DISCOVERING HUNGER IN AMERICA
Federal food policy during the 1950s was not predicated on domestic poverty or the fact that there might be hungry children in America. Indeed, the nation’s main center for food policy, the Department of Agriculture, spent the decade focused on agricultural productivity, commodity markets, and foreign aid. While the USDA regularly distributed milk and surplus foods to the nation’s schools, its primary mission was to support farm incomes and provide technical support to the increasingly industrialized agricultural sector. Similarly, when Congress authorized the Department of Agriculture to send commodities abroad under P.L. 480, its intent was as much to maintain American agricultural prices as to feed hungry people in the “Third World.” Just as the Department of Agriculture had used American schools as outlets for surplus food during the 1930s, agriculture officials used farm commodities “to encourage economic develop ment abroad.”5 By the time John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, food had become a staple in Cold War diplomatic strategy. Shipments of wheat, corn, and other commodities served as symbols of American democracy and prosperity, shoring up regimes threatened by internal revolutionary movements and external Soviet support. Ultimately, as president, Kennedy codified the use of food as a diplomatic weapon by appointing Senator George McGovern to head the “Food for Peace” program targeted at “developing” nations.6 Agricultural prosperity and an abundance of food appeared to confirm the success and superiority of American institutions in the Cold War world. Kennedy’s Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman boasted that “if we were as far ahead of the Russians in the space race as we are in agriculture, we would by now be running a shuttle service to the moon.”7
So confident were Americans in their abundant food supply that nutritionists and home economists rarely studied domestic food habits and cultures any more. Reporting to Lyndon Johnson on malnutrition among children in the United States, presidential aide, Richard W. Reuter noted, “Our office has been able to find little evidence of study of the nutritional adequacies of U.S. families since New Deal days.” He added, “Apparently, little is known of the actual diets of children in our own poverty areas.”8 Unlike earlier generations of food reformers who had been fascinated by the food cultures of immigrants, ethnics, and African Americans, midcentury nutritionists explored eating habits and food-related conditions like rickets and malnutrition only in foreign settings. “We know more about the nutrition of Indians in India than we do about our own people,” admitted one malnutrition specialist.9 When nutritionists, doctors, social workers, or teachers discussed hunger in American at all, they did so through the lens of foreign field research and experience abroad. Indeed, many of the 1960s anti-poverty activists came to domestic concerns after serving in the Peace Corps abroad. Returning home, this generation was shocked to “discover” poverty in their own communities.
As it turned out, the only language food reformers of the 1960s had to describe hunger and malnutrition came from their experience outside the United States. When, for example, anti-hunger activists in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign found poor communities in the Mississippi Delta, they likened the condition of people there to “those primitive tribal Africans in Kenya and Aden.”10 A group of physicians subsequently told an “incredulous” panel of experts that, after examining black children in South Carolina, they were shocked to find advanced stages of hunger and kwashiorkor, “a protein deficiency disease normally associated with West Africa.”11 Similarly, a child care worker in Hidalgo County, Texas, was shocked to find the conditions there “considerably worse” than any she had seen during her Peace Corps stint in Honduras, “the most backward country in Central America.”12 Urban activists likewise drew on their experiences in places like Ethiopia, West Pakistan, and Southeast Asia to understand the conditions they found in America’s inner cities.13 The specter of hunger in the world’s most prosperous nation was profoundly embarrassing. Images of starving children in the Mississippi Delta and in Appalachian valleys and, increasingly, in the nation’s poor urban neighborhoods as well unnerved mainstream liberals. As late as 1967, President Johnson’s Interagency Task Force on Nutrition and Adequate Diets reported that “at the present time most of the basic and applied work on the relationship of malnutrition to development is being carried on outside of the U.S.”14
A new, domestic-oriented anti-hunger and anti-poverty movement emerged during the early 1960s. Informed by such striking works as Michael Harrington’s scathing expose, The Other America, and a powerful and influential review in The New Yorker by Dwight MacDonald, poverty began to take center stage among liberal reformers.15 Led in large part by civil rights activists and liberal church groups, a new “hunger lobby” linked domestic poverty to racial inequality and demanded a reorientation of domestic food and agricultural priorities. As the civil rights movement in the South exposed the realities of economic as well as political discrimination, the media and the American public gradually took notice of hunger and malnutrition in their own midst. Most accounts of the “discovery” of poverty during the early 1960s date the change in public awareness to John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. During a campaign visit to rural West Virginia, for example, Kennedy promised to pay special attention to social issues at home. After the election, liberal policy makers pushed the new president to address poverty and inequality in the North as well as the South. While the new administration put most of its focus on employment and educational opportunity rather than hunger, one of Kennedy’s first executive orders reestablished the Food Stamp Program. By the time of the Kennedy assassination and Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement of his War on Poverty, in 1964, new anti-poverty and anti-hunger groups had begun to appear throughout the country. Chief among the goals of these groups were free lunches for poor children.16
AGRICULTURE OR WELFARE?
