(1941) A BIGGER ROLE FOR FOOD STAMPS? FOOD STAMPS' ROLE
By MILDRED ADAMS
New York Times
18 May 1941
THE food stamp plan celebrated its second birthday last Spring amid national applause. Farmers like it, government officials, relief administrators, chambers of commerce approve it.
Some thirty-odd foreign countries, inquiring whether a similar mechanism might be helpful in post-war relief abroad, look on it as an oracle credits it with "the somewhat equivocal achievement of proving that this is an intelligently administered subsidy can broaden the distribution and be made to serve broad social purposes without disrupting normal trade or its general profit-and-loss principles."
Meanwhile, it has become a popular feature, the stamp plan, and there is talk of extending it from surplus to non-surplus foods.
This very popularity arouses hopes and questionings in the lay mind. Especially in those usually accompanying an emergency measure.
When an official device, an orange economic gadget has apparently brought in the millennium to those