Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right

Copyright © 2020 by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Harris, Matthew L., author.

Title: Watchman on the tower : Ezra Taft Benson and the making of the Mormon Right / Matthew Harris.

Description: Salt Lake City : The University of Utah Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019049800 (print) | LCCN 2019049801 (ebook) | ISBN 9781607817710 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781607817574 (paperback) | ISBN 9781607817581 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Benson, Ezra Taft. | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Political activity—United States—History. | Mormon Church—Apostles—Biography. | Mormons—Political activity—United States—History. | Conservatism—United States—Religious aspects—Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC BX8695.B38 H37 2020 (print) | LCC BX8695.B38 (ebook) | DDC 289.3092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049800

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049801

Errata and further information on this and other titles available online at UofUpress.com

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

For Courtney, Madison, Taylor,

and Jackson—my rocks.

I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.

—Ezekiel 3:17 (KJV)

In their capacity as elders, prophets, ambassadors, and ministers, the Lord’s agents are watchmen upon the tower. Their obligation is to raise the warning voice so that the sheepfold of Israel shall stand secure from the dangers and evils of the world.

—Bruce R. McConkie

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Socialist New Deal

Chapter 2: Socialized Agriculture

Chapter 3: Making a Conspiracy Culture

Chapter 4: Reining in the Apostle

Chapter 5: Remaking Benson

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe many people thanks for their generous assistance in the production of this book. Special mention goes to Greg Prince, Joseph Geisner, and Gary Bergera for generously sharing documents that they had collected over the years. Also noteworthy are Lee Davidson and Ernie Lazar for sharing FBI files on Ezra Taft Benson and Cleon Skousen, respectively. Matthew Bowman reviewed the manuscript and offered several useful suggestions to strengthen it, as did Gary Bergera. Newell Bringhurst read parts of the manuscript but, more importantly, listened patiently on the phone as I worked through numerous knotty issues about Benson. Darius Gray shared insights about meeting with right-wing Mormon groups. Patrick Mason and I shared conversations about Benson for which I am grateful. Richard Davis generously shared his insights about Benson’s politics. Steve Mayfield regaled me with stories describing his encounters with Benson’s family during his church mission in Colorado in the early 1970s. Curt Bench shared glimpses of Benson’s personality and temperament when he worked for Deseret Book in the 1980s. John F. McManus, former president of the John Birch Society, was ever-gracious sharing insights about Benson and tracking down the Mormon leader’s correspondence with Robert Welch.

Numerous archivists and librarians also helped along the way. My thanks to the staff at the LDS Church History Library, especially William Slaughter, for providing a congenial and hospitable place to work. Also deserving praise are the archivists at the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Utah State University, the Eisenhower Presidential Library, and the Wisconsin Historical Society, all of whom tracked down materials in a timely fashion and provided an abundance of cheer and good will as they did so. Kenneth McKenzie, the inimitable interloan librarian at Colorado State University–Pueblo, my home institution, proved indispensable (once again) in my research. The university also provided generous research funds that aided in the researching and writing of this book. Tom Krause of the University of Utah Press has been courteous and professional in responding to my queries.

Slight portions of Watchman on the Tower are drawn from my previously published work. I’d like to thank Bill Morain and Jed Rogers—the editors of the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal and Utah Historical Quarterly, respectively—for allowing me to use articles I published in their journals.¹

And finally, my family: My sister Trina and her husband, Chris, provided a welcome refuge during my research capers in Utah, along with their sweet children, Sarah and Rocky. My brothers, Michael and Aaron, patiently listened as I regaled them with stories about Benson’s importance in shaping contemporary Mormon history. My mother and father were also joint collaborators in my Benson book—as they called it. They listened patiently as I described my research findings, shared their own recollections of Benson, and otherwise served as generous listeners even when I had exhausted their patience with what one scholar called the burden of knowledge. Likewise, my two older children—Madison and Taylor—have been generous supporters, fearless interlocutors, and terrific companions. Their patience, love, and good will sustains me. Jackson, my special-needs son, deserves a shout-out as well. During long hours of writing, he was unflinching in entering my office, peeling my fingers off the keyboard, spinning my chair around, then plopping himself on my lap saying, What’s Daddy doing? Moments like those are precious.

