School lunch advocates clearly had a more positive view of federal programs, particularly children’s welfare measures. “I see nothing subversive in the school lunch program,” Richard Russell insisted. Indeed, he argued, school lunches would provide an insurance program against creeping socialism. “In my opinion,” Russell said, “a school child who has a good bowl of hot soup and a glass of sweet milk for his lunch will be much more able to resist communism or socialism than would one who had for his lunch a hard biscuit which had been baked the day before and which he had brought with him to school in a tin can.”45 Virginia representative John Flannagan, a co-sponsor of the legislation in the House, similarly argued that feeding children would protect national security rather than threaten it. “The dictator nations,” Flannagan observed, “exist upon hungry bodies and befuddled minds. If you want to dispel the gloom of Nazism and communism from the face of the earth, the thing to do is to feed and educate the peoples of those nations. A full stomach and a trained mind will never embrace either Nazism or communism.”46
DISCRIMINATION AND SEGREGATION
Most fundamentally, however, the school lunch debate revealed the beginning of a new civil rights legislative initiative. The post-war Democratic political agenda depended on an increasingly tenuous New Deal coalition of urban liberals and southern conservatives. While conservative southern legislators like Russell and Ellender could support federalism in the name of farmers and children, they fiercely opposed any effort to challenge their region’s entrenched system of racial segregation. At the same time, however, a new generation of legislators and reformers, buoyed by the wartime rhetoric of tolerance and freedom, began to push for legal and legislative measures designed to end segregation. Thus, when Congress began debating the school lunch program, first-term New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell, along with the NAACP, was quietly devising a plan to challenge any legislation that sent federal funds to segregated facilities. When the school lunch bill came before Congress in February 1946, Pow ell had just begun to formulate his strategy. Immediately after taking office that year, he had spearheaded a bruising fight on the floor of Congress over the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). This legislation would have permanently funded the wartime agency set up to monitor racial discrimination in employment and extend the federal government’s civil rights activities into the post-war period. Knowing that federal school lunch funds would be going to states with segregated school systems, Powell decided to make the school lunch bill his first test case.47 When the school lunch bill came to the floor of the House two weeks after the FEPC fight, Powell immediately offered an amendment that would prohibit federal funds from going to any state or school if, in carrying out the functions of the bill, “it makes any discrimination because of race, creed, or national origin of children, or, between types of schools, or, with respect to a State which maintains separate schools for minority and for majority children, it discriminates between such schools on this account.”48
Powell’s amendment, like the post-war civil rights movement generally, posed a fundamental challenge to American liberals. For most of the twentieth century, liberal lawmakers had bemoaned racial segregation but had done little to challenge it. In particular, Congress stayed far away from the South’s “separate but equal” public school system. By opposing any measure that sent federal resources to segregated institutions or states, Powell’s amendment put liberals—as well as conservatives—on notice that the issue could no longer be ignored. Appealing to the post-war liberal rhetoric of humanitarianism and tolerance, Powell pointed out that Congress had just sent funds to the new United Nations refugee administration. He challenged his colleagues to “be humane enough to see that the minority race have the same opportunities in the free-lunch program as do those of the majority race.”49 The question was, how far would liberal Americans be willing to push Congress to dismantle racial segregation? In the case of the school lunch legislation, would the program’s liberal supporters be willing to go so far as to withhold funding from racially segregated schools? Powell knew his strategy would not dismantle segregation, but he did hope to insert the principle of nondiscrimination into federal policy. “The purpose of my amendment,” he told the House, “is not in any way to alter existing educational patterns.” Rather, he said, “the purpose of my amendment is to assure that where there are separate schools or even where there are not separate schools, the money allotted for the school lunch program shall be allocated fairly to all people without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.”50 By wording his amendment as anti-discrimination rather than anti-segregation, however, Powell inadvertently undermined his own purpose. As far as school lunch advo cates, whether from the North or from the South, were concerned, the program already was open equally to all children.
Lawmakers had insisted from the start that surplus food be available to any school wanting to participate. Program administrators, in their turn, had long insisted that there was no discrimination in the program. Of course, the financial and administrative requirements of the school lunch program, by definition, excluded many districts and schools from participating. What is more, while provisions existed on paper requiring all participating schools to offer free lunches for poor children, no one looked very closely at how many (if any) free meals were actually available. Nor had anyone looked into the actual distribution of lunch programs to see how many black schools, North or South, participated. Everyone involved with the school lunch program blithely asserted that there was no discrimination. Liberals were therefore particularly uncomfortable with Powell’s amendment. Jerry Voorhis, for example, simply refused to support it. Not only did he believe it to be “not at all necessary,” but he also feared that “the controversy and misconceptions arising from it might hurt the bill.”51
Opposing discrimination rather than segregation, Powell’s amendment actually invited the support of southern legislators. Richard Russell, for example, loudly declared that he, too, opposed discrimination and had crafted the school lunch bill to serve all children equally. While Russell and other southerners distrusted Powell’s motives and certainly did not want to see Congress move toward dismantling segregation, they took great pains to insist that segregation and the system of racially separate schools in their region in no way constituted discrimination. North Carolina representative John Hamlin Folger declared that segregation “has never been a discrimination in any particular and never will be.” Folger supported the school lunch program because, he believed, children’s health “is too important to all of our races.”52 Virginia representative John Flannagan, a strong advocate of the school lunch program, declared Powell’s amendment “entirely unnecessary.” It would, he warned, “alienate some votes that might otherwise be cast for approval.” In other words, Flannagan knew he could marshal support for the school lunch program from southern representatives, but would not be able to keep them in line if the bill in any way appeared to endorse federal interference with segregation.
