Word: bensons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...went from Black Sunday to White Wednesday," crowed an Agriculture Department official in Washington last week. Suddenly whitened were Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson's prospects of hanging on until the end of the Eisenhower Administration despite huge crop surpluses and massive farm-program spending...
...Benson's Black Sunday he was in Washington's Walter Reed Army Hospital, convalescing from a gall bladder operation and brooding about the campaign by high-level Republicans to dump him as a political liability. The day before, Republican National Chairman Thruston Morton had dropped a blackjack hint that Benson ought to "step down" for " the good of the party (TIME, Dec. 21). In G.O.P. inner councils there had even been discussion of the possibilities of persuading the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call Mormon Apostle Benson back home to Salt Lake City...
Resignation. Benson turned on a TV set, watched calmly as Morton, on Face the Nation, declared that the Republican Party has to face the "political fact" of Benson's unpopularity in the farm belt...
After the program, Benson telephoned Morton, arranged an appointment with him for the following day. Then Benson wrote out a statement: "Resign? I am resigned to one thing: to do my duty as I see it, to continue my fight for a prosperous, expanding and free agriculture." In a 45-minute talk with Morton the following afternoon, Benson made it plain that he meant what he had said: he was not going to resign...
Next day came the brightening. The voters in Iowa's Fourth District elected a Republican to fill the unexpired term of a Democratic Congressman who had died in office (see below), and the outcome seemed to show that simply denouncing Benson is not quite so surefire a method of winning farm belt elections as Democrats had hoped-and Republicans had feared...