None of this is possible, of course, without the enduring support of my wife, Courtney. Mormon studies isn’t quite her thing, but she loves ideas, enjoys good conversation, and shares my joy about the life of the mind. Her example to our children, boundless support for my scholarly endeavors, and unfailing devotion to me and our family only begins to capture the gratitude I feel for the blessing she is in my life.

INTRODUCTION

This book explores the political worldview of the Mormon apostle-president Ezra Taft Benson, arguably one of the most outspoken and controversial Mormon leaders in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As an LDS general authority, including forty-two years as a Mormon apostle and nine years as the church president, he was beloved by countless Mormons who praised his sermons condemning communism, socialism, and the welfare state. Indeed, few Latter-day Saints exerted more influence in the history of the contemporary Mormon Church or in national politics than Benson. Ultrapatriotic and intensely ideological, he played a significant role in the rise of conservatism following the Second World War and was twice recruited to run for the U.S. presidency. Among his friends included four American presidents—Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush—and influential politicians like Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, and Nelson Rockefeller.

Most notably, Benson served as the secretary of agriculture in the Eisenhower administration—the first Mormon apostle to serve in a presidential cabinet—and he was the first Mormon leader to be awarded the prestigious Bronze Wolf Award, the highest award given by the Boy Scouts of America for volunteer leaders.¹ He was also the recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal, the second highest civilian award bestowed by the United States government, in recognition for serving his country and religion.²

And yet, as beloved as he was, Benson was controversial. Over the course of his LDS church ministry, the First Presidency,³ the highest-ranking body in the LDS Church, rebuked him on at least four occasions and some of his fellow apostles wanted him disciplined. Grassroots Mormons also found him controversial and some called for his removal from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the second-highest-ranking body in the LDS Church. While thousands of Latter-day Saints lauded him for his teachings and deep knowledge of the faith, a vocal minority found his sermons divisive and polarizing. Benson once quipped that he was not a strong partisan, yet those who knew him, knew him as a fire-breathing crusader for right-wing causes. And that is precisely why he was loved and simultaneously disliked within the Latter-day Saint community.⁴

Indeed, over a span of nearly fifty years, he delivered dozens of peppery sermons freely mixing his religion with his extreme right-wing politics.⁵ Confident and self-assured, he viewed himself as an Old Testament prophet—a watchman on the tower. His sermons frequently included the words watch, warn, or witness in the titles.⁶ Part of his vigilance had to do with the time he was living in; the other part was his personality and temperament. With the rapid spread of communism and socialism following World War II, Benson believed that God had called him to save the Constitution from these godless forces.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that many of Benson’s sermons touched on patriotic themes underscoring his unwavering belief in the providential destiny of the United States.⁷ Nowhere was this sentiment more vividly illustrated than in a letter he wrote to President Ronald Reagan in 1984: I have felt impressed that I should write you and acquaint you of some of the great prophecies made in the Book of Mormon, a new witness for Christ, and which volume has much to say about America. Benson went on to explain that the United States had a special place in the development of democracy and capitalism, the creation of republican institutions, and indeed in the birth of Mormonism itself. This nation, Benson testified to Reagan, is the Lord’s base of operations in these latter days. It is where the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored and where God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ appeared to… Joseph Smith.⁸

Benson was especially vigorous in his praise of the U.S. Constitution, where he proclaimed it a heavenly banner and sacred document—its words akin to the revelations of God. He also taught that Latter-day Saints had a divine responsibility to save the Constitution from communism and socialism.⁹ This counsel applied most critically to his own family, whom he believed that God had blessed for this special purpose. In a remarkably candid letter in 1981, written when Benson was the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, he informed his children that certain bloodlines seem to have the spirit of freedom in their veins. Mother and I are grateful that each of our children has that spirit of freedom… and have a love for this country and understand its divine destiny.¹⁰

Not coincidentally, Benson’s staunch conservatism and intense patriotism compelled him to participate in a number of patriotic organizations. At various times during his ministry he affiliated with the John Birch Society, the All-American Society, and the Freemen Institute—three ultraright anticommunist organizations. At the same time, he urged his family to become involved in right-wing causes. His eldest son, Reed, became the national director of public relations for the John Birch Society in 1962 and his second son, Mark, became the vice president in charge of development at the Freemen Institute in 1979.¹¹ Likewise, his wife, daughters, and grandchildren joined patriotic organizations and embraced right-wing causes.¹² Flora, his wife of over half a century, recognized Ezra’s influence on their family and praised him to the children: Isn’t Dad wonderful, and isn’t it marvelous that we have a father the Lord has called to serve his country and his Church and the kingdom? His daughter Barbara concurred, adding that her father was a big, healthy, hearty man, with no fears, no anxieties, no prejudices, with his eye to the glory of God and his great prophetic wisdom as to the future of the world and God’s children.¹³

