95. Mary G. McCormick, “Nutrition Work in the Schools,” Survey, 47, no. 2 (October 1921): 51.
96. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, ch. 9.
97. Both studies quoted in Cummings, The American and His Food, 166.
98. “News from the Field,” JHE, December 1922, p. 648. Levenstein calls this “the great malnutrition scare.” On the push to measure children, see Revolution at the Table, 113.
99. See Bailey B. Burnett, “Attacking Defective Nutrition,” Survey 44, no. 12 (June 19, 1920).
100. Caroline L. Hunt, “The Daily Meals of School Children,” JHE, October 1909, p. 363.
101. McCormick, “The Home Economics Teacher,” 3.
102. Lottie Milam, “The Rural School Lunch Today,” JHE, March 1922, p. 129. On early school cafeterias, see Mary DeGambo Bryan, The School Cafeteria (New York: Crofts, 1943).
103. Miss E. W. Cross, “The Daily Meals of School Children,” JHE, October 1929, p. 364.
104. Rose, “Child Nutrition and Diet,” 131.
105. “News from the Field,” JHE, December 1921, p. 625.
106. Katharine Curry Bartley and Nancy S. Wellman, “School Lunch: A Comparison of its Development in the United States and England,” School Food Service Research Review 10, no. 1 (1986): 6.
107. For an early history of school lunches in the United States, see Gordon W. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program: Background and Development,” Food and Nutrition Service, 63, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1971.
108. Molly Ladd-Taylor, “When the Birds Have Flown the Nest, the MotherWork May Still Go On: Sentimental Maternalism and the National Congress of Mothers,” in Apple and Golden, Mothers and Motherhood.
109. United States Department of Agriculture, “School Lunch in Country and City,” Bulletin No. 1899 (Washington, D.C., 1942). During the 1920s some Latin American states instituted school meal programs as well. See Bartley and Wellman, “School Lunch: A Comparison.”
110. See Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion; and Mink, The Wages of Motherhood.
111. Paul V. Betters, The Bureau of Home Economics: Its History, Activities, and Organization (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1930).
112. “Notes from the Field,” JHE, July 1921, p. 335. The Columbia Teachers College Nutrition Program was established in 1909 as the Department of Nutrition and Food Economics in the School of Household Arts. Students of Ellen Richards found employment there through the 1920s. See also Juanita A. Eagles, Orrea F. Pye, and Clara M. Taylor, Mary Swartz Rose, 1874–1941: Pioneer in Nutrition (New York: Teachers College, 1979), 38. In 1921 the Carnegie Corporation funded the American Food Research Institute at Stanford, giving $700,000 over ten years for “an intensive study of problems connected with the production, distribution, and consumption of food.” Home economics, according to Margaret Rossiter, underwent “rapid institutionalization as an academic field for women after 1910” (Women Scientists, 65). Also Rossiter, “The Origin of the Agricultural Sciences,” and John Higham, “The Matrix of Specialization,” both in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Also see Walton C. John, “LandGrand College Education, 1910–1920,” Part V, Home Economics, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1925, No. 29, Washington, D.C., 1925, and Hamilton Craven, “Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture: Ellen Swallow Richards and Her Allies,” Agricultural History 64 (1990): 122–33.
113. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots ofReform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 391.
114. Rosenberg, No Other Gods, see, e.g., 140. Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), characterize the Department of Agriculture as “an island of state strength” in an otherwise relatively weak institutional state structure.
115. Graves, Girls’ Schooling, makes this argument. See p. 212.
116. Sanders, Roots ofReform, 390.
117. Adam D. Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 101.
118. See ibid., 193. Also David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
119. On Rose, see Eagles et al., Mary Swartz Rose, 6–9. According to the authors, “she became the first woman to have a professorial appointment in nutrition in the United States” when she took the position at Teachers College in 1909. Rose was the only woman among the eleven “founding fathers of the American Institute of Nutrition in 1928” and was its first woman president in 1937. In 1939 she was described as “the strongest living link between the laboratory and the consumer of food.” Also see Alonzo E. Taylor, “After-the-War Economic Food Problems,” JHE, January 1921, p. 1. On the popularization of vitamins during the war, see Apple, Vitamania, 217, 310, and Cummings, The American and His Food. On the World War I impact on food policy, see Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 137–49, and Mark Weatherall, “Bread and Newspapers,” in Kamminga and Cunningham, The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 180. Also see Elmer Verner McCollum, “Our Present Knowledge of the Vitamins,” in Louis B. Wilson, Lectures on Nutrition: A Series of Lectures Given at the Mayo Foundation and the Universities ofWisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Washington (St. Louis), 1924–1925 (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1925).
