The transformation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a pariah tradition in the United States to the ultra-patriotic institution it is today is one of the more remarkable stories in American religious history. In Watchman on the Tower, Matthew L. Harris gives us an extreme example of this process in the life of Ezra Taft Benson, a twentieth-century Mormon apostle and church president whose far-right political views were unsettling even to this most conservative of American new religious movements.
Born in 1899 on a small farm in Whitney, Idaho, Ezra Taft Benson was a descendant of Mormon pioneers who had long preached a rugged individualism against government paternalism. During the 1930s, Benson, a trained agronomist, promoted private farm cooperatives in an effort to counteract the blandishments of FDR’s “socialistic” New Deal (37). Benson firmly believed that accepting New Deal aid would lead farmers and others...
University of California Press