Chapter 13 Publicity “… he was a blameless citizen who walked before all men as an example.”    Kansas City Journal   The word came to Mr. Smith of his father’s last illness while we were eating our simple Thanksgiving dinner at the little house in Worcester. A few hours later came the wire from I. A., Frederick’s brother: “Father still lives. Is calling for you.” Fred was ready to start at once; but with the banks all closed for the holiday, we could only procure enough money between us (and I emptied my secret reserve and the children’s banks) to get him as far as Chicago, where I wired my sister’s husband to meet him. Mr. Smith often tells how, rushing across the city in a cab to make a close connection between stations, Fred Johnson sat, a ticket and money with which my husband could continue his journey in one hand, while he held his brother-in-law’s hand tightly clasped in the [223] other with a mute sympathy and friendship which did much to send Frederick to his father’s deathbed with courage and resignation. His sister Audentia’s husband met him near Kansas City with the word that he was in time.   With faculties undimmed by the approaching change, the aged father greeted his son and talked with him long and confidentially of the church and the future and quietly laid down the burden of its leadership, intrusting it to Frederick’s strong hands.   A few days later Joseph Smith, president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, died at his home in Independence, and with his passing my husband lost not only a good father, but a wise counselor and friend.   Waiting anxiously for word in Worcester, and later sadly thinking and speaking of “grandfather” and of Frederick in his grief, and longing for his return, we were introduced to that peculiar phase of modern publicity which enter without hesitation into the house of sorrow lest the people be denied the right to know.   I think of all times when one pays most severely the penalty of public service is during these crises when such sacred and personal relationships as these must be given up [224] for all to know and discuss. That this material unquestionably belonged to the world by reason of the public character both of the dying prophet and of the future leader, Mr. Smith and I well understood; yet it was with some reluctance that we saw these matters made so unhesitatingly public.   By some chance Alice Myrmida was alone at the house when the first reporter called. She was a little surprised at the young man’s insistent questioning, but being accustomed in answering courteously and intelligently all manner of queries concerning her father’s movements and the doctrines of his church, I could see nothing in the interview as she reported it to me which was not representative and conservative. On her way to school the next morning, however, the child caught a glimpse of the result of her first interview, and she told me afterward that she felt all the way to school as if everyone on the car were looking at her! Not that the article was actually untrue, but Hearst-like the truth was treated from a sufficiently sensational angle to make it appear uncomfortably distorted and the headlines were very large and very black.   My first interview was scarcely more successful. The dear old grandfather was very [225] much in our minds, and we had been recalling certain of the more intimate traits of manner and habit which had endeared him to us all even during those last trying years of illness and incapacity. We had only recently received a letter from him which contained notes for both Alice and me. In the last years I had always tried when Fred was very busy to write him concerning our activities and affairs, and it seems that I had previously sent home an account of some little debating honor which Alice had won. The notes which he dictated in return were characteristic of his courteous interest and also of his unfailing humor which prevailed through blindness and deafness and infinite suffering, until death itself. He sent me at the same time his license to perform our marriage which he had had all those years. This is what he wrote to me: “Independence, Missouri, November 2. “Mrs. F. M. Smith,   “Worcester, Mass. “My Dear Daughter:   “I was pleased to receive your letter and also the one from Alice and to know of her advancement in her school work.   “I am pleased to know you have been making some impression as a tract distributor and in putting in a good word for the cause. You would be more apt to see the psychological moment than Fred, for while the moment is passing he is analyzing the effect of what he might say until it passes. We are not so absolutely small when we rub up against our Gentile neighbors. Witness the short and successful examination of Fred in French and German.   “On Sunday I attended the sacrament service and stayed throughout and bore my testimony. I heard nothing during the meeting but a few words from the closing song,’ I assisted in blessing a child of Brother George Ketchum, named Edna May Ketchum. I could not help thinking that when the girl has grown to womanhood Edna ‘may ketch ‘em.’ Pardon the pun, and I expect it will make you laugh, but I kept a straight face when I blessed the baby, because Brother White’s long beard was immediately in front of me. When I spoke, would you believe it, the people were as still as mice, and when I got through some of them had tears in their eyes and were wiping their noses, but don’t you tell anybody. It was warm as a June day.   “We have a fire today, and we were out on the porch and took a sun bath. With love to all from all, I am   “Yours paternally,   “Joseph Smith.”   The note to Alice was as follows: [226]   Independence, Missouri, November 4. “Miss Alice M. Smith,   “Worcester, Mass. “My Dear Granddaughter:   “I was much gratified to get you letter and acknowledge that you ‘do me proud’ by sending me your quaint letter of information of how you won out in debate and were made captain of the team. What a triumph that is for you! I am pleased that you took the negative of the proposition, for the President of these United Sates should be respected as any crowned head and for better reasons.   “The folks have furnished me with a very nice chair to sit in at table, one with arms so that I need have no fear of falling out, and through the intervention of your Uncle I. A., I have a new desk, a beauty, mahogany, and altogether I feel quite elevated. Please remember that Friday, this week, is my birthday, when I will be all of eighty-two years old.   “I send the inclosed herewith for your mother a paper that she may have sentiment enough in her heart to feel that it should be filed with a certain certificate she has, as a kind of memento, if I may take that much liberty. I have a number of these licenses and thought perhaps your mother might like to have this one, to ‘remember me by.’   “I sign myself,    “Grandpa,      “Joseph Smith.”   Why I permitted myself to be inveigled into showing these letters to the reporter [228] who first caught me at home after Father Smith’s death, I do not really know - but our hears were very full, and the representative of the press was sympathetic. I told him, too, about Brother Joseph’s wonderful memory, how he always remembered the name of anyone he had ever met, and how in the last years of his blindness he could solace himself and make his conversation with friends very pleasant by the wealth of poetry and epigram and quotation which he was able to recall - how I had heard him recite pages at a time of such books as Holland’s Bitter-Sweet which he had learned in his youth.   