• U.S.

AGRICULTURE: Apostle at Work

16 minute read
TIME

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When Ezra Taft Benson was asked to become Secretary of Agriculture last fall, he told Dwight Eisenhower: “General, no salary in the world could persuade me to take the job.” Benson began to give Ike his reasons. First, he had not supported the Eisenhower nomination, had been for his distant cousin. Bob Taft, instead. Well, said Eisenhower, so were a lot of other patriotic Americans. Secondly, said Benson, he had often voiced doubts as to whether a military man should be in the White House. Answered Eisenhower: All the more reason to get good civilians in the Cabinet—like Benson. Benson’s third reason was the one he felt most strongly: he was a clergyman, one of the Twelve Apostles who guide the Mormon Church. No clergyman should have to take a job where politics might compromise his principles. That was the opening for Ike Eisenhower’s clincher. “Mr. Benson,” said he, “we have a mandate from the American people to restore their faith in the U.S. Government. Surely you agree that that is a spiritual job?”

In the eleven weeks since Apostle Benson took office, he has found that his job, if not always spiritual, is one that requires all the fortitude and dedication of a Brigham Young. Benson is a big (6 ft., 220 Ibs.), open-faced 53-year-old who looks younger, has the ruddy complexion of one who has spent years in the fields (which he has) and the hearty smile and firm handshake of a Boy Scout leader (which he is). He adheres to the old-fashioned philosophy that God helps those who help themselves. Benson quotes the Bible to show how he applies this dictum to farming. Not through Government handouts, says he, but “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Benson believes that “no real American wants to be subsidized.” For holding to these beliefs Benson has been caught in a whirling political storm. His principles have not been twisted by the blow, but the force of the gale is mounting.

Props & Prices. Benson has to buck a phalanx of entrenched (by Civil Service) Agriculture Department bureaucrats, many of whom have come to think of themselves as the masters of U.S. agriculture. He has to bear responsibilities far heavier than the average citizen realizes. Not only does the law require him to support the price of a dozen commodities, but it also gives him discretionary power to support any farm commodity produced in the U.S. It follows that the Secretary of Agriculture is likely to be blamed by some farmers if the price of any farm commodity drops.

The pressure on Benson is vastly multiplied by the fact that when he took office farm prices had been falling for months—and some are still going down. The Eisenhower Administration and Congress have these choices: 1) let prices fall; 2) support prices while limiting production by Government fiat; 3) support prices without limiting production, which might mean that the Government would buy a greater and greater share of more and more commodities.

All three courses have precedents. A long fall in farm prices is painfully associated with political disaster and nationwide depression. The Government restricted production during the early New Deal, when Henry Wallace’s farm policy called for killing pigs and plowing under every third row of cotton. The Democrats later switched from a policy of scarcity to one of abundance—and Government buying of surpluses. Charles Brannan, Truman’s Secretary of Agriculture, said: “I would never lose a wink of sleep if my policies led me to overproduction of some crops.” Brannan had the happy experience of operating largely in the years of almost insatiable markets. World War II, European reconstruction and the Korean war brought abnormal demand. But in a few commodities, the philosophy of expanding production at guaranteed high prices glutted even the hungry postwar markets —and with some disastrous results. The classic example was the great 1948-50 potato glut; millions of bushels, bought by the Government to support prices, had to be dyed blue and kept off the market. Net loss to the U.S. through the potato program: $478 million.

The potato crisis of those years may now be repeated in a number of other (and more basic) crops. Neither the New Deal nor the Fair Deal solved the farm problem. In the mid-’30s artificial scarcity concealed the problem; in the 1940s, temporary high demand obscured it. Now the old question, shorn of its camouflage, has landed on Benson.

16-to-1 Shot. His starting point is clear. In his first days in office, he said: “[Farmers] should not be placed in the position of working for Government bounty rather than producing for a free market.” What Benson advocated was price supports high enough to “provide insurance against disaster,” but not to guarantee profits to the inefficient.

The words were hardly out of his. mouth when farm-bloc politicos began trumpeting the alarm. Benson, they said, was “leading down the road to disaster”; his stand “could wreck agriculture.” Washington buzzed with the word that Benson’s head would be first on the chopping block in the new Administration. Benson was new in politics; he was amazed at the attacks. But since then, with his mail running 16 to 1 in favor of his stand, he has stuck to his free-enterprising guns—at least in principle. The day-to-day struggle that centers around his office is exceeded in intensity only by the pressures on Secretary of State Dulles and Secretary of Defense Wilson.

Early to Rise. Benson has taken command of his vastly complex task with the calm assurance of an able administrator, the energy and prayerful devotion of a Mormon missionary. A committee worker who believes, like every good Mormon, in cooperative endeavor, he has already streamlined the huge Agriculture Department so that only four men, instead of 20, report directly to him. Up at 5 and usually in his spacious, paneled office by 7:30 or 8, Benson starts most working days with a round of handshakes; he has met about one-third of the 8,000 Agriculture employees who work in Washington.

