Joseph Smith for President

why would anyone want to be president of the United States? Joseph Smith knew. Spencer McBride's biography of a unique political moment unfolds in Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom. Harvesting an impressive cache of primary source material and dynamic new analysis, McBride uses Smith's unlikely presidential run to investigate the political and religious systems of the day.Inequality abounded in early America, and at some point, Smith tasted nearly all of it. He experienced poverty, intolerance, defamation, and the appalling inaction of a Congress too polarized to protect the citizens who lived, literally and figuratively, on the extreme margins of democracy. In response to the federal government's shortcomings, Smith crafted a radical platform. He pledged to abolish slavery, close the jails, reintroduce a national bank, shrink Congress, protect religious minorities, and expand westward only after securing Native American cooperation. His plans for reform were sweeping and controversial. The grinding threats of the extermination of Smith's followers and constant mob violence heightened his campaign's urgency and, ultimately, hastened his own end.By unpacking the political and religious consequences of Joseph Smith's bid, McBride reveals new connections between executive power, popular protest, and religious inequity in an early republic buckling under the pressure of upholding revolutionary ideals. While Smith's assassination at the hands of a mob in June 1844 may be well-known history, what is less studied is the story unveiled here: how Mormons reframed and debated the idea of what American citizenship was worth in the 1840s. Using Smith's candidacy to gain a fresh vantage point on US democracy unveils a national community in crisis.Joseph Smith only ran for president once all the main branches of government failed to heed his petitions for civil rights. A personal plea to the White House fizzled. Top-down reform was, for Smith, a last resort. But, as McBride argues, Smith's conceptualization of executive power—something that scholars should investigate more in our long political history of third-party candidates—tipped the prophet toward the presidency. Why a suddenly discontented patriot and avowed outsider like Joseph Smith undertook that journey, striking back at a vicious press by building his own, makes for a compelling read. It prompts us to recall that the glowing tales told of universal religious liberty actually incurred steep physical and moral costs for Smith's generation. “In forgetting—or worse, never learning—the troubling plights of religious minorities in the history of a country that aspires to loftier heights, Americans comfortably situated in the cultural mainstream celebrate their exceptional level of freedom while many of their fellow citizens suffer the effects of systemic discrimination and fear-driven persecution,” McBride writes (4). If elections hold up a mirror to the republic, as John Adams suggested, then antebellum America was afire. Dissenters vastly outnumbered democrats. Liberty felt fragile. Battered by critics, Joseph Smith somehow still loved the country enough to try and lead it. That mystery, of murky patriotism wrapped in new religion, permeates McBride's profile.Inquisitive and devout, Smith made an apt, if rather accidental, student of American government. The basic narrative of Smith's life moves at a sprightly pace, thanks mainly to the author's expert navigation of a dense and complicated archive. It is extremely difficult to tell a major political saga and stay up to speed with the biography of such a famous intellectual on the page. McBride handles the challenge with grace. Smith spent his life learning the nation's political contours from the outside in. From his Vermont boyhood to his Palmyra, New York, years and right through his milestone publication of The Book of Mormon in 1830, young Joseph Smith lived through five very different administrations, spanning the executive eras from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson.The early nineteenth century was a hothouse of political growth, with parties branching and growing in provocative ways. McBride's historical instincts are on target here, deploying Smith as both a novice pupil and an unpredictable practitioner of antebellum civics. Charismatic congressmen, doomsday preachers, and celebrity orators swarmed the public stage and filled the press, clamoring for voters’ attention. McBride outlines the United States’ shifting policies regarding immigration, western expansion, and Native dispossession in clear prose with useful context. The race for the nation's highest office could be a muddy process to follow, with misinformation flying around and electoral protocols varying widely. This book builds out Smith's wild political world with nuance and color.Whether invoking Puritan “city on a hill” theology to establish a new home for his followers in Nauvoo, or inventing exactly the newspapers he needed, Smith's labor to connect with fellow citizens is an intriguing glimpse of American religion's uses and democratic experiments. His political education crystallized in Nauvoo, where he crafted covenants and charters to buttress the physical and legal infrastructure of a new community. Smith was keenly aware, as McBride points out, that his pleas to safeguard Mormon lives came at a critical juncture for the fate of the Whig and Democratic parties in Illinois. The Mormons’ strength in bloc voting became an additional tool. They did not view the practice, as McBride observes, as “a means of exerting control over their countrymen or of subverting democratic norms. Rather, they saw it as a means of self-preservation, a point of leverage that tied their desire to live and worship peacefully in Nauvoo to the interest of the state's non-Mormon power brokers” (67). Whether via petitions, mission work, congressional lobbying, or voting, Joseph Smith and the Mormon community tried to belong to the larger democratic system. Gradually, the presidency seemed like a viable next step. He crusaded into a crowded arena of campaigning, rife with clubs, surrogates, and canvassers who hawked cartoons, pamphlets, and satirical sheet music. Shrewdly, he was the first to spot his biggest flaw. His “political base was centralized and localized,” McBride explains. “If Smith was going to stand a chance in that fall election, he and his supporters had to look beyond the conventional” by “storming the nation” with an all-new kind of messaging that conveyed his plan for a radical rebirth of American democracy (123).What would a Joseph Smith presidency look like? Greater religious tolerance headed the agenda. “Real religious freedom required the religious majority to defend—and even facilitate—the worship of others” (49). In a century where candidates and newspaper editors reiterated that “good Christians make good citizens,” Smith's refinement of that message is particularly significant. His insistence on the systematic inequality of different faith groups still bears resonance. The twelve-page tract framing his reforms, General Smith's Views on the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, is a unique piece of political literature. Smith came out swinging against Martin Van Buren and his successors, and the Mormon candidate's goals were many. He clung to an outsider's populist rhetoric, but his ideas were cutting-edge. Smith hoped to reengineer and enlarge the federal power of the government while running a lean executive branch and a reduced Congress.In some ways, Smith's plan was a rejoinder to the violent mobocracy afflicting 1840s political participation. Yet his dream was a dramatic reinvention of the practice of American republicanism and where it might extend. The nation's fluctuating boundaries, with simmering pressure points of expansion in Oregon and Texas, drew his eye. Smith's conditional approach to western expansion, ever reliant on Native American approval, mired him in the ongoing debates regarding slavery and abolition. “He argued that the souls of black Americans were equal to those of white Americans, and, therefore, that they should be free. Yet, his proposal to purchase their freedom validated the idea that these men, women, and children were actually property,” McBride writes (100). One excellent book cannot cover it all, but richer detail regarding the evolution of Smith's personal views on race and slavery, along with the related Mormon theology on those topics, would have been illuminating at this point in the campaign story. Surely, it would have been a deciding factor for many potential voters.Overall, exploring Joseph Smith's White House run tells us about a new faith's struggle to survive, and it indicates the nineteenth-century nation's next bend in the road to disunion. Far from a conventional presidential history, McBride's book offers us a welcome twist at the end, drawing readers closer to the diverse ideas of the many Americans deciding the country's fate. What did they make of a Mormon nominee? Minus a vote, Nauvoo resident Sally Randall made a strong case for Smith's morality, writing to her family and friends: “Now I want to know what father and the rest of the people thinks of Joseph Smith being president. If they want a righteous man at the head let them vote for him” (125). It was just the kind of conversation that Joseph Smith might have hoped for as a political outsider slowly gaining and guiding the nation's trust

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