Close associates, however, portrayed a different side of Benson. A friend recalled that Benson was an extremely intense individual—not inclined to banter or joke. His coworkers at the Department of Agriculture characterized him as inflexible, highly moralistic, and straight-laced. Lowry Nelson, who taught the apostle in three courses at BYU, complained that Benson took himself so damn seriously. Even President Eisenhower, who had a close relationship with the apostle during their cabinet years, remarked that Benson expressed his views not always with the maximum of tact.¹⁴ Naturally this extended to his duties as an apostle, where Benson had a number of awkward moments and run-ins with Latter-day Saints. On one occasion, for example, he reportedly refused to give an infertile Mormon couple a blessing after they informed him they had used birth control, which the church prohibited at the time. On another occasion, he allegedly instructed a young woman to sell her engagement ring to buy food storage in preparation for the End Times.¹⁵

Benson also clashed with Mormon historians. Along with fellow apostle Boyd K. Packer, he rebuked them for emphasizing humanistic trends in church history and for inordinately humanizing the prophets of God.¹⁶ Benson’s disenchantment with Mormon historians, moreover, led him to push for the dismantling of the Church Historian’s office, in what critics correctly perceived as a tactic to penalize scholars for practicing the conventions of their discipline. No less worrisome for Mormon intellectuals, Benson strongly condemned popular Mormon journals like Dialogue and Sunstone, which published liberal interpretations of Mormon thought and culture.¹⁷

Ezra Taft Benson in his living room. Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society.

Benson’s stern demeanor notwithstanding, he had a gentle side to him that Latter-day Saints rarely witnessed. He could be kindhearted and generous as when, for example, he wrote a charitable letter to a journalist who had said unkind things about him. The apostle was also thoughtful and wrote genuine letters of sympathy to his family and friends during their moments of grief and despair; and, despite a busy schedule, he rarely forgot to send a birthday card or holiday greeting to those he cared about.¹⁸ But most importantly, Benson was a fierce advocate of Mormonism and an unabashed champion of the Book of Mormon. Deeply affected by this religion, he called for prayer before each cabinet meeting during his tenure in the Eisenhower administration and shared copies of the Book of Mormon with several U.S. presidents and heads of state.¹⁹ His earnestness of purpose and strict fidelity to his religion were matched only by his aversion to communism, which he forged during the turbulent years of the Cold War. For much of Benson’s adult life, he lived during a period of prolonged economic and military tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. Church president Heber J. Grant called Benson as an apostle in 1943—a few years before the Cold War began—and Benson died in 1994, a few years after it ended, serving some fifty-one years as an LDS general authority, much of which was during the rapid expansion of communism during the post–World War II era.

One of the crowning achievements of his life occurred in 1953 when President Eisenhower asked him to serve as the secretary of agriculture, where he worked tirelessly to stabilize a volatile farm economy. During his cabinet years the outspoken Mormon apostle came to view communism, socialism, and liberalism as inextricably linked and as part of a worldwide conspiracy to centralize and fortify government power. Somewhat quixotically, he viewed the civil rights movement as part of the same conspiracy. He claimed a direct link between the Kremlin and Martin Luther King Jr., asserting that many integration leaders are members of five to 10 communist front organizations in the United States.²⁰

Following his government service in 1961, Benson resumed his duties as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and continued promoting his ultraconservative politics. In a number of books and sermons, he assailed labor unions, welfare programs, and federal aid to education. These ill-conceived government programs, he reasoned, were socialist in nature and had placed the United States on the royal road to Communism.²¹ Benson was especially critical of American presidents who oversaw the programs. He claimed that Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter were all part of the communist conspiracy. Similarly, he alleged that Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was also part of the conspiracy, as were numerous government bureaucrats, public officials, and Hollywood actors. He was no less critical of the United Nations, which he called a communist plot—and he asserted that a government program to fluoridate the water supply was actually a sinister plot to erode freedom.²²

