Ezra Taft Benson and the Family Farm

Many small farmers charged that Ezra Taft Benson’s farm policies were driving them out of business. The fact that the countryside was hemorrhaging population during the 1950s seemed to support their contention. Indeed, the largest wave of farm abandonment and out-migration in the nation’s history occurred in those years. This chapter explores Benson’s agrarian polices while he was the secretary of agriculture in the Eisenhower administration. In specific, this chapter explores the following questions: What did he say over the course of his career about the moral and spiritual values and the economic costs of family farming? How did he respond to criticism of his policies by small farmers? How did he justify his policies and what advice did he offer? Did he regard the exodus of Americans from small farms as lamentable but inevitable? To what degree did he recommend educational opportunities or rural development policies to ease the transition from farm employment to non-farm work and urban lifestyles?