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What a strange game is politics.
—Ezra Taft Benson 

I 

Contemplating the 1952 U.S. general elections, David O. McKay, lifelong Republican and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, eagerly anticipated a Republican sweep. At the news of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decisive win as the thirty-fourth American president, McKay was elated. “In my opinion,” the venerable seventy-eight-year-old Church leader recorded, “it is the greatest thing that has happened in a hundred years for our country.” The next day, he wrote in a letter to the president-elect, “Your being placed at the head of the United States Government at the time of the present crises in our history . . . is a manifestation of Providential watchfulness over the destiny of this land of America. . . . I pray that Divine guidance may be yours continually as you assume the responsibility of directing the destiny not only of the United States of America but of the entire world.” 

McKay’s faith in the sixty-two-year-old retired five-star U.S. Army general was cemented two weeks later when he learned that Eisenhower wanted to appoint a member of the Church’s second-tier Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as his new Secretary of Agriculture. The LDS prophet knew that the invitation represented an unprecedented honor in Mormon history and a new phase in the acceptance of the million-member church into mainstream American society. He also realized that the appointment would require that he take the extraordinary step of granting the churchman a leave of absence from his full-time ecclesiastical duties. 

Arriving home from his office on November 20, 1952, McKay answered a long-distance call from Arthur V. Watkins, Utah’s two-term Republican senator. If Ezra Taft Benson, fifty-three years old and serving as an apostle since 1943, were offered a position in Eisenhower’s cabinet, would he be allowed to accept? Yes, McKay quickly replied.  Only moments earlier, Benson himself had told Watkins: “I’d be glad to try anything President McKay asks me to do.”  The next morning, Benson ran into McKay as the two men arrived for work at the LDS Church Administration Building in downtown Salt Lake City. “Brother Benson,” McKay said, “my mind is clear in the matter. If the opportunity comes in the proper spirit I think you should accept.” “I can’t believe that it will come,” Benson replied. “I’ve never even seen Eisenhower, much less met him or spoken with him.” (Both men had originally supported Ohio Senator Robert Taft as their party’s 1952 presidential candidate.) 

The following day, Benson and a colleague were forty miles south in Provo, preparing to help divide a local LDS stake. While browsing in a downtown clothing store for a suit to fit his six-foot-one-inch tall, 220- pound frame, Benson was told that his wife, Flora, was on the telephone. Eisenhower’s office was trying to reach him, she said. “There’s really something to it,” Benson told himself moments later, concluding “to get off by myself for a while” to “quietly consider a course of action.” He drove to the campus of nearby Brigham Young University, where he soon located a vacant office and knelt in prayer. Afterwards, he telephoned McKay, who again stressed that he should “accept if it was a clear offer.” For the devout Benson, McKay’s counsel was received not simply as friendly advice but as heavenly inspiration. 

When Benson finally returned the call, he reached Milton Eisenhower, whom Benson had known when the younger Eisenhower worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1930s and who now served as his brother’s advisor. Could Benson fly to New York City to meet the President-elect at 2:00 P.M. on Monday, the 24th? Benson said he would be there, then immediately notified McKay, who urged that he leave the same evening. After meetings, Benson rushed home and caught a plane east departing a little after midnight. Arriving in New York City less than twelve hours later, he spent the rest of the day in his hotel room nursing a new cold. 

Meeting first with Milton Eisenhower, Benson learned he was the sole candidate for the cabinet post and that his nomination had been urged personally by Senator Taft and others.Though the outreach to Taft was an expression of political reconciliation, Milton Eisenhower’s role in Benson’s appointment was presumably the decisive recommendation.The morning’s newspapers had already announced Benson’s nomination—in Salt Lake City, McKay’s pleasure appeared in print that afternoon—so Eisenhower’s announcement probably did not come as a complete surprise. Though he worried he might be “expected to rubber-stamp programs” he did not agree with, Benson had already decided: “I would have a rare opportunity to fight effectively for my beliefs as an American.” When eventually introduced to President-elect Eisenhower, Benson, much relieved, remembered “lik[ing] him immediately.”

Benson began by noting his initial support of Taft and belief that the country would probably be better served by a civilian president. He then cited the need for increased research and more effective marketing of American agricultural products, together with minimal-to-no federal involvement in the actual business of farming: “Farmers should be permitted to make their own decisions . . . with a minimum of government interference.” “You’ll never be asked to support a program you don’t believe in,” Eisenhower promised. What about the compatibility of his calling as a Church leader, Benson also wondered.“We have the great responsibility to restore the confidence of our people in their own government,” Eisenhower said. “That means we’ve got to deal with spiritual matters.”He then pointed out that he had earlier met David O. McKay, and felt certain McKay would support Benson’s appointment.“I didn’t want to be President, frankly, when the pressure started,” Eisenhower admitted. “But you can’t refuse to serve America.” McKay’s conditions having been met, Benson realized he had no other option but to accept.If Eisenhower wanted him, Benson said, he would “serve for not less than two years—if he wanted me that long.”“No true American would refuse a call . . . to serve our country,” Benson later commented publicly. “I shall do my best, God being my helper.”

II 

For the strait-laced, strong-willed Ezra Taft Benson (born August 4, 1899), the call to national service was an unmistakable manifestation of “God’s will.”Four days later, on November 28, McKay, aided by Second Counselor J. Reuben Clark, placed his hands on the apostle’s head and set him apart—a ritual usually reserved for Church callings—as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.“You will have a responsibility, even greater than your associates in the cabinet,” McKay prayed, 

because you go . . . as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are entitled to inspiration from on high, and if you so live and think and pray, you will have that divine guidance which others may not have. . . . We bless you, therefore, dear Brother Ezra, that when questions of right and wrong come before the men with whom you are deliberating, you may see clearly what is right, and knowing it, that you may have courage to stand by that which is right and proper. . . . We seal upon you the blessings of . . . sound judgment, clear vision, that you might see afar the needs of this country; vision that you might see, too, the enemies who would thwart the freedom of the individual as vouchsafed by the Constitution, . . . and may you be fearless in the condemnation of these subversive influences, and strong in your defense of the rights and privileges of the Constitution.

