Sensing a looming crisis, and probably hoping to deflect any widespread public or congressional scrutiny of the school lunch program, the Department of Agriculture, under Freeman’s direction, developed a small-scale food-based welfare plan. Using the model of foreign aid, Agriculture officials put together a school lunch “CARE package” that included “the essentials for lunch,” including nutrition charts and menu suggestions. The CARE packages were distributed to a small number of model schools. This was, Freeman later admitted, “a less than adequate solution.”36 The following year Agriculture Department staff members were dispatched to a few isolated Appalachian communities to help local school officials start lunch programs. Most of the targeted schools, however, had no space to store, prepare, or serve food, and many had only “two-burner hotplates” for cooking. Freeman’s heart clearly was not in this new direction. While he admitted that these projects brought much needed nutrition to poor children, he complained to Congress that they required an “enormous effort.” If Congress wanted his Department to adequately feed the nation’s poor children, Freeman declared, it would have to vote new appropriations and provide “new authority” for the use of surplus food and federal resources.37
The “new authority” came in 1966 as the forces for reform gained ground both in Congress and among public advocacy groups. In 1966 Congress passed the Child Nutrition Act that, for the first time, appropriated funds directly for free lunches. The act also established a pilot School Breakfast Program aimed at poor children. The 1966 Child Nutrition act proved to be a milestone in the transformation of school lunches from farm subsidy to welfare. Heralded as “an important landmark in the War on Poverty,” the Child Nutrition Act covered public as well as parochial schools and included every state plus Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam.38 John A. Schnittker told LBJ aide, Harry McPherson that the reason the 1966 Child Nutrition Act passed was that members objected “to doing less for kids, even if some are rich kids.”39
The 1966 Child Nutrition Act put federal money into free lunches for the first time, but it did not fundamentally alter the National School Lunch Program’s basically inequitable financial and administrative structures. The new federal “Special Assistance Funds” earmarked specifically for free meals promised no new matching money to the states and provided no additional federal money for basic school lunch operations, such as new facilities, equipment, or labor. That is, the Special Funds could not be used to expand existing cafeteria facilities, build new lunchrooms, or hire more staff to cover the new free meals that had to be provided. Department of Agriculture officials offered no help to local schools, which now had to finance large numbers of free lunches. Because very few states contributed any local taxes or other state resources to school lunchrooms, urban districts, in particular, were caught in a dilemma. Built without cafeteria facilities in the first place, city schools by the 1960s were “plagued with decaying buildings” and had little money to pay for repairs, let alone new cafeterias.40 City school districts, already in financial crisis, had to raise their own money to build or expand their kitchen and lunchroom facilities. They also had to raise money to pay lunchroom workers, most of whom were low-paid women. Indeed, the ASFSA estimated that the vast majority of its members “are in an income bracket that scarcely lifts each of them above the poverty level.”41 The results were predictably problematic. In Washington, D.C., for example, the price of Type A lunches increased from 35 cents to 42 cents. The district faced an additional crisis when the unionized school cafeteria workers demanded a pay increase but insisted that the increase not come “through raising lunch prices.”42 Nonetheless, Congress now mandated that all schools—whether they had previously participated in the National School Lunch Program or not—provide free lunches to all poor children in the district. The result was, one report noted, a “crazy quilt pattern which bears little relationship to the degree of need.”43 The pattern did, however, bear considerable relationship to the nation’s pattern of racial discrimination and clearly allowed states to continue “local custom” with regard to black children.
Figure 6.1. School administrators protested cuts in regular school lunch appropriations. Lunch menu with handwritten note addressed to President Johnson, from James R. Jordan, Superintendent of the Auburn Union School District, Auburn, California, April 4, 1966. GEN AG–7–2 School Lunch Program 4/1/66–4/4/66, WHCF Box 11, LBJ Library.
