One of the fundamental questions raised by the civil rights movement and the “discovery” of poverty in America during the 1960s was what role government welfare programs should play in alleviating economic and social inequality. At its base, the social movements of the 1960s were profoundly ambivalent about whether public benefits like school lunches should be available universally or should be targeted to the poor (and increasingly that meant to African Americans). In the crisis atmosphere that pervaded the late 1960s, however, feeding poor children rose to the top of the public agenda. The resulting shift in the National School Lunch Program had significant consequences for all children. While grass-roots pressure to feed poor children succeeded in vastly expanding the number of free meals offered, the unwillingness of legislators (and, ultimately, the public) to invest more heavily in children’s nutrition significantly limited the scope of the program and reduced the number of non-poor children eating lunch at school.
THE FREE LUNCH MANDATE
Although the 1966 Child Nutrition Act promised federal funds for free school lunches, for the next six years community activists, teachers, and local administrators fought with the Department of Agriculture to translate those funds into actual meals for poor children. By the department’s own reckoning, through either “intent, ineptness, or inadequate resources” it was slow to feed the nation’s poor children.2 The USDA preferred, of course, to blame local communities for not taking advantage of the available resources, but the Secretary of Agriculture as well as school lunch administrators acknowledged that Washington needed to do more. The American School Food Service Association, the school lunch program’s major national professional association, estimated in 1968 that at least six and a half million poor children, mostly in cities or isolated rural areas, still had no access to free lunches.3 While over two-thirds of America’s public schools by then participated in the National School Lunch Program, fewer than 10 percent of children in poor, urban neighborhoods could expect to find a noon meal at school.4 Most urban schools still had no cafeteria or kitchen facilities and few had budgets that could encompass a free meal program. Philadelphia, for example, fed only 8 percent of its poor children, while in St. Louis only 4 percent of all lunches served were free. Examples of hungry school children came from all parts of the country. A teacher in Green Bay, Wisconsin, told a Senate Committee in 1968 that in her class, “five out of six children are getting no lunch.”5 In Sumter County, Alabama, the principal of the black high school admitted, “We know there are fifty or more children who cannot afford to buy lunch but we don’t have enough money to feed them all.”6 On the Marysville, Washington, Indian reservation, the local school lunch director said that out of almost four thousand children, “only 40 receive free or reduced price lunches.”7
The evident failure of the American welfare system to feed poor children fueled the increasing sense of social crisis that characterized the late 1960s. While the civil rights movement’s early faith in integration gave way to militant calls for “black power,” and the student anti-war movement adopted ever more revolutionary rhetoric, the anti-hunger/antipoverty movement also found itself questioning whether American institutions could meet the challenge of reform. For liberal Americans, however, poverty and hunger loomed as the most curable of the nation’s woes. Surely, the plentiful supplies of food could be better distributed. The hunger lobby found ready congressional allies in liberal legislators. Most notably, for the first time, urban Democrats, who were in the midst of challenging their party’s intransigent southern wing, began to focus on food policy.
The mounting calls to end poverty and hunger spurred a series congressional hearings and media reports. In April 1967, New York senator Robert Kennedy, along with Pennsylvania senator Joseph Clark, led a highly publicized congressional visit to the Mississippi Delta. The senators’ description of rural poverty and hunger among that region’s mostly black population shocked mainstream America. Not long afterward, the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty, a liberal coalition largely representing labor unions and religious groups, sponsored a physicians’ tour of the same delta area.8 The Citizens’ Crusade (soon re-named the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry) published its findings in a widely distributed volume, Hunger U.S.A.9 Most disturbing to the physicians was the extent of hunger among the Delta residents. Families living on $15 a week, surviving on “biscuit for breakfast, boiled beans for lunch, and bread and molasses for dinner,” contrasted sharply with the comfort and affluence of middleclass America. “We do not want to quibble over words,” the doctor’s report asserted, “the boys and girls we saw were hungry—weak, in pain, sick, their lives are being shortened.”10
The physicians’ accounts of “pitiful” Mississippi children living in “alarming,” “unbelievable,” and “appalling” conditions elicited moral outrage among the nation’s editorial writers and sparked the formation of grass-roots anti-hunger groups all across the country. Hunger U.S.A. became the basis for a controversial CBS television report of the same name. By the spring of 1968, exposes, including a Pulitizer Prize-winning series on conditions in poor communities by journalist Nick Kotz, prompted more Senate and congressional hearings on poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. Finally, in late 1968 George McGovern, former head of the Food for Peace Program, convened a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. McGovern expressed his shock and dismay at the fact that “every American does not have the food, medical assistance, and other related necessities essential to life and health.”11 He urged “bold emergency action” to combat hunger and poverty.12 Meeting in venues across the country, the committee provided a platform for poverty activists, welfare mothers, and community organizers to air their grievances. The widely publicized hearings also became an arena in which representatives from the Departments of Agriculture and Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), along with local officials, attempted to defend their programs and justify their practices. Among the most contentious topics to be aired was the National School Lunch Program’s failure to provide free meals for poor children.13
The anti-hunger lobby focused special ire on the Department of Agriculture. Most particularly, the hunger lobby insisted that the department had botched the task of feeding the nation’s poor. Food and agriculture policy, the activists insisted, should provide food for hungry people, not market subsidies for farmers. In effect, the hunger lobby was asking the Department of Agriculture to re-orient its food programs and re-define its central mission. John Kramer, a leading hunger activist, called the department’s oversight of food programs “an acknowledged farce.”14 Leslie Dunbar, head of the Citizens’ Crusade, declared that food programs are “welfare programs” and should not be administered by a department “which has as its key purpose maximizing income for producers of major crops.”15 The implications for the lunch program were clear. The hunger activists challenged the Department of Agriculture to abandon its traditional mode of using lunch programs as outlets for surplus commodities and to expand the program’s capacity to provide free lunches for the poor.