However stunned, Benson believed firmly that God’s hand had guided him toward his new “calling.” He had graduated with honors from BYU in 1926, then earned a master’s degree from Iowa State College (Ames) the next year. On September 10, 1926, he had married Flora Amussen, daughter of a well-to-do jeweler and Danish convert in Logan, and the first of their six children was born January 2, 1928, in Salt Lake City. In 1927, they relocated to the small farm in southern Idaho which he and his brother, Orval, had purchased several years earlier. Some eighteen months later, Benson began working full time as a countywide agriculture agent, helping farmers to improve stocks, rotate crops, and organize farm-oriented cooperatives. Soon he was employed by the University of Idaho (Boise) as an extension economist and marketing specialist. In 1933, he helped to organize the Idaho Co-operative Council and became its first secretary, a position he held for the next five years. During this period, he took a leave of absence to enroll in additional graduate classes at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1938, after consulting with the Church’s First Presidency (then consisting of Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark, and David O. McKay) and with Flora, Benson agreed to become executive secretary of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, headquartered in Washington, D.C. The council represented more than 2 million American farmers and 5,000 farming cooperatives. “I love the co-operative movement,” he explained, “I believe in it. It squares with my philosophy of life, my religious philosophy.”When, in 1943, he was invited to join another large cooperative association at nearly double his $25,000- a-year salary,Benson again sought the advice of Church officials. Informed instead that he was being called to join the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (at an annual salary of $6,000),Benson quickly resigned his job and soon relocated his young family to Utah. 

For the next nine years, he devoted himself full time to the challenging duties facing Christ’s newest latter-day emissary. Benson routinely visited the Church’s stakes and missions, offering advice, nurturing faith, and superintending LDS growth. He also made certain, as instructed by Church leaders, to continue his support of farming and cooperation, regularly combining both interests at home and during his Church tours away from Salt Lake City.In fact, in addition to his Church assignments, he served as vice-president, trustee, member of the executive committee, and chair of the American Institute of Cooperation (founded in 1925 and composed of 1,500 farmer cooperatives).Because of his “celebrity status,” Benson received more non-ecclesiastical speaking invitations during these years than most other LDS officers,and Church leaders evidently valued the worldly cachet of Benson’s secular activities. 

For Benson, the cooperative movement tapped the very best of human nature, blending in mutually beneficial ways the principles of freedom and self-reliance that he believed found their fullest expression in American capitalism. Benson was convinced that God’s direct intervention was evident not only in the founding of the United States as a democratic Christian republic,but in the development of a self-regulating economy based on hard work, individual responsibility, and private ownership. Terming himself a “libertarian,” “constitutionalist,” and “conservative conservative,”Benson believed that the divine “truths” of the LDS gospel, American Constitutional government, and Western capitalism were intimately intertwined.“A sound agriculture is vital to the national economy,” he told Church members in 1945. “Let us not be inclined to run to a paternalistic government for help when every problem arises, but let us attack our problems jointly, and through effective, cooperative effort, solve our problems at home.”Benson also subscribed to the anti-Communist rhetoric that marked much of American political discourse during these years. Communism, he said in 1947, “is a total philosophy of life, atheistic and utterly op posed to all we hold dear.”“I’d rather be dead,” he insisted, “than lose my liberty.”“He is a man,” a non-Mormon observer commented, “whose religion elevates the economic interests of propertied men to the level of universal moral principle.”

Benson was nothing if not a man of deep-seated, seemingly dogmatic conviction.“My faith is the dominant force in my life,” he wrote in 1962.In enunciating that faith, Benson was uncompromising: “These truths will, if you are wise, take precedence in your lives ‘over all contrary theories, dogmas, hypotheses or relative-truths [from whatever source] or by whomsoever advocated.’”His belief in the human ability to access God’s will circumscribed his behavior, determined his values, and governed his roles as husband, father, and leader.“He deeply believed his commitment to serve his country could only be fulfilled,” two of his biographers commented, “by making his actions accountable to God.”

At the same time, Benson’s cherished convictions also sometimes engendered a rigidness of thought and action—“unrelenting righteousness” both “blunt and unyielding,” in the words of two other commentators—that did not always best serve life’s complexities. Benson himself described this characteristic as “resolute resistance.”“I had this bad habit—I guess you call it bad,” he explained, “of laying things on the line economically just as hard and cold as I could based on the facts, so they’d register with people, and not giving them a lot of soft soap, try and build up good will immediately.”Following a sermon that he sensed might be controversial, he confided to his diary in April 1952: “If I come in for criticism so be it, I spoke only of principles vital to the future of this nation.”For Benson, government involvement in the lives of citizens was justified only when it could be undertaken more efficiently than state, local, or private intervention; and when its effect on the “morale and character of the people,” including “our free institution[s], our local government, the home, the school, the church and our other institutions” was demonstrably positive.Generating more controversy than any other member of Eisenhower’s cabinet,Benson was predisposed by temperament and experience to ask “advice from no mortal person,” an early assistant remembered. “[H]e felt he had supernatural powers.”

From the beginning of his tenure, Benson insisted that he had not sought the secretaryship. “I can’t imagine anyone in his right mind wanting it,” he told BYU students on December 1, 1952, a week after his meeting with Eisenhower. “Because I know something of what it entails; I know something of the crossfires, the pressures, the problems, the difficulties.”Yet in accepting the prestigious assignment, Benson was motivated as much by godly patriotic obligation as by religiously fueled secular ambition. He had pursued a path, both before his calling as an apostle and afterwards, that had propelled him to the forefront of the American agricultural industry. “I knew that I was well known and favorably known,” he later admitted.In fact, when Thomas E. Dewey ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. presidency in 1948, Benson had been approached about a possible cabinet position—also Secretary of Agriculture.Eisenhower’s invitation may have come as a shock, but it was neither wholly unexpected nor entirely unwanted.

III 

A man reinvigorated, Benson moved decisively into his new $22,500-a-year Cabinet position (later $25,000),not waiting for nomination hearings or official swearing in. He arranged to have his Church assignments shifted to other apostles, easily cleared the FBI’s background investigation,began “prayerfully” gathering a coterie of like-minded associates—some of whom were LDS  —and embarked on a whirlwind cross-country tour to assess the needs of America’s farmers.Two of his first employees, both age thirty-six and nearly twenty years Benson’s junior, were Frederick W. Babbel, Benson’s traveling companion during a 1946 LDS relief mission to post-war Europe,and D. Arthur Haycock, former secretary to LDS Church President George Albert Smith. Haycock became Benson’s personal secretary, Babbel his administrative assistant.“My husband realizes his limitations,” Benson’s wife subsequently commented, “and so in his work it is always his desire to surround himself with the very best of counselors.”

