School Lunch Politics (41 page)

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 worked 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.

39. House Hearings, 1945, p. 3. Testimony of Marvin Jones.

40. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 14.

41. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 84.

42. House Hearings, 1945, pp. 109–10.

43. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 19.

44.
Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Home Economics,
Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture, 1941 (Washington, D.C., 1941), 5. Thanks to Carolyn Goldstein for this reference.

45. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 16. Also see Richard Osborn Cummings,
The American and His Food,
202. Surplus food also went to parochial schools.

46. See Robyn Muncy,
Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), also Cummings,
The American and His Food,
201, 216. He points out that dietetics emerged out of nutrition and home economics and became a special organization within the American Home Economics Association specializing in food, nutrition, and institutional management. According to one source, the BHE research on diets and consumption provided FDR with the source of his often quoted observation that “one-third of our nation is ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed.” See Jacqueline L. Dupont, “Reflections: Hazel Katherine Stiebeling (1896–1989),”
Nutrition Reviews,
October 2002.

47. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program,” 9, and Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 16, 36–38. Also see Cummings,
The American and His Food,
202. This figure is probably exaggerated. Baldwin,
Poverty and Politics,
estimates that in 1939, 82% of the department's total employees worked outside Washington. This included the Farm Security Administration and the Soil Conservation Service in addition to the Extension Service (239).

48. Press release, October 19, 1943, USDA History Collection, Series 1, Subseries 2, Documentary Files, Section iv, Distribution of Products, Box 1.2/9, and Nutrition Standards and Civilian Food Supply, 1943–46, Office of War Information, Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library.

49. “Public's Aid Asked on School Lunches,” NYT, April 17, 1944.

50. House Hearings, 1945, p. 53.

51. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 150. Also see testimony of Mrs. Grace Gosselin, United Neighborhood Houses of New York; “The need is more obvious today because such large numbers of women are at war work and, therefore, must find another way to provide an adequate and good midday meal for their children” (156).

52. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 187.

53. Richard Russell to President Roosevelt, July 22, 1942; Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Russell, August 18, 1943, and October 1, 1942; Richard Russell Collection, Series IX B, Box 44, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens.

54. Groups endorsing the National School Lunch Program included the General Federation of Women's Clubs, American Association of University Women, League of Women Voters, League of Women Shoppers, National Consumers League, National Parent Teacher Association, National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of Negro Women, the United Auto Workers Union Women's Auxiliary, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations Women's Auxiliary.

55. “Has Your Child Half a Hog's Chance?”
Ladies' Home Journal,
October 1944.

56. House Hearings, 1945, p. 53. Also see Senate Hearings 1944, p. 110, for PTA statement.

57. “Public's Aid Asked on School Lunches,” NYT, April 17, 1944.

58.
Congressional
Record,79
^th
Cong., 2
^nd
Sess., 92:2, February 19, 1946 p. 1460.

59. Ibid., 1453.

60. See, e.g., Sheingate,
The Rise ofthe Agricultural Welfare State,
118–19.

61. Virgil W. Dean,
An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). Dean says that within eighteen months of the war's end “the USDA was completely reconstituted” and had regained authority over food programs including school lunches (23).