Initially, the Department of Agriculture resisted efforts to link its food programs to welfare policy. While the department had always, in a very real sense, provided welfare for the nation’s farm sector, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, much like his predecessors, never envisioned the surplus commodity programs as social welfare more generally. Neither USDA officials nor their congressional supporters had any desire to get into the business of welfare or social services. Throughout both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations, Freeman contended uneasily with the growing pressure to re-orient the lunch program toward needy children. It was not that he objected to government assistance for poor children or that he opposed a free lunch program. But he believed that these programs belonged elsewhere in the government bureaucracy. Freeman was not unsympathetic to calls for welfare reform; he just did not believe that the Department of Agriculture was the appropriate vehicle for such measures. As a protege of Minnesota Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey, the Secretary had solid liberal credentials. He chaired Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party in the 1950s and served three terms as governor. During a bitter 1959 strike at a meat-packing plant in Albert Lea, for example, he called in the state’s national guard, thus alienating the company management, who preferred to wait out the union action, as well as the union who felt it was in a position to win the strike. Freeman’s actions nonetheless won him the respect of state as well as national Democratic leaders, and at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, he had the honor of placing Kennedy’s name in nomination. After the election, Kennedy tapped him to become Secretary of Agriculture.17 When Freeman took over the department, he inherited a six-billion-dollar operation with over 96,000 employees. It was second in size and influence only to the Department of Defense.18 Freeman’s view was that the USDA existed for the benefit of American farmers and that it was his job and the job of agriculture programs to keep those interests in the forefront. What is more, the School Lunch Program mission, as Freeman saw it, was to make nutritious meals available to all children, not just those who were poor.
When Freeman became Secretary of Agriculture, the National School Lunch
Program was, without doubt, one of the department’s most prized achievements. Commanding a loyal backing in Congress, the program had been protected throughout the 1950s by a still-powerful southern farm bloc. Louisiana senator Ellender, who had chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee for over two decades, remained one of the program’s staunch protectors. During the early 1960s, however, pressure built to expand the program’s reach, particularly, to provide free lunches for poor children. For an increasing number of liberal lawmakers, protecting farmers would no longer suffice. American food policy, they insisted, must serve the needs of all citizens and, most especially, the poor. For the first time since the National School Lunch Program’s creation, its fundamental mission came into question. Not only did critics begin to ask why farm surpluses defined school menus, but they also began to question how decisions were made regarding which children received free meals. Ultimately the critical question was whether the school lunch program could—or would—serve as a universal child nutrition program and also provide free meals to poor children.
Freeman openly admitted that the lunch program had badly neglected the nation’s poor children. In 1962 he commissioned a survey of the program. The results, he admitted, “were jarring, to put it mildly.”19 The survey uncovered the fact that poor children were almost entirely excluded from school lunchrooms. “In many areas only a very small percentage of school lunches are free or reduced prices, the heaviest participation in school lunches coming in areas where there is little need.”20 According to Freeman’s own estimate, at least half a million needy children attended schools that offered lunch programs but did not serve free meals. As if that were not enough, over nine million American children attended schools that offered no meal program at all. Of those nine million, Freeman estimated that at least one million were “children of poverty.”21 The problem clearly went beyond simple poverty. Schools with the highest proportion of needy children were concentrated in low-income urban areas—neighborhoods that by the early 1960s were heavily black. Similarly, in the South, most of the all-black schools in that region’s segregated system had no lunchroom facilities.22 In 1963, according to White House aide, Harry McPherson, Jr., the school lunch program in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia reached 62 percent of white children and only 26 percent of non-white. At the same time, McPherson estimated that fewer than one-third of the white children came from low-income families, while “from 50 to 90 percent … of the Negro children came from such families.” In Maryland, only one out of eight students in “the Negro high school” received school lunches as compared with one in two or one in three in the white schools. The basic reason for the “gross inequities,” McPherson admitted, was that “the program is administered as a surplus food distribution activity and the methods of administration largely ignore the question of need.”23
