Dr Matt Harris from Colorado State University-Pueblo has an amazing book called 2nd Class Saints. It’s about the race ban from World War 2 to the present. It’s a best seller and sold out in about a month! I think it will win book of the year! We’ll discuss his cutting-edge scholarship, how he got access to some amazing diaries and meeting minutes, and the amazing discoveries that help describe the removal of the race ban in June 1978. We’ll dive in deep! Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Matt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/matt-harris/
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GT 00:54 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I have one of my absolute favorite guests on the show, and it’s been way too long. It’s been more than three years since he’s been on. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where you teach?
Matt 01:08 My name is Matt Harris, and I teach at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where I’ve taught since 2005. I teach legal history, civil rights history, race and politics, church and state and the American Constitution.
GT 01:25 Oh, wow!
Matt 01:25 All the stuff that I write about usually shows up in some form in my classroom, lectures and teachings. So, it’s a lot of fun.
GT 01:37 Well, and you’ve got a best selling book. I fact, I think it’s only been out a month or two.
Matt 01:44 It’s been out since July 1st.
GT 01:46 So, less than a month, and it’s already sold out.
Matt 01:49 It’s already sold out.
GT 01:50 So tell us the name of the book.
Matt 01:52 The book is called Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality. I’m happy to say it sold out the first print run. But there’s a second printing that’ll come out probably in a few days. So, the gap is not it’s not big.
GT 02:11 I just want to point out that Matt was kind enough to autograph a copy of Second Class Saints, and one of you is going to win this book. It’s a fantastic book, I’m sure. Here’s the thing. I already think it’s going to win the Best Book Award for next year, although you are going to have a run for your money, because Paul Reeve is coming out with his book on the 1852 legislature, a similar topic, so he might give you a run for your money.[1] But this book is incredible.
Matt 02:57 Thank you.
GT 02:58 For those of you, you know, nobody watches on my podcast like I do. We have already talked about a lot of this book from about six years ago, I think it was.
Matt 03:12 Probably.
GT 03:12 And so, we’re going to dive into a little bit, because I’m sure in the last six years I’ve got some new listeners that haven’t heard that. But I will say, go check it out. We’re going to talk about some of the other stuff in this book that doesn’t get as much play. Also, I don’t know if I should ask you now. I’ll ask you later, but I’ll just preview it here. I’m going to ask what you had to put on the cutting room floor?
Matt 03:41 Yeah. I’ve been asked that. That’s a good question.
GT 03:46 Anyway, just for those of you, by the way, you’re my first five-time guest.
Matt 03:52 Woo!
GT 03:52 But, it’s been three years.
Matt 03:56 Wow, oh my goodness, five times. Where does time go?
Pres Benson
GT 04:00 Although one of them technically, we started talking about this book, and we then we got, then I asked a question about Ezra Taft Benson, and then we went for another two hours. So I, actually, split that one up twice. So, you’re a big Benson fan. Right?
Matt 04:20 No. I mean, that’s not a comment on him, personally, it’s a comment on his politics. I do not think that right wing extremism is good for anybody. Anyway, I have written about Elder Benson, and I’ve written about how his political views have influenced the Church. And one of the points I frequently noted to people when I’ve talked about Elder Benson…
GT 04:47 Because you’ve written two books on him.
Matt 04:48 I’ve written two books about him. One’s called Thunder From the Right. It’s a collection of essays that I put together.
GT 04:53 It’s a fantastic book.
Matt 04:54 Thanks and BYU professors contributed some essays and hosted other Mormon studies scholars. The other book is called Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right. What I’ve shared with people is he wasn’t just an important religious leader, which he was, but [he was] also a significant political thinker in post-war America. Because he had such ultra-conservative views, he influenced the Church, and we’re still feeling his influence today. It’s not lost on me that a lot of folks who identify as being ultra-conservative, Elder Benson and Cleon Skousen are their two favorite people. So, their influence still looms large.
GT 05:38 Very good. And that’s another fantastic book, I’ll add.
Matt 05:41 Thank you. Yeah, I can’t seem to shy away from controversial topics. What is it about me? (Both chuckling) Right wing extremism and the priesthood ban and race…
Academic History
GT 05:53 Alright. So before we dive into the book, one thing I want to do is just, since it’s been so long, is remind people where you got your bachelor’s, master’s, Ph.D. and that sort of stuff.
Matt 06:05 Sure. So, I graduated in 1994 from BYU with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science, mostly focused on political theory and philosophy. I did a master’s degree at BYU. My wife had one year left at BYU, and so rather than go somewhere else for graduate school, I decided to stick around with my master’s while she finished her BA. Then I went to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, New York – Syracuse University.
