The Reining in of Ezra Taft Benson

Scholar Matt Harris on the conspiratorial, anti-communist firebrand who divided a quorum

Ezra Taft Benson, circa 1953 (illustration courtesy of Beck Seamons)

In October, the Utah Monthly had the chance to sit down with Matt Harris, a professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo and a scholar of twentieth-century Mormonism. Harris’s most recent book is Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, which came out this past summer. (Read our review here.) He is also the author of a brief political biography of Ezra Taft Benson, Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right. In the portion of the transcript provided below, we discuss his Benson biography, specifically the sources of Benson’s far-right political beliefs and the controversies that ensued when Benson mixed those politics with his responsibilities as a Latter-day Saint apostle. A later installment of the interview transcript will cover Harris’s more recent book. 

You mention in the introduction to Watchman on the Tower that the Cold War shaped Benson’s thinking as both a politician and an apostle. Could you talk a little bit about that context? 

Elder Benson was called into the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943, and ten years later, in 1953, he was selected to be President Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture. Benson was really worried about politics. He hated the New Deal, it was too liberal for his liking, and he thought that most of the bad things that happened in the world were because of liberal regimes. And he did not make distinctions between liberalism, socialism, or communism, he just thought they were sort of all one big ball, one led to the other, and so he was worried about world conditions. 

Let me back up a minute. He was living in D.C. when he was called as an apostle, and after his call he moved with his family to Salt Lake, where he began his full-time duties as an apostle. And then in 1953—with President McKay’s support—he accepted the call to be the secretary of agriculture, which necessitated his move back to the nation's capital. And it’s there where his whole world fell apart, where he got to deal with, you know, politicians and lobbyists for the first time. And Benson’s a very serious man. He’s not used to having to compromise with people. He’s not used to having people push back on his ideas. And so his whole Washington D.C. experience just absolutely unnerved him. And this is the same moment when McCarthyism is running wild. Benson’s caught up in this stuff, and is given a special blessing by President McKay and J. Reuben Clark, McKay’s counselor, that he is to protect against the threats to the Constitution, that beyond being the secretary of agriculture, he is to play a role similar to McCarthy’s and sort of root out these subversive influences. Benson’s back in the nation’s capital, doing his government service, when the whole nation is absolutely on fire with communist allegations, and thus unsurprisingly, Benson’s caught up in all this.

Interesting. And I think you also mention in your book that Benson was a fan of J. Edgar Hoover? Is that right? 

He didn’t meet J. Edgar Hoover until he moved to Washington, but he’d always been a fan. He read Hoover’s FBI crime reports, which were periodicals that Hoover would publish every so often about crime statistics, and Benson always read those. And if you look at some of Benson’s sermons, he’s frequently quoting from what he calls the FBI bulletins. And I mean, one can’t imagine today that an apostle in Salt Lake is routinely quoting from the FBI director, but that’s what Benson was doing, and it’s astonishing. 

It’s not just the FBI reports. It’s also two books that Hoover wrote. The first one is called Masters of Deceit (1958). It was ghostwritten by members of his bureau. He put his name on it, and it became a national bestseller. And the other one was called A Study of Communism (1962), which was essentially the same thing as Masters of Deceit, but geared towards a high school audience. And J. Edgar Hoover was trying to inform Americans of all ages about what he called “communist front groups,” communist groups that he alleged were posing as innocuous civic institutions. Hoover and subsequently Ezra Taft Benson, Cleon Skousen, and others saw the Civil Rights Movement as a communist front group. 

I think one of the more fascinating things I learned from your book was about the tensions within the Quorum of the Twelve over some of Benson's advocacy. Could you talk about what specifically caused some of Benson’s fellow apostles to become frustrated with his politics? 

The John Birch Society. The John Birch Society has sort of fallen out of repute, but it was the most extreme anti-communist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1958 by a guy named Robert Welch, a millionaire who made his money in the chocolate business. He decided that after he retired, he would turn his attention to fighting communism, and so he started the John Birch Society. Welch pushed a lot of conspiracy theories that Ezra Taft Benson would just circle around. Benson embraced these theories uncritically, including the fact that the United Nations was a communist front group and that Eisenhower was a communist. I mean, this is crazy, right? This is a five-star general, and Bircher called him a communist. Franklin Roosevelt was a communist. Lyndon Johnson and Earl Warren, chief justice of the Supreme Court, were both communists. Birchers also call the fluoridation of water an attempt to subvert freedom. 

And so just all of these conspiracy theories, and the brethren didn’t like it because a lot of Latter-day Saints complained about Elder Benson promoting these conspiracy theories in general conference, in stake conferences, in priesthood conferences. You know, Latter-day Saints go to their worship services to learn about Jesus Christ and the scriptures, and instead they’re getting a steady diet of Birch Society conspiracy theories from Elder Benson. So some of the people who complained about Elder Benson the most were two Democrats, Hugh Brown and Henry Moyle, both of whom were in the governing first presidency. But it’s important for your audience to know that even the theological conservatives hated the Birch society. So for example, Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee, the two most seminal apostles in the 1960s, and both conservative religious leaders, don’t believe in the Civil Rights nonsense that Benson is spewing. And in fact, both Elder Smith and Elder Lee called Benson in and told him to knock it off because his politics were really dividing the church. 

