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This paper investigates three sometimes overlapping radical causes in the RLDS Church – labor unions, Socialism, and cooperatives – during what some historians now call “the long Progressive Era,” 1880-1940. While the RLDS Church as a whole was never a uniformly “radical” religious tradition, pastors who served as labor union leaders, apostles who worked for or supported the Socialist Party of America, and ordinary members who created church-sponsored agricultural cooperative communities ensured that a vibrant radical tradition existed within a big-tent church of mostly working-class members. The three topics analyzed in this essay – unions, socialism, and cooperatives – did not simply typify the three routes for radicalism in the long Progressive era’s RLDS Church. Rather, unions, socialism, and cooperatives were three ways that radicals more generally in this era pursued their projects.
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.
This paper examines for the first time FBI records from its 1944 White Slave Traffic Act investigation of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) – a case whose prosecution eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Bureau used this investigation, with the support of the mainstream LDS Church, to police not only a particular conception of appropriate sexuality but also particular definitions of religion, whiteness, and American citizenship.