Ever reluctant to become involved in state-level decisions about school lunch policies, the Department of Agriculture essentially left the provision of free meals up to local and state officials. The result was widespread inequality and inconsistency from state to state and district to district. Some states sent the special assistance funds only to schools that specifically requested aid. Other states targeted one or two schools for pilot programs—leaving the rest without money for free lunches. In Alabama, for example, the state’s share of the special assistance fund, almost $60,000, went to fourteen schools. However, Sumter County, the poorest district in the state with a 70 percent black population, received none of the money. Georgia distributed its special funds to almost two dozen schools, but there, too, the poorest county received nothing. Arizona used all of its $20,000 appropriation in one district. Arkansas sent its special fund to nine schools, none of which were in its largest city Little Rock. In Colorado the all of the funds went to one school in Denver, and Florida sent its entire appropriation to just ten schools.44
The Agriculture Department funding formula for the special funds only compounded the system’s inequalities. Each state’s share of the special assistance funds depended on a complicated calculation based on the number of children who had received free lunches during the past year. This meant that states with historically more generous welfare policies received more than other states, regardless of number of poor children in the schools. New York, for example, received over $350,000 in special funds, while California, which actually had more schools but had served fewer free lunches the previous year, received only $100,000. Poor children in California thus received lower school lunch subsidies than did their East Coast counterparts.45
Most problematic was the fact that legislators neglected to establish any standards or procedures for determining which children would be eligible for free meals. Like federal welfare policy generally, the Child Nutrition Act left it to state and local officials to determine benefit levels (in this case how many free lunches to offer) and to identify who was eligible for assistance. Great Society welfare policy depended heavily on local standards in the distribution of public benefits. Despite the fact that the Johnson administration initiated the first “serious” reform in Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), for example, including requirements for vocational training in order to push women into the work force, states still set eligibility standards and determined benefit rates.46 As the inequities of the nation’s welfare system became more evident, however, particularly the extent to which African Americans had systematically been excluded from the welfare system, Congress came under increasing pressure to establish national eligibility standards. The debate over eligibility standards for school lunches as well as for food stamps, ADC, and other federal benefits starkly exposed the limits of the American welfare state.
The 1966 Child Nutrition Act, at least in theory, directed the Secretary of Agriculture to establish—and enforce—guidelines for determining which children qualified for free lunches.47 Neither the USDA nor Congress, however, was eager to alter the unspoken rules of local prerogative when it came to the distribution of welfare benefits. While the department had long established nutrition guidelines—in the form of RDAs, food equivalency charts, and healthy menus—it always left the day-to-day operation of school lunchrooms in the hands of local officials. The program’s congressional backers, particularly southerners such as Ellender and Russell, strongly favored the program’s decentralized operation in which administration, menus, and eligibility were all determined by people at the local level. Decen
tralization had clearly had been the intent of the program’s founders, who were happy to bring agricultural subsidies to their states but wanted no federal interference with “local custom” when it came to schools. As civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy told Orville Freeman, “Local resistance is an old and sad story.”48 While civil rights demands increasingly challenged states’ rights in the South, particularly with regard to voting, public accommodations, and, by 1965 em ployment as well, education and school funding continued to be local matters. Thus, despite increasing pressure to fund free meals for poor children, the Department of Agriculture had difficulty shifting away from its traditional “hands off” approach to local administration of the National School Lunch Program.49
The free lunch mandate, however, forced the Department of Agriculture into a welfare role for which it was ill prepared. Having, up until this point, maintained only minimal oversight on state and local lunch programs, the Agriculture Department was singularly uncomfortable with its new welfare-oriented role. DOA officials initially issued a weak and confusing set of guidelines that basically just reminded local school lunch administrators that they were obligated to provide free meals to all poor children in their districts. Secretary Freeman refused to send specific directions to local administrators telling them how to accomplish this task. Initially, Freeman’s directives were so weak that many schools were unaware they even existed. One principal claimed he “had never heard that there were new guidelines,” and another called them “a fairly closely guarded secret.”50 Ultimately, confusion over the mandate to serve free meals, combined with the fact that the school lunch budget overall did not increase, set up a series of confrontations not only between federal and state officials but between grass-roots activists and government officials as well. Indeed, for the next two years, Freeman engaged in a battle with school lunch advocates over how to feed poor children in the nation’s schools.
