School Lunch Politics (17 page)

Two major arguments were raised in opposition to Russell's bill. Both reflected traditional arguments against the expansion of federal authority as well as new post-war anxieties. The threat of communism and nuclear war, combined with fears of a renewed economic depression, fueled con servative calls for a vigorous national defense despite continuing opposition to the growth of the federal government. The few voices raised in opposition to the creation of a national school lunch program saw it as a dangerous encroachment by the federal government into local affairs. Feeding children in school, the critics believed, would be the first step in the intrusion of government into citizen's kitchens and schools. North Carolina Democratic senator Harold D. Cooley wondered how far the government would go. If Congress began with free lunches for schoolchildren, he asked, then “why not provide medical care and dental care and hospitalization for all poor children who are needing in that regard?”
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Other lawmakers feared that government-sponsored subsidies of children's meals would weaken the spirit of individualism, the nation's fundamental character strength. In a Congress that was about to pass federal housing legislation and would shortly consider a comprehensive health care bill, government action rankled many conservatives and smacked of creeping socialism. The Republican Whip, Leslie Arends of Illinois, acknowledged that “the objective of hot school lunches is desirable,” but said he could not support the creation of a permanent federal program for “all school children.”
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Iowa Republican John Williams Gwynne agreed. “I believe in school lunches,” he said, “I believe in children having proper food and proper education.” But “whose responsibility is it”? he wondered. For Gwynne and other Republicans, the answer was simple. “The responsibility is first upon the parents.” Only if the parents prove unable to meet their duty, he believed, should the government step in.
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School lunch opponents clearly viewed government involvement with childhood meals and food habits to be a major threat to the development of individual character and initiative. Closely linked to these concerns were fears that a school meal program would undermine traditional gender roles and turn child-rearing over to the state. Opposition to school lunches was particularly heated because food and meals represented such fundamental, formative experiences for the nation's youth. The idea of communal feeding seemed particularly dangerous for individuals as well as for communities. Michigan Republican congressman Anthony Dondero, for example, feared that the school lunch programs were “destroying local self-government.”
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Others predicted that a government feeding program would signal the triumph of socialism, which “has brought hideous creeping paralysis to the economic life of every country that has ever adopted it.” Ohio representative Cliff Clevenger warned that “unnatural mothers” who advocated “turning children of three and one-half and even two years of age over to the state” were behind the push to create institutional school meal centers.
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Oklahoma Republican Ross Rizley, an inveterate Cold Warrior, feared the emasculating effects of a strong federal government. “I would hate ever to see it come to the place in this Govern ment,” he said, “where we just fed kids for the purpose of feeding them, whether they needed it or not.” If you subject children to such a program, he warned, “you tear down, to my way of thinking, the very things that I think have made this country and have demonstrated in this war that our kids were better than anybody else's kids when it came to a question of fighting.”
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Fearing that a free school lunch program would destroy national morale, the bill's opponents warned against “inculcating in little children at the most impressionable period of their lives the idea that they can get something for nothing from Uncle Sam.”
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School lunch advocates clearly had a more positive view of federal programs, particularly children's welfare measures. “I see nothing subversive in the school lunch program,” Richard Russell insisted. Indeed, he argued, school lunches would provide an insurance program against creeping socialism. “In my opinion,” Russell said, “a school child who has a good bowl of hot soup and a glass of sweet milk for his lunch will be much more able to resist communism or socialism than would one who had for his lunch a hard biscuit which had been baked the day before and which he had brought with him to school in a tin can.”
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Virginia representative John Flannagan, a co-sponsor of the legislation in the House, similarly argued that feeding children would protect national security rather than threaten it. “The dictator nations,” Flannagan observed, “exist upon hungry bodies and befuddled minds. If you want to dispel the gloom of Nazism and communism from the face of the earth, the thing to do is to feed and educate the peoples of those nations. A full stomach and a trained mind will never embrace either Nazism or communism.”
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D
ISCRIMINATION AND
S
EGREGATION

