Dan Ellsworth: One of the most profound insights RSR provided into Joseph’s psyche was Joseph’s effort to redeem his own father. Reading of Joseph’s reaction to the baptism of his father – weeping for a good part of the day – was a huge eye-opener for me. It was clear that Joseph saw in that ordinance a redemptive power he deeply wanted his father to experience. And it was hard for me to imagine a religious fraud, as many claim Joseph to be, responding the way he did to that event. Here is how Bushman portrays the event on page 110 in RSR:

Following the organization of the Church of Christ, Joseph Smith Sr. was baptized in a small stream on Hyrum’s farm. Lucy said that Joseph Jr. grasped his father’s hand as he came out of the water and cried out, “Oh! My God I have lived to see my father baptized into the true church of Jesus Christ”! According to Joseph Knight, Joseph “bast out with greaf and joy and seamed as tho the whole world Could not hold him.” He “went out into the Lot and appeard to want to git out of site of every Body and would sob and Crie and seamed to Be so full that he could not live.” Knight and Oliver Cowdery went after Joseph and finally brought him back to the house. “He was the most wrot upon that I ever saw any man,” Knight said. “His joy semed to Be full.” Some great tension had been relieved.

That is not the response of a fraud.
When Bushman later asserts that Joseph’s restoration of the Priesthood was really a restoration of fatherhood, I found that amazing- the idea that the Priesthood would make broken men like Joseph Smith Sr. capable of providing a rich inheritance to their offspring. Given how the ability to provide a rich financial inheritance to one’s offspring is almost universally regarded as one of the measures of successful manhood, Joseph’s restoration of this superior definition of successful manhood is something I consider an important and serious concept. There is also much to learn from the fact that the revelation of this concept was actually driven in a substantial way by Joseph’s personal desire to realize the redemption of his father. The relationship between Joseph’s personal life and his revelations turns the Sunday-school concept of revelation ex nihilo on its head.

Jeff Bennion: I think it was D. Michael Quinn in Early Mormonism and the Magical World View who tried to make hay out of the fact that Lucy Mack Smith, in her biography, reports a dream Joseph Smith, Sr. had that is remarkably similar to Lehi’s dream in the first part of the Book of Mormon. Since Lucy Mack Smith wrote her book so long after the events in question, we can’t exclude the possibility that she had unconsciously confounded the two stories. But whatever we make of the similarities, one thing it certainly does do is invite comparisons between Lehi and Joseph Smith, Sr. Both may have felt they were stranded in a dreary wasteland, lost and alone, and trying to get their families home and safe. Joseph Smith, Sr. must have felt like a failure as a father because of their many financial reverses, and it must have been heartbreaking for Joseph Jr. to watch this man, his father whom he worshiped, beaten down by business failures. I don’t know how much to credit the reports of Joseph Sr. being a drunk (Bushman doesn’t give them much credence), but if that was the case (and alcohol was consumed in much larger quantities then than today) that could only have added to Joseph Jr.’s distress.

On the question of Joseph Jr.’s family in general, I think it is remarkable how they unanimously supported and believed in his prophetic calling, even those of his grandparents who were still alive.

A related point is how keenly Joseph Jr. missed his older brother Alvin, and how much his loss and death marked him. I think Joseph’s anxiety about his brother Alvin dying before the gospel was restored must have provided impetus to the revelations on proxy work for the dead, and it clearly was a great relief to him when he saw the vision of his brother exalted (now canonized as D&C 137)