Steve Benson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Arizona Republic and a four-time finalist for the award, who used his razor-edged pen to mock an Arizona governor and fellow Mormon, leading to a lasting rift with the church authorities, died on July 8 in Gilbert, Ariz. He was 71.
His wife, Claire Ferguson, said the death was from complications of a stroke in February 2024. He had been under hospice care at an assisted living center.
Like most effective editorial cartoonists — whose ranks have been trimmed by the contracting newspaper industry — Mr. Benson used his unflinching opinions and a provocative drawing style to rile politicians and raise questions about moral and societal issues.
In an interview in 2017 with KJZZ Radio in Phoenix, Mr. Benson said that “the role of an editorial cartoonist is not really to give the bottom line on anything, because all we want to do is kick bottoms and, and if it incentivizes people to jump into the — into the riot — then that’s great.”
“I don’t aim to please,” he often said, as his mantra. “I just aim.”
In criticizing President Trump’s insistence on extending barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018, Mr. Benson depicted President Ronald Reagan speaking before a wall topped by concertina wire and saying, “My fellow Americans, don’t build this wall.” It was a takeoff on Reagan’s speech in front of the Berlin Wall in 1987, when he famously invoked the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
In one of the 10 cartoons that earned Mr. Benson the 1993 Pulitzer in editorial cartooning, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel and Secretary of State James A. Baker III are standing beside a graveyard of Jews whose tombstones say they were killed by terrorists. Mr. Shamir asks, “I suppose you’re going to blame us for this growing Jewish settlement, too, Mr. Baker?”
Another was that of a starving Somali child whose torso takes the shape of an hourglass with its sand having nearly run out; it appeared at the time of a U.S.-led United Nations military intervention in Somalia.
After winning the Pulitzer, Mr. Benson told The Republic, “Hopefully, this is an indication that editorial cartooning is a serious business.” He added, “I’m tingly all over.”
He had been a finalist for the prize in 1984, 1989 and 1992 and would be again in 1994.
Mr. Benson grew up in a Mormon family, a grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1985 until his death in 1994 and the secretary of agriculture under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Mr. Benson’s cartooning and religious faith clashed when he often lampooned Evan Mecham, a conservative Republican who was the first Mormon to be elected governor of Arizona; Mr. Mecham served only 15 months, stepping down when he was convicted of two charges of misconduct in an impeachment trial in the State Senate in 1988. While in office, he rescinded the holiday that honors the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Benson, who had early on been a supporter of Mr. Mecham’s, ultimately portrayed him as a “paranoid pipsqueak whose ethics rose no higher than his socks,” The New York Times wrote in 1988. His cartoons rankled his Mormon relatives — he was excluded from a Thanksgiving dinner at his in-laws’ house — as well as Mr. Mecham, who called to tell him that his work violated the Ten Commandments.
Even more, Mr. Benson was ousted as a local church official in 1989 after his cartoon, “The Second Coming” — drawn after Mr. Mecham said he would run for re-election in 1990 — showed the governor descending from heaven holding a volume titled “The Book of Moron, by Ev Mecham.”
In 1993, Mr. Benson and his wife at the time, Mary Ann Benson, announced that they had resigned from the church. Mr. Benson said he had become an atheist.
He also moved from conservative to liberal in his politics, expressing his new leanings with cartoons that supported civil, transgender and abortion rights and Native Americans.
Stephen Reed Benson was born on Jan. 2, 1954, in Sacramento and grew up in Salt Lake City; Richardson, Texas; and Fort Wayne, Ind. His father, Mark, was the president of a division of Saladmaster, which makes cookware. His mother, Lela (Wing) Benson, was a music instructor.
Steve’s early drawing talent was nurtured by his paternal grandmother, Flora Benson, who arranged for art lessons. As a teenager, he enrolled in an art correspondence course, on a scholarship, and submitted work all through high school (in Richardson and Fort Wayne). One summer job in high school was caricaturing customers at the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park.
After serving a two-year Mormon mission in Japan, Mr. Benson entered Brigham Young University, where he was a political cartoonist for the student newspaper The Daily Universe. He started as a graphic arts major but switched to political science when he “realized that he needed a bigger canvas,” Ms. Ferguson, his wife, said. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1979.
He soon started working for the Senate Republican Policy Committee in Washington, where he arranged meetings and also drew caricatures. His cartoons appeared in a book that came to the attention of The Arizona Republic, based in Phoenix; he was hired by the newspaper in 1980. In 1990, he left for The Tacoma Morning News Tribune in Washington State, but returned to The Republic a year later.
During his time in Phoenix, one of his cartoons offended Barry Goldwater, the longtime United States Senator from Arizona and the 1964 Republican candidate for president. In response, Mr. Goldwater sent a note to Mr. Benson saying: “There are — and have been — good Bensons. You ain’t.”
In 1997, Mr. Benson angered firefighters with a cartoon based on Charles Porter IV’s Pulitzer-winning photograph of a firefighter cradling a child killed in the Oklahoma City bombing two years earlier. At the time, jurors were weighing whether to impose the death penalty on Timothy McVeigh, who had been convicted in the bombing.
In the cartoon, Mr. Benson put a “Death Penalty Fanatics” label on the firefighter’s coat; had the exhausted child saying, “Please, no more killing”; and depicted the firefighter replying, “Oh, stop your whining!”
The International Association of Firefighters said the cartoon mocked first responders who had risked their lives searching for bombing victims. The baby’s mother asked for an apology.
Mr. Benson refused to apologize. He told The Associated Press that “he was trying to point out the ultimate irony of sentencing McVeigh to death.” Mr. McVeigh was executed in a federal prison in Indiana in 2001.
Mr. Benson stayed at The Republic until 2019, when he was laid off; he then joined The Arizona Mirror, a nonprofit news website, which preserves his cartoons online in “Benson’s Corner.” The collection includes a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty standing on a map of Arizona and saying, “I’m here to help you guard your reproductive rights.”
After Mr. Benson’s death, Jim Small, the editor of The Arizona Mirror, wrote in a tribute, “His work was as ubiquitous as it was powerful, and it not only sparked water cooler conversations in workplaces across the state, but it sometimes actually drove news cycles.”
Mr. Benson retired in late 2023.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Audrey Benson Nuamah, and his sons, Brent and Eric, all from his first marriage, to Mary Ann Christiansen, which ended in divorce; his brother, Michael; his sisters, Stacey Ann Reeder, Margaret Ferry and Mary Richards; and seven grandchildren. Another sister, Stephanie Benson Young, died in a car accident in 2022. Another daughter, Rebecca Benson, also from his marriage to Ms. Christiansen, died in 2018 when a vehicle struck her bicycle.
Mr. Benson found a fan in Queen Elizabeth II after he portrayed her as rain-soaked, wearing galoshes and carrying a dripping umbrella to Buckingham Palace after her West Coast tour in 1983, which coincided with severe rainstorms.
A palace guard asks her, “A pleasant trip, your majesty?”
A spokesman said that she had been amused by the cartoon and asked Mr. Benson for the drawing. Mr. Benson told The A.P. that “as one of the queen’s loyal subjects” he would make an exception to his rule against giving away originals.