Sunday, April 26, 2020

"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.
If you read this at another site, it's been stolen.

6 comments:

  1. I'm sure that today, the starving will not care how they get their food, as long as they get it. I hope it doesn't take months of policy making to make that happen.

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  2. A cucumber looks sad? The grocer throws it in the bin, the big bin. Cheese´s best before-date has run out - bin. Etc, etc.
    People come at night with torches to get the food.
    If unlucky they get caught and fined - the food is still OK!

    Now we have some stores who were able to talk to the managers and get the food to sell for a low price. But just some.

    Where have we been going? Back then people ate whatever they could find.
    Now farmers are forced to plant corn, corn, corn.

    But, yes, how come? Politicians get fields they never worked in!
    A woman who never served helped the Bundeswehr/Army to have tables to change your baby, and maternity clothes, too.
    Now she is - oh, does it matter? She even cheated when studying, those are politicians, I could go and on.

    And the "little man" suffers, we do.
    Well, certainly nothing compared to the 30´s! Luckily.
    Why do we read such books? I´m at "Hiroshima" atm. Do we read about bad times when we are living in a tad bit bad times?

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  3. It's sad that in so many countries people are having to resort to charity to feed their families, due to unemployment because of the virus.

    Sad to hear that in the 1930's farmers preferred to burn and destroy their crops instead of giving it away to the hungry people. I can understand their point of view, but it's still sad to see food go to waste.

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  4. I've thought about this a lot lately as I've seen too much video footage of crops being plowed under on the news recently and wondered about this in the past. The opening line of "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" keeps running through my head -- "Once I stood in breadlines, with the best." I think of it whenever I see video of people lined up for food banks. This books sounds fascinating and terribly sad.

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  5. It's sad to see food wasted. There are plenty of people who would be glad to have some. I saw a movie back in 2009, Dive: Living off America's Waste. It was an eye opener to show all the food being wasted.

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  6. I just read about a farmer who was going to have to let the tomatoes rot, because no migrant workers to pick them. He could always invite people to come and pick. We did that when I was a kid, pick cherries for a fee.

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