All this was true of course but when I saw it in print I had very much the same reaction which Alice first experienced; that feeling, every time I stepped onto the street or into a crowd, of being looked at by every one around me.   After that we confined ourselves to the necessary facts of Joseph Smith's death and Frederick M. Smith's succession to the leadership of the church; but the variety of comment, description and opinion which appeared in the various papers as the result of the conscientious interviews was appalling. One keen-eyed young woman, who came, after Mr. Smith returned from Independence [229], for a Sunday supplement story, I believe, called my husband a "Christian socialist," an appellation then as little understood and less frequently used than at present. But she added with a feminine touch that "They practice what they preach, for a nice cup of tea awaited me at the end of the interview."   Whether it was because of this article or some other I cannot tell, but Mr. Smith told me later that some one in Oregon had written to him and said he wished to join our church because he had must read in Boston paper how good we were to the poor. It took only a stamp to tell him that “The idler shall have no place in Zion.”   The matter of pictures was even more disconcerting. There is something about the newspaper method of reproduction which make a most lamentable effect with our not too handsome photographs, and while Mr. Smith’s picture often appears in various papers on occasion, the girls and I have usually escaped this doubtful honor. One stormy night, however, two men drove out from Boston to Worcester for a story, and in spite of the fact that these interviews were becoming more and more burdensome I asked the two soaked but cheerful young men into the house and began to dry them [230] out over the radiator. The one got his story, and then the other produced a camera and insisted that we submit to a flashlight picture on the spot. I was just wondering whether the better way to get rid of them would be to confiscate the outfit or to order them out of the house with a revolver, when a fresh burst or rain took the photographer, who was also the driver, to the window where he discovered that his motor car which he had driven into the grassy side street instead of leaving it in the main road a few hundred yards away was in danger of becoming permanently mired, and the two sadly withdrew while the road was yet passable, much to our relief.   But I was eventually defeated in my attempt to hold our likenesses from the public by one wily member of the brotherhood, although I did not submit without some hope of compensation. I had been so consistently annoyed by the fact that while the reporters listened deferentially to all my explanations of our work and ideals these discussions were frequently neglected in the write-up for the more sensational features of the tale. Consequently when this representative calmly overruled my objections that our photographs were our personal property and of interest only to our families I determined to [231] strike a bargain with him. I agreed to give him pictures of myself and the girls as well as of my husband if he would promise to make certain statement, and even to use exactly as it was an article which had been written by my husband’s counselor in which our ideas were clearly set forth. To his credit, he used the promised material as well as the photographs, and I was afterwards complimented by our church men, who said it was one of the finest interviews ever published concerning our work.   When Frederick returned I told him, a little plaintively, perhaps, of the way the press had abused its privileges and how annoyed I had been at having every attempt I made to present the facts truthfully and well so distorted. He laughed, I remember, and then added seriously:   “Don’t worry, little woman. Everyone will know that it was the newspapers that put the sensationalism into the stories you told them; but some of the people at the university told me when I was there this morning that I was very fortunate to have a wife who could represent me so well with the newspapers.”   Besides, the papers do often speak intelligently and sometimes very appreciatively of us and our work. I have always prized especially [232] a clipping from the Kansas City Journal containing an editorial on the death of Joseph Smith, which is typical of the tributes paid him by many papers where he was known and his work understood better than in the region about Boston, but which is perhaps more concisely and beautifully put than others:   “In the ecclesiastical dogmas which made up the denominational belief of the late Joseph Smith the general public has no particular interest. But in the death of the late venerable head of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints the country loses an interesting and useful citizen. Joseph Smith was considerably more than a powerful church man into whose keeping had been committed the destinies of one of the great denominations of the world. Those who ignorantly confounded the Reorganized Church with Mormonism, in the objectionable acceptance of the term, will not appreciate the theological distinctions between the two nor understand that nothing was more hateful to Joseph Smith than the doctrines of Brigham Young, with their polygamous teachings and all the other features which make Utah Mormonism obnoxious in the eyes of the average American.   “But all who ever cam in contact with Joseph could readily appreciated the broad charity of his tenets, the untarnished private life he lived, the unswerving devotion to duty which he always displayed and the simple [233] modesty of his relations toward his church and the world at large. To his church he was the prophet whom all its communicants revered, but he was also the unostentatious leader who constantly practiced the virtues which he enjoined upon his followers. To the world he was blameless citizen who walked before all men as an example and whose interest in the movement that made for the welfare of the community always had his heartiest support. “Perhaps nothing could give a clearer insight into the character of Joseph Smith than the directions which he issued shortly before his death in respect to his funeral. Disliking nothing so much next to sham as ostentation, he directed that his funeral should be conducted with the utmost simplicity, without any of the elaborateness which his followers would otherwise have provided in order to testify to the honor in which they held him. He was the prophet, but first of all he was the Christian gentleman and the good citizen. As such he lived, as such he died, as such he will be remembered by all outside the household of his faith. His followers themselves can have no legacy of remembrance more honorable than this appraisement of the people among who he lived and labored so many years. Kindly, cheerful, loyal to his own creed, tolerant of those of others, standing for modesty, simplicity, good citizenship, embodying in his private life all the virtues which adorn a character worthy of emulation - such is the revelation of an ecclesiastical message translated into the terms of human character.” [234] Previous Chapter (12) Next Chapter (14) Frederick Madison Smith page Who was Who