GT 06:38 Oh, I thought it was Neil A Maxwell.
Matt 06:39 Well, I don’t know if they would have given me a degree.
GT 06:45 (Chuckling) They gave you one already.
Matt 06:47 Yeah, two degrees.
GT 06:49 Yeah, that’s right.
Matt 06:51 Then I got a second master’s degree at Syracuse and my Ph.D. My focus for the first part of my career was in early American history. I’ve shared this before with folks, but when I was at BYU, I had several people, faculty mentors, who told me, “Don’t do Mormon history. It’s like quicksand. Once you’re in, you’ll never get out.” They were right. They were absolutely right. And so I don’t know if my wife’s very happy about that. “You should have listened to your mentors.” About 12 or 13 years ago, I made a switch to Mormon history and religious history.
GT 07:35 Of which we are very grateful.
Matt 07:37 Thank you. I really enjoyed early America. I still do. I teach it, and I still publish in the field, but mostly my energies and efforts have turned to Mormon history where—let me say one thing that’s, I think, fascinating. Sometimes people ask me why? Why Mormon history? And one, it’s my heritage. So there’s that. But the other one is, from a practical standpoint, I have a colleague who teaches Roman history, and frequently, she has to go to Rome to get source material.
GT 08:08 There’s not worse places to go.
Matt 08:10 No, there’s not. But it’s really, really difficult, especially during COVID, especially gathering grant funds to go. It’s expensive to fly to Rome. For me, I get– Latter-day Saints will send me stuff by email attachment. I can get my sources right there in my home office, in my pajamas. I live in Colorado, and the archive, most of the most important archives, as you know, Rick, are in Utah at the Church History Library or the Church Archives, University of Utah, BYU Utah State, the Utah Historical Society. And then there’s a few other scattered Mormon archives around the country that are important, one at Yale, one at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. So I get access to sources easily. Even with early America, I had to go back east to get into the archives in Philadelphia and New York and other places. So, it’s really an embarrassment of riches, especially when people send you things. But when I come to Utah, I’m able to criss-cross these different archives and take my phone out and just start snapping pictures. It’s so easy in the digital age.
Pres McKay, FDR, & Lyndon Johnson
GT 09:24 Let me ask you this, because I remember, I guess it’s been two years, one or two years ago, John Whitmer Association was in Texas, and you took off to go to the Lyndon Johnson Library. Was that Mormon related or not?
Matt 09:42 No, not so much. I mean, a tiny bit. It was mostly because I had never been before. Lyndon Johnson is really interesting for Latter-day Saints. Your listeners may not know this, but we tend to think that the Church has always been conservative. But in the 1960s Utahns supported the Great Society. This is probably the one or two most liberal government programs in the history of this country.
GT 10:11 Yeah. And Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat Utah voted for.
Matt 10:15 That’s correct. And Lyndon Johnson, believe it or not, was a good friend to David O. McKay.
GT 10:21 Oh, I didn’t know that.
Matt 10:21 Yes, and that’s really hard to hear or understand, rather, because President McKay was a pretty intense conservative. And when–let’s see. Let me get this right. In 1952 when Eisenhower won election for the first time in the presidential campaign, David O. McKay wrote a friend, and he said, jokingly, he said, “With Ike’s election, we know there really is a God.” And I mean, I laughed when I read that, because that just shows you that President McKay wanted a Republican to win office, and just thought, you know, divine favor at work here.
GT 11:02 Well this is after the–it almost felt like two decades of FDR. Right?
Matt 11:08 Exactly right. This would have been after 13 years or four terms in office. FDR took office in the oath of office in, let’s see, January of 1933, about the same time Adolf Hitler is coming to power in Germany. He died in office in April of 1945, his fourth term. So, do the math, 13 years. And so between the New Deal and the Great Society, those are the two of the most liberal government programs in the history of our country. So, McKay, being the conservative that he was, like a lot of conservatives, did not like FDR, but Utahns supported FDR in the New Deal, as they did LBJ, to the detriment of some Church leaders who tried to counsel Latter-day Saints not to support these two liberal presidents. But the Saints have a mind of their own. They don’t always march in lockstep with the politics of their leaders, and so they voted against the counsel from David O McKay, from Heber J. Grant, from George Albert Smith. It wasn’t until the early 70s where you start to see this electoral shift with Latter-day Saints. There’s a lot of reasons for it that I talk about in my book, Watchman in the Tower. But the civil rights movement would be one, and the welfare state, this idea where the welfare state gets a bad name, and so the church is really concerned that the Saints would be dependent upon these welfare programs, and they ought to look to the Church’s welfare program as a substitute for the government program. That didn’t change until the 1980s, the mid 80s, when Gordon Hinckley was a counselor in the First Presidency.
