School Lunch Politics (16 page)

Despite their general inclination to oppose federal welfare schemes, southern Democrats eagerly endorsed school lunch legislation. Indeed, Georgia senator Richard Russell and his Louisiana colleague Allen Ellender rightly claimed to be “founders” of the National School Lunch Program. Both men occupied influential positions on the Senate Agriculture Committee from the 1940s through the late 1960s, and both believed that federal commodity support policies would help small (white) farmers and relieve the region's persistent rural poverty. In a certain sense, Russell and Ellender both sympathized with poor rural families, whether black or white. But that sympathy did not imply any deviation from the southern code of racial segregation and states' rights. The two senators represented the most conservative wing of the Democratic party's New Deal coalition, reluctantly supporting President Roosevelt's state welfare programs, including Social Security, only so long as the Democratic party refrained from seriously pushing for racial equality. This had been most manifest in the limitations encoded into the Social Security law that left agricultural and domestic workers uncovered and that rested administration of the program in the hands of state and local officials.

Richard Russell's support for a national school lunch program dramatically illustrates the Democratic party's compromise between liberal welfare ideals and its conservative southern wing. Russell served in the Senate from 1933 until his death in 1971 and is perhaps best known as mentor to Lyndon Johnson and later as “the single most powerful figure in the Senate.”
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In 1944, when he introduced a National School Lunch bill, Russell was still the state's junior senator but had clearly staked out his role as a leader of the southern farm bloc. Russell's political base was among Georgia's small-scale, white farmers, although he claimed considerable support among Georgia's rural blacks as well. At the same time, he was openly paternalistic and unabashedly racist in his attitudes toward his black constituents. Even a sympathetic biographer noted, “White supremacy and racial segregation were to him cardinal principles for good and workable human relationships.”
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Despite his open opposition to anything smacking of civil rights or racial integration, Russell understood that his state's grinding rural poverty—white and black—would ultimately stymie any hope for economic development. He liked to think of himself, at least according to one historian, as a “representative of a maligned agrarian way of life.”
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To pull his region out of poverty, Russell believed, would require federal as well as private resources. To that end, he vigorously worked to bring federal money into Georgia in the form of military bases, for example. A national school lunch program, he be lieved, similarly would contribute more “to the cause of public education … than any other policy adopted since the creation of free public schools.”
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At the same time, of course, Russell equally vigorously opposed any measure that hinted at dismantling segregation and was one of the most vocal opponents of any form of civil rights legislation. In 1946, for example, while sponsoring the establishment of a national school lunch program, he loudly condemned the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Committee, which would have monitored equal employment for blacks in any newly established federal facilities in the South.

Louisiana senator Allen Ellender's support for a national school lunch program similarly revealed the compromises central to the Democratic party's post-war liberal agenda. Like Richard Russell, Ellender viewed school lunch legislation primarily as a subsidy for southern (white) farmers but also as a way to help poor children both black and white. First elected to the Senate in 1937, Ellender had served in the House since 1924, including a stint as Speaker from 1932 to 1936. Ellender may have been slightly more moderate in his views than some of his southern colleagues—he refused, for example to join the Dixiecrat revolt in the late 1940s, but he voted with Dixiecrats to oppose labor and civil rights legislation. Ellender remained in the Senate until his death in 1972, championing the school lunch program but strenuously opposing any measure that would expand federal authority over the structure, finance, or administration of local lunchrooms. Ellender, according to one biographer, “assumed blacks to be inferior to whites” and believed that civil rights legislation “discriminated against the South.”
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For him, as for southern Democrats in general, race represented an absolute divide he would not cross, viewing almost any federal administrative authority as an attack on segregation. Ellender, for example, supported federal aid to schools “provided the administration of these funds is under the jurisdiction of the various states,” and not under the control of officials from Washington.
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While Russell and Ellender, along with a significant number of other southerners, happily endorsed federal assistance for farmers and children, they fiercely resisted any hit of interference in “local custom” regarding the organization of schools—and other social spaces—in their region.

Southern Democrats were not alone in linking school lunch policy to farm policy and agricultural development. Northern New Deal liberals saw an opportunity at the war's end to expand federal social programs, but they also believed in the Department of Agriculture's policies of commodity support and market expansion. California's Democratic Representative Jerry Voorhis, for example, was particularly articulate in connecting school lunch legislation to the modernization of agriculture as well as to children's welfare. He believed that an aggressive agricultural support policy not only would eliminate poverty but also would allow for expanded productivity to meet the growing post-war consumer demand. A national school lunch program, Voorhis argued, would help expand the demand for American commodities by introducing children—and their mothers—to new foods and by creating outlets for surplus products. Elected to the House of Representatives from California's Twelfth District in 1936, Voorhis claimed an “almost religious zeal” for the school lunch program.
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A Midwesterner by birth, Voorhis was educated at Yale. After graduation, he put aside his elite background to work with the “common man,” spending the 1920s working in factories and on the railroad. Finally, he turned to his true passion, education, and opened a home and school for boys. Voorhis's social conscience was evident from his early days in Congress where he consistently championed liberal causes and was a staunch supporter of New Deal welfare measures. Indeed, the congressman's liberalism ultimately became his downfall when he lost his House seat to the young Richard Nixon in 1946. In that heated campaign, Nixon attached Voorhis's “pink” record, particularly his support for labor and his opposition to anti-Communism. At the top of Nixon's list of “bad votes” cast by his opponent was Voorhis's support for the National School Lunch Program.
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Beginning in 1944, Russell and Ellender in the Senate, along with Voorhis and others in the House, began a legislative campaign to create a National School Lunch Program. As both the House and Senate debated creating a permanent National School Lunch Program, children's meals became part of a larger struggle over states' rights, federal power, and racial equity. In the case of school lunches, unexpected alliances created space for the creation of a new social program yet also limited the scope of that program. While considerable public support existed for school lunch programs, legislators had to craft a program that would satisfy widely competing constituencies. On the one hand, liberals riding their New Deal and wartime policy successes saw school lunches as an expansion of the social safety net and part of a new civil rights agenda. Optimistic about the ability of the federal government to solve social problems and institute a new era of tolerance and equality, liberal law makers embraced children's welfare and a national school lunch program as emblematic of America's moral and political leadership in the post-war world. Southern Democrats also signed on to the patriotic symbolism of school lunches, but they saw a national program also as a conduit for regional development and agricultural support. For southern legislators, school lunches presented a perfect combination of agricultural relief, regional development, and children's welfare.
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Although they certainly parted company from liberal Democrats when it came to federal oversight or civil rights, they could happily support federal subsidies to agriculture.