To be sure, Benson’s embrace of conspiracy theories placed him outside of the mainstream of the Republican Party. His conspiratorial thinking had developed gradually, evolved in fits and starts, and was not fully evident to Latter-day Saints until the tumultuous civil rights years. During the 1940s and 1950s, for example, he supported conservative politicians like Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, and Barry Goldwater but also moderates like Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller. By the 1960s, however, he moved to the fringes of the party when he began associating with a number of conspiratorialist thinkers, from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Birch founder Robert Welch to fringe-right politicians like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace. He was also influenced by fellow Mormon conspiracists J. Reuben Clark, W. Cleon Skousen, and H. Verlan Andersen, to name a few.

Why Benson became a conspiracist is not an easy question to answer. His journals during the years that he was active with the John Birch Society, the organization that most shaped his conspiracy views, are not available to researchers. Nevertheless, scholars have offered a range of explanations why Americans in general have embraced conspiracy theories. Historian Richard Hofstadter published an influential essay in 1964 suggesting that persons prone to conspiracy theories experienced a status anxiety occasioned by war, job displacement, and economic depression. Other scholars, such as political psychologists Robert Robins and Jerold Post, document a malign power of paranoia in American history and explain conspiracy thinking as a product of persons with a fragile self-esteem who have lost their moorings.²³ Still others view conspiratorial thinking as a way to make sense of a complicated world fraught with danger and uncertainty. Political scientist Michael Barkun argues, for example, that conspiracists create a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of light and goodness are pitted against the forces of darkness and evil. They claim special knowledge of unknown or unappreciated events that pose a danger to themselves and their country.²⁴

The reason why Benson embraced conspiracy theories is more prosaic and less imaginative than why other Americans aligned with a conspiracy subculture. The apostle did not have a fragile self-esteem, neither was he paranoid, nor did he experience a status anxiety. But he did see the world as an eternal war between good and evil and he viewed the rise of the nuclear age, the rapid spread of communism and socialism, and the emergence of the welfare state as signs of the times. Certainly, he was not unique in these sentiments. Like many evangelicals during the Cold War era, and like many of his fellow apostles in the Quorum of the Twelve, Benson was clearly influenced by biblical End Times prophecies.²⁵ He studied very intently the millennialist passages in the Bible that foretold Christ’s return to the earth, during which he would vanquish evil and inaugurate a thousand-year reign of peace. In this (as with early Mormon leaders) he adopted a premillennial eschatology—a popular belief shared by evangelicals in which the world, plagued by sin and corruption, required Christ to intervene and save it.²⁶ Benson was also immersed in End Times prophecies in the Book of Mormon, as well as the writings of early Mormon leaders who claimed that the Mormon elders would save the Constitution in the last days. His conspiracist thinking, then, was not the function of an individual disorder but rather the Cold War environment in which he lived. As historian Robert Goldberg has persuasively argued, the conspiracy theorist does not operate in a vacuum, and neither did Benson.²⁷

In any event, the LDS hierarchy did not share Benson’s extremist views. Neither his fellow apostles in the Quorum of the Twelve nor the First Presidency embraced his conspiracy theories, though many of them were conservative theologically and politically. First Presidency counselor Hugh B. Brown was his most vocal critic, but apostles Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, and Gordon B. Hinckley also rejected his partisanship. They grumbled in private when LDS Church president David O. McKay allowed Benson to freely mix politics with religion, giving the impression to Latter-day Saints—and to outsiders—that Mormonism and conservatism were irrevocably aligned. More troubling, the general authorities expressed frustration when Benson besmirched the Democratic Party, linking it with communism.²⁸

As one might suspect, Benson had a very decided view of what it meant to be conservative or liberal. Apostle Harold B. Lee undoubtedly exaggerated when he quipped that anyone who didn’t agree with Brother Benson’s mind was indeed a communist. But his point, however hyperbolized, is well taken: Benson had strong partisan views.²⁹ He defined a conservative as one who adheres to the sound principles of this nation as propounded by the Founding Fathers and as dedicated to sound fiscal policies, freedom of enterprise and a minimum of federal influence in the lives of citizens. In contrast, he asserted that liberals were those who promote progress and change sometimes at the sacrifice of sound fiscal policy, freedom of enterprise, and often to the extent of using the federal government as the dominant instrument of change. They advocate for broad federal participation in most aspects of life—business, education, agriculture, health, culture—which bordered on socialistic.³⁰