By introducing his amendment in the language of anti-discrimination as opposed to anti-segregation, Powell left open a doorway through which segregationists like Russell and Flannagan could slip. Southerners had long argued that segregation was not a system of racial discrimination, but simply a separation of the races. Indeed, the very language of the Supreme Court’s 1890 confirmation of segregation affirmed that separate could be equal. So strong was Richard Russell’s conviction that segregation did not equal discrimination that he had actually agreed to a mild anti-discrimination clause in an earlier version of his bill. “The colored people are my friends,” Russell insisted, “and I want to see them have the benefit of these funds. I know in the main, they need it more, perhaps, than some of the others do.” In Russell’s view, segregation was simply a recognition of social reality and racial capacities. Russell warned that Powell’s amendment, by withholding federal resources from southern states, would actually end up discriminating against bl
ack children. “The inclusion of this clause,” Russell warned, “will do that which the author of its amendment does not want, because there are too many states … that maintain separate schools for the races.”53 Should Powell’s equation of segregation with discrimination hold, Russell predicted, no southern schools would be able to participate in the National School Lunch Program.
Southern conservatives, of course, immediately recognized Powell’s amendment as what it was—an attempt to dismantle segregation. Texas representative William Robert Poage, an inveterate defender of states’ rights, pointed to Powell’s own recent statements arguing that “segregation is discrimination.” Poage understood that if the amendment passed, local officials would lose the power to interpret just what constituted discrimination in federal programs. Pointing to a recent case in which a federal judge had ruled against the common practice of stipulating racial preferences in newspaper job-ads, Poage warned that the country was embarking on a slippery slope.54 Mississippi’s deeply conservative representative John Elliot Rankin also saw in Powell’s amendment the threat of a new assertion of black rights. Rankin, who rarely bothered to disguise his contempt for minorities, whether black or Jewish, accused Powell of using “the exact language used in the Communist platform” in his amendment. The Communists, Rankin insisted, “want to destroy our separate school system and to force Negro equality upon us.” The Powell amendment, Poage warned, “means trouble throughout the Southern States.” What “they” mean by discrimination, he observed, “is segregation of the races.”55
Powell’s amendment only reinforced Republican opposition to the school lunch program. Foreshadowing what would become an increasingly common congressional alignment, northern Republicans joined with the most conservative southern Democrats to oppose any expansion of federal power. While some northern Republicans claimed to support the principle of anti-discrimination, they clearly saw Powell’s amendment as a good way to kill the entire lunch program. Harold Knutson, a Republican from Minnesota, for example, admitted that he opposed the creation of a National School Lunch Program because he did not want to see any more growth in the federal government. He nonetheless voted in favor of Powell’s amendment. Pennsylvania Republican George Harrison Bender introduced his own amendment that specifically prohibited federal funds from going to any state that maintained separate school systems. When confronted, both representatives admitted to being “against the passage of the bill.”56 Powell’s amendment finally passed with a vote that reflected the shifting post-war political alliances. Among the votes against the amendment were Jerry Voorhis and the up-and-coming congressman from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Figure 4.1. President Truman signing the National School Lunch Act. Congress created the National School Lunch Program in 1946. Also shown: Richard Russell (third from left) and Allen Ellender (fourth from left). United States Department of Agriculture, photo by Forsythe. Courtesy Harry S Truman Library.
