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Chapter 3 considers efforts to shape farm policy to preserve small-scale farming and eliminate surpluses even as the beginning of the modern agricultural revolution produced historic and ever-increasing harvests. This abundance presented policymakers with a new problem in world affairs: the challenge of what to do with too much food. President Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson sought to solve the farm problem and address surpluses of food production by dismantling Depression-era government involvement in farming and restoring a free market in agriculture and food production. Following unsuccessful farm policy reform efforts, they next sought to address the problem of surplus food by deploying the excess abroad as food aid, a strategy that led to the passage of the 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, creating the first permanent American organization designed to provide food aid to foreign nations.

Latter-day Saint apostle Ezra Taft Benson became Secretary of Agriculture in 1953 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Especially in the 1960s, Benson both reflected and guided Mormonism’s embrace of right-wing politics through his fervent anti-communism. He then became LDS Church president in 1985. As apostle and church president, Benson regularly preached from the Book of Mormon, and he encouraged church members to read it devotionally. Benson’s efforts helped bring the Book of Mormon to a greater position of prominence and familiarity within the church. Moreover, through his selective reading of the scripture, Benson highlighted particular passages and privileged certain themes that resonated with his own American exceptionalism, anti-communism, and arch-conservatism.

This chapter talks about Ezra Taft Benson who commenced work as secretary of agriculture in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration in 1953, while serving as one of the twelve apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It describes Benson as a central figure in postwar American politics who represented the confluence and conflict between the various stripes of Mormon and American conservatism. It also discusses how Benson was the subject of national media interest and scrutiny in the 1950s and 1960. The chapter points out how Benson often took clear and controversially conservative positions on many of the historic conflicts of the twentieth century, such as anticommunism, the women's movement, international and domestic conflicts, and the culture wars. It traces American public representations of Mormonism by looking at Benson as a media filter.

For every one farm that prospered during the cost-price squeeze of the 1950s, five failed, contributing to a steep decline in the number of farm owners in North Carolina by 1959. This chapter explores how generous federal subsidies contributed to the growth and success of a few farm owners but the failure of most others. The Eisenhower administration pursued policies that severely undermined the most vulnerable segments of the agricultural population while enhancing the stability and earning potential of other farm owners. Those who prospered, by and large, represented a young, white, university-educated cadre of farm owners who assumed the reins of family farms and transformed them into modern, family-run agribusinesses. Although tobacco production and federal tobacco subsidies formed the foundation of their economic security, small farm owners also took advantage of federal loan programs to branch out into other agricultural endeavors, especially poultry production, inadvertently undermining their survival as a group.

Many facets of Mormon history have shaped the Church's history and identity. Unlike polygamy or pioneer migrations, the Book of Mormon will always be a constant in the faith group, and thus is a prime factor in defining Mormon culture, ethnicity, or religiosity. Assent to Smith's story of its origins is the foundation of faith in the religion itself. Since the Book of Mormon received renewed emphasis under Ezra Taft Benson in the 1980s, the scripture increasingly found a cultural vocabulary that gives cohesion and distinctness to the Mormon people. Heroes, villains, plots, motifs, and objects – from Captain Moroni to Lemuel to the stripling warriors to Rameumpton to the Liahona – provide members with a private language that shapes and defines their collective experience while helping maintain the cultural distinctness that has always been a hallmark of Mormonism.

Systematic anti-Black racism did not end with the legal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. It simply changed shape: into debt peonage, criminalization, mass incarceration, housing segregation, sexual predation, voter suppression, and discrimination of all kinds. The same holds true for systematic anti-Black racism in white American Christianity. This chapter examines how structures of everyday white supremacy persisted in everyday Mormonism beyond the end of the priesthood and temple ban, especially through rhetorical strategies on the part of LDS Church leaders that evaded historical facts or dismissed history as insignificant and demonstrated no commitment to responsibility, reconciliation, or reparations.

Postwar agricultural policies had resulted, among other things, in the government’s taking title to enormous surpluses of agricultural commodities. The taxpayer cost of storing these commodities and the cost of payments to farmers for these products were soaring higher with each passing year. Domestic demand plus commercial exports were inadequate to reduce those surpluses. More needed to be disposed of through P.L 480, Title I, and MSA surplus disposal programs. These practices were alarming other food-exporting countries. Canada and Australia were angry about U.S. government-supported wheat exports. Egypt and Turkey led countries protesting subsidized sales of cotton; New Zealand was unhappy about butter, and Thailand and Burma were furious about subsidized rice sales. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Hubert Humphrey was calling for directing these surpluses toward countries in the world where hunger was endemic. His call would not be heeded until John Kennedy arrived in the White House.