Joseph F. Smith’s editorial in the Juvenile Instructor of 15 September 1903, decrying mob violence, just feels odd to me – help me to figure it out.

Hyrum Smith, Joseph F.’s own father, died at the hands of a violent mob. Joseph F. normally has no hesitation in retelling that awful story. Here, though, although he speaks in general of violence against missionary elders in the South, and about the “drivings” of Mormons in the 19th century, he doesn’t make any direct reference to his father or to Carthage. Why do you think that was so?

His attitude toward the lynchings of blacks is remarkably banal. He seems to accept without question that black men are guilty of crimes against white women, merely shrugs when he writes of lynchings, even of the killing of the “wrong” men, and only expresses dismay when the killings become too violent, mingled with “torturing and burning.” How do you feel about his attitude?

He seems to have two primary purposes for this editorial: One, it seems to me, is a sense that mob violence will spread as, perhaps, one of the factors in the destruction of the last days, in the category of “wars and rumors of wars.” He also cautions Latter-day Saints against participating in mob violence – he seems concerned about our participation in mob action as perpetrators, not as victims. Is that how you read this? or do you see other purposes for the editorial?

-oOo-

Recently the President of the United States in a letter to Governor Durbin of Indiana congratulated that officer upon the admirable way in which he had thwarted and finally defeated the purposes of a mob at Evansville. The letter itself was a note of alarm to the people of this country upon the frequency and hideousness of mob violence which has grown with unprecedented rapidity within the last year.

For years mobs in the Southern States have acquired the habit of lynching negroes whose offenses against the white women of the south have been of the most atrocious character. As a rule, these negro victims were unworthy of sympathy; but it sometimes happened that the wrong “nigger” was hanged, and then people said that was really a shame. But of late the manner of torturing and burning these negroes has brought out the most cruel and heinous spirits that ever lurked in human nature. The details of mob violence have often been too horrible to read and were sickening to every sense of humanity and justice.

Later the white man became the object of mob violence and the disposition has grown with alarming rapidity to disregard the processes of law and subject life and liberty to the caprice and frenzy of the mob. This practice has grown so rapidly that a leading weekly magazine of the country announced in a recent issue that, “only two lynch law murders of men who had been placed in jail were reported last week.”

Then again these mobs are growing rapidly in numbers so that those engaged in torturing and hanging number thousands when formerly the mob did not consist of more than forty or fifty men. President Roosevelt gave the best summary of the situation that has yet appeared when he said: “The spirit of lawlessness grows with what it feeds on, and when mobs with impunity lynch criminals for one crime, they are certain to begin to lynch real or alleged criminals for other causes.”

Nobody in the world deplores more than do the Latter-day Saints the prevalence and brutality of mob violence. If mob violence in this country did not have its origin in the drivings and persecutions of the Latter-day Saints, it is certain that no class of people in this country have suffered more and longer from the lawlessness of the mob than have the Latter-day Saints. For more than half a century the “Mormons” have been the victims of lawless mob violence against which very little has been said, for the chief reason that the victims had been so long pursued by hatred and prejudice that the world had been taught to withdraw all its sympathy from them. Whipping, driving, and shooting Mormon Elders in the south called forth no anxiety and little objection upon the part of the press; and the Mormon Elder, pure and upright in his life, has received less sympathy and protest in his favor than the negro ravisher who deserved, perhaps, the punishment, however inexcusable the method of executing it.

It is a precious boon to stand with all men face to face equal before the law and to live under a government where the orderly and just execution of the law prevails. We have always believed as a people that those who mobbed us, and that the country at large which acquiesced in mob violence were sowing to the wind and that some day the country would reap the whirlwind. that the prevalence of mob violence is a direct menace to the institutions of our country no one need to doubt who reads the comments of the pres upon the subject.

Again labor organizations that either encourage or condone violence may, unless they are cautiously vigilant, degenerate from individual to organized mob violence. No one can foresee with what awful destruction and horrors the spirit of mobocracy may overwhelm the land, but the possibility of these horrors is apparent to every student of history and to everyone who reads the signs of the times.

A few years ago mob violence was confined almost wholly to the south; today it is spreading in the north, and if it keeps the pace of the last few months it will not be long before the fair name and the honor of the law of almost every state in the Union will be tarnished. Utah may be no exception, for public sentiment may take on this form of violence in the presence of some unexpected and atrocious crime.

The Latter-day Saints in Utah and everywhere are earnestly and prayerfully admonished to shun as a sacred religious duty the spirit of mob violence. It is better to be patient and endure depredations upon human rights than to violate the institutions of our country and to substitute violence for law and order. If the reign of the mob extends its hideous rule over this country as rapidly in the future as it has done in the past, it may reach communities where the Saints live before they are aware of the presence. it is not only the duty of every Latter-day Saint, therefore, to refrain from the violent and unlawful conduct of bodies of men bent upon human destruction, but to exercise his influence and power to restrain others from imbuing their hands in the blood of their fellow man.

it is not easy to comprehend how the judiciary and those entrusted with the prompt and just execution of the law can look upon the rapidly increasing violence of the mob without a conscious reproach that they have contributed to such a state of anarchy by the dilatory methods which have been permitted to creep into our judicial system. The frequency of mob violence is really less alarming than the increase in number of those who engage in it, and one may almost be excused if he wonders whether the mob with its horrors is to become an established institution of our country.

It is certainly disquieting when one realizes how little mobs are influenced by the spirit of alarm and the denunciations of both the pulpit and the press. Such violence may be smothered and suppressed for a season because of the growing alarm it has created, but its spirit is growing in our country and may become of such proportions as to overcome human control sooner than many imagine.