The Department of Agriculture’s dismal record of service to poor children fueled both citizen outrage and intra-governmental rivalries. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty quickly spawned both federal and local agencies that threatened the Agriculture Department’s monopoly on food policy and children’s meals. New York congressman Charles Godell put it bluntly, “I think we can state without much question,” he said, “that the commodity distribution program was not a program primarily established to feed the hungry in this country.” In Godell’s view, the school lunch program should be moved “elsewhere than the Department of Agriculture.”24 Joseph Califano, head of the newly created cabinet Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), saw in the Department of Agriculture’s failures an opening for his own programs and began to offer funds to schools wanting to establish free lunch programs for poor children.25 HEW’s pioneering Head Start Program, for example, included free meals in its pre-schools. HEW funds were more flexible than the Department of Agriculture’s school lunch appropriations and could be used to pay for labor and equipment as well as for food. Califano went so far as to suggest that all federal child nutrition programs be shifted from the Department of Agriculture to his own agency. As presently structured, the HEW secretary charged, the National School Lunch Program benefited farmers but was of little use to poor children. Furthermore, the Department of Agriculture had neither the will or the desire to turn itself into a welfare agency. Califano’s legislative assistant Phillip Hughes argued that the Agriculture Department’s “main concern” was to serve farm interests. The special needs of the poor, Hughes said, particularly the need for food, were “more likely to be met sooner” if the federal government turned over responsibility for child feeding to HEW.26 In fact, among the proposals for “legislation with Civil Rights implications,” prepared by President Johnson’s advisers in 1965, was a plan to shift all school lunch and milk programs over to HEW.27
Nutrition professionals and child welfare advocates had long questioned the Department of Agriculture’s control over children’s nutrition. Nutritionist Michael Latham took the department to task for its “imperfect job” and its inability to distribute food to the people who really needed it. The USDA”s underlying philosophy, Latham insisted, “is in conflict with what needs to be done.” In Latham’s view, “a department which has as its main aim the improvement of agriculture and the lot of the farmer suffers a conflict of interests when its second duty is to feed the poor.”28
Under Califano’s leadership, communities across the country began to use education and welfare funds to open new free lunch programs in schools and day-care centers. In particular, states used funds from the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to start free lunch programs. Often these were considered “emergency” meal programs for poor children in urban areas and predominantly black rural counties as well.29 ESEA and Head Start free lunch programs operated independently of the Department of Agriculture and appeared where no National School Lunch Programs had existed before. South Carolina, for example, used ESEA funds to provide an estimated 1700 free lunches. Little Rock, Arkansas, used similar funds to serve over 2,000 meals each day. In Minneapolis, 3,000 “inner city” children ate free lunches paid for with ESEA funds, while in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico, schools drew on these monies to provide meals for the children of migrant workers. 30 By the end of 1965, Agriculture Secretary Freeman, who was not especially happy about the fact that other agencies were infringing on his depart ment’s school lunch territory, estimated that as much as $16 million in education funds was being spent “to assist the schools in feeding needy children.”31 Neither Freeman nor Agriculture Department advocates in Congress wanted to lose food programs—whether school lunches, milk, or food stamps—to other authorities.32 John A. Schnittker, Acting Secretary of Agriculture, insisted that while HEW was making a significant contribution improving the nutritional welfare of poor children, the ultimate “objective” of nutrition for all children would best be served “by centralizing in the Department of Agriculture the basic responsibility” for such activities.33
With powerful advocates in both the House and the Senate, the Department of Agriculture enjoyed considerable support in its effort to maintain a hold on school lunch programs. While the push to expand welfare programs, particularly to African Americans, was gaining ground in Congress, however, school lunch advocates hesitated simply to target poor children. Traditional program backers, including Allen Ellender and Richard Russell, were particularly leery of explicitly turning the program into welfare because they feared this would lead to increased federal scrutiny of Jim Crow restrictions on benefits for blacks. These men argued therefore that the program should remain focused on all children and should not shift its emphasis to the poor. Ellender, for example, loudly protested against turning the school lunch program into welfare for poor children. Liberals, he believed, with their commitment to a civil rights agenda, were trying to entirely re-define the school lunch program. “I do not want to mix it in with “Headstart” or “Head-on” or whatever you might call the programs in the poverty program,” Ellender complained.34 Richard Russell similar
ly insisted that feeding poor children had never been the original bill’s central intent.
With increased competition from new agencies and mounting public pressure to serve more poor children, the Department of Agriculture and its congressional backers for the first time had to re-think the fundamental goals of the school lunch program. In an effort to ward off the critics and to answer the increasingly loud demands for more free lunches, Agriculture Department officials, along with the program’s professional association, the American School Food Service Association, began to draft major changes in the program’s administrative and funding structure. In 1962 Congress for the first time required the Department of Agriculture to enforce the free meal provision in the School Lunch Act. In the school lunch budget appropriation that year, Congress directed the Secretary of Agriculture to provide free lunches to all poor children. The legislators, however, neglected to appropriate any new funds for this purpose. Indeed, the special assistance fund that was supposed to provide an incentive for states to offer more free and reduced price meals went entirely unfunded for two years.35 Still, Congress put the Department of Agriculture on notice that something needed to be done to re-direct school lunch priorities.
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