School Lunch Politics (43 page)

18. Sidney Baldwin,
Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 236; and Walter W. Wilcox,
The Farmer in the Second World War
(Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1947), 364–67. The largest growth was 1933–39, when the number of employees went from 21,023 to 59,113.

19.
Congressional Record: 79th Cong., 2d Sess.,
92:2, February 19, 1946March 28, 1946 (hereafter
Congressional Record),
February 26, 1946, p. 1610.

20. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 36.

21. Ibid., 23. Also see Harvey Levenstein,
Paradox ofPlenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
(Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 78.

22. Alonzo L. Hamby,
Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 246.

23. Gilbert C. Fite,
Richard B. Russell, Jr., Senator from Georgia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 496.

24. Hamby,
Liberalism and its Challengers,
245.

25. Fite,
Richard Russell,
187.

26. Thomas A. Becnel,
Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana: A Biography
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 142.

27. Allen Ellender to Mr. R. O. Moncla (secretary of the Lafourche Parish school board), March 1, 1947, Allen J. Ellender Archives, Folder 39, Box 624 School Lunch, Ellender Memorial Library, Thibodaux, La.

28. Jerry Voorhis,
Confessions ofa Congressman
(Garden City, N.Y.: Double day, 1947), 144.

29. Ibid., 339.

30. See Ira Katznelson, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,”
Political Science Quarterly
108, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 283–306 286.

31. Paul E. Mertz,
New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 105.

32. Robert C. Lieberman,
Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), argues that Southern support for the New Deal was “of two minds.” Southerners were “wary of expanding federal power, especially in social policy,” but at the same time they “desperately needed New Deal largesse” (37).

33.
Congressional Record,
February 26, 1946, p. 1626.

34.
Congressional Record,
February 19, 1946, p. 1465.

35. Ibid., p. 1460.

36.
Congressional Record,
February 26, 1946, p. 1610.

37. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 29.

38. House Hearings, 1945, p. 29. Cooley was in the Senate from 1934 to 1967. He chaired the Agriculture Committee in the 81st, 82nd, and 84th to 89th Congresses.

39.
Congressional Record,
February 19, 1946, p. 1451.

40. Ibid., p. 1467. Gwynne served in the House from 1935 to 1949.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., p. 1460.

43. House Hearings, 1945, p. 252; “School Luncheons Restored by House,” NYT, June 2, 1944; “School Lunch Cost Assailed in House,” NYT, February 20, 1946; and “House Votes Fund for School Meals,” NYT, February 22, 1946.

44. “School Lunch Cost Assailed in House,” NYT, February 20, 1941.

45.
Congressional Record,
February 26, 1946, p. 1611.

46.
Congressional Record,
February 19, 1946, p. 1454.

47. This strategy, later dubbed “the Powell Amendment,” attracted considerable controversy both among liberals generally and within the civil rights movement. Charles V. Hamilton,
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma
(New York: Atheneum, 1991), 225–27. Three years after the school lunch debate, the NAACP adopted an official policy of opposing federal financial support for segregated facilities. This strategy was opposed by groups, including the National Council of Negro Women, particularly when it came to public housing legislation. According to Hamilton, some groups “knew that if an anti-segregation amendment were attached … this would lose the political support of Southerners who wanted the money but not the desegregation, as well as conservatives who hated any federal support for social programs.” They feared an anti-segregation amendment would thus kill the legislation entirely. Hamilton suggests that Powell first introduced his amendment in 1950 to a federal aid to education bill. He says Powell's amendment simply stipulated that federal funds “should be distributed without discrimination” and argues that this “did not satisfy the NAACP at all.” The problem was that Powell's language “could be entirely compatible
with segregated
facilities.” Hamilton concludes that Powell was initially careless in the language he used to draft the amendment, not realizing the extent to which southern legislators claimed that segregation did not consti tute discrimination. The NAACP sent Powell a letter noting that the amendment, as written, “did not cover racial segregation” and offered more effective language. Hamilton says, “Clearly, Powell was caught short in his attentiveness to the distinction between segregation and discrimination.” After that, Powell and the NAACP worked together. It is clear from the school lunch debate that Powell had begun to experiment with his amendment before 1950.

