THE LIMITS OF THE LUNCHROOM
In truth, during the 1950s, the National School Lunch Program served up more in rhetoric than in substance. The Department of Agriculture could boast about its school lunch program, and those lawmakers who had an interest in agriculture could feel good about their support for farmers. Despite the generally optimistic tone of domestic politics during the 1950s, however, American social welfare policies, including the National School Lunch Program, were marked by serious limitations. Most notably, the school lunch program’s administrative and fiscal structure revealed the influence of southern legislators who insisted on weak federal oversight for social programs and the reluctance of liberal lawmakers to challenge obvious regional and racial inequalities in services and benefits. The popular belief, for example, that any American child who needed a nutritious lunch could get one was largely a myth. The National School Lunch Program’s administrative structure fundamentally institutionalized inequality and discrimination and seriously undermined the federal government’s claim to be an effective guardian either of national food policy or child nutrition. As with Aid to Dependent Children and other federal welfare programs, federal funds were distributed via state agencies. While this pleased southern legislators who resisted federal involvement, particularly when it came to racial equity, it perpetuated local inequalities when it came to feeding children. Thus, while the National School Lunch Act set nutrition standards for children’s meals and insisted that poor children be given free lunches, Congress established no enforcement mechanism—and appropriated no funds—to ensure that these requirements were met.
TABLE 5.1
Sources of Funding for School Lunch Program, 1947–68*
Source: Hearings, School Lunch, and Child Nutrition Programs, September 29–October 1, 1969, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, 91st Cong., 1st Sess., 184.
*Does not count local contributions.
School lunch funding structures perpetuated America’s regional and racial inequalities. In order to encourage local “buy-in” for the school lunch program, congressional appropriations covered only a small fraction of the cost of children’s lunches. After the first three years of operation, states were obligated to match federal contributions on a three-toone basis. Most states, rather than raise local taxes, decided to charge children a small amount for lunch and count those fees as their part of the match. Thus, until the early 1960s, the National School Lunch Program’s financial base rested on families who were able to pay the cost of subsidized meals for their children. For this reason, lunches during the 1950s came to be seen as a subsidy for the middle class, broadly defined as families who could afford to pay for school lunches.
Although congressional appropriations for children’s lunches increased each year during the 1950s, the federal government’s real share of school lunch budgets actually declined (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). In 1947, the program’s first year of operation, federal contributions accounted for 32 cents out of each school lunch dollar, while state and municipal contributions made up about 12 cents. Children’s lunch money, along with contributions from PTAs and civic groups, made up the rest of the program’s operating budget. In 1952 the federal school lunch contribution fell to only 12 cents and state government payments accounted for just 9 cents. In point of fact, the only source of school lunch funding that increased during the 1950s was the amount that parents sent to school for their children’s meals. By 1952, parent contributions in the form of lunch fees covered over half of the program’s costs. Indeed, between 1947 and 1968, state and local contributions averaged only 21 percent of the total pro gram costs, while children’s fees nationwide, accounted for 55 percent.47 In 1962, Department of Agriculture officials boasted that the states paid nine million dollars in matching contributions. Two-thirds of that nine million, however, came from children’s school lunch fees and not from state or local treasuries.48 Some state legislatures actually passed laws prohibiting the use of local taxes for school lunch programs. Others contributed only to food expenses and refused to pay for operating costs or equipment. In Louisiana, despite Allen Ellender’s commitment to the program state funds made up just over one-third of the school lunch operating expenses. In Georgia, the situation was even worse. State funds made up only 0.4 percent of the cost of lunch. Northern states were only somewhat more generous. New York State, for example, paid only 21 percent of the cost of lunch, and Massachusetts contributed only 11 percent.49 In other words, while the federal government took credit for a National School Lunch Program, it was children’s fees that kept the program going.50
TABLE 5.2
Local Sources of Financing for National School Lunch Program, Selected States, 1967*
Source: Committee on School Lunch Participation, Their Daily Bread: A Study of the National School Lunch Program (Atlanta, Ga.: McNelley-Rudd Printing Service, 1968), 38–39.
* Some states were not listed because the figures were incomplete at the time of publication.
** This was the first year Florida appropriated funds for school lunches. At the time of the study, the governor had just vetoed it.
