commutation. Do you believe, men and women of Chicago, that this silent form would be in your midst today if Joe Hillstrom had been a good Mormon, paying his tithes promptly to the Church, and had had two, three or four wives to call him husband? Go and listen, every one of you, if you can, to the address of the Hon. Frank J. Cannon, at one time Senator from Utah, son of a Mormon Bishop, contemporary with Brigham Young, and himself one of a family of twenty childred. Listen to that remarkable address called "Under the Prophets" and you will understand. He is in New York; he will be in Chicago soon.

On a magnificent bronze and marble tablet just in front of the Utah Hotel in the City of Salt Lake there are the names of 150 of the early mormons who led that band into the valley, and the fourth name from the top in the first column is the name of Hubert C. Kimball, who succeeded Brigham Young. Herbert C. Kimball, his nephew, one of the most prominent men in the Mormon Church, was the foreman of the jury that convicted Joe Hill. And when that jury was sworn, Joe Hill's fate was sealed. That is all there was to it. And when the villainy of the conviction became known and its awful import swept over the land; when

more than a hundred thousand petitioners, grand men and women from every state wrote and wired the Board of Pardons and Gov. Spry; when meeting here, in New York, in Milwaukee, Toledo, San Francisco, attended by thousands, all unite by resolutions; when the Swedish minister and our own gracious President Wilson, all beseech and beg, "Give Joe Hillstrom a fair change; give him a show," what does Gov. Spry reply? He sent the - - you saw it in the papers - - this defiant answer: "Mind your own business, President Wilson; you are interfering with justice in the State of Utah."

I am not disposed, men and women here today, to do Gov. Spry and injustice. I shall not abuse or villify him. I deprecate violence and I wish him no harm. A cause is a poor one indeed that enlists disciples of hate or indites abusive, anonymous, threatening letters. Gov. Spry has said that he has received many of these. Those things don't pay. Just remember that God holds the scales of Justice and of Right with an even poise in his omnipotent hand, and that he has said, "Vengeance is mine; " will repay."

But I was telling you somewhat of this Mormon Church and of its resources and its power. That is in many respects beneficent is not to be denied. That it has builded out there a might city, a glorious city, and developed a wonderful country, which is a great credit in its upbuilding capacity is equally certain. Into this community, after they were established there many people, Gentiles, like you and me and Joe Hill, - they call them Gentiles, - they were naturally attracted there and they came and settled down. This is history now. And the Mormons, with this same spirit of intolerance, jealous, vindictive, splenatic, looked at them and they said to themselves, "We will get them out of here, if not one way, then another," and they had a man by the name of Lee, John Lee, who was quite willing and capable of doing their bidding. And so Lee wnet among the Gentiles and he said, "Now you are not getting along here very well with the