48.
Congressional Record,
February 20, 1946, p. 1493.

49. Ibid., 1494.

50. Ibid., 1496.

51. Ibid., 1506.

52. Ibid., 1496.

53. Ibid., 1495. The case Poage cited was one involving the Dallas
News.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid. 1503. Rankin was also notoriously anti-Semitic. To end his speech opposing Powell's amendment he read a statement by the Jewish War Veterans who advocated an anti-discrimination clause in the GI Bill. “This group of Jews,” Rankin said, “would deny the benefits of the GI Bill to every white veteran south of the Ohio River. I wonder what would have happened if those brave men from the Southern States had failed to do their duty in this war, and we had depended upon these Jews to do all the fighting.”

56. Ibid., 1498.

57. Leiberman,
Shifting the Color Line,
24.

58. House Hearings 1945, p. 89.

59. Senate Hearings 1944, p. 235.

60.
Congressional Record,
February 19, 1946, p. 1453.

C
HAPTER
5. I
DEALS
AND
R
EALITIES
IN
THE
L
UNCHROOM

1. “Food for Thought,”
New York Times
(hereafter, NYT), November 19 1961.

2. The number of schools increased from 54,157 in 1950 to 64,000 in 1962. U.S. Department of Agriculture Production and Marketing Administration, Food Distribution Branch, “Supplement to School Lunch and Food Distribution Programs, Selected Statistics, Fiscal Years 1939–1951,” Washington, D.C. March 1952.

3. Estimates based on: “Child Nutrition Programs: Issues for the 101st Congress,”
School Food Service Research Review
13, no 1 (1989): 38. (In 1962 total school enrollment including public and parochial in the U.S. and territories was 43.4 million; United States Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry,
Hearings, National School Lunch Act,
87th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 19, 1962 (hereafter, Senate Agriculture Subcommittee, 1962), 18. USDA, “Supplement to School Lunch and Food Distribution Programs.” United States Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor,
Hearings,
91st Cong., 1st Sess., March 6, 1969 (hereafter, House Committee on Education and Labor, 1969), 39.

4. On post-war consumer society, see Lizabeth Cohen,
The Consumer's Republic: The Politics ofMass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2003).

5. Virgil W. Dean,
An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 26.

6. “Truman Approves School Lunch Bill,” NYT, June 5, 1946.

7. Richard E. Neustadt, “Extending the Horizons of Democratic Liberalism,” in J. Joseph Huthmacher,
The Truman Years: The Reconstruction of Postwar America
(Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1972), 81.

8. On the limitations of the Truman years see Barton J. Bernstein, “The Limitations of the Liberal Vision,” in ibid., 108–9.

9. See Edward D. Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid,
Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth Century Reform
(New York: Praeger, 1980), 159; Linda Faye Williams,
The Constraint ofRace: Legacies ofWhite Skin Privilege in America
(University Park: Penn. State University Press, 2003), 101; and Ira Katznelson, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,”
Political Science Quarterly
108, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 283–306.

10. Robert C. Lieberman,
The Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 122.

11. Democratic platform text in NYT, July 24, 1952. The school lunch program was part of the party's platform that year.

12. Richard B. Russell to Walter J. Shaffer, April 20, 1949, Richard B. Russell Collection, Series IX B, Box 41, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens.

13. “Cut Called Danger to School Lunches,” NYT, May 8, 1953; and “Benson Is Opposed on Cut in Subsidy,” NYT, April 14, 1953.

14. Carl M. Brauer, “Kennedy, Johnson, and the War on Poverty,”
Journal of American History,
69, no. 1 (June 1982): 98–119, 101. Also, “Child Nutrition Programs: Issues for the 101st Congress,”
School Food Service Research Review
(Spring 1989), 51.

