School Lunch Politics (25 page)

Poverty and hunger gradually emerged as focal points for social activists of the 1960s. While the “culture of poverty” thesis suggested a need for things like education and job training, civil rights activists expanded their agenda to include access to government services as well as respect from public officials and others charged with delivering benefits to poor people, particularly poor blacks. Calls for welfare rights, food stamps, and free school lunches took on increasing importance, particularly after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that, at least formally, ensured voting rights and equal opportunity in employment and education. In the highly charged and increasingly polarized atmosphere of the 1960s, anti-poverty and anti-hunger movements appealed to liberal sensibilities. Tackling these issues seemed to call less for a radical restructuring of American society than for a more equitable distribution of existing resources and opportunities. The anti-poverty and anti-hunger groups came together during the mid-1960s largely in an effort to shift public resources toward the poor and to demand that poor people, most of whom were assumed to be black, be treated fairly by public officials. The civil rights movement ultimately forced the federal government, albeit reluctantly, to assert na tional standards in matters ranging from voting and employment rights to housing and education and to set eligibility standards for government benefits. National standards, however, proved more difficult when it came to education and children's welfare, traditionally the purview of the individual states. This was not simply a problem of countering racial discrimination in the South. Indeed, states in other regions turned out to be as reluctant as Old Dixie to provide resources for poor people.
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Deeply ingrained notions of family self-reliance and personal independence complicated efforts to expand the free lunch program. In many communities there was the conviction that parents should pay at least minimal fees for lunch and resentment against those who could not. That resentment was only intensified as poverty became associated with race. Indeed, in many communities, liberal attempts to expand government benefits to the poor, whether black or white, were met with substantial resistance. Warning President Johnson that the costs of free lunches would bankrupt her lunchroom, Helen A. Davis, school lunch director in Todd County, Kentucky, observed, “It is unfair to the students and parents of this nation who strive to help themselves to withdraw aid to the school lunch and milk programs that will help
all
students in order to help only those who have learned to be parasites on the economy of the nation.”
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Vella Bellinger, a housewife from Berwyn, Nebraska, similarly believed that programs for the poor would discriminate against the middle class. “How can we stress using our ability to provide for oneself and then practice deprivation because one has succeeded in acquiring a modest means of self support?” she asked the president.
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In many communities people believed that requiring poor children to work for their meals was a good thing. Ohio's eligibility guidelines declared, “It is good character-building education to have the child perform some work in return for his lunch.”
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C. L. Mooney, president of the Lockney, Texas, Independent School District, similarly observed, “In our district we have had a long-standing policy that no free lunches will be served unless the student is willing to work for his meal.” The chore, he said, was usually “token,” but the knowledge that they “earned their meat by the sweat of the brow” built pride in the students.
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A principal in Tucson, Arizona, on the other hand, decided that no one deserved a free lunch. “Everyone should pay something,” he believed, “for the family's self-respect.” Besides, he added, “the cost of a free lunch program in a school as poor as this would be prohibitive.”
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He did, however, let some children eat for free “on a short term basis,” if, for example, a parent was temporarily out of work. In return for their lunch, these children might be asked to help out in the school kitchen.
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For the better part of the century, nutritionists and children's advocates had insisted that the public had an interest in healthy children—not just healthy poor children. Indeed, the widespread popularity of the National School Lunch Program rested on the assumption that the government had a role to play in ensuring the health of the next generation. Turning the school lunch program into a free lunch program for the poor, however, risked weakening that popular support. Genevieve Olkiewicz, director of food services for the Montebello, California, Unified School District, worried, “In our recent enthusiasm to help the needy we seem to be forgetting the vast majority of Americans.”
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School lunch advocates of course applauded the effort to feed poor children. But at the same time, they did not want to see the lunch program serve only the poor. ASFSA executive director John Perryman cautioned against re-orienting the lunch program. If the schools were forced to serve only poor children, Perryman warned, the idea of “better nutrition for all children” would be left behind.
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National Educational Association legislative representative Mary Condon Gereau similarly insisted that while her organization “heartily” favored providing all needy children with lunch and milk, those children should not be fed “at the expense of the other children in the schools.”
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The debate about free school lunches for poor children revealed a fundamental ambivalence about food, family responsibility, and social policy. Since its inception, the school lunch program had operated in theory (if not in practice) as a universal subsidy. Like school supplies, books, and, indeed, public education itself, many Americans had come to see school lunches almost as a democratic necessity. New York representative James Scheuer argued that “if it is logical to say to a child who can afford it that he can pay for the soup, why is it not proper to say to that child…you are going to use so many dollars worth of paper, crayons, and chalk We think you should pay for that.”
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Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Howard Davis admitted that, in principle, there was no difference. But school lunches, Davis suggested, were not the same as school books. Parents, he observed, “would normally pay for [lunch] if the children went home … or if they had lunch at the corner drugstore.”
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Families should, Davis believed, “pay part or all of the cost of these lunches” whenever possible.
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For many Americans, food and meals remained, at base, a family responsibility.
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C. L Mooney, president of the Lockney, Texas, Independent School District, for example, told the president that federal assistance providing breakfast and lunch in school raised a moral question. The school's main responsibility, Mooney insisted, was to teach. “May I ask,” he wondered, “when the parent's responsibility is going to begin?”
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Liberal as well as conservative policy makers worried that universal child nutrition programs might “sound like the replacement of the American home.” Senator Eugene McCarthy, a staunch liberal, agreed that food was most appropriately provided in the home. Still, McCarthy insisted, it was time for Americans to develop a more comprehensive child nutrition program. Even McCarthy, however, to propose a universal free lunch program.
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By the mid-1960s, a sense of social crisis overwhelmed any lingering thoughts about a universal lunch program for all children. Indeed, the National School Lunch Program was becoming, for all intents and purposes, a poverty program.

CHAPTER 7

 

A Right to Lunch

Once the 1966 Child Nutrition Act promised every poor child in America a free school lunch, a nationwide grass-roots movement quickly emerged, demanding fundamental changes in the National School Lunch Program. During the late 1960s, the widespread activism sparked by the civil rights and anti-war movements spawned a new militancy among northern blacks and students. But civil rights, peace, and hunger also motivated a wide swath of mainstream liberal activism as well. National women's organizations, long involved in education, welfare, peace, and equal rights, emerged as leaders in the anti-hunger movement formulating what ultimately became the blueprint for school lunch reform. For liberal groups, in particular, the anti-poverty movement and related calls for free school lunches, free food stamps, and welfare rights pointed to concrete social programs that promised to address both racial and social inequalities. In many ways, hunger was an easier issue to address than the seemingly intractable inequities of race in American life. Tackling food policy called less for a radical restructuring of American society than for a more equitable distribution of existing resources and opportunities.

Civil rights activism, combined with a resurgence of liberal anti-poverty reform, dramatically altered the political context in which the National School Lunch Program had operated for the first two decades of its existence. In the process, school lunchrooms became sites of intense battles over who was poor and where public responsibility for poverty rested. For the first time since the Depression the nation's food policies took center stage both in defining and in combating poverty. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty ultimately forced a reorientation of the nation's food policy, turning school lunches and food stamps—essential elements in agricultural policy since the New Deal—into the centerpieces of domestic social welfare. Grass-roots pressure forced the Department of Agriculture, albeit reluctantly, to respond to the nutrition and food needs of the poor. Where historically the central purpose of the department's food aid programs, whether domestic or foreign, had been the disposal of surplus farm produce and the maintenance of commodity prices, during the 1960s food and nutrition became, as one commentator noted, “leading tools in fighting poverty.”
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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.