"Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat" by Janet Poppendieck

"A breadline knee-deep in wheat is obviously the handiwork of foolish men." 

 -- James Crowther, 1932 (cited p. xv)                

Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance
in the Great Depression by Janet Poppendieck.

Here's a book that's all-too reminiscent of the current emergency of unemployment, hunger, and social dislocations. The expression "breadlines knee-deep in wheat" embodied with sadness and irony a paradox of want in the midst of plenty in 1930. Throughout America, families were starving and at the same time farmers were destroying bounteous harvests. Vegetables were plowed under to rot in the fields. Wheat was ending up in government warehouses where vast surpluses were piling up. Apples and oranges were soaked in kerosene and burned. Dairy farmers poured milk onto the street. Hog farmers killed their sows and piglets because the market value was so low. And meanwhile there were breadlines -- starving people waiting for pathetic handouts of any food they could get. Sound familiar?

Janet Poppendieck's book documents the long political struggle to bring prosperity back to the US. Legislators and the president had to balance several constituencies, a struggle that began in around 1929 or earlier, and lasted until World War II (unless you take a bigger look, and say it never ended).

The interest groups pressuring the government as the Depression began included the nation's farmers. Naturally, they wanted to get a fair price that covered their production expenses and enabled them to plant the next year's crop; economic collapse left them unable to earn a living or pay their debts. Commodity farmers were often unable even to feed their families. Food processors  and middle-men opposed food being "given away" -- even to the poorest people who couldn't pay for it -- because the food industry feared erosion of their profits. State and city governments ran out of money and tried to convince Washington to pass bills to help them do something for their desperate citizens. Ideologues and puritans said everyone should earn his bread, no giveaways, no charity that would be a destroyer of the human spirit. Hungry unemployed and impoverished people, both on farms and in cities, didn't care how they got food, they just wanted starvation to end. And yes, children and adults really died of malnutrition in this terrible era.

The complexity of all the different interest groups was a major topic of the book. For example, the FSRC (Federal Surplus Relief Corporation), formed to address these problems, was

“...an accountant’s nightmare, it was a politician’s dream, it promised something for everyone.The diets of the unemployed would be improved .... Farmers would benefit both by direct government purchase of their unsaleable crops and by improved prices for the remaining portions. Processors could expect contracts to convert raw commodities into forms suitable for relief use .... Budget balancers presumably, could anticipate reduced overall relief costs due to bargain prices and economies of scale, and both the public and the New Dealers would be relieved of the discomfort caused by contemplating waste amid want. ...surplus commodity distribution seemed to promise loss nowhere and gain everywhere.” (p. 135-136)

Somehow in spite of all the politics, new programs began to function soon after Roosevelt became president. Job programs like the WPA and CCC began to provide money so that people could buy food and other essentials, and could pay their rent. Farm programs worked out. Unfortunately, no program was free of political fights.

Hard Times weren’t necessarily over, but within a few years, the worst of the problems of the early 1930s began to be handled. The book deals with all the ins and outs of policy negotiations; ideological reasons for choosing to give people make-work jobs, sometimes with a good will towards the victims of the economic disaster, sometimes not; outright grants of money, or assistance in kind (such as distribution of farm surplus to stop hunger). The sum total of Roosevelt’s New Deal alleviated hunger and poverty for several years, until in 1938, the decision was made to spend less on the many relief programs — and the country was back in a “recession,” if not an all-out depression again. The details in the book are interesting but I felt very overwhelmed by the time I was finished reading about these efforts

Policies and programs were put in place have lasted virtually until now, despite various revisions throughout successive administrations with many ideologies about welfare, food programs, school lunch programs, and farm subsidies. It’s tempting to see that undermining of these very programs during the last decade has forced us to repeat many of the hardships during the current challenging situation, though obviously the causes are totally dissimilar. As in 1930, the lack of solid programs to fight poverty has made our society less able to deal with the sudden widespread unemployment and want caused by the pandemic. For this reason, Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat is that much harder to read today but astonishingly timely.

UPDATE May 1: article about farm produce rotting in fields and efforts to donate it to food banks, the twenty-first-century reenactment of breadlines knee-deep in wheat: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-produce-rots-in-the-field-one-florida-farmer-and-an-army-of-volunteers-combat-a-feeling-of-helplessness--one-cucumber-at-a-time/2020/04/30/6230c3ae-842b-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

Review © 2020 by mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

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