Southern Democratic party support, so necessary for the success of the school lunch legislation, ensured that the structure and administration of school cafeterias would be left to local officials and, despite the Powell Amendment, would leave existing racial divisions intact.57 The decentralized administrative structure of the program reflected one of the core characteristics of American welfare and social policy. While social welfare advocates praised the new National School Lunch Program as a victory for children’s health and nutrition reformers applauded the new potential for improving American diets, astute observers soberly warned that the school lunch bill was, in truth, severely limited in its scope. Unions, liberal women’s organizations, and child welfare advocates, in particular, cautioned against the bill’s funding formula that required states to match federal contributions to the program. The matching provisions, they warned, would render poor states less able to match federal dollars and poor districts within states would have difficulty meeting the matching obligation. As a result, the very children who most needed a nutritious lunch would be left out of the program entirely. National Education Association legislative representative Agnes Winn cautioned that bill’s funding formula “forces the diversion of available school revenues from one purpose to another—from arithmetic and history and citizenship to the school lunch program.” Given that choice, she said, few districts would be willing to pay for free lunches.58 United Auto Workers’ Union representative Anna Berenson warned that unless “ironclad safeguards” were instituted to ensure that poor states “guarantee that all children, regardless of geographical accidents of birth,” would benefit from school lunches, the program would inevitably favor more prosperous communities. The spokeswoman of the American Association of University Women concluded that the legislation crafted by Congress ensures that “unto him that hath shall be given.”59 As with much of American welfare state legislation, however, Congress formulated a program that depended heavily on local resources and left the day-to-day administration to the discretion of local officials. Congress did not stipulate how states were to raise their matching contributions nor, despite Powell’s amendment, did it establish any enforcement mechanism to ensure that school lunches were offered equally to all children. The most problematic consequence of lax congressional oversight, however, was the fact that while the school lunch legislation required schools to feed poor children for free, no one was charged with enforcing that provision.
The debate and legislation establishing a national school lunch program after World War II revealed both the high ideals of American democracy and the social fissures that would split the country open over the next two decades. Coming out of the war, American optimism ran high. American freedoms would unlock the “iron curtain,” and America’s consumer prosperity, it seemed, would fuel a world economy devastated by war. In this context, few public voices denied the value of feeding children at school. The New Deal promise of rational social planning and a more equitable distribution of resources seemed logically to point to a national food program for the nation’s children. Indeed, most public officials liked to boast that America could well afford to keep all of its children healthy. Commenting that he had received “thousands of letters” from across the country in support of the school lunch bill, Adolph J. Sabath, Democratic representative from Illinois, said, “I do not know of any appropriation we have ever made that has been more humanitarian in nature.”60 At the same time, a persistent fear that the economy would once again sink into depression fueled farmers’ desires to protect what they had come to see as a significant outlet for surplus commodities—the nation’s school cafeterias. Overall, however, a lingering, if not intensifying, distrust of federal authority combined with the realities of racial and economic equality to make it difficult for law makers to craft a truly universal or egalitarian school lunch program. Indeed, the question of which children would receive lunch, who would decide, and what role state and local officials would play in that process revealed fundamental splits in the post-war American political agenda.
CHAPTER 5
Ideals and Realities in the Lunchroom
During the 1950s the National School Lunch Program became a permanent fixture in the federal budget. It also became a potent symbol for the American promise of equality and prosperity in the post-war world. Popular loyalty to the program reflected a confidence in continued economic growth and in America’s new position as “leader of the free world.” The affluent society and an expanding middle class became articles of faith in post-war political and popular culture. In 1959, when Vice President Richard Nixon promised the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev that the United States would defeat communism with kitchen appliances, he articulated America’s quintessentially optimistic confidence that consumer prosperity would necessarily produce social equality, if not world peace. Central to that vision, of course, was individual health and an abundance of food. Frozen foods, processed foods, and “fast foods” signaled not only seemingly homogenized American tastes but the ability of even those whose incomes did
not quite meet middle-class levels to enjoy the benefits of modern life. Poverty and hunger all but disappeared from the pages of newspapers and from the consciousness of most lawmakers. In the Cold War world, the United States claimed not only to support its heartland producers but also to ensure the health and well-being of all its children. Most Americans, if asked, assumed that their government offered school lunches to all children and free lunches to any who could not afford to pay. In 1961 the New York Times confidently asserted that “children unable to pay must be served free lunches; and the lunches must meet nutritional standards of the Department of Agriculture.”1
The fact was, however, that the American public invested the National School Lunch Program with an idealism that far outstripped its capacities. School lunch menus were still based on surplus commodities—apricots one year, olives the next—and many schools chose not to serve “Type A” meals. More significant, however, was the fact that most American children did not, in fact, have access to the program. Although federal school lunches were available in almost every state and U.S. territory (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands), only about half of the nation’s public and parochial schools actually participated in the program.2 Similarly, although the number of children participating in the program increased from 8.6 million in 1950 to 14 million a decade later, this consti tuted only about one-third of all American schoolchildren.3 The National School Lunch Program, while an agricultural subsidy in content, was administered like a social welfare program in practice. This meant that, as with other welfare benefits, school lunches were administered by states who decided how federal resources were distributed and by local officials who decided which schools participated and how many free meals were offered. Most significantly, school teachers, principals, or social workers determined which children deserved free lunches. The tension between an ideal of universal child nutrition and the ability, indeed, the willingness of either Congress or the states to fund and oversee such a vision revealed the limits of the post-war liberal welfare agenda.4
School Lunch Politics Page 13
