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

This paper historicizes the radical shifts in public administration, free-enterprise capitalism, and food systems occurring within the Cold War United States as dependent on Mormon influence on ostensibly “secular” state formations. In 1953, the US Department of Agriculture – helmed by Secretary of Agriculture and future President of the LDS Church, Ezra Taft Benson – overhauled its entire bureaucratic system away from New Deal farm security and towards laissez-faire capitalism. This shift is often narrated as the abandonment of family farms for agribusiness. Instead, this paper argues that the USDA simply mirrored the earlier changes in the LDS Church administration, privileging vertical integration techniques, the white nuclear family, and free enterprise. Focusing on bureaucracy and material culture, this paper adds new stories to studies of the LDS and secularism, where the state turns to the Saints not as a problematic religion but as a useful model in organizing statecraft around free enterprise.