The consequences of the School Lunch Program’s financial structure meant than many American children had no access to subsidized meals. Because states were not obligated to participate in the federal program, as late as 1960 only about half of the nation’s public and private schools (64,000) contracted with the department of Agriculture for lunch programs. While the department boasted that it fed over fourteen million children, this was only a third of the nation’s public school students.51 Most of the children eating school lunches during the 1950s came from rural, white school districts in the South and southwest. The program’s heavily rural and southern bias clearly reflected the continued influence of legislators like Richard Russell and Allen Ellender, who enthusiastically backed the program well into the 1960s. Not surprisingly, both Georgia and Louisiana claimed among the highest participation rates in the nation (73% and 74%, respectively), this despite the fact that the states themselves contributed little to the program.52 Indeed, in 1960, not one of the nation’s large cities contracted with the Department of Agriculture for school lunch subsidies.53 As late as 1962, only 5 percent of Philadelphia’s schools participated in the federal program. Chicago and Detroit offered subsidized lunch for only 10 percent of their schoolchildren, while Cleveland and San Francisco fed fewer than 20 percent. The only major city boasting even 50 percent participation was Miami (62%), reflecting the program’s general Southern tilt54 (see Table 5.3).
The program’s rural bias reflected the structure of urban schools as much as the interests and influence of southern lawmakers. Many city schools had been built during the 1920s’ expansion of public education. Designed as neighborhood schools in an era when middle-class mothers had not yet entered the work force in large numbers, most of these schools had no cafeteria facilities—school boards as well as school architects assumed children would go home for lunch. Whether this reflected the reality of life in urban, working-class neighborhoods of the 1920s and 1930s is questionable. It is certain, however, that by the 1950s, despite the rise of a post-war “culture of domesticity,” large numbers of mothers held jobs outside their homes and could not wait in their kitchens for their children to come home at noon. The domestic ideal, combined with a general disinterest in agricultural programs, however, explains why, until the mid-1960s, most northern politicians as well as liberal civic groups paid little attention to the workings of the school lunch program. Only after 1963, when the civil rights movement looked to the North, and politicians as well as activists “discovered” poverty, did school lunches become an issue for legislators in states such as Illinois, Ohio, California, and Massachusetts. As one historian put it, during the 1950s, the school lunch program worked well in the South and in rural areas but was “no issue at all for big-city liberals.”55
TABLE 5.3
National School Lunch Program Participation in Select Ci
ties, 1962*
Source: Hearings, National School Lunch Act, June 19, 1962, Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, 87th Cong., 2nd Sess., 25.
* Includes only elementary schools.
Like other federal welfare benefits, school lunches depended on the will of local politicians to fund the program. The consequences of this decentralized administration were particularly dramatic when it came to providing free lunches for poor children. The fact that the Department of Agriculture allowed states to use children’s fees as the matching requirement meant that even if schools wanted to offer free lunches, they had to come up with local contributions to do so. Most states chose simply to ignore the free lunch mandate. The burden of meeting the full cost of the lunch program rested on local communities, many of which had neither the resources nor the inclination to devote substantial amounts of money to feed poor children. Schools could, admittedly, charge more to paying children in order to subsidize free meals. Most districts, however, felt themselves strained even to meet the costs for children who could pay. Local administrators feared that asking children to pay higher prices would cause them to drop out of the program and thus decrease the overall revenue. One state school lunch director called the program’s matching formula “not realistic.”56 The predictable result was that few children received free lunches, and, particularly in the South, racial segregation prevailed. The American School Food Service Association’s Rodney Ashby admitted: “Despite successes, achievements, accolades, and unbelievably few criticisms, our pride of accomplishment … is not a little dulled when we view what should have been done and what must yet be accomplished.”57
The fact was, during the 1950s, few policy makers, whether in the Department of Agriculture or in liberal civic organizations, were particularly concerned about feeding poor children. The Department of Agriculture largely ignored the School Lunch Act’s provisions requiring participating schools to offer free lunches to children who could not afford to pay. In the end, the number free lunches served actually declined during the 1950s. Just after the program began, 17 percent of lunches were served for free. By 1960, fewer than 10 percent of the National School Lunch Program meals were offered for free.58 A 1962 survey estimated that half a million low-income children attended schools that participated in the program but offered no free meals.59 When confronted with the survey results, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman admitted that the findings “jarred any complacency we might have had.”60
The limits of the program were dramatically illustrated in 1955 when the Los Angeles school district quietly dropped out of the program. When the federal cash subsidy for each meal fell to 4 cents that year, the district decided it was “financially impractical” to remain in the program.61 No longer contracting for federally subsidized food, the district tried to develop a lunch program based on local resources. According to its own evaluation, however, the nutritional standards for Los Angeles school lunch fell below federal guidelines, providing only one-third of the children’s RDAs. Los Angeles school officials then faced the financial conundrum of a school lunch system dependent on children’s fees. To serve nutritious meals and at the same time provide free lunches to poor children, the city’s lunch administrators realized they would have to either ask for increased local taxes or raise the price of lunch. Believing the former was politically impossible, they announced that the cost of lunch would increase. When the price went up, however, the number of paying children declined and the district ended up losing money in any case. Ultimately, Los Angeles school officials decided to keep the price of lunch low in order to induce children to stay in the lunch line. This meant that they also decided to limit the number of free meals they could offer. Poor children in Los Angeles thus found themselves excluded from the lunch program. While the result was that the city ran a viable lunch program, feeding about one-third of its schoolchildren in 1960, the number of poor children receiving free meals was “microscopically small,” less than 1 percent.62