Most fundamentally, however, the school lunch debate revealed the beginning of a new civil rights legislative initiative. The post-war Democratic political agenda depended on an increasingly tenuous New Deal coalition of urban liberals and southern conservatives. While conservative southern legislators like Russell and Ellender could support federalism in the name of farmers and children, they fiercely opposed any effort to challenge their region's entrenched system of racial segregation. At the same time, however, a new generation of legislators and reformers, buoyed by the wartime rhetoric of tolerance and freedom, began to push for legal and legislative measures designed to end segregation. Thus, when Congress began debating the school lunch program, first-term New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell, along with the NAACP, was quietly devising a plan to challenge any legislation that sent federal funds to segregated facilities. When the school lunch bill came before Congress in February 1946, Pow ell had just begun to formulate his strategy. Immediately after taking office that year, he had spearheaded a bruising fight on the floor of Congress over the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). This legislation would have permanently funded the wartime agency set up to monitor racial discrimination in employment and extend the federal government's civil rights activities into the post-war period. Knowing that federal school lunch funds would be going to states with segregated school systems, Powell decided to make the school lunch bill his first test case.
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When the school lunch bill came to the floor of the House two weeks after the FEPC fight, Powell immediately offered an amendment that would prohibit federal funds from going to any state or school if, in carrying out the functions of the bill, “it makes any discrimination because of race, creed, or national origin of children, or, between types of schools, or, with respect to a State which maintains separate schools for minority and for majority children, it discriminates between such schools on this account.”
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Powell's amendment, like the post-war civil rights movement generally, posed a fundamental challenge to American liberals. For most of the twentieth century, liberal lawmakers had bemoaned racial segregation but had done little to challenge it. In particular, Congress stayed far away from the South's “separate but equal” public school system. By opposing any measure that sent federal resources to segregated institutions or states, Powell's amendment put liberals—as well as conservatives—on notice that the issue could no longer be ignored. Appealing to the post-war liberal rhetoric of humanitarianism and tolerance, Powell pointed out that Congress had just sent funds to the new United Nations refugee administration. He challenged his colleagues to “be humane enough to see that the minority race have the same opportunities in the free-lunch program as do those of the majority race.”
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The question was, how far would liberal Americans be willing to push Congress to dismantle racial segregation? In the case of the school lunch legislation, would the program's liberal supporters be willing to go so far as to withhold funding from racially segregated schools? Powell knew his strategy would not dismantle segregation, but he did hope to insert the principle of nondiscrimination into federal policy. “The purpose of my amendment,” he told the House, “is not in any way to alter existing educational patterns.” Rather, he said, “the purpose of my amendment is to assure that where there are separate schools or even where there are not separate schools, the money allotted for the school lunch program shall be allocated fairly to all people without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.”
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By wording his amendment as anti-discrimination rather than anti-segregation, however, Powell inadvertently undermined his own purpose. As far as school lunch advo cates, whether from the North or from the South, were concerned, the program already was open equally to all children.

Lawmakers had insisted from the start that surplus food be available to any school wanting to participate. Program administrators, in their turn, had long insisted that there was no discrimination in the program. Of course, the financial and administrative requirements of the school lunch program, by definition, excluded many districts and schools from participating. What is more, while provisions existed on paper requiring all participating schools to offer free lunches for poor children, no one looked very closely at how many (if any) free meals were actually available. Nor had anyone looked into the actual distribution of lunch programs to see how many black schools, North or South, participated. Everyone involved with the school lunch program blithely asserted that there was no discrimination. Liberals were therefore particularly uncomfortable with Powell's amendment. Jerry Voorhis, for example, simply refused to support it. Not only did he believe it to be “not at all necessary,” but he also feared that “the controversy and misconceptions arising from it might hurt the bill.”
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Opposing discrimination rather than segregation, Powell's amendment actually invited the support of southern legislators. Richard Russell, for example, loudly declared that he, too, opposed discrimination and had crafted the school lunch bill to serve all children equally. While Russell and other southerners distrusted Powell's motives and certainly did not want to see Congress move toward dismantling segregation, they took great pains to insist that segregation and the system of racially separate schools in their region in no way constituted discrimination. North Carolina representative John Hamlin Folger declared that segregation “has never been a discrimination in any particular and never will be.” Folger supported the school lunch program because, he believed, children's health “is too important to all of our races.”
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Virginia representative John Flannagan, a strong advocate of the school lunch program, declared Powell's amendment “entirely unnecessary.” It would, he warned, “alienate some votes that might otherwise be cast for approval.” In other words, Flannagan knew he could marshal support for the school lunch program from southern representatives, but would not be able to keep them in line if the bill in any way appeared to endorse federal interference with segregation.

By introducing his amendment in the language of anti-discrimination as opposed to anti-segregation, Powell left open a doorway through which segregationists like Russell and Flannagan could slip. Southerners had long argued that segregation was not a system of racial discrimination, but simply a separation of the races. Indeed, the very language of the Supreme Court's 1890 confirmation of segregation affirmed that separate could be equal. So strong was Richard Russell's conviction that segregation did not equal discrimination that he had actually agreed to a mild anti-discrimination clause in an earlier version of his bill. “The colored people are my friends,” Russell insisted, “and I want to see them have the benefit of these funds. I know in the main, they need it more, perhaps, than some of the others do.” In Russell's view, segregation was simply a recognition of social reality and racial capacities. Russell warned that Powell's amendment, by withholding federal resources from southern states, would actually end up discriminating against black children. “The inclusion of this clause,” Russell warned, “will do that which the author of its amendment does not want, because there are too many states … that maintain separate schools for the races.”
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Should Powell's equation of segregation with discrimination hold, Russell predicted, no southern schools would be able to participate in the National School Lunch Program.

Southern conservatives, of course, immediately recognized Powell's amendment as what it was—an attempt to dismantle segregation. Texas representative William Robert Poage, an inveterate defender of states' rights, pointed to Powell's own recent statements arguing that “segregation is discrimination.” Poage understood that if the amendment passed, local officials would lose the power to interpret just what constituted discrimination in federal programs. Pointing to a recent case in which a federal judge had ruled against the common practice of stipulating racial preferences in newspaper job-ads, Poage warned that the country was embarking on a slippery slope.
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Mississippi's deeply conservative representative John Elliot Rankin also saw in Powell's amendment the threat of a new assertion of black rights. Rankin, who rarely bothered to disguise his contempt for minorities, whether black or Jewish, accused Powell of using “the exact language used in the Communist platform” in his amendment. The Communists, Rankin insisted, “want to destroy our separate school system and to force Negro equality upon us.” The Powell amendment, Poage warned, “means trouble throughout the Southern States.” What “they” mean by discrimination, he observed, “is segregation of the races.”
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