Because of his loaded schedule, Benson does much of his memo-and letter-writing at home (his memos are irreverently referred to by some in the department as “epistles from the Apostle”). He holds staff meetings at night twice a week; these are always opened with a prayer. Associates, in fact, are never surprised, when they walk in on the Secretary, to find him praying. Says one: “He spends as much time on his knees as he does on his feet.”

For the tireless Benson machine, prayer is the basic fuel. A few years ago, when touring Mormon churches on a rehabilitation mission in Europe, Apostle Benson and other church leaders were blocked from entering Russian-occupied Poland. When things looked hopeless, Benson said: “I think I would like to pray,” and went to his room. When he emerged, he announced to his assistant: “We are going to Poland. I have been commanded to go.”

Within a day, Benson had cut through all the red tape, arranged for transportation and the necessary permission. Benson matches prayer with a tither’s cash: at least 10% of his $22,500 Cabinet salary goes straight to the Mormon Church.

Eight-Wife Man. The new Secretary of Agriculture, who comes from a long line of Mormons, started with a tough row to hoe—a row of sugar beets on his family’s 160-acre farm in the Cache Valley of southern Idaho. His paternal great-grandfather and namesake, an early Apostle and eight-wife man in the days when Mormons advocated plural marriage, accompanied Brigham Young to the Salt Lake desert; his grandfather was born in a covered wagon as the family moved across the plains. Ezra himself was born in a two-room frame house, which was expanded again & again as ten more children arrived.

He could drive a team of horses at four; at ten he was thinning sugar beets and hand-milking a string of 30 cows morning and night. When he was 14, his father was called away on a Mormon mission; Ezra was left to run the family farm for two years. A leader in studies and sports at local Mormon schools, Ezra entered Utah State Agricultural College and met Flora Amussen, a tennis-playing coed considered “most popular girl in town.” While the courtship was still young, the Mormon Church stepped in: Benson was picked as a missionary to England. As is expected of any young Latter-day Saint, Benson answered the call without question.

“Our Benson.” For two years, he spread the Mormon gospel through the slums of Newcastle, hard hit by postwar depression. Clad in workman’s pants and a green turtleneck sweater, young Benson became a familiar figure preaching to groups of unemployed on street corners. He organized athletic clubs, ran picnics, signed up converts. Many a Newcastle oldtimer still refers to him fondly as “our Benson.” Said one last week: “He spoke with the voice of God.”

Home again in 1923, Ezra made straight for Flora Amussen’s doorstep, and proposed. But the Mormon Church stepped in again. This time it was her turn to do a missionary stint in Hawaii. Benson enrolled in Brigham Young University, where he matched Flora’s reputation by being voted most popular man in his class, and graduated with honors. One professor recalls: “He was the smartest agriculture student I’ve ever had.” Finally married in 1926, Flora and Ezra set off in a model T pickup truck for Iowa State College, where he had won a scholarship. They pieced out their diet with free samples of hickory squash and buttermilk from the agricultural school; within a year Benson had his master’s degree, and went back to run the family farm (now owned by a brother).

Potato Pusher. He became a county agent, toured his area teaching new farming methods to the oldsters and building up 4-H Clubs for the young. He made such a name for himself that he became an economist for the University of Idaho’s extension service at the age of 30. He helped boost the new Idaho Cooperative Council; as its executive secretary, he was behind a publicity campaign that helped put Idaho baked potatoes on restaurant menus all over the U.S. Benson caught the eye of others in the farm-cooperative movement, in 1939 was offered a Washington job (at $25,000 a year) as executive secretary of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, an organization of 53 farm groups. He took the job on one condition—that he would not have to make the rounds of capital cocktail parties.

In 1943, a big cooperative offered him a job at $40,000 a year, and Benson, then president of the Washington Stake* of the Mormon Church, set off for Salt Lake City to get advice from his superiors. He never even got to ask; instead, the Mormon leaders asked him to become one of the Twelve Apostles. Benson accepted, was given a living allowance of about $6,000 a year.

Soap-Dish Detail. Elder Benson, as he is known to fellow Mormons, settled down to the life of an Apostle in a ten-room Devonshire-Norman-Spanish house in Salt Lake City. Like many good Mormons, the Bensons set aside one night a week to be spent with their six children (the eldest, Reed A., 24, is now an Air Force chaplain). Such “family nights” are always opened with a prayer and a reading from the Scriptures; then Benson flicks on the family jukebox for some spirited dancing with his four daughters.

It is a cooperative household. How late may the girls stay out? A committee is appointed to hand down a ruling. How much time can be spent watching TV? Another committee decision. Mrs. Benson hands out work assignments according to ability: a few years back, one Benson tyke, too small for any other job, was given responsibility for keeping the soap dish clean. Like all good Mormons, the Bensons neither smoke nor drink alcohol. They take no coffee or tea, eat meat sparingly.

Hot Flies. For his new job, Benson needs to stay in training. In the past generation, the Agriculture Department has provided a case history of centralization of power and bureaucratic growth—from 33,000 employees and an outlay of $251 million in 1933 to a staff of 67,000 and a budget of more than $1 billion last year. (Benson has slashed about 10% from the budget requested by the Truman Administration for the next fiscal year.)