For nearly half a century, Benson’s writings and sermons permeated Mormon culture. His writings had a profound impact in how Latter-day Saints viewed liberalism, the welfare state, and federal programs. As Robert Goldberg has explained, Benson did much to wean Mormons from their Democratic loyalties and firm their support for the Republican Party.³¹ But it was not just mainstream conservatives the apostle influenced. Thousands of right-wing Mormon extremists, clearly outside of mainstream conservatism, were inspired by Benson’s sermons and writings. Included in this number were Latter-day Saints who started a polygamy sect in Manti, Utah, in 1994; town officials in LaVerkin, Utah, who declared their city a U.N. free zone in 2001; a BYU physics professor who promoted conspiracy theories about 9/11 in 2005; a Mormon woman who predicted the End Times in 2014; a Nevada rancher who refused to pay federal grazing fees that resulted in an armed confrontation with law enforcement in 2014; and antigovernment zealots in Oregon who sparked an intense forty-one day standoff with federal authorities after they occupied a government building in 2016.³²

Today, the LDS hierarchy has distanced itself from the extreme right-wing politics of Ezra Taft Benson and embraced a more moderate image for the church. As this study shows, three LDS leaders—Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, and Gordon B. Hinckley—reined him in. Nevertheless, thousands of Latter-day Saints continue to promote Benson’s ultraconservative views in their books and on their websites—a clear sign that his legacy endures.

This book explores that legacy and traces how Benson developed a radical form of conservatism. I argue that three pivotal experiences in Benson’s life shaped his ultraconservative views and defined the leader that he would become. The first was his mission to war-torn Europe just after World War II. The second was his eight years in the Eisenhower administration when he served as the secretary of agriculture. And the third was his affiliation with the John Birch Society, the most extreme anticommunist organization in the United States.

Chapter one probes Benson’s 1946 mission to Europe in what became one of the most important humanitarian missions in the history of the church. Less than two years after World War II ended, the First Presidency asked Benson to deliver food, water, and clothing to Latter-day Saints whose lives had been shattered by the war. There, fresh from the smoldering ruins of war, Benson developed strong views about communism, fascism, and socialism that shaped his views about government. Likewise, this chapter explores how his experiences running farm cooperatives during the Great Depression profoundly affected how he viewed the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman administrations, in particular, why he believed their domestic policies posed a danger to democracy and capitalism.

Chapter two explores Benson’s embattled tenure as the secretary of agriculture in the Eisenhower administration. He called Roosevelt and Truman’s farm policies socialized agriculture and resented when lobbyists and liberal government bureaucrats opposed his efforts to scale back the federal government’s involvement in the farm economy. Equally important, Benson’s tenure in the Eisenhower administration led him to conclude that subversives had infiltrated the federal government—a view reinforced by the demagogic Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy but also by three friends and mentors who profoundly influenced him: First Presidency counselor J. Reuben Clark, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and BYU professor W. Cleon Skousen.

Chapter three investigates the influence of the John Birch Society on Benson. He alleged that Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., were all part of a communist conspiracy. Also important, this chapter explores how Benson appealed to Mormon scripture to support his conspiracy theories. He offered a fresh and innovative way to read secret combinations in the Book of Mormon. The apostle claimed that there were parallels between a secret group of plotters who conspired to overthrow the Nephite government and liberal government bureaucrats in the modern day who plotted the overthrow of the U.S. government. Finally, this chapter evaluates Benson’s desire to run on two presidential tickets with prominent segregationists Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.

Chapter four explores church presidents Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, and Spencer W. Kimball’s efforts to rein in Benson following David O. McKay’s death in 1970. As church leaders sought to expand missions and build temples in communist and African nations, they found Benson’s extreme partisanship damaging to the church. This chapter further probes Benson’s assessment of the Jimmy Carter administration. Just weeks after President Kimball’s historic revelation in 1978 lifting the priesthood and temple ban, Benson sent a chilling letter to FBI director William Webster claiming that President Carter had aided and abetted the communist conspiracy. Benson also averred that the KGB, a Soviet intelligence agency, had infiltrated all three branches of the U.S. government.

Chapter five discusses Benson’s LDS Church presidency—in particular, how his counselor Gordon