As its subtitle indicates, Joseph Smith for President analyzes three enduring forces in American socio-political life: religious vitality, anti-religious mob violence, and Constitutional principle designed to mediate between them. The book joins scholarly critique of the Nation's failure to protect its non-Protestant citizens, constitutional principle notwithstanding. McBride's contribution is to add the explanatory power of antebellum states’ rights to the causes of that failure.
The first chapters of the book describe the dramatic events that prompted the prophet to run for president. Chief among them is the relatively well-known Missouri war against and expulsion of its Latter-day Saint residents. Much less known are the events related to the Saints’ failed effort to obtain redress at the federal level for injury to their basic rights as American citizens. McBride's account places the conflict between state and federal citizenship in high relief. It begins in 1839, when Smith and a small delegation carried the Saints’ personally written narratives of loss and petitions for aid directly to President Van Buren and to Congress. Their refusal to act was the insult that, added to the injuries of Missouri, propelled Smith to run for president in 1844.
McBride argues Smith's was not merely a protest campaign; it was possible, though unlikely, for him to win. The second half of the book analyzes those possibilities and Smith's campaign, its personalities and strategies. His platform, Views on the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, rightly gets particular attention in the book and reveals the seriousness of Smith's intentions for social and political reform. As a pamphlet, copies of it were sent to all federal and state officers, including the Supreme Court, and to the nation's newspapers. Four months later, Smith was dead, assassinated by a mob while under protective custody of the governor of Illinois. Whatever confidence the Saints had in their government, state or federal, died with him. They “stood aloof” from the 1844 presidential election and sought self-governance outside the boundaries of the US (202).
Many books have been written about state-sponsored persecution of the Latter-day Saints. McBride successfully argues that the federal government's failure to protect them from it, as citizens and as a religious minority, was not only a matter of religious prejudice. Rather, federal refusal to protect religious freedom for minorities, no less than the refusal to liberate those trapped in slavery, reflects also a national commitment to states’ rights. Carried by the story of Smith's surprisingly serious, though truncated, bid for the American presidency, McBride's analysis is both illuminating and interesting: an excellent choice for the classroom and deserving of attention from the general readership.