The problem, as Orville Freeman saw it, was an issue of federal versus state authority. Congress, he believed, never intended that the Department of Agriculture or the National School Lunch Program interfere with state educational policies. It had simply authorized him to distribute free lunch funds to each state. After that it was up to local officials to determine which schools and which children received benefits. “The law is specific,” Freeman said. Only state legislatures, he believed, held the power to determine how food and meal subsidies were distributed. The only thing he could do, Freeman told Congress, was to withhold school lunch funds, but he knew this would spark outrage around the country as all children, rich and poor, would be affected.51 Freeman knew, furthermore, that if he refused to send food to delinquent states (states that did not make plans to offer free lunches), schools would simply stop feeding children altogether. The dilemma was posed starkly by Alabama representative Glenn Andrews, who pressed school lunch director Howard Davis about what his department would do if districts did not comply with the free lunch mandate. When Davis reluctantly acknowledged that his department would be “bound to carry out the law of the land,” Andrews replied tartly, “In other words, for political considerations you would leave a bunch of children hungry if a county failed to integrate properly?”52 The result would be that neither poor nor middle-class children would get school lunches. Thus the only guidelines the secretary could muster were constant urgings that states follow Department of Agriculture standards of operation. Beyond that, Freeman insisted, his hands were tied.53
Because neither Congress nor the Department of Agriculture wanted to alter the unspoken rules of local prerogative, the distribution of federal welfare benefits was notoriously inconsistent. In some school districts only children whose parents were on welfare qualified for free lunches, but in other areas welfare recipients had to pay for their children’s lunches. The Washington, D.C., school district, for example, assumed that welfare payments covered food costs and insisted that “parents who received welfare could afford to pay for lunch.”54 The income qualification for free lunches varied widely across the country. In some districts, families earning $2,000 a year qualified for free meals, while in other states the income cut-off was $3,000.55 In South Carolina, children from families earning under $225 per month could get free meals, while in New Mexico the figure was $110; in Arkansas, children could not eat for free unless their parents’ monthly income was less than $85. Florida’s free lunch criteria were fairly loose and included children from families receiving county assistance, families on “limited” income, children eligible for ESEA subsidies, as well as families facing “temporary emergencies” and children showing signs of malnutrition or “clear-cut neglect.” 56 Eligibility for free lunches often varied from school to school within the same state. In one Georgia county a family with two children and an annual income between $2001 and $2500 had to pay five cents for lunch, while in the neighboring county those children could eat for free.57
Local decisions about which children received free lunches revealed a continuing legacy of paternalistic, if not racist, practices. In most cases, eligibility for free meals was determined by school officials—teachers, social workers, or principals—or by other individuals in the community, including PTA members, welfare case workers, or local ministers. School lunch founder, Senator Richard Russell, for one, saw no problem with such a personal approach. Local officials, he believed, were best suited to “determine the ability of the children to pay for lunches, with the free lunches to go to the neediest children.”58 This was, of course, precisely the paternalistic, often discriminatory system that welfare and civil rights activists sought to avoid by establishing objective, national eligibility standards. For one thing, principals and teachers regularly made moral judgments about the behavior of students and parents when deciding which children could eat for free. In Florida, principals, teachers, and social workers oversaw the eligibility process.59 The result was inconsistent at best and discriminatory at worst. A child in Collier County, Florida, who Health Department director Charles Bradley admitted was “malnourished,” nonetheless did not qualify for the free lunch program. The problem was that the child did not appear thin enough. “Look at the fat arms and muscles,” Bradley said, “that kid’s all right.”60 In San Diego, Texas, school superintendent Bryan P. Taylor was confident that he knew the children’s “mothers and the grandmothers and their fathers and their fathers before them,” and would have no trouble deciding which children needed free lunches.61 Children in Appalachia were regularly denied free lunches if their fathers were considered to be alcoholics. A Florida school lunch supervisor “let” two children have free lunches because she found out that their father was going into the hospital. However, when she discovered that the family had a television set in their home, she took away the privilege, saying, “If they could afford a television set, they certainly could afford good nutrition for their children, so I refused to put them on the free list.” The trouble with “these people,” she concluded, “is that they have no sense of values—they just don’t know what’s important and what isn’t.”62 Thus, in most states, the decision as to which children received free lunch was personal and often arbitrary.63
Leaving eligibility determinations up to local officials had predictable results. In some schools poor children were required to carry out the garbage, sweep the floors, or clean the washrooms in return for lunch.64 One district went so far as to insist that poor children “clean their plates,” while paying children were allowed to leave food. Another state required regular school attendance and insisted that the poor children “apply themselves well” before they were deemed eligible for free meals. All over the country free lunch children stood in separate cafeteria lines or paid for their lunches with special, easily identifiable tokens. Ultimately, neither weak Department of Agriculture guidelines nor the posturing of elected officials prevented children from experiencing the social stigma attached to poverty.
The chaos of state and local free lunch eligibility requirements reflected one of th
e central tensions in President Johnson’s War on Poverty. On the one hand, public pressure had dramatically altered the context for discussions of poverty. Grass-roots welfare-rights and anti-poverty movements demanded that poor people be treated with dignity and respect, particularly from public officials in places like welfare offices and schools. At the same time, targeted programs separated poor and black people from middle-class Americans, increasing the distance and the stigma attached to poverty. While the school lunch program’s congressional advocates, including Allen Ellender, for example, insisted that there be no distinction between poor and paying children, they were unwilling to let federal officials intervene in local school decisions. Thus, although Ellender insisted that rich and poor children “should play together and work together and eat together,” he believed that community tradition and local officials could best decide which children needed free meals.65 But local officials simply perpetuated the racial and class discriminations common across the country. Many school officials, north and south, found themselves having to make judgments for which they were neither prepared nor entirely sympathetic. As one former state school superintendent observed, school boards often differed in class, race, and ethnicity from the poor children they were being asked to serve. “I think they had an awakening in the last few years,” she said. “They found a lot of people there that I don’t think they considered to be people—Mexicans, Negroes, Indians and so forth.”66
School Lunch Politics Page 17