15. “Child Nutrition Programs: Issues for the 101st Congress,” 27; Senate Agriculture Subcommittee, 1962, p. 18.

16. “U.S. Lunch Plan Scored in Study,” NYT, June 19, 1969.

17. “Truman Approves School Lunch Bill,” NYT, June 5, 1946.

18. Karl A. Fox, Vernon W. Ruttan, Lawrence W. Witt, eds.
Farming, Farmers, and Markets for Farm Goods: Essays on the Problems and Potentials ofAmerican Agriculture,
Supplementary Paper No. 15, Committee for Economic Development, New York, November 1962, p. 130.

19. United States Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, 90th Cong., 2nd. Sess. (hereafter Senate Select Committee), Part 11 February 18–20, 1969, p. 3510.

20. USDA, Production and Marketing Administration, Food Distribution Branch, “Supplement to School Lunch and Food Distribution, Selected Fiscal Years, 1939–1951,” Wsahington D.C., March 1952.

21. United States Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor,
Hearings on Malnutrition and Federal Food Service Programs,
90th Cong., 2nd Sess Part I, May 21–June 3, 1968, (hereafter, House Committe on Education and Labor, 1968) 151.

22. United States Congress, Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry,
Hearings, School Lunch and Child Nutrition Programs,
91st Cong., 2nd Sess., September 29–October 1,1969 (hereafter, Senate Agritculture Committee, 1969) 185.

23. Senate Agriculture Subcommittee, 1962, p. 11.

24. “Pupils Get Food in 60,000 Schools,” NYT, August 9, 1959.

25. See, e.g., memo from Orville Freeman to President Johnson, December 27, 1966, WHCF EX AG7, Box 10, Folder AG7 11/13 66–. LBJ Library. In this case, the growers asked that the government “buy heavily for the School Lunch Program.” Freeman considered this “a proper request” within his mission under Section 32.

26. William L. Lanier to Richard B. Russell, March 10, 1966, and Howard B. Davis to Richard B. Russell, March 28, 1966, Richard Russell Collection, Series IX B, Box 10, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens.

27. J. D. Ratcliff, “They're Playing Politics with Our Children's Health,”
McCalls Magazine,
September 1950. (From National Agricultural Library, USDA History Collection, Box 1.3/15, “Free Distribution to Low Income Groups (SLP),” 1949–53.)

28. Senate Select Committee, Part 11, 3504–5.

29. Ibid., Part 11, 3600. Also see Committee on School Lunch Participation
Their Daily Bread
(Atlanta, Ga.: McNelley-Rudd, 1968), 79.

30. See Robyn Muncy,
Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

31. James T. Bonnen, “The Crisis in the Traditional Roles of Agricultural Institutions,” in Fox et al., eds.,
Farming, Farmers, and Markets.

32. Senate Select Committee, Part 1, 154–55.

33. See Muncy,
Creating a Female Dominion,
155. Also, Barbara Miller Solomon,
In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America
(New Haven: Yale University Press: 1985).

34. Senate Select Committee, Part 1, p. 21.

35. Ibid., Part 1, p. 176. Mead's example was the fact that no public objections were raised when an orange juice substitute with no nutritional value was introduced on the market.

36. Patricia L. Fitzgerald, “Decades of Dedication: The Formative Fifties,”
School Foodservice and Nutrition,
December 1995, p. 36.

37. Ibid., 40.

38. Ibid.; and Don Paarlberg,
American Farm Policy: A Case Study of Centralized Decision Making
(New York: John Wiley, 1964), 277.

39. Fox et al., eds.,
Farming, Farmers, and Markets,
130.

40. United States Congress, Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry,
Hearings, School Milk and Breakfast Programs,
89th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 21, 1966, (hereafter, Senate Agriculture Committee, 1966), 16.

41. Jean Mayer, Final Report, White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health, 1969, p. 236; and Peter H. Rossi,
Feeding the Poor: Assessing Federal Food Aid
(Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1998), 79.