Benson, Naomi Achenbach

Naomi Achenbach Benson, a teacher as well as a political and civic activist from Everett, Washington, was a member of the Snohomish County Democratic Party and the Washington State Progressive Party. She worked on behalf of a wide variety of liberal causes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s: civil liberties and freedom of speech, liberal relief policies, pacifist foreign policies, equal rights for women and minorities, public power, and many others.

Naomi Benson was born Naomi Achenbach on August 19, 1878, and raised on her parents’ farm in Gladbrook, Iowa. She began attending the Iowa State Normal School in Cedar Falls in 1893, then in 1900 enrolled at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, from which she graduated in 1902. After graduation, she taught one year of seventh grade and three years of high school before moving to Everett, where she taught high school from 1906 to 1908 and 1912 to 1919. She moved back to Iowa in 1919 to help her parents with the farm, and on October 12, 1921, she married Jesse Noble Benson, a highway engineer from her hometown. After their marriage, Jesse Benson worked out of town while his wife continued to help at the Achenbach family farm. The Bensons moved into their own house in 1922 and in the late 1920s moved to Everett permanently.

Naomi Benson was a member of numerous organizations throughout her lifetime. Among the first that she supported were the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Everett-based Mountaineers, the American Red Cross, and the National Parks Association.

Benson first became seriously involved in politics in the 1920s, when she joined the League of Women Voters and served on a Democratic Party committee. She then took little part in political affairs until the Great Depression. In May 1936 she acted as a delegate from the Snohomish County Democratic Women’s Club to the State Conference of Democratic Women. In September of the same year she was elected Democratic Party state committeewoman. Benson continued to serve as a committed Democratic Party worker in the early 1940s but was slowly becoming disillusioned with the party and the government. She was particularly concerned with what she considered mismanagement by the Works Progress Administration. In 1942 she resigned from her post as state committeewoman and by the mid-1940s she was turning down other positions on Democratic committees and declining to assist with party campaigns.

Benson, who had always been an admirer of Henry Wallace, joined the Progressive Party when it split off from the Democrats in 1948. She became president of the Snohomish County chapter of Women for Wallace, a Progressive Party organization that supported Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign. Benson also served on the Progressive Party’s Washington State Executive Board and helped lead a strong effort by the Progressives in Snohomish County. Wallace ran stronger in Snohomish County than anywhere else in the state. Benson resigned her leadership posts in 1950, when members of the Communist Party took over top positions in the Washington Progressive Party.

Among the organizations in which Benson most actively participated were the Public Ownership League of America and the Everett Consumers’ Co-operative Association. In conjunction with the Public Ownership League in the early 1940s, Benson worked on an initiative for a public utility district, which was eventually established. Her involvement in the Everett Consumers’ Co-operative, founded in 1945, consisted of serving in several capacities, including recording secretary and trustee chairwoman. Benson attempted to stabilize the cooperative as it became plagued with financial problems, but it fell apart in 1948 with the resignations of several trustees.

In her later years Benson supported numerous liberal groups, including the American Association for the United Nations, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee (an anti-war group), Americans for Democratic Action, the Association on American Indian Affairs, the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Washington Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, and the Workers Defense League.

Although Benson fought communist efforts to control left-wing organizations, she strongly defended their right to participate in the political process. Benson opposed the state legislature’s Canwell Committee investigations of alleged communists and the federal government’s efforts to prosecute “subversive” organizations. She participated in picketing of the Canwell Committee in 1948 and testified on behalf of Jerry O’Connell, a former Montana representative who was first convicted but, on appeal, later acquitted of disorderly conduct for the leading role he took in the picketing. In 1954 and 1956 she also appeared for the defense in a series of Smith Act anti-communist court cases.

Naomi Benson died in 1961.

From the guide to the Naomi Achenbach Benson papers, 1895-1961, 1935-1961, (University of Washington Libraries Special Collections)