THE WOMEN’S CAMPAIGN
At the heart of the hunger lobby was a group of mainstream liberal women’s organizations who insisted that the Department of Agriculture had a moral obligation to feed poor children. Immediately after Congress passed the 1966 Child Nutrition Act promising school lunches to poor children, five national women’s groups—the National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW), the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Church Women United (CWU), and the Young Women’s Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.)—formed the Committee on School Lunch Participation (CSLP). Initially, the women’s intent was simply to help start free meal programs in their communities. Their purpose quickly shifted, however, once they began to realize the extent to which poor children were left out of the National School Lunch Program. While a militant women’s liberation movement was gaining strength during the late 1960s, the CSLP represented the liberal mainstream of women’s politics.
The CSLP constituent organizations embraced what historians have labeled a “maternalist” politics based on family and child welfare. Ultimately, the CLSP, with its moderate approach and seemingly conservative style, forced a radical restructuring of the National School Lunch Program.16
The CSLP was, in many ways, a classic example of women’s civic participation. The five national organizations shared a long history of cooperation on social and educational issues and for decades had worked in coalition on both the local and national levels. While the middle years of the twentieth century have often been characterized as the “doldrums” in terms of women’s political activity, in fact, women’s organizations, including those forming the CSLP, actively pursued political agendas including equal rights, education, housing, race relations, and children’s welfare.17 Women in cities as well as small towns ran parent-teacher groups, served on school boards, campaigned for jury duty and repeal of the poll tax, and lobbied for women to be appointed to public boards and commissions. In the context of the increasingly militant movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, liberal women’s organizations optimistically believed that nation’s social problems could be solved by rational leadership, citizen participation, and compassionate legislation. Eschewing any “divisive” political agenda, the CSLP women embraced rather “a religious orientation” and a concern for social problems that was “neither that of a useful political tool or a passing fancy.”18 Not unlike women reformers in the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, the CSLP women believed the government could and should be a positive force for public welfare. At the same time, they believed American democracy needed a universal system of welfare, health, and education to ensure informed participation by all citizens. The CSLP groups could all proudly claim decades of “practical experience on the local level dealing with the great social issues of our day.”19 Indeed, these groups had provided key advocates for the School Lunch Program since its inception and had lobbied extensively for the 1966 Child Nutrition Act guaranteeing poor children access to free lunches.
In the tradition of women’s voluntary activities, the first instinct of the women of the CSLP was to organize a service project that would, as NCJW representative Olya Margolin said, provide free lunches “where needed.” As it became clear, however, that the need was much greater than the capacity of volunteer projects, the women began to reconsider their strategy. After considerable debate, the CSLP steering committee decided to undertake a nationwide survey of the school lunch program With a sizable grant of $25,000 from the Field Foundation, a Chicagobased philanthropic organization that focused on civil rights, community development, and children’s issues, the CSLP hired NAACP staff member Jean Fairfax to coordinate the survey project. Over the next eighteen months, under Fairfax’s direction, women from each of the sponsoring organizations interviewed school lunch administrators, principals, teachers, and parents in their communities. They asked direct and pointed questions aimed to uncover exactly how the lunch program operated, where the funding for school meals came from, and precisely which children were served—and which were left out.20 The result was a carefully researched and shockingly frank report entitled Their Daily Bread. In essence, Their Daily Bread was a manifesto in favor of a government-sponsored universal free lunch program for all American children. In practical terms, the report provided unassailable evidence of the need for a free lunch program for poor children. If a universal lunch program was not feasible, the women insisted, the National School Lunch Program should become a key element in a national anti-poverty agenda.