120. On vitamins and health, see Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, and Apple, Vitamania; also Nancy Tomes, “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880–1930,” and Lynn K. Nyhart, “Home Economists in the Hospital, 1900–1930,” both in Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics. Nyhart says that fears of scurvy and beriberi among the troops spurred a demand for nutrition research and dietetic advice. See p. 138.
121. See Susan Estabrook Kennedy, “Herbert Hoover and the Two Great Food Crusades of the 1940s,” in Lee Nash, ed., Understanding Herbert Hoover: Ten Perspectives (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institute Press, 1987), and “Herbert Hoover: A Biographical Sketch,” Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum, www.hoover.nara.gov/education/hooverbio.html. Also see Carolyn M. Goldstein, “Rationalizing Consumption at the Bureau of Home Economics, 1923–1940,” paper presented at the Schlesinger Library, April 30, 1998. Goldstein argues that home economists’ role in Hoover’s food conservation campaigns was important for institutionalizing expertise and sought to define “a vocational role” in the public sphere.
122. See Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 137–46.
123. See, e.g., Rowena Schmidt Carpenter, “Menus and Recipes for Lunches at School,” USDA Miscellaneous Publication No. 246, 1928, Countway Library, 36.c. 1928.2–246. Also see Annual Reports, North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service, 1920–26, vols. 7–12, 44–15, and 82–85. Thanks to Lu Ann Jones for these references.
124. Mabel Hyde Kitterdge, “School Lunches in Large Cities of the United States,” JHE, September 1926.
125. C. Rowena Schmidt, “The Psychology of Child Nutrition,” JHE, May 1925, p. 264.
126. Irene C. Harrington, “The High School Lunch: Its Financial, Administrative, and Educational Policies.” JHE, November 1924, p. 625.
127. Anna L. Steckelberg, “Planning for the Hot Lunch in Rural Schools,” JHE, November 1923, pp. 643–14.
128. Mabel Hyde Kitridge, “School Lunches in Large Cities,” 510.
129. McCormick, “The Home Economics Teacher,” 3.
130. Rose, “Child Nutrition and Diet,” 138.
CHAPTER 2. WELFARE FOR FARMERS AND CHILDREN
1. For a discussion of food relief policy, see Janet Poppendieck, Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
2. See Madeleine Mayhe
w, “The 1930s Nutrition Controversy,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 445–64.
3. “20% of City Pupils Are Found Underfed,” New York Times (hereafter, NYT), October 29, 1932.
4. United States Congress, House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the School Lunch Program, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., March 23–May 24,1945 (hereafter House Hearings, 1945). Reported by Dr. W. H. Sebrrell, Medical Director, United States Public Health Service, 25–26.
5. “For Child Health: A National Call,” NYT, October 1, 1933. Also see “Food in Crisis,” NYT, May 1, 1936.
6. See 1932 study of 400 Philadelphia families, Evan Clague, “When Relief Stops, What Do They Eat?” Survey, 67, no. 16 (November 16, 1932).
7. “Parents Warned on Economy Diets,” NYT, April 20, 1936.
8. House Hearings, 1945, p. 26.
9. “Finds Nervous Ills in Homes of Idle,” NYT, January 16, 1932.
10. House Hearings, 1945, pp. 54–56.
11. United States Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry, Hearings on Bills to Assist the States to Establish and Maintain School-Lunch Programs, May 2–5, 1944, 78th Cong., 2nd Sess. (hereafter Senate Hearings, 1944), 46–48.
12. The states were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. See H. M. Southworth and M. I. Klayman, “The School Lunch Program and Agricultural Surplus Disposal” (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Agricultural Economics, USDA, 1941), 14ff.
13. See ibid., 14.
14. Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger 1988), 138.
15. Adam D. Sheingate, The Rise ofthe Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Also see Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
16. See, e.g., Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare: 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Joanne L. Goodwin, “‘Employable Mothers’ and ‘Suitable Work’: A Reevaluation of Welfare and Wage Earning for Women in the Twentieth-Century United States,” in Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds., Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997.
17. M. L. Wilson, “Nutritional Science and Agricultural Policy,” Journal of Farm Economics 24:1, Proceedings Number (February 1942): 188–205. Quote on 199.
18. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 15.
19. Ellen S. Woodward, “The Works Progress Administration School Lunch Project,” Journal of Home Economics (hereafter JHE), November 1936, p. 592 Woodward estimated that 592 of the 5,000 women were “economic heads of families” (36).
20. See Gordon W. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program: Background and Development,” Food and Nutrition Service, 63, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1971, p. 9 and Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 36.
21. On gender and race in the WPA, see Linda Faye Williams, The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003).
22. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 38.
23. Anita K. Hynes, “W.P.A. School Lunch Project in Jefferson City,” JHE November 1936, p. 608.
24. Ellen S. Woodward, “The Works Projects Administration School Lunch Project,” 593.
25. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 36; and “The Fate of School Feeding,” JHE editorial, June 1943, p. 360.