Matt 12:58 Hinckley gave this remarkable sermon, and he said that it’s okay to take government assistance if you’ve exhausted the opportunities from your family or maybe Church or a charity. But Hinckley recognized the Church had limitations about what it could give toward Latter-day Saints in need. And so as a last resort, he said [that] it’s okay to take a government assistance. I wish I were a fly on the wall when Benson read that sermon or heard the sermon, because this would have been 1985. He was still lucid at that point.I’m certain he had heartburn, because he spent–steam coming out his ears. He spent, I mean, much of his adult life, telling the saints, “Don’t ever accept government assistance.” In 1977 he gave a talk, a devotional dress at BYU, and he told these young students, many of whom were married and had children, he said, “You should drop out of school before you accept one penny from the government.” Because a lot of students in the 1970s at BYU, they were taking government assistance, which is a great irony. You’ve got this collision course going on, which is on the one hand, the counsel to these young couples is, multiply and replenish the earth as soon as you get married. There’s never any consideration about whether you can afford it. Do you have insurance? Just get married, have children, let it come naturally, and God will provide. Well, hmm, God is providing the taxpayers of Utah.
GT 14:27 (Chuckling)
Matt 14:29 And so that was a problem with the brethren, because that was the counsel. Have children, don’t delay. But on the other hand, don’t take government assistance. Well, what are you supposed to do if you’re a young couple at BYU, and you have two children, and you’re both in school full time. You’re not making it. Your little minimum wage job making hamburgers at Burger King is not going to cut it. And so they would take government assistance, and Benson didn’t like it. He told them to drop out. I don’t know how many listened to him, but that’s what he said. And I don’t think that some of the other brethren would have supported that. I mean, Hinckley certainly wouldn’t have. Probably President Kimball, not either. He was not– Kimball was not moderate in his politics. And very few of the brethren, and lot of them are conservative politically, let’s be clear, and certainly theologically, but very few of the brethren had Elder Benson’s radical views of politics. That oftentimes caused issues in the Quorum of the Twelve and with the First Presidency. Because when he would express his hard right political views in public to the Saints, usually at stake conferences, when they want to hear, to be spiritually edified and uplifted, they’re hearing about how Lyndon Johnson is the Antichrist. They don’t want to hear that. And so they complain to the First Presidency. The First Presidency tell Elder Benson, you know, “Stop it.” We’re getting so many complaints about you. Stop it. Just focus on the scriptures and Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Leave the politics alone to other people. But Elder Benson, it was in his DNA. It was really hard.
Benson’s Ag Policies Under Eisenhower
GT 16:16 Well, cool. I will tell you one other little semi-personal anecdote. My grandfather was a potato farmer from Idaho. He was not a fan of Secretary Benson’s agriculture policies. So, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on Elder Benson, but can you just dive into a little bit of his policies as Agriculture Secretary under Eisenhower?
Matt 16:48 Yeah. So one of the reasons why President Eisenhower called him into that position was, first of all, he was recommended by Arthur Watkins, a senator of Utah. He was also recommended by Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, who was a very influential senator, more so than Watkins was, and also a distant cousin to Ezra Taft.
GT 17:11 Oh, I was going to say…
Matt 17:12 Even though Robert Taft was not LDS. Both Watkins and Taft told Ike, who didn’t know Benson. They said, we’ve got the guy for you. His name is Ezra Taft. Benson. He’s been in farm cooperatives for a number of years. He’s well respected in that line of work, and he’ll do what you need to do to please party conservatives, which is to roll back the government programs or subsidies to farmers that Franklin Roosevelt had put in place.
GT 17:45 Which is why my grandpa didn’t like him.
Matt 17:47 Oh, exactly, yeah, if you’re a Democrat. So, what they thought was the government, starting with FDR, and then Truman, and then just going forward, the idea was that farmers needed some assistance against the whims of Mother Nature. If there’s a bad crop here, it would wipe out a farmer’s crop, and they would be in trouble, and we would all pay a huge price, since a lot of our food, obviously, comes from these farms. So, the government wanted to stabilize the market that way by helping these farmers. Elder Benson, who starts with the premise that the government is not good. The government should not be in our lives. The government should not be giving subsidies.