Babbel later recalled of Benson’s invitation: “That night . . . I . . . prayed just as sincerely as I knew how to pray. I told my Heavenly Father that I needed to know definitely. I was not reluctant to go if He was willing to have me do so. The answer came through as clearly as any answer I’ve received in life—and I’ve received hundreds of them—‘If he wants you, go.’ I thanked Him. Then I picked up the telephone and I said to my wife, ‘I got the answer; we’re leaving.’”One of Benson’s first non-LDS appointees, Don Paarlberg, added: “He asked me whether I liked my [current] job . . ., which I said I did. He asked me whether I was happily married. I told him I was. He asked me whether I was active in church affairs, and I told him I was. Then as I was about to leave, he asked me if I could come on his staff and serve as his economic advisor. I said I wanted some time to think about this. He said, ‘Fine, let me know in about two days.’”

Having suggested that the new cabinet’s pre-inaugural first meeting begin with prayer, Benson was overjoyed when Eisenhower invited him on January 12, 1953, to offer the invocation. For Benson, “beseeching the Lord for spiritual strength was as necessary . . . as eating or sleeping.”“We are deeply grateful for this glorious land in which we live,” he paraphrased LDS scripture. “We know it is a land choice above all others, the greatest under Heaven. . . . We thank Thee for the glorious Constitution of this land which has been established by noble men who Thou didst raise unto this very purpose. . . . Help us ever, we pray Thee, to be true and faithful to these great and guiding principles.”

The next week, however, Benson was “deeply disappointed” when Eisenhower chose not to begin the cabinet’s meeting again with prayer. Had he done something wrong, Benson wondered. That evening, he “broke down and wept aloud” in his small apartment. Five days later, he summoned his courage and sent Eisenhower a letter urging that all cabinet meetings thereafter “be opened with a word of prayer.” Eisenhower did not act immediately, looking instead for a practice that would be acceptable to everyone. Then, on the second Friday morning cabinet meeting after Benson’s letter, Eisenhower announced that, barring any objections, he would like to start with a moment of silence. “And that’s the way it was . . . from that time on,” Benson wrote.(Benson made certain that his own departmental staff meetings always began with a vocal invocation—a “custom,” he termed it.)

One of Benson’s first priorities was taming a massive $730 million federal bureaucracy. Even before assuming office, he began to reorganize his department’s twenty agencies, and 8,000 Washington-based employees, into four main divisions. (This also reduced the number of agency heads participating in weekly staff meetings.) Some agencies were combined; some transferred to other departments; and some eliminated. The goal was to reorient Agriculture away from what Benson viewed as interventionist-driven farm policies and toward the department’s real mission: improved marketing and better commodity-related education and research. He was convinced “he had to alter the ideological temper of his department and acquire some measure of direction over its vast operations.” “A new administration must be able to choose enough players for its team,” he explained; “otherwise, it cannot give the electorate the type of government they voted for.”

Collectively, Benson’s upper-level appointees “inclined toward a conservative brand of economics and only a few had any practical experience in politics.”As expected, Benson’s desire to surround himself with similarly oriented undersecretaries and assistants was seen as a purge by some long-term department staff—notably those whose own employment had begun during the previous twenty years of Democratic leadership—as well as by some Republicans looking to reward party faithful. Benson, “unaware of senatorial prerogatives and unmindful of partisan demands,” was strictly concerned with “merit and department needs.”His refusal—at least, initially—to accommodate patronage prompted one Republican senator to complain privately of Benson’s “lack of political savvy.” Others pointed more generously to “political inexperience, and possibly bad advice from disloyal subordinates.”

Benson tried not to terminate outright the employment of anyone whose services he no longer desired—especially high-profile appointments—preferring instead to arrange for lateral reassignments. But the transition was not always smooth.Fred Babbel, whose personnel-related duties earned him the “lovable” nickname “Hatchet Man,” recalled: “Secretary Benson asked me under no circumstances to ever deprive a person of his job or his livelihood without first making an effort to have them placed in another job that would be equal if not better in terms of income and fundamental responsibilities. . . . As far as I know, I never moved a single person without being sure that he had an equal if not better job in terms of livelihood.”

While Benson favored close past associates—which included LDS Church members—for senior advisory and administrative positions,he also sometimes acted, according to Babbel, as if membership in the Church were a detriment: “He leaned over backwards not to show them any kind of favoritism or special privilege. He did not want to feel be holden to them in any respect, and this caused some people to wonder be cause he seemed actually to discriminate against those of his own faith rather than favoring them in positions of the department.”

“He regard[ed] his ecclesiastical responsibilities [as being] of such an important nature,” Babbel continued, 

that he wouldn’t want to ever have to compromise even in the least, under any circumstances, because of friendship or anything else [regarding] that relationship. So he [could] be very friendly to those who [weren’t] close to him, but to the people who work[ed] directly with him he [was] very, very businesslike. . . . [T]his caused him to be a little overly severe in his normal desired relationships with his own people because he didn’t want to establish a relationship that would make them feel that they could w[h]eedle in and ask for special responsibilities or special favors or something like that.

In conjunction with the reorganization and new hirings, Benson’s office also issued a memorandum regarding his expectations of all department employees. The generally benign statement read, in part: “The people of this country have a right to expect that everyone of us will give a full day’s work for a day’s pay.”This one sentence was immediately interpreted by some as proof that Benson believed “the Department was filled with loafers and that we were going to crack down on them.”Benson insisted that the statement was not intended as criticism (and later commented on having to learn that “every word needs to be twice weighed”).But the damage had been done, the incident giving rise to the belief that Benson was focused on perception, not on people. Babbel remembered: 

His first press secretary. . . wrote out the first press release from the department in which he quoted Secretary Benson as having said, among other things, “I expect an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” And the press immediately picked this allegation up as being [from] a man who was critical and caustic of the people who were working in agriculture and that he was chastising them or trying to put them in line . . . Secretary Benson . . . was embarrassed that it was put out under his name as an official thing that had been done, and, in a sense, so far as his effectiveness in the department with the regular line employees who really didn’t know him as a person, he lost his battle the first day.

