Please help out Tanner on his paper for school, feed back would be appreciated.

Dear Family and Friends, For my English class at Boise State University I am writing a research paper on the 1844 presidential candidacy of Joseph Smith Jr. I have written to you and several others of my friends and family seeking some comment concerning Joseph Smith’s politics and platform. My purpose is primarily to discover what is known about his campaign and political positions and how they stand up as they encounter modern political strategies and ideologies. I would appreciate it so very much if you would consider responding with a statement. Please feel free to be as concise or exhaustive as you please. I have enclosed my proposal essay which indicates the foreseen nature of my final analysis and the plan by which I intend to pursue this discussion. With much love, Tanner Barker P. S. The following articles have been helpful to me in my preliminary research: WOOD, TIMOTHY L. “The Prophet and the Presidency: Mormonism and Politics in Joseph Smith's 1844 Presidential Campaign”;. 200. September 1 2009. ;" target=_blank rel=nofollow>http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3945/is_200007/ai_n8922399/?tag=content;col1>. TAPPER, JAKE. “The First Mormon Presidential Candidate”;. 2007. September 1 2009. ;" target=_blank rel=nofollow>http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3963656>. Joseph Smith’s platform is published in full in History of the Church Volume 6 pages 197-209 SMITH JR., JOSEPH. History of the Church. History of the Church. Ed. B. H. ROBERTS. Second ed. 7 vols. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1978. I also sent out a letter to politicians asking of them the same thing I am asking of you. If you are interested in a more exhaustive response I will provide here a list of ideas that would be helpful which I provided for the politicians: 1. Your favorite of the planks in his platform 2. Your least favorite of said 3. Your opinion as to the likelihood of his being elected 4. The value of his campaign strategy 5. Your opinion as to his motivation for ascending to the presidency 6. Your opinion as to whether or not he would continue to seek the presidency if he lost the 1844 election 7. Any comment at all you wish to make The Political Joseph Smith In 1844 Joseph Smith Jr., then President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ran for President of the United States of America. This is not well known. His career as a statesman I think is an important part of our nation’s history, yet there are very few books of history that mention Joseph Smith except to call him a scoundrel or a prophet. Colossal as a presidential campaign is, it was not nearly the most important or controversial event that surrounded him. Given his portentous religious claims, one might wonder if his political activities matter at all (LDS Edition of the Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith – History 1). While I agree that his politics matter least of all the facts surrounding him, I yet submit that Joseph Smith’s politics do matter. America is an as yet successful experiment. Here, in this time and place, we have freedom as has never been had on earth. The politics of America are the answers we attempt to give to the vexed questions inherent in democracy. I maintain that there is rarely a “right” answer where politics are concerned, but there are so very many wrong answers. In my lifetime I am hard pressed to find any answers that politicians have given to America’s important questions that have not been wrong. So I will appeal to Joseph Smith, a man that I respect, to seek some answers I can trust. Whether or not his answers can be trusted by my reader will be left to the reader’s decision. Barker 2 Joseph Smith has always sparked controversy and passion. Today this is truer than ever. He is being scrutinized by scholars who are more impassioned, better trained, and who have more material at their disposal than ever before. One would think that we would be approaching a final analysis of that man. We are not. As Richard Lyman Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Emeritus, at Columbia University (a practicing Mormon) laments, “One never gets an ‘open look’ at Joseph Smith” (Bushman, Historian’s Perspective). This basketball analogy is effective to indicate the difficulty of getting at Joseph Smith through the agenda driven material surrounding him. Bushman says this is because “the sources are passionate” (Bushman, Historian’s Perspective). Also, the scholars tend to be passionate, whether in sympathy or antipathy. I agree that this is regrettable to the academic, but I submit that Joseph Smith deals with issues that require our passionate response. While these most important issues may not submit well to dispassionate scrutiny, perhaps the issue of his politics might. My intention is to find out. Politics, too, elicit passionate responses. Since Joseph Smith is, and was, not a popular or unpopular, but a largely unknown, political figure and was not a member of any political party, we might approach a more scientific analysis of politics, at least of his politics, by using him as a case study. Joseph Smith was neither a Whig nor Democrat (the two major parties of that era), nor would he conform to the ideologies of modern Democrats or Republicans. He was a third party, independent, candidate who created his own party. Ross Perot did the same in the 1992 election. Joseph Smith’s party was “The Reformed Jeffersonian Democracy, Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights” party, sometimes reduced to simply the “Reform” party (Roberts, 2:207-208). Barker 3 The materials available for research on this topic are tremendous. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has published a seven-volume History of the Church, which is a collection of documents relative to the early history of that church. It is edited by Brigham H. Roberts and Joseph Smith himself is the principal author. The Church also commissioned Brigham H. Roberts, an Apostle in the Church, to compose his A Comprehensive History of the Church, which is a semi-apologetic work of historiography in 6 volumes, the first two volumes of which speak of Joseph Smith’s life and teachings. It does this by interpreting the documentary history. These works alone leave us without a paucity of sources to consult. Yet these two works barely scratch the surface of the scholarship that has been applied to Joseph Smith’s life and his presidential candidacy. My task will not be to search for sources, but to carefully sift through and find the most useful ones. My research, I intend, will focus on these books that I have found helpful: Joseph Smith: Presidential Candidate by Arnold K. Garr, Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder by Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith by Robert V. Remini, and Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet by Dan Vogel. Of course most of my primary sources will be from History of the Church and A Comprehensive History of the Church. Another interesting source will come from a non-traditional tact that I intend to take. I intend to conduct some informal surveys in different areas of our community to ask the public to comment on Joseph Smith’s political career. I will also be sending a letter to several of my friends and family which asks for a statement on Joseph Smith’s politics. This discussion matters. Joseph Smith is a character in history that begs to be accounted for. Until one has sufficiently researched and satisfactorily answered the questions Barker 4 that his life and teachings foment one has not sufficiently or satisfactorily resolved the major issues of religion and American culture. This paper will speak to the American principally, but one cannot speak of one minute in Joseph Smith’s life without speaking of the religion that so hotly set him ablaze.