Fast forwarding to when Benson becomes prophet—does something happen there that prevents him from being as political in that position? Is there some reining in that goes on? 

Yeah, there’s no doubt. A lot of people in the church have this mistaken idea that somehow President Benson was calmed or soothed or changed over time. None of that’s true. It’s certainly not borne out by any evidence. What happens is that there is a steady stream of leaders who rein him in, and Harold Lee is the first church president to do so. President McKay and Benson were close, so [although] McKay didn't like the Birch stuff, he didn’t fully rein in Elder Benson's political proclivities. And Harold Lee told him, “You know, when I'm the president, you're done. I mean, he was very open with him. “I don't have any authority right now to check you. But when President McKay is dead—and he's going to be dead soon, because he’s in his 90s—and then his successor, Joseph Fielding Smith, is dead, you’re done.” 

Lee had a temper. He had a stiff backbone. He had no problem standing up to Elder Benson, who was sort of a vigorous personality himself. So President Lee told Benson that he was not to talk about conspiracies, Gadianton robbers, or secret combinations in general conference. And President Lee said that “if anybody ever talks about secret combinations or conspiracies or anything in conference, it’ll be me, not you.” So Lee laid down the law, but he wasn’t around very long, and when he died in December 1973, Spencer Kimball became the new president. 

And Elder Benson thought he could push around President Kimball because they had been called into the Quorum of the Twelve on the same day in 1943, they had sat through dozens of quorum meetings, and Kimball was a guy that didn’t like conflict. So Elder Benson thought he could run roughshod over him. And boy, was he wrong, because when Elder Benson resumed talking about Gadianton robbers and secret combinations and all that mumbo jumbo, President Kimball called him into his office and read him the riot act. And he said, “Elder Benson, you are the most senior apostle in the church other than me, and you have a greater responsibility in your duties as the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—leave politics alone.” 

But of course, politics is in Benson’s DNA, and in 1980 he gave a very controversial devotional address at BYU called “Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet.” And one of the things that Benson said that was so controversial was that the prophet could speak for the church in political affairs. He is hinting that the church may endorse Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. And of course, that kind of thinking elicits a plethora of commenters, including liberal Latter-day Saints, who wrote President Kimball protest letters about Elder Benson’s talk. In response, Kimball called Benson in again and required him to apologize to the entire Quorum of the Twelve for this incendiary talk. Evidently, President Kimball didn’t think it was sincere or contrite, because the following week, he had Elder Benson come back and apologize to all the general authority seventies.

In 1985, when Benson became the new church president, one of the first things he did was he reached out to the Birch Society, and he said to the Birch president—a man that I’ve interviewed—“I want my counselors, Tom Monson and Gordon Hinckley, and my secretary, Arthur Haycock, to have your literature; please send the American Opinion magazine to them and bill me. And when I interviewed the Birch president, I asked him, I said, “Well, what happened?” He said, “Oh, about a few weeks later, when they got their first magazine, I got a nasty letter from all three of them, saying, don’t send us this trash.” And so President Benson is trying to resume [his explicit political advocacy], and he learns that there’s push back among his colleagues. 

Not surprisingly, he wants to call his son Reed Benson, a Bircher, into the Quorum of the Twelve, but that gets shot down. He wants to call a guy named Verlan Andersen, a Birch Society member who taught at BYU for years, into the Quorum of the Twelve, but that gets shot down. He wants Cleon Skousen as an apostle—of course, nobody will go for that. And this is all to say that Gordon Hinckley and others, they’re the ones who are really putting the squeeze on President Benson, because starting with President Kimball and then continuing on through President Kimball’s counselor, President Hinckley, the message to Benson is that you can’t be trashing the Civil Rights Movement and expect the gospel to flourish in Northern Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa. You can’t call a liberal a socialist or a Communist and expect to get into Canada. So they’re trying to tell Benson that the church needs to not be so parochial, not be so blinkered, that it really needs to have this more cosmopolitan look. Has to be nonpartisan, because liberals and socialists and communists need to be safe too. 

Okay, interesting. I think that that’s an important point and sort of unexpected, that Benson was so beyond the pale in his conspiracy theorizing and his other crazy beliefs that even the apostles we remember as being dogmatic or doctrinaire were fed up with him. So last question, I’m wondering how you see Benson’s politics, his style, reverberating into the present day, especially within the church?

I mean, Benson’s planting the seeds of white Christian nationalism, no doubt about it. And I want to be clear, though, that there’s no evidence that Elder Benson ever advocated violence. He was always a law and order kind of guy, and I’m certain he would have been very uncomfortable with the insurrection on January 6, but he would have been buying into all these MAGA conspiracies, because that’s really what he taught and embraced during his lifetime. And what’s interesting is that even though he’s been dead since 1994, there are tons of people who are still promoting his talks on their websites, their social media platforms. So he has a remarkable staying power, even decades after his death. And if you go to any sort of right-wing Latter-day Saint site, they’re always quoting President Benson.