To demonstrate the secretary’s warmth, Babbel thought that Ben son should personally shake the hand of every employee at least once. Benson agreed. However, when others urged that Benson ask employees to come to work early to meet him, Babbel protested that this would create more problems. Babbel’s fears proved true; and when the feeling among some employees became “more bitter than ever because . . . here again was evidence of a man that you had to do his bidding,” the plan was dropped. Though Benson had been able to meet about a third of his employees, the experience “left an indelible mark on the people,” Babbel noted. 

There had been sufficient damage done that there were nice little ways in which they could divert this or undercut this and cause things to happen in a way that did not always reflect to his credit. . . . He still felt that if people could really get to know him that he could somehow ride over it, but, through the years, there were many things said perhaps in the department or leaked from the department that would tend to try and build up a wrong kind of picture of the man.. . . [I]f they had gotten to really know the man, they would have found that he was probably one of the greatest Americans who has ever lived.

Benson usually arose by 5:00 A.M. each day, devoted an hour or more to prayer, meditation, and memo-dictating (sometimes referred to by department employees as “epistles from the Apostle”), and was in his office by 7:30 or 8:00 A.M. At first, he tended to put in fifteen- to six teen-hour days, six days a week.Often he could be found praying. “For the Benson machine,” Time magazine reported, “prayer is the basic fuel.” “He spends as much time on his knees as he does on his feet,” one associate observed. Benson also removed all ashtrays from his and adjacent offices—or converted them into containers for paper clips and other small objects—and by his example discouraged smoking in departmental meetings.And he tried not to be photographed holding any glass that looked as if it might contain alcohol.In addition, he made certain that the temperature in his office almost never exceeded 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Babbel explained: “When people came in there if it was a warm room they would just relax and be comfortable. If it was cool, they tended to want to get their business over with and get out. And he enjoyed a cooler room anyhow. He had made this a practice in his life to keep his room slightly on the cool side so people would be more interested in trying to get their business over with and move out.”

Benson also posted two small signs in his office. One, a quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln, read, according to Babbel: “I will never do that which I feel to be wrong even though it may be a means of helping me achieve that which I feel to be right.”The other, and better known, was attached to the marble base of a pen set usually “in full view of all who stood before his desk”: “O God give us men with a mandate higher than the ballot box.”The mottoes served as constant reminders of Benson’s guiding philosophy and as gentle warnings of what guests could expect—a commitment to principles over politics. 

Benson learned over time to build support for the implementation of new policies, thereby endowing his views with the weight of consensus. J. Earl Coke, one of his non-LDS assistants, later asserted, with some frustration, that while he agreed with Benson’s “fundamental philosophy,” Benson did not always use staff counsel in seeking advice for those departments for which Coke was responsible.Babbel, in contrast, remembered that Benson sometimes could be too collaborative: 

I believe at first he found it rather difficult to make decisions. He was so anxious to make the right decision in every case. He is a man of very high principle and he felt that every decision should be based on principle and not on expedience in any way. So, he arranged to have advisory groups in every one of the commodity areas. . . . When they would come up with [a] final answer, which was acceptable to him, he would usually phrase his decision on the basis that, I have brought together the best men I could in this area; it has been their judgment that we should move in this direction. I endorse what they have said and we will move in this direction. But it frequently seemed to many people to be a way of trying to avoid making a direct decision on his own. . . . Undoubtedly, there were some decisions made which were, perhaps, not popular and there may have been some that were made that were in error. This will always happen regardless of who you are if you make decisions.

Benson also made certain to try to commemorate privately the weekly meetings of the Quorum of the Twelve back in Salt Lake City. Babbel reported: 

Secretary Benson always made it a practice, which he continued throughout his eight years, that since these men would always use Thursdays as a fast day, a day on which they went without their meals until after they had had their meeting, he too not only observed the fast on Thursdays, but he would always, wherever he was, when the ten o’clock rolled around out in Salt Lake—which would be twelve o’clock here—he would always arrange to have on his schedule fifteen or twenty minutes when he could go into the room by himself and kneel in prayer and join his feelings with the people who were making decisions that affect the Church. He did this wherever he was, on travels, on trips, wherever it was.

“The thing that used to amaze me about the Secretary,” Babbel summarized, 

was that his average load, daily load, of decisions that had to be made—program and policy decisions—ran close to 100 a day that had to go out under his signature. Yet he was traveling between 300,000 to 450,000 miles a year all over the world. . . . Oftentimes he was not in the department for two weeks at a time, and by the time he would come back he would have handled anywhere from 200 to 1,000 decisions. We had to try and brief him someway so he would know what he [we] had done in his absence. . . . And it taught me one thing: that people at the high administration levels with this kind of problem facing them in terms just of the sheer number of decisions that they have to make each day and for which they are responsible without even knowing what they have decided, puts them in a very, very bad light.

“In most Cabinet posts, and especially in agriculture,” Benson echoed, “few decisions are made with adequate time for reflection, for checking [with] all interested and responsible parties. You do what you can, what there is time for. But it’s a steady round of decisions and emergencies; emergencies and decisions.”

IV 

When hearings regarding Benson’s nomination began in mid-January 1953, some senators wanted to know if he anticipated any major revision of existing U.S. farm policy. Benson’s supporters had already been quoted publicly as saying that he would seek “a return to a free market, with gradual discontinuance of high support programs”; and Benson himself had asserted: “I don’t think any real American wants to be subsidized.”But Benson also knew that, during the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower had insisted that price supports—specifically 90 percent of parity for six basic commodities (corn, cotton, peanuts, rice, tobacco, and wheat)—would remain unchanged through 1954. To have suggested otherwise would have been to “court disaster.”Though Benson believed Eisenhower’s promise had been a “mistake,”he agreed to abide by the president’s pledge. As for adjustments after 1954, he declined “to be drawn into specific commitments about what I would do or recommend in hypothetical situations.”(Benson already knew what he wanted to achieve and did not want the disclosure to cloud his appointment.) Six days later, on January 21, 1953, Benson was officially installed as the fifteenth U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

Benson inherited a federal farm policy that had, over the past two decades, been crafted to achieve greater price stability for America’s farmers “by limiting . . . the flow of products onto the market.”In practical terms, the government’s attempts to control production, including price supports and other programs (such as acreage allotments), had become “tantamount to a form of national management for agriculture.”During the early 1930s, the federal government had restricted production; by the decade’s end, it had encouraged over-production. Consumer demand had peaked—with prices and income rising dramatically—during World War II and the Korean War. However, by the time Benson took office, declining prices resulting from the previous decade’s over-production had reached “statutory levels of price support,”and Benson was legally required to enforce the now artificially high prices, which he and others believed functioned primarily to subsidize farming inefficiencies. 