26. Milburn Lincoln (“M. L.”) Wilson, who became Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in 1934, is best known as the major architect of the “domestic allotment” policy under which the government adjusted farm income by guaranteeing (purchasing) a portion of the crop at protected prices. This policy became the backbone of New Deal agricultural policy. Wilson was also an advocate of nutrition, believing that better nutrition would strengthen not only American workers but also consumer food markets. See Rebecca L. Spang, “The Cultural Habits of a Food Committee,” Food and Foodways 2 (1988): 359–91. Also see Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State, 112–14. Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline ofthe Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), argues that the conflict was less a question of liberal versus conservative than between “different bodies of fact and information which led naturally to competing conclusions and conflicting behaviors” (83). Wilson was raised on a farm in Iowa and became the first county state extension agent for Montana. After World War I he studied agricultural economics and returned to Montana to become an agricultural economist at Montana State. Howard Ross Tolley worked at the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the mid 1920s where he and Wilson met. See also David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 180–81.
27. On the differences in agricultural policy, see Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 256–57; William D. Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); and Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, “Farm Policy from FDR to Eisenhower: Southern Democrats and the Politics of Agriculture,” Agricultural History 53, no. 1 (January 1979): 352–71. The latter authors argue that the AAA, passed in 1933, aimed to “raise farm income by restricting total output” (359). Also see Willard W. Cochrane and Mary E. Ryan, American Farm Policy, 1948–1978 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), and John Mark Hansen, Gaining Access, Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919–1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
28. Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State. This author argues that “small changes in production can produce large swings in (farm commodity) price” (24).
29. Some surplus food was also used for the first, short-lived food stamp program. This program was disbanded during World War II. Maurice MacDonald, Food Stamps and Income Maintenance (New York: Academic Press, 1977). Janet Poppendieck argues that the move of surplus policy into the Agriculture Department “marked the beginning of a process by which food assistance was increasingly divorced from federal relief and integrated with the Agriculture Department’s price support programs” (Breadlines, 175).
30. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program,” 7. P.L. 320, August 1935, authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to make available money from customs duties to “encourage the domestic consumption of certain agricultural commodities … by diverting them from the normal channels of trade and commerce.” This was not the first time the USDA had ventured into the realm of markets. As early as the Progressive Era, the USDA had created an Office of Markets, which became the Bureau of Markets in 1919 and, finally, the Office of Farm Management and Bureau of Crop Estimates, part of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. See Elizabeth Sanders, Roots ofReform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 393. Also see MacDonald, Food Stamps and Income Maintenance, 2. On Milo Perkins, also see Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 218. Also see Milo Perkins, “Our Population is Commodity Rich and Consumption Poor,” address, n.d. (probably October 1940), Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, folder 236, Schlesinger Library. On Tolley, see Richard S. Kirkendall, “Howard Tolley and Agricultural Planning in the 1930s,” Agricultural History 33 (January 1965); 25–33, and Rowley, M. L. Wilson. Tolley and Wilson worke
d together during the 1920s. Rowley suggests that Tolley, like Wilson, saw three factors as key to the development of American farming: large-scale tractors and power machinery, increasing the size of family farms, and reducing costs to farmers. See pp. 50–51. On Milo Perkins, see Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 243. Perkins came from Texas and left a successful burlap bag business to work with Secretary of Agriculture Wallace. He went to work for the Farm Security Administration in 1937.
31. This first food stamp program was disbanded during World War II.
32. House Hearings, 1945, pp. 3–4.
33. “The Fate of School Feeding,” JHE editorial, June 1943, p. 360. Dora S. Lewis and Phyllis Sprague, “A Survey of School Lunchrooms,” JHE, November 1936, p. 602.
34. See Statistical Abstract of the United States, 91st ed. (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1970), Table 146, “School Enrollment by Type of School, 1930–1968,” 104, and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1980, 101st ed., Table 218, “Public and Private School Number by Level, 1940–1979,” 138.
35. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program,” 8. According to one study, 25% of the schools and 60% of the children served by the new surplus disposal program were in rural communities in the South and mountain states, and most were in elementary schools. “School Lunch in Country and City,” USDA Farmers’ Bulletin No. 1899 (Washington, D.C. 1942), 8.
36. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 42—14.
37. Don Paarlberg, Farm and Food Policy: Issues of the 1980s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1980), 104. Paarlberg says that the significance of government purchases on prices for specialty crops like prunes and pears was measurable, but for most other commodities, including meat, there was little impact. The program, he claims, “was a charade, and all the principals knew it.” He argues that government programs meant to alleviate the surplus actually aggravated it by boosting prices and stimulating production (103–4).
38. Poppendieck, Breadlines, 225. Also see Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 78.
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