School Lunch Politics by Susan Levine

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