The prices the federal government paid for farm products reflected a balance between the prices farmers received for their goods and the prices they paid to purchase goods.“Parity” was the “balance” price that originally prevailed for farmers during the early 1910s. “The price of wheat, for example,” Benson explained, “would be 100 per cent of parity when the selling price of a bushel of wheat would buy as much of other goods as it did in 1910–14.”“In 1914,” a wheat farmer illustrated, “I could take a bushel of wheat to town, sell it, and use the proceeds to buy a good shirt. I figure I should be able to buy the same shirt for a bushel of wheat today.”Over the years, the government’s purchasing programs had resulted in the stockpiling of huge amounts of agricultural products—worth some $1.3 billion in 1952.These growing reserves were then stored (possibly indefinitely), sold at a loss (because of the artificially high prices paid), or destroyed (when no longer consumable). If warehoused, they required ever larger storage facilities and the paying of ever-increasing rents and other fees—$1 billion annually in 1952.The result was a government-subsidized cycle of over-production, often by marginal farmers—numbering an estimated 1.5 million—who greeted any change in supports as a tangible threat to an already precarious way of life. 

Shortly after taking office, Benson oversaw the distribution of a 1,200-word official “General Statement” on farming. As much a personal testimony of the “eternal principle” of freedom as a secular pronouncement of U.S. policy,the declaration was “influenced to some extent,” Benson explained, “by an old-fashioned philosophy that it is impossible to help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. It is a philosophy that believes in the supreme worth of the individual as a free man, as a child of God, that believes in the dignity of labor and the conviction that you cannot build character by taking away man’s initiative and independence.”

Benson’s blunt statement put America’s farmers on notice that government supports were intended as temporary mechanisms to help protect and stabilize free markets, and not as permanent relief or subsidies. Federal programs should aim “to obtain in the marketplace full parity prices of farm products and parity incomes for farm people so that farmers will have freedom to operate efficiently and to adjust their production to changing consumer demands in an expanding economy.”For Benson, “Any infringement upon personal liberty …would in the long run stifle initiative, destroy character, and demoralize the people.”Toward that goal, Benson proclaimed, the Department of Agriculture would henceforth support expanded research and education programs; emphasize domestic and foreign markets; and—most controversially—push for the elimination of all federal subsidies. Directly impacted were small family farms—the very institutions Benson himself believed formed the “backbone” of American agriculture and “bulwark of our free way of life.”The political value of small family farms was greater than their steadily decreasing numbers indicated;and ironically, given his own advocacy-driven experiences in Idaho farming, Benson now found himself having “to play the role of the hard-hearted administrator seeking the welfare of all agriculture.”

In his first public speech as secretary, Benson continued his warning cry. To cattlemen facing falling prices, he announced in February 1953 that they should no longer expect to rely on government help, insisting that he “would not be stampeded into any unwise action by present price declines.”(“The only really effective way to get out of the beef mess,” he told one critic, “[is] to eat our way out.”) “We need a nation wide repentance to rid this land of corruption,” he also proclaimed. “We must return to the fundamental virtues that have made this nation great. . . . May we have the courage to stand up and be counted to stand for principle, for those noble concepts and ideals which guided the founding fathers in the establishment of this great land.”“It was a matter of conscience,” Benson’s biographers observe, “that farmers be educated as to where their real interests lay.”Such religion-infused rhetoric, however, stressed what Benson viewed as farming’s unhealthy elements and, for many listeners, not only blamed farmers and ranchers themselves—ostensibly, the inefficient—for their predicament, but presumed to lecture them on patriotism and loyalty to country. 

Not unexpectedly, Democrats—and some farm-state Republicans— accused Benson of repudiating longstanding national policy. The backlash caught the new secretary off guard. “The roof fell in,” he remembered. “There was a depth of feeling, a sacredness attached to the existing price support programs far greater than I had imagined. . . . I felt pretty low.”Fortunately, he was relieved to discover that Eisenhower agreed with him. “I believe every word you said,” the president consoled, then tempered this support with the comment, “but I’m not sure you should have said it quite so soon.”Others concurred that Benson’s statements needed to be “couched in more acceptable” terms.In fact, one of Benson’s ecclesiastical seniors, J. Reuben Clark, frankly urged him “to get better acquainted with Congressmen, and try to work it out so that they would believe, the Congressmen would think they were proposing things that he wanted, rather than that he was proposing them”; and “to submit everything to the White House, and to secure approval for all announcements of policy which he made, not in a general way, but specifically.” Clark, a former federal bureaucrat himself, also worried that Benson “was traveling too much; that a good deal could happen in the Home Office while he was away”; and that “he was talking too much.”Clark’s advice fell on deaf ears, as Benson was convinced his “back-breaking” speaking tours were “essential” to his program.“By being such an outspoken critic,” his biographers note, “the Secretary made it difficult for himself when he [later] faced Congress with legislative proposals.”

In mid-1953, Benson announced he was tackling a sweeping review of federal farm policy, insisting “it has been undertaken without a preconception of what it should reveal.”He was speaking of the future of the U.S. government’s various programs, not the elimination of price and other supports. “Agriculture needed 90 per cent of parity supports about as much as an athlete needs a strait jacket,” he quipped.Still, many congressmen responded with alarm, convinced that the fledgling bureau crat—“a lamb among a pack of wolves,” according to J. Reuben Clark— should have first met with congressional farm bloc representatives to appraise the acceptability of his proposed policies.Renewed rumors of Benson’s departure were quickly refuted by Republican and administration supporters.With the establishment of a broadly constituted, eighteen-member National Agriculture Advisory Commission, Benson hoped to fashion “a more positive image of his leadership” and “build a ground swell of bipartisan support for future programs by calling for unity.”More importantly, David O. McKay reassured him by letter: “Your Agricultural policy is sound. Political dem[a]gogues seek to undermine your clear thinking. Loyal citizens are with you. Hold to your standards. God bless and guide you!”Benson showed some weariness in his reply: “The days are difficult. . . . We go from one emergency and one fight into another.”