Racial equity and states' rights marked the congressional debate over school lunches from the very start. In 1944 and 1945 both the House and the Senate held hearings on the creation and the shape of a National School Lunch Program. Initially, the legislators considered three versions of a National School Lunch bill. In an unexpected move, a group of southern Democrats, led in the Senate by Allen Ellender and South Carolina's Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith, proposed to take school lunches out of the Department of Agriculture and place the newly created National School Lunch Program under the control of the Commissioner of Education. Neither Ellender nor Smith were known for their support of federal education policy. Indeed, both men fiercely opposed anything that might open the door to Washington interference in the public schools, particularly when it came to the distribution of resources in the South's segregated school systems. Nor were these men known for their support for social programs in general. While Ellender had supported some New Deal social legislation, Smith was, according to one account, one of its “ardent” foes.
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It was therefore surprising that Smith and Ellender, both former chairs of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry with a proprietary interest in the Department of Agriculture, would suggest moving school lunches from their traditional bureaucratic base. Nonetheless, their bill proposed giving the federal Commissioner of Education control over children's school meals. The reason for this sudden interest in making children's nutrition part of an education program was the fact that the wartime Community School Lunch Program, as administered by the Department of Agriculture during the war, had been contracting directly with local school systems. For Smith and Ellender this smacked too much of Washington interference in state affairs. They preferred to keep federal officials away from their region's segregated school systems. Their bill gave the Commissioner of Education control over school lunches but prohibited him from working directly with schools or even with local school systems. Instead, the Smith-Ellender bill established a national school lunch program that could work only through state-level educational offices. State officials—as opposed to local school administrators—would be authorized to distribute federal resources in accord with “local custom.” Smith and Ellender did not mind bringing federal resources into the South so long as they could control the distribution of those resources. In this case, they supported the creation of a national school lunch program but insisted that decisions about which schools participated and which children received federally subsidized food be determined by the states and not by Congress.
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Smith and Ellender's assurances that their bill would not allow federal officials into the nation's schools did little to assuage conservative suspicions that children's meals represented the entering wedge in a campaign to expand Washington influence. Northern Republicans joined Southern Democrats in opposing federal authority. Republican senator Robert A. Taft warned against allowing federal “nutrition experts” into the schools. “To set up a new Federal control over the diet and food of the people of this country,” he said, “seems to me to go beyond anything we have done heretofore and beyond the existing school-lunch program.”
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Under the Constitution, of course, state governments had authority over public education, and legislators from both parties questioned any expanded federal role in school matters. New York Republican John Taber declared the National School Lunch bill to be “one of the most dangerous bills that has ever been brought to the floor of the House.” In his view, it was “designed to wreck the public school system of America.”
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Ohio Republican Cliff Clevenger warned that “if you participate in this thing you will find … you have lost control of your free public-school system.”
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Equally unexpected was the effort by New York's veteran liberal senator Robert Wagner to keep the school lunch program in the Department of Agriculture. Wagner's school lunch bill left the Secretary of Agriculture in charge of children's meals, but also included funds for nutrition education. Children's welfare advocates and liberal reformers generally favored nutrition education programs and severely criticized the Department of Agriculture for its lack of attention to this aspect of school lunches. The reason Wagner failed to gain much support, however, was that his bill allowed and even encouraged the Secretary of Agriculture to negotiate contracts with individual schools and school districts, much as the Community School Lunch Program had been doing. In keeping with the liberal goal of expanding the social safety net, Wagner's bill encouraged federal oversight and involvement in local school lunch programs. Indeed, his bill would have allowed federal officials to bypass state educational administrations and, at least potentially, to work with black and white schools equally.

In the end, Richard Russell introduced what he considered to be a compromise bill. Russell had already made it clear that he would support the program only if it remained in the Department of Agriculture. His bill, however, eliminated federal money for nutrition education and stipulated that the Secretary of Agriculture could operate only through state education departments. As Russell put it, federal officials would have “no authority what-ever over the management of the schools.”
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Russell's bill, which he claimed to have drafted without consulting anyone in the Department of Agriculture, ultimately became the National School Lunch Act passed by Congress in 1946.
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