Each year, the department turns out hundreds of pamphlets on subjects ranging from “The Meaning of the United Nations Flag” to “Consumer Preferences and the Use of Eggs in Honolulu.” Recently, its staff of thousands of researchers was hard at work on such projects as training electric fans on cows to see how they react to living in a draft (they didn’t seem to mind much), and treating houseflies with radioactive isotopes for identification (it was thereby found that they can fly 20 miles without keeling over).

Ezra Benson is far more sympathetic to research than toward expanding Government power over agriculture. Says he: “We are here to help, not to dictate.” In a dig at his predecessor’s Brannan Plan, which promised all things to all farmers at staggering expense, he vows that no master plan for agriculture will bear his name. Any program that he advocates will result from close cooperation between the Agriculture Department and the farm groups concerned.

Butter, more than a month’s supply of which (150 million Ibs.) the government has stored in freezers, will be the first test of Benson’s new approach. Taxpayers can justly complain, as one did recently, about being “forced to pay for butter while eating oleo.” But Ezra Benson decided that the surplus was a problem for buttermen themselves to solve. By continuing the high support level, he gave them a year to do so. Last week, just before a slight drop in the support price for butter was to take effect, dairymen dumped a thumping 15 million Ibs. on the Government. But in Chicago there was some evidence of more constructive ac tion: 300 dairy leaders voted to spend $2.000,000 on promotion next year to broaden their markets.

Cold Cash. At the moment, the U.S. has more than $3 billion tied up in farm commodities through loans and other price supports; much of this may be a total loss, to be added to the $1 billion lost through price-support operations since World War II. Under present laws, which the G.O.P. is committed to support, the Government must uphold six “basic” (i.e., politically potent) commodities—cotton, corn, wheat, tobacco, rice, peanuts—at 90% of parity** through 1954. The U.S. already has mountains of cotton and corn in storage, and enough wheat (450 million bu.) to turn a good-sized lake into a bowl of Wheatena.

Ezra Benson has cautioned cotton farmers to plant less this year; they have responded by planning for just as much as before. If, as some predict, a bumper crop results, Benson will be forced by law into an action diametrically opposed to his control-free philosophy: he will have to proclaim acreage allotments, i.e., production controls, for next year.

Nearly everyone—including Secretary Benson—agrees that some kind of price support is necessary, since farm prices usually scoot up & down much faster than the prices of what the farmer buys. If the New Deal-Fair Deal policies are not the answer, what is?

Many experts think that perishable commodities such as butter and potatoes should have no price supports at all. For nonperishables, such as corn, cotton, and wheat, the best solution may be a system of flexible price supports, which would allow at least a partial functioning of the law of supply & demand. Flexible supports would mean that when a surplus mounted, the U.S. could reduce its support prices, thus discourage overproduction of the next crop.

Private-Enterprise Job. There are many other methods by which the U.S. Government might lessen its farm load by turning over more of the job to private enterprise. Among those being considered by Ezra Benson and his advisers:

¶ Quasi-governmental corporations to be financed by the price-supported industries themselves to run their own support operations.

¶ Price insurance plans under which farmers would kick in premiums against disaster in the market place.

¶ Marketing agreements which would be, in effect, legalized breaches of antitrust laws. (Such agreements have already proved effective stabilizers for oranges, nuts and some vegetables.)

¶ More aggressive selling. Benson has not forgotten what salesmanship did for the Idaho potato.

Benson also thinks the Agriculture Department can help in developing new markets abroad, and by encouraging industrial research into new uses for farm products. Says he: “I’d like to see Du Pont, for example, go into corn research and do for corn and its potential byproducts what they have already done for coal.”

Educating Up & Out. All such projects would help. But a basic problem would still remain: the U.S. has too many marginal farmers (an estimated 1,600,000), who barely scrape along from year to year. Many of Ezra Benson’s advisers, along with virtually everyone else who has studied the problem, think that marginal farmers must either be educated up to the level of profitable farming—or educated clear off the farm and into jobs in town. While barely making a living themselves, the marginal farmers add to crop surpluses, help drive prices down and Government costs up, and thus freeload on the U.S. Those who cannot make good, in short, should get out—just as any grocer or garage owner may be forced out of business for inefficiency. In this gigantic educational program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture should be a teacher, but not a commissar.

On the farms of the U.S. last week, there was still a gnawing uneasiness about prices. There was also uneasiness about Elder Benson and his free-market ideas. But, for the most part, U.S. farmers seemed prepared to give him a chance. Said a Kansas corn man: “We’re holding judgment on Secretary Benson like on the new country preacher whose sermons may run out in a few Sundays.” Meanwhile, Ezra Benson was putting his faith in the Lord—and cooperative free enterprise. Said he: “A completely planned and subsidized economy weakens initiative, discourages industry, destroys character and demoralizes the people. You never help people by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.”

* Equivalent to a diocese. Mormons think of their church as a giant tent with stakes driven into the ground all over the world.

** A price designed to stabilize the farmer’s buying power at a “fair” level. A wheat farmer recently supplied a lucid example of parity: “In 1914. 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. That’s what we mean by parity.”

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