For example, just as he was able to point to some preliminary successes—a reorganized department, a fully staffed Advisory Commission, the granting of special loans and purchases of government stocks at reduced prices, the selling abroad of more than 40 million bushels of wheat, and the securing of increased storage space—Benson learned that his department was also beginning to incur large operating deficits: an estimated $35 million by 1955. Much of this sum had been incurred by funding research into new uses for agricultural products. He responded by trying to shift the costs for some federal programs to states receiving such aid as well as by cutting programs that could, he believed, be addressed more effectively locally.“What we need,” he told Eisenhower, “is some means of obtaining an understanding and acceptance of the principle of greater reliance on local effort.”But expenditures resulting from acts of God, such as droughts which periodically devastated portions of the country, proved to be more responsive to federal intervention than to local fiscal restraint.

“Except for the President,” Benson lamented to concerned Mor mons toward the end of his first year in office, 

I am assured that no man in public life has a heavier responsibility at the present time [than I]. I feel the weight of it very keenly. The cross fires, pressures and political maneuvering associated with the office make the burden almost unbearable at times. I know that I have the faith and prayers of millions of people who are hoping and praying that the philosophies and principles which I am trying to advocate will prevail. 

Of course, the Church is on trial. This emphasizes the importance of all of us living our religion fully and maintaining every standard of the Church. Only in this way can you be of your greatest help. 

I hope you will not become unduly depressed when you read items deeply critical of me and my activities. This seems to be a part of the office and will be so, particularly during the ensuing year, which I feel confident, will be a crucial one and one fraught with political chicanery and political pressure to an unusual degree.

V 

Facing 1954, Benson knew it “was going to take a considerable amount of White House leadership to secure legislative support” for his reforms.His penchant for sometimes taking sudden, seemingly “drastic” action without laying the groundwork with members of Congress or the administration—one of J. Reuben Clark’s concerns—underscored what some observers insisted was an uninformed naivete about “the ways of Washington” that both threatened to derail his momentum and to compromise unintentionally U.S. policy in other areas of national interest.For his part, Benson saw such action—in this particular instance, the lowering of supports for butter—as decisive and necessary. “I would be appreciative,” Eisenhower aide Sherman Adams cautioned him, “if you would have those in your Department cooperate more fully with the standard operating procedure.”

Benson’s farm policy, which Eisenhower presented to Congress on January 11, 1954, was a “carefully constructed compromise” balancing a hard-line drive for lower price supports with the administration’s politically nuanced advocacy of “gradualism.”It proposed, in part, that after 1954, federal price subsidies be slowly adjusted to reflect supply, thereby obtaining for farmers “greater stability of income.” Then, effective January 1, 1956, supports on agricultural commodities would be based on “modernized parity”—reflecting the past decade’s prices instead of those from 1910–14—with allowances made for incremental shifts from “old” to “modern” by permitting moves of up to 5 percentage points per year,with supports and adjustments varying according to commodity. The intent, Eisenhower explained, was to reduce production and to stimulate consumption to the general benefit of “all 160,000,000 of our people,” and not principally the agriculture sector.

Immediately, Benson embarked on a countrywide speaking tour to drum up support, often addressing audiences he remembered as being latently hostile.He announced: “I am unalterably opposed to programs that substitute government aid for reasonable self-help,” insisting that success not be measured according to a “political applause meter.”He knew that small farmers could be hurt but was adamant that “most of agriculture’s present problems can be met through increased research and education and improved marketing methods.”Benson’s usual strategy was “to predict dire consequences . . . unless administration proposals were adopted immediately and in their entirety.”The need for such reform seemed obvious: The old parity system encouraged overproduction, diminishing markets, and ballooning storage costs. “I am fearful,” Benson told the Senate Agriculture Committee in April 1954, “that if we do not heed the storm warning now on the horizon many positive gains in the field of agricultural legislation will be swept away.”Predictably, his program received a cool reception from most farm states and their representatives—Republicans and Democrats alike. Their response was to portray Benson “as an enemy of the farmer.”Benson held his ground. “It’s easy to keep calm,” he told readers of American Magazine, “if you have inner security and peace of mind. . . . I try to do the thing I believe to be right and let the chips fall where they will.”Still, he took at least some of the op position personally. “We are all our Father’s children,” he later wrote, “and as such we must love all men. I think I do. But at times I love some more than others.”

When Congress ultimately decided against lowering price supports, Eisenhower joined Benson in arguing the administration’s case publicly, insisting that a transition to more flexible price supports would not bankrupt American farmers. “I know,” Eisenhower asserted (with Benson concurring), “that what is right for America is politically right.”Farm states were not so sure, however, agreeing in principle with the notion of incrementalism but arguing for a more gradual implementation. As expected, Benson opposed any compromise, whereas Eisenhower was “prone to take half a loaf rather than none.” Eisenhower knew that support in Congress was building to maintain parity at 90 percent and decided instead to settle for ranges from 82.5 percent to 90 percent, rather than 75 percent to 90 percent. The compromise passed and was signed into law on August 28, 1954.

“We have had a weak and vacillating leadership,” an annoyed Benson complained. “There is too much effort, too much action based on expediency and not enough on principles, eternal principles, which constitute the very foundation of all we hold dear as a great Christian nation.”Later, he reported, more judiciously: 

It had always been my characteristic to determine an objective and then drive directly at it, with no detours. But one day the President talked about this characteristic of mine and the difficulties it engendered when applied to political realities. 

The President took a pad of paper and with a black pencil marked a bold X at the top of the page. At the bottom, he drew a rough square. “Ezra,” said he, “in the military you always have a major objective. This X is the objective. Here are our forces,” pointing to the square. “Now, it might seem that the simplest thing to do is to go straight toward the objective. But that is not always the best way to get there. You may have to move to one side or the other. You may have to move around some obstacle. You may have to feint, to pull the defending forces out of position. You may encounter heavy enemy forces, and temporarily have to retreat. There may be some zigs and zags in your course as you move toward the objective.” I nodded. “That may have to be the way you work at this farm problem.” 

