A
long line of jobless and homeless men wait outside to get free dinner
at New York's Municipal Lodging House in the winter of 1932-33 during
the Great Depression. (AP Photo)
During the Great
Depression, Americans foraged through garbage cans for food and dug in
public parks to find roots they could eat. Parents reluctantly sent
their children door-to-door to beg. Ninety-five people were admitted to
New York City’s four largest hospitals due to starvation in 1931. Twenty
of them died. That same year, the Municipal Lodging House for the
homeless provided 408,100 lodgings and 1,024,247 meals. A year later, in
1932, it provided 889,984 lodgings and 2,688,266 meals, at a time when
the entire New York City population was only 6.9 million people.
Relief
agencies nationwide lost their ability to prevent starvation. Local
governments, expected to fund relief efforts themselves, began running
out of money to do so. In May 1932, the average relief grant in
Philadelphia (out of which people were expected to pay for food and all
other basic expenses) was cut to $4.32 per family per week, equaling
about $62 per week in today’s money. In New York City, the average
weekly relief grant fell to $2.39 (about $35 in today’s money).
Baltimore gave needy families an average of 80 cents and Atlanta
provided 60 cents per week for whites and less for blacks.
The
nation was near the point of revolution. At times, armed men would go
into stores in large groups to demand credit and, when refused, take
food anyway. The term “food riot” became popular in the press.
Adding
fuel to the fire was the country’s glut of unused food. Neither farmers
nor factory workers had the money to buy each others’ products.
Oklahoma union activist and editor Oscar Ameringer wrote: “The farmers
are being pauperized by the poverty of the industrial populations and
the industrial populations are being pauperized by the poverty of the
farmers.”
Today it seems obvious to most of us that
government should have purchased some of the excess agricultural
products and distributed them to the hungry, but at the time, opposition
to government involvement in social welfare, as well as the belief in
the unlimited abilities of American charities, was deeply ingrained in
American thought. The idea of the government buying food and
distributing it for free seemed radical, particularly to the Republicans
in charge of the nation. In 1931, when Democratic leader William McAdoo
suggested that surplus wheat be distributed to the unemployed,
President Herbert Hoover rejected the idea, saying, “I am confident that
the hungry and unemployed will be cared for by our sense of voluntary
organization and community service.” Ironically, Hoover had first become
nationally known in America for his effective leadership in providing
aid to starving Europeans following World War I, but he couldn’t accept
the reality that his beloved United States needed that same type of
help.
“I am confident that
the hungry and unemployed will be cared for by our sense of voluntary
organization and community service.” -Herbert Hoover
As
America’s crisis worsened, Hoover would not budge in his opposition to
domestic relief. In a 1932 speech, he decried government aid, saying: “A
cold and distant charity which puts out its sympathy only through the
tax collector yields only a meager dole of unloving and perfunctory
relief.” He was clearly blind to the fact that millions of Americans on
the verge of starvation would have been grateful for any sort of food
aid, no matter how unloving and perfunctory. Two days before the
election of 1932, which he lost in a landslide to Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Hoover declared himself unable to “find a single locality where people
are being deprived of food or shelter.”
Hoover was the
nation’s first significant right-wing hunger denier. It is no wonder a
conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution, is named after him. But
he was not alone in his opposition to government food aid. Wealthy
people who dominated the boards of charities complained that providing
food aid would promote dependency and that private charity was more
efficient than government aid. Even progressive social workers believed
that food aid “was an antiquated form of relief, inconsistent with
modern social work practice and the dignity of the client.”
Yet
the severity of the crisis eventually sunk in for many of our nation’s
leaders, and necessity trumped ideology, as even staunch Republican
Congressman Hamilton Fish supported a proposal to have the government
buy excess wheat for distribution to the poor, saying, “It is a disgrace
and an outrage that this country of ours, with overabundance of food
stuffs, should permit millions of our own people to continue to be
undernourished and hungry.” Citing instances in which Congress had aided
the victims of disasters abroad, Fish argued that the “first function
of government is to take care of its own people in time of great
emergency.” Permitting people to starve, he declared, was “creating a
hotbed for communism.”
When Roosevelt took office, the
controversy over whether to support food aid versus other kinds of aid
remained unsettled. His agriculture department received widespread and
withering criticism for slaughtering and then discarding hogs in order
to reduce supply. In response, FDR ordered the department to start
distributing the meat to the hungry.
Today’s liberals
tend to forget that FDR repeatedly opposed giving out free money and
food without requiring work (especially when they blasted Bill Clinton
for supposedly betraying the New Deal tradition by supporting welfare
reform). Roosevelt said direct relief was “a narcotic, a subtle
destroyer of the human spirit.” Instead of continuing to sponsor a
“spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the
national fiber,” he said, the government must find work for those in
need and able to work. “We must preserve not only the bodies of the
employed from destruction but also their self-respect, their
self-reliance and courage and determination. Therefore, the Federal
government must and shall quit this business of relief.”
A
pragmatist who sometimes contradicted himself in order to solve
pressing national problems, Roosevelt also significantly expanded the
efforts — begun in the previous administration, against Hoover’s will —
to distribute free commodities to low-income Americans. FDR included
other goods in addition to wheat and significantly increased the volume
of surplus food purchased and distributed by the federal government.
FDR
also supported creation of the first Food Stamp Program, in 1938. The
program operated by permitting people on relief to buy orange stamps
equal to their normal food expenditures; for every one dollar worth of
orange stamps purchased, 50 cents worth of blue stamps were received.
Orange stamps could be used to buy any food; blue stamps could only be
used to buy food determined by the Department of Agriculture to be
surplus. Over the course of nearly four years, the program reached
approximately 20 million people in nearly half of the nation’s counties,
and cost a total of $262 million (about three billion dollars in 2006
dollars).
So that is the story of how food aid was tied
to farm aid from the start. Today, though many rural and suburban people
rely on federal nutrition assistance programs (such as SNAP), they’re
perceived as urban programs. Thus, they’ve remained in Farm Bills in
order to try to win votes from urban members of Congress. House
Republicans now want to separate SNAP from the Farm Bill in order to make it easier to make cuts.
In
my opinion, farm bills should be classified as “food bills” and SNAP
should continue to be part of them. Food producers and consumers are
mutually dependent upon each other. When so many Americans are
low-income and hungry or food insecure, that limits the amount of money
they can spend on food, thus limiting income for food producers. When
producers can’t afford to stay on their land or face environmental
threats, it threatens the availability of nutritious, fresh food for New
York consumers. A true food bill would aid hungry Americans and small
family farmers alike.Joel Berg leads the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and is a Senior Fellow at the Center For American Progress. This post is adapted from his book All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?
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