Cases like Los Angeles notwithstanding, the National School Lunch Program ended the 1950s as one of the nation’s most popular federal programs. No one in the federal government had bothered to tinker with it very much during the fifteen years since its establishment, and most people thought the program worked pretty well. The Department of Agriculture exerted little administrative oversight, largely because of the founders’ aversion to federal interference in state affairs. Agriculture officials believed it was up to the states to distribute both cash and commodities as they saw fit. For that reason, the inequities in the system remained largely hidden from public scrutiny. The principle of states’ rights guarded local officials from accountability and provided an easy excuse for federal officials to ignore the fact that the program was not meeting its stated goals. The last thing Department of Agriculture officials wanted was to be seen as interfering with local school matters. In principle, as Allen Ellender envisioned it, this would ensure local loyalty to the program. In fact, as the dismal figures on poor children revealed, it reinforced a deep inequality in the American social fabric. That inequality could be masked during the 1950s as relative prosperity combined with a political climate that eschewed critical dissent. By the end of the decade, however, demands for racial equity, along with a growing awareness that many Americans had been left out of the era’s economic boom, opened the school lunch program—and other government benefits as well—to new scrutiny.
CHAPTER 6
No Free Lunch
For the first fifteen years of its existence the National School Lunch Program enjoyed widespread support but fed relatively few children. Those children who ate school lunches generally paid a small fee and received a “balanced” hot meal that was prepared on-site at least partly from surplus commodities. Teachers, principals, and social workers might designate certain children to receive free lunches, but on the whole, few schools regularly provided free meals. Indeed, the period between 1946 and 1960 marked a remarkably complacent time when it came to questions of poor people in America. While a new movement for civil rights was quietly brewing, it focused more on dismantling the legal structures of Jim Crow—voting rights, public accommodations, and segregated schools—than on economic conditions. After 1960, however, poverty returned to center stage in national policy and reform circles. Although the “discovery” of poverty during the 1960s took many forms, from President Johnson’s War on Poverty and the institutionalization of Great Society welfare programs to the vast expansion of volunteer food pantries and community health clinics, Department of Agriculture officials were slow to grasp the significance of these movements for its long-standing food programs, including the National School Lunch Program. Only gradually did it dawn on policy makers, parents, school officials, and activists that poor children were not being served in school lunchrooms.
Poverty had never, of course, disappeared from American communities. Despite the aura of affluence that characterized the 1950s, large numbers of Americans remained outside the middle-class consumer economy. While blue-collar union wages afforded many working-class families a comfortable living, the benefits were largely confined to white workers in urban, industrial enclaves. Outside the manufacturing sector, rural poverty, combined with large swaths of urban “ghetto” areas, gave lie to the notion that all Americans had achieved middle-class status. Indeed, the post-war economic expansion of the 1950s effectively hid lingering pockets of poverty—rural as well as urban—from public view. By the end of the decade, however, a decline in the manufacturing sector threatened the economic security even many blue-collar families thought they had achieved after World War II. At the same time, a resurgent civil rights movement revealed the underlying racial inequalities in America that en compassed economic status as well as political rights. With the “discovery” of poverty during the early 1960s, federal benefits like the National School Lunch Program appeared increasingly limited, if not downright discriminatory. The program promised, in principle, to feed the
nation’s children and to provide free meals for those who could not afford to pay. By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that neither goal was being met.
As the election of 1960 approached, Americans seemed to believe that they had conquered the problems of poverty and hunger. Images of undernourished draftees and Depression Era bread lines had long since receded. The nation had plenty of food—so much that tons of commodities were regularly shipped abroad to feed the hungry in the “underdeveloped” world. Indeed, under P.L. 480 the Department of Agriculture set up school lunch programs abroad to bring the bounty of American farms to the world’s hungry children.1 In the midst of abundance, however, nutritionists rather quietly began to warn Americans against “overeating,” and doctors began to report an increasing incidence of obesity. American culture focused on diet fads and weight loss—symptoms of too much to eat rather than too little. Margaret Mead observed that “every cocktail party, every school picnic, every coffee-break, the whole articulate verbal section of the American people were trying not to eat something.”2 Hunger and malnutrition seemed a very distant threat to those Americans who, by 1960, enjoyed an unprecedented bounty of consumer goods including an ever-growing assortment of processed, frozen, and prepared foods.3 Poverty, hunger, and malnutrition appeared to be conditions endemic to foreign countries and remote parts of Africa, Asia, or Latin America, certainly not conditions found in the American heartland.4
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