I was thinking of General Ike’s lesson in tactics when I agreed to the compromise, if necessary, on the level of support in order to get the principle of flexibility established.

“While our principles have remained unchanged for a hundred years,” Eisenhower explained, “the problems to which these principles must be applied have changed radically and rapidly.”

The Agriculture Act of 1954—which Benson credited with helping to “break” an obdurate “farm bloc”—exempted $2.5 billion of stockpiled commodities from the calculation of federal price supports, introduced flexible parity to begin in 1955, and mandated that incremental parity take effect in 1956 until a transition to modern parity could be achieved.In addition, the Department of Agriculture received $20 million more for 1955 than it had for 1954, this despite overall cuts in the federal budget totaling $12 billion. “All in all,” Benson’s biographers suggest optimistically, “rural America had been treated quite favorably by this legislation.”In his speeches, Benson was upbeat: “A new direction has been set toward greater responsibility and freedom for agriculture.”Yet he also found it impossible to suppress his own tendency toward paternalism: “The problems of agriculture cannot be solved through political hocus-pocus— through a government handout here and there—through this or that pressure group.”

To some, Benson seemed heartless. “You ask about my advice to farmers who face losing their homes, equipment, and life savings,” he commented. “If I were in that condition, I would check closely to see if I was operating as efficiently as possible. . . . If this still did not prove satisfactory and I had a small farm that did not require my full attention, I would attempt to supplement my income through outside work.”Such simplistic, if well-intended, advice did not make Benson’s job easier, or the opposition less vocal; and he began to wonder about his continuing value to the administration. But when, toward the end of 1954, he reminded Eisenhower he had originally agreed to serve for two years, the President was emphatic: “When you leave…I will leave.”

Central to Benson’s plan for decreasing surpluses was maximizing sales overseas. When Benson took office, U.S. farm exports were at $2.8 million, a seven-year low.With the passage of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act in mid-1954, the administration was authorized to sell surpluses for foreign currencies at losses of up to $700 million annually; to sell to friendly (i.e., non-Communist) nations at costs not to exceed $300 million during a three-year period; to distribute to dis tressed regions within the United States under certain conditions; and to acquire by barter products necessary for national security. Implementation devolved upon Benson and Harold Stassen (U.S. Director of Foreign Operations), with oversight by Clarence Francis (a former Eisenhower consultant). To no one’s surprise, the “task of getting rid of surpluses . . . was a very involved and complicated process.” Foreign currencies “had to be spent within the country making the purchase”; sales involving barter ing or trading, preferential prices, or give-aways “tended to disrupt the normal channels of international trade”; while “selling below the world market price or invading territory traditionally belonging to another country was explicitly prohibited in the General Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (of which the U.S. was a signatory).”

Because of the “monumental” challenges of disposing of crops long priced too expensively for world markets, Benson determined that “extraordinary” effort was required; and in 1955, he embarked on a trade mission to Latin America, Canada, and Europe.He concluded he was “going to have to fight for markets and not be intimidated by retaliatory threats of import quotas.”(McKay thought that Benson at this time was “the strongest man in President Eisenhower’s Cabinet.”) Within the administration, however, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles worried that Benson’s approach to trade—which might be perceived as dumping—would alienate some countries. He consequently “pressed for a lenient trade policy which yielded if not outright forfeited markets to our allies and the non-aligned nations.”Given the competing goals, Agriculture “often found itself at odds” with State.“We are not engaging in any cut-throat race for markets,” Benson said, trying—unsuccessfully—to calm Canadian officials in mid-1955, “but there is no reason why we should not set an example for the world of friendly competition.”He also promised equally skeptical Europeans: “(1) we will compete fairly; (2) we will stress quality; and (3) we will seek mutually profitable deals.”Benson’s assurances failed to convince, and countries lodging formal complaints regarding U.S. dumping included Australia, Burma, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Thailand, and Uruguay.

Without question, the largest untapped foreign market for U.S. products was Communist countries.Although both Benson and Dulles were reluctant to trade with Communist regimes, they knew that a too-strict application of U.S. policy could be counter-productive to American interests. For example, when America refused to sell wheat—its most stockpiled commodity—to Poland, Polish leaders instead purchased it from Canada. Yugoslavia, after being turned down, bought from Russia, even though U.S. policy encouraged rapprochement.As a result, the administration came to embrace the principle of “net advantage,” believing that the United States gained “more by selling to Communist nations than by refusing to.”Benson opposed strengthening the economies of Communist countries; but bowing to pragmatism—as well as to U.S. farmers—he offered no public criticism of the new policy. After all, his biographers note, he wanted “desperately to get rid of domestic surpluses and this turn-about …would soon open up new markets heretofore sealed off.”Still, some congressmen complained that Benson favored sales over resisting Communism.

As if to emphasize his department’s anti-Communist credentials, Benson in mid-December 1954 announced that Agriculture would not be retaining Wolf Ladejinsky, a lateral transfer from State. Ladejinsky, an expert in Asian land reform, had entered U.S. government employ in 1935. Benson’s initial reason for firing him was that the Russian Jewish immigrant was not sufficiently skilled but later asserted that he was also a security risk. When Ladejinsky’s supporters protested, a public relations “hurricane” ensued. Soon it became known that Benson had relied on the advice of two aides, both of whom, according to historian Mary S. McAuliffe, had made “errors in procedure and judgment in handling the case.” In particular, Milan D. Smith,Benson’s new executive assistant, had “inaccurately and incompletely briefed Benson, by furnishing him an inaccurate and incomplete summary of Ladejinsky’s case file.” Smith also wrote the announcement of Ladejinsky’s termination “without a prior USDA investigation” and “circulated an anti-Semitic letter . . . as ‘classic’ evidence of what ‘thinking people’ believed about the Ladejinsky case.” Though he emphatically disavowed any anti-Semitism, Benson refused to consider that his aides—both of whom were LDS—could be mistaken. Less than a month later, Eisenhower intervened to secure Ladejinsky’s employment elsewhere in the government. Eventually, Benson retracted—but never repudiated—his claim that Ladejinsky was a security risk.