GT 18:31 Why do we keep putting these people in government?
Matt 18:35 Well, so that’s what Ike did. Benson did what Ike wanted him to do. He started to cut back farm subsidies, and millions of people complained, including Latter-day Saints in Utah. They would write. There’s a letter that I read. I’ll never forget this letter. It’s from a woman in Logan, Utah, and she wrote Ezra Taft Benson’s mentor, J. Reuben Clark of the First Presidency. And she said, Dear President Clark, Elder Benson is threatening to cut our subsidies. I want you to know how this will impact my family. I am having a faith crisis over this. Can you please direct me.”
Matt 19:18 So, Clark is caught in a really interesting position. On the one hand, he’s sympathetic to this woman’s issues. Right? If they lose this government subsidy check, it’s going to affect their domestic economy. They won’t be able to pay their mortgage and maybe even put food on the table for their kids. But on the other hand, Clark doesn’t want to meddle. He wants to distance himself from Benson, because Benson’s a lightning rod of criticism and even the Church brethren, they’re like, he is one of us. But what he does in Washington is separate from what he does in Salt Lake as an apostle. So they’re trying to make this bifurcation that’s really difficult to do. Because this woman who’s a farmer’s wife, she couldn’t make that distinction. She saw an apostle and a secretary wrapped into one. But the brethren are trying to separate the two. So, he basically punted. Clark said, “You’ll have to take this up with Secretary Benson, which is probably the right thing to say, honestly. So, if your own people are really frustrated with you, then that’s a problem. The thing that the woman said was, “I’m having a crisis of faith.” So, that’s a another problem. She’s looking at it through the lens of Mormonism, and can’t reconcile his farm policies, or can’t separate the farm policies from his duties as an apostle. Anyway, he was really controversial, and I’ll just say one last thing about this. In 1956 when Ike was up for re-election, David O. McKay flew to Washington, and he said to President Eisenhower, “It’s okay to release him. We’ll take him off your hands.” I know that sounds grating and harsh, but what he was saying was, we know he’s controversial. You don’t have to feel any loyalty towards him. He needs to come home. And Ike, to his credit, said, No. I’m going to keep him. And so he kept him for a second term. Ike got reelected, obviously. But people told him, even Republicans, you got to drop Secretary Benson. He’s dragging you down. He’s hurting the ticket, all of that. And in 1959 when Nixon was going to succeed Dwight Eisenhower’s in that presidential election year, Ike had been termed out. Benson had just thought about running in 1960, himself, and couldn’t get the support from the Church leaders and others. But Nixon told Ike, get him out of the country. I don’t want to be anywhere near him, because of his farm policies. And so Ike sent him to Europe towards the latter part of the second term. That was not by accident.
GT 22:07 That’s not the first time he got sent to Europe.
Matt 22:09 No, he’s been sent before, but that was for Church related issues.
GT 22:13 I know.
Matt 22:14 This is just because of his farm policy. Let me say just one last quick thing about Benson. I would never defend his politics. I don’t think they’re good for the Church, [nor are] they good for the country. Those are just my political views and values. But one thing about Benson that he did get a bad rap for is that he really took a lot of criticism for his farm policies, and he was only doing what Eisenhower wanted him to do. But Eisenhower left him out to dry, did not come and say, “Hey, I support him 110%.” Ike distanced himself when all the arrows came. Now you can argue that Ike supported him by retaining him for a second term, which is true. But boy, when the brick bats came flying Benson’s way, Ike was hiding. It was ugly. They threw eggs at him at public events. One farmer threw a shoe at him. I mean, when you feel like your paycheck is going to be cut in half, this hits home. So Benson, this proud Mormon apostle, was hung out to dry, and Ike didn’t come to his aid. And then later on, in the 1960s Benson, who was just furious with his boss, linked Eisenhower at the commies. He turned on his boss. I’ve been asked this before, you know, how could he turn on his boss like this and associate his boss with the Kremlin and comment that Eisenhower was a tool of the communists, and his cabinet. It’s because of Benson was bitter about how Ike could treated him over the farm policy. We could talk about this all day.
GT 23:49 All right. So I will just point you guys to our interview about Elder Benson five years ago, or however long [ago] it was. It’s really good, and we dive into a lot more details. I was going to ask another question, but we’re going to go into this book here. (Both chuckling.)
{End of Part 1}
[1] The book is titled “This Abominable Slavery,” and it did win Best Book Award at the Mormon History Association meetings in June 2025. The book can be purchased at https://amzn.to/40Wqd8T
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Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.
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