School Lunch Politics (40 page)

79. Gillett, “Our Work in Foods,” 395. Gwendolyn Mink is less sanguine about the reformers' appreciation of immigrant culture. She finds the education project “culturally intrusive” even though reformers “warned against aggressive monoculturalism”
(Wages of Motherhood,
84). See esp. ch. 4. Also see Ross,
Love and Toil.

80. Michael Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between the Wars,” in David Arnold, ed.,
Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Worboys makes the argument that the science of nutrition created the problem of malnutrition, particularly in the context of the development of colonial medicine.

81. Mary Swartz Rose, “Child Nutrition and Diet,” JHE, March 1923 p. 130.

82. On the “discovery” of malnutrition, see Arnold,
Imperial Medicine,
esp. Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition.” Also James Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain,”
American Historical Review
110, no. 3 (2005). Vernon sees the movement to weigh and measure hungry children as a way to depoliticize hunger by offering a scientific and technocratic solution.

83. James Kerr,
Newsholme's School Hygiene: The Laws ofHealth in Relation to School Life
(New York: Macmillan, 1916), 195. On malnutrition historically, see Aymard, “Toward the History of Nutrition.”

84. On weighing children, see Jeffrey P. Brosco, “Weight Charts and Well Child Care: When the Pediatrician Became the Expert in Child Health,” in Alexandra Minna Stein and Howard Markel, eds.,
Formative Years: Children's Health in the United States, 1880–2000
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Also Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger.”

85. Rose, “Child Nutrition and Diet,” 129.

86. “Preparing Child to Start School,” editorial, JHE, September 24, 1929, p. 409. Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table,
describes the scale as using height, weight, eyesight, breathing, muscularity, mental alertness, and rosy complexion (115). On Baldwin Woods, also see Cummings,
The American and His Food,
192. In 1921 the Child Health Organization of America called a conference of seven professional organizations to consider the possibility of adopting a uniform table of weight for height and age. There was substantial agreement among the various tables used. JHE, April 1921, p. 192.

87. “Height-Weight Tables for Children,” note by Sybil Woodruff, JHE, July 1924, p. 391. Roberts,
Nutrition Work with Children
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 107. The Baldwin-Woods scale slightly modified the original Dunfermline measurements by allowing for greater zones for each age and weight. Except for a few modifications these scales remained in use well into the twentieth century. (A number of authors refer to it as the Dumferline scale. See, e.g., Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table,
114–15.) Also see Julius Levy, “Child Hygiene in New Jersey,”
Survey
44, no. 7 (May 15, 1920), and Julia Roberts, “Weight as a Measure of Nutrition,” JHE, August 1924.

88. See Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table,
114–15.

89. “Standards of Child Nutrition,” editorial, JHE, October, 1921, p. 517. Also see Brosco, “Weight Charts.”

90. Gillett, “Factors Influencing Nutrition Work,” 16–18. African American diets also came under scrutiny. See, e.g., Phillips and Howell, “Racial and Other Differences.” They observe that, “while the Negroes had a much greater quantity of food and spend more for it than the foreign families, they received the least nourishment” from it. Their diets, the authors observed, lacked vital grains and were low in protein (406–7).

91. Woodruff, “Height-Weight Tables for Children,” 391.

92. See Mink,
Wages of Motherhood;
and Ladd-Taylor,
Mother-Work.
Also Robert D. Johnston, “Contemporary Anti-Vaccination Movements in Historical Perspective,” in Robert D. Johnston, ed.,
The Politics of Healing: Histories of Twentieth-Century North American Alternative Medicine
(New York: Routledge 2004).

93. Mary G. McCormick, “The Home Economics Teacher and the Community,” JHE, January 1922, p. 4.

94. Amy Drinkwater Storer and Gertrude Gates Mudge, “The Red Cross Nutrition Program in New York City,” JHE, November 1921, p. 539. Brosco, in “Weight Charts,” argues that the malnutrition scare ended in the 1930s as monitoring children's weight became part of the physician's regular care.

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.

C
HAPTER
2. W
ELFARE
FOR
F
ARMERS
AND
C
HILDREN

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 Mayhew, “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).