Their Daily Bread presented a scathing indictment of the National School Lunch Program. The 1966 Child Nutrition Act, the CSLP charged, by not changing the school lunch program’s fiscal and administrative structure, had left “the root of the problem”—free lunches for poor children—un-addressed.21 There simply were not very many free lunches available in the National School Lunch Program. The CSLP’s most damaging finding was its documentation of how little states and local communities contributed to the program. In a careful analysis of the sources of school lunch funding in each state, Their Daily Bread made it clear that every state relied on children’s fees, often for over 90 percent of the program’s operating budget. But the women’s report found abuses in the program that went beyond structural problems. Evidence from all parts of the country pointed to widespread discrimination against poor children and poor communities. The women documented inconsistent standards used to identify poor children and practices that singled them out in insidious ways, including different meals, separate lines, work expectations, and dress codes. “Over and over again,” they wrote, “we heard parents say that although their need is great they would not subject their children to the humiliation of being pointed out” in the school lunch line.22
The results of the CSLP project galvanized a widespread movement for school lunch reform. The “most cherished myth” about school lunches in the United States, the women reported, “is that no child who really needs a lunch is allowed to go hungry.” Pulling no punches, the CSLP declared, “We flatly say that this is not so.” The committee’s conclusions were stark. Two out of three American children did not participate in the National School Lunch Program. Fewer than 4 percent of the nation’s fifty million school children were able to get free or reduced price lunches. Eligibility for free lunch was determined “not by any universally accepted formula” but by “local decisions about administration and financing which may or may not have anything to do with the need of the individual child.” The school lunch program, the CSLP report concluded, was not simply inadequately funded, rather, its entire administrative and financial structure was “both unjust and harmful.” Four fundamental problems lay at the heart of the program. First, the federal financing was inadequate and “the gap between available Federal money and the needs of the program grows bigger every year.” Second, the funding formula that allowed states and local school districts to count children’s meal payments as their matching contribution meant that few schools could afford to offer free meals. Third, those schools that did offer free lunches had no “uniform method of determining who shall be eligible,” resulting in “unequal and unfair decisions on the local level.” Finally, many older, urban schools, built without cafeteria facilities, could not afford to participate in the program. This meant, the CSLP concluded, “that the slum child, who needs good nutrition most, has the least chance of getting a school lunch.” Like the women who carried out the school lunch study, “most of middle-class America,” they found, assumed that school lunches were universally available. These “comfortable assumptions,” the CSLP discovered, “are unrealistic.”23
The National School Lunch Program’s fundamental inadequacy stemmed from its reliance on local initiative and “custom.” Just as the civil rights movement doubted that local communities would, on their own, enact measures to eliminate racial discrimination, so the CSLP women doubted that states, counties, or cities would—or could—solve the problem of poverty without federal intervention. The federal government, the CSLP concluded, was the only institution that could equitably and effectively care for the nation’s poor children. The problem was that the federal government—and the Department of Agriculture—had left school lunch funding up to state legislators, and these bodies, almost uniformly, threw the cost of lunch back on to the children themselves. According to the 1946 School Lunch Act, states were required to match every dollar of federal funds with three dollars “from sources within the State.” Neither Congress nor the Department of Agriculture, however, had ever spelled out what those sources should be. Thus, from the start, the CSLP found, “the only substantial non-Federal contribution is what the children pay for lunches.” The figures were startling. Between 1962 and 1967, states contributed less than 25 percent of the operating costs for school lunches. On the whole, children’s fees accounted for between 75 and 100 percent of the program’s financing.24
No matter which region of the c
ountry the CSLP looked at, they found state legislators, school boards, and county commissioners reluctant to pay for school lunch programs. In Alabama, for example, the state and local governments contributed nothing at all. But Alabama was only the most extreme case. In Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, children paid over 90 percent of the program costs. Missouri children paid 76 percent, Wisconsin’s students paid 77 percent, and in Utah, children’s fees made up 79 percent. In most cases, state legislatures appropriated less than 10 percent of the total lunch costs. Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas contributed less than 1 percent. The most generous state was Allen Ellender’s Louisiana, which contributed 36 percent of the costs. No other state even approached this amount, New York and Missouri came in at around 20 percent. While local contributions were also skimpy, they frequently exceeded the amounts contributed by state legislatures. In Arizona, for example, the legislature put in only 0.3 percent, while counties and school boards contributed a total of over 17 percent. In Massachusetts, where the legislature contributed 11 percent of the cost of lunch, counties, towns, and school boards added another 23 percent. Richard Russell’s home state of Georgia contributed a mere 0.4 percent, and localities there only 3.2 percent beyond that. It could be fairly said that children paid for the National School Lunch Program. The CSLP recommended that states and local communities not be allowed to use children’s fees or private charity to meet their matching responsibilities. Children’s health and nutrition, the women believed, was a public and a national responsibility.25
School Lunch Politics Page 19
