DiaBLOGue

Any discussion of Ezra Taft Benson’s eight years as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture must include mention of his family, especially his wife, Flora, and his oldest son Reed, whom he credited as his most valued advisers. “It was Flora’s ideas and courage—her positive influence and determination— more than anything else,” Benson wrote in 1962, “which added steel to my spine to fight it out for principle against the nearly overwhelming pressures of political expediency.” Second only to Flora was Reed, twenty-four in late 1952, who, according to Benson, understood “more fully what I was trying to accomplish possibly better than anyone else. . . . He worked quietly and effectively behind the scenes on matters that were often of the utmost importance.”Benson’s wife and children not only provided love and support but also emerged in the national media as the public face of an idealized mid-twentieth-century American family—white, privileged, patriotic, with mother as homemaker, father as breadwinner, surrounded by attractive, well-mannered offspring.