Sealing the Cold War State: Food, Vertical Integration, and the Making of Mormon Free Enterprise

In the 1948 issue of *Public Administration Review*, G. Homer Durham suggests students of public administration shift their attention strictly from government apparatuses and appreciate a wider influence. In fact, he argued, the government could learn quite a bit about information management and corporate structure from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Unlike the bloated, disparate, and sometimes even contradictory regimes of the burgeoning administrative state, the Saints were perfecting a centrally organized bureaucratic structure, and one that did not stifle but further amassed individual autonomy: “for an equally powerful doctrine of the Mormon religion is the individual ‘free agency’ of every person. […] Besides, most of the million members of the Church are hard-headed American farmers, educators, and business and professional men and women” (177). Narrating the post-1930s alternative welfare system the Church had crafted, Durham essentially defines the Saints via the shift most state agencies would be making in the coming years: vertical integration. The LDS not only had a million members and the central organization systems to take care of them, but, as noted earlier, those members created a vast network of farmers, educators, and business professionals across varying private enterprises. The Church’s turn away from the New Deal welfare state and longstanding flirtations with sovereignty which shifted into self-sufficiency, alongside its embrace of public administrative techniques and corporate structure, they would ultimately craft a hierarchy of power that operated independently from, while still thriving in, the larger consumer market: connecting entrepreneurs, farmers, food processors, truck drivers, and retail stores, the Church’s organization enabled businesses to flourish via contract-farming system of total vertical integration. That is, the Saints exemplified how to craft a vast welfare system with a highly centralized administrative apparatus while priming itself for the unfettered free market.

This paper argues that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the US Department of Agriculture worked in tandem to functionally create what would eventually be termed “agribusiness” through mutually beneficial means. Namely, through mapping Correlation and other bureaucratic shifts within the LDS Church alongside the United States’s Cold War agricultural policies, this paper makes a simple yet wide-reaching argument: Ezra Taft Benson – then Secretary of Agriculture, but formerly in the Quorum of the Twelve and future LDS President – modeled the largest bureaucratic overhaul in US agricultural history after the largest bureaucratic overhaul in LDS history just a couple decades prior. While some scholars have recently shown Benson’s role in the making of modern conservatism, especially his praise of the FBI or his virulent racism and homophobia, his role as an architect of the free-market capitalist system in agriculture from the farmer to the grocery store remains under-analyzed. Namely, this is because religion scholars focus on Benson’s beliefs: his allusions to white horse doctrine, his conspiratorial views, and his racist understanding of the family, especially. While his beliefs are important, many miss the profound influence of the LDS Church felt in Benson’s role as a government bureaucrat. As David Walker has shown, the success of the LDS has always been tied to economics and bureaucracy; Benson understood this and sought to rearticulate the nation-state in the image of the Welfare System era Church. Further, his policies allowed many LDS related industries and corporations to become multi-billion-dollar companies through his changes. As Benson pushed for farms to become better businesses, for them to own all aspects of agricultural production, he did this knowing the constantly expanding LDS Church had already been practicing contract-based vertical integration between feed mills, farmers, processors, trucking companies, and retailers for decades. Benson’s USDA, then, did not kill the family farm any more than the LDS Church killed the traditional Mormon family; rather, they enshrined the white heteropatriarchal nuclear family in all its capitalistic violence as the center of domestic policy, and did so before the broader “Religious Right” narrative of consumer capitalism shown by scholars like Bethany Moreton with conservative evangelicals. The family farm did not die, but was remade in a hyper-capitalistic image. Namely, it morphed into massive corporations like the family farms networked via AgReserves within the Church and Ore-Ida outside of it.

This brings together studies of Mormonism with critical histories of the state, paperwork, and food to examine an entirely overlooked archive. Rather than rehashing the competing characters and theologies within Mormon history, this paper finds Church influence in everything from the development of paper milk cartons to state investments in food preservation systems to the widespread adoption of contract-based vertical integration in large-scale farming. In that sense, it joins scholars like Sonia Hazard and Amanda Beardsley, taking a materialist approach to LDS history that seeks continuities rather than peculiarities between Mormons and broader technological and material cultures. Building on works by Sylvester Johnson, Judith Weisenfeld, Charlie McCrary, and Michael Graziano, I look to the bureaucratic formations of religion, its aesthetic acts of record-keeping and indexical modes, and how such methods of paper knowledge, to use Lisa Gitelman’s term, weave in and out of larger projects of statecraft. Looking to the LDS Church as a set of bureaucratic and organizational modes places the Saints directly into the histories of paperwork and surveillance. Where scholars like Simone Browne and Craig Robertson demonstrate the biometrics and biopolitics of information gathering, this paper argues that religion generally and the LDS specifically have been inseparable from the exploitative capitalist formations of political economies that sought to economize life into manageable and numerable dollars and cents. That is, this paper centralizes the Latter-day Saints in the story of burgeoning neoliberalism, and how neoliberal modalities viscerally altered the day-to-day lives of Americans at the micro levels of taste and consumption as well as the macro levels of Cold War food policies.