As the Ladejinsky affair wound down, Benson returned to championing expanded research. At the time, industrial uses accounted for only 7 percent of the total quantity of American farm products produced.The basic components of most agricultural commodities are cellulose, starch, sugar, oils, and protein; and Benson decided to authorize contracts with private industry to “(1) [develop] commercial uses for dialdehyde starches; (2) [manufacture] paper products from cereal starches; (3) [find] uses for wheat glutens; and (4) [extract] substances from grain for the making of resins, plasticizers, and chemicals.” He also supported “seeking new uses for carbohydrates, dried whole milk, and cotton,” together with “raising such new and exotic crops as bamboo, kenaf (for twine), jojoba (for wax), safflower (for oil), sesame, pistachio nuts, sunflowers, and high amylose corn for starch.”But some administration officials believed that he should have relied even more heavily on the private sector, and expressed concerns when annual expenditures for research consistently exceeded appropriations. More money, they worried, was being spent on “developing more productive varieties of seeds, finding better fertilizers, discovering new pesticides, and improving cultivation techniques” than on finding new uses.

Benson’s efforts, especially at improving farming methods, actually helped to “create more surpluses—not to find ways to dispose of them.”“I knew how a ship captain must feel as he watches his badly leaking vessel take water,” he remembered. “Surpluses had become the number-one problem in U.S. agriculture. No real hope of improving farm income was in sight until the surpluses could be liquidated.”Benson quickly came to appreciate that more concrete results were needed—“there simply is no easy way to unload a surplus”—and by 1955 also admitted that “no administrator in government could function without taking cognizance of political cross-currents.” In practical terms, this meant “seeking to placate certain segments of the farm population”—in other words, compromise or, as Benson now ruefully quipped, “rising above principle.”

VI 

Knowing that as Republicans prepared for the 1956 general elections “the farm situation has worsened while we have been in office,”Eisenhower directed Benson to take “temporary or specific action” to “meet any current emergency with which the American farmer and his family are faced.” In other circumstances, Benson would have “resisted any thought of allowing pure politics to enter into his decision-making.” However, Eisenhower’s instruction was not a request, and Benson was a mostly loyal foot soldier. After consulting with staff, he responded by proposing a “retirement plan” to remove arable land from cultivation and transfer it to a federal “Soil Bank.” Thus, surpluses would be “prevented by bringing commodity production into adjustment with market demands.”“We would use the surplus to use up the surplus” was how Benson expressed it.

Though the idea was not new, Benson’s proposal centered on the concepts of “acreage” and “conservation” reserves. Under Benson’s plan, American farmers would be paid for productive acres taken out of cultivation and deposited in acreage reserves at rates approximately one-half of what they normally received from the government for their crops, usually corn, cotton, rice, and wheat. Preliminary estimates placed the cost at $455–$650 million annually. Lower yielding land could be placed in conservation reserves. Estimates here were reportedly more difficult to make, but “it was obvious that this type of program would cost substantial sums of money.”Benson insisted that acreage reserves was strictly a “short term emergency program . . . intended to hit the surplus a mighty blow.”He knew the Soil Bank was far from ideal;but, his biographers point out, he “was under White House pressure to find a way to help farmers financially while simultaneously solving the dilemma of overproduction.”

As he recuperated from a minor heart attack, Eisenhower in early 1956 responded to renewed calls for a return to 90 percent parity by stressing that retiring land from cultivation would help to prevent the accumulation of new surpluses.Benson worked to convince himself and others that the program, in fact, complemented his own drive for flexible-to-no price supports. He wanted “passage of a Soil Bank without any encumbrances.”What Congress eventually handed him and the administration, however, was a partisan-friendly “omnibus measure with many at tractive but costly vote-getting features.”(“The two times when people are apt to be most unstable,” Benson observed, “are when they are in love and when they are running for office.”) Most distressingly, in Benson’s view, the bill “surreptitiously returned price supports back to 90 percent of parity.”“In a democracy such as ours,” one of the administration’s congressional supporters countered, “we must always compromise.”

Benson, disgusted by the strong-arming, again contemplated resigning.Despite some staff support for the bill, Eisenhower was disappointed as well and responded that he would have to veto it: “In the long run it would have hurt all farmers.”He then “let it be known” that he would be willing to compromise on parity, intimating that while he could not support a return to 90 percent, he would not insist on 75 percent, but would allow it to remain at 82.5 percent. When the revised bill was finally signed into law, Eisenhower believed the Soil Bank was “rich with promise” for “improving our agriculture situation.”The bill authorized a Soil Bank for three years, with $750 million for acreage reserves and $450 million for conservation reserves. Approximately half a million farmers deposited 11 million acres in the acreage reserve and about 1.5 million acres in the Conservation reserve.As it turned out, however, the Soil Bank passed too late in the year to affect production levels significantly for 1956.

Although hopeful about the Soil Bank,Benson was dismayed at Eisenhower’s concession on price supports. “This was the first, and I guess the only time that I was really disappointed in the President,” he wrote in his memoirs. “His veto was an act of raw political courage. Why negate it in part by putting off the inevitable dropping of support levels? He did it, I knew, out of good motivation; because he feared there might be no protective legislation enacted at all that year for farmers. And he did it, too, because he believed in the gradual approach.”

Stumping for the Republican Party that fall,Benson tried to position himself as a “rational reformer,” pointing out “the weaknesses of the price support system which had frozen production into uneconomic patterns by ignoring new consumer preferences and market demands.” However, opponents portrayed him as a “callous businessman interested only in serving large landowners or big corporations.”While many economists favored flexible supports, their views “could not compete with the oversimplified political rhetoric of [Benson’s] detractors.”In the end, Eisenhower’s considerable popularity returned him to office,but Republican support in six Midwestern farm states was slipping.And Democrats gained slightly greater control of both Houses. “The election proved one thing,” Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) observed, “and that is that the people like and want President Eisenhower, but they do not like or want the Republican party.” Benson may have genuinely believed that the “headlines in agriculture are not all bad,”but a less partisan analysis would have foreseen a second term as turbulent as the first. 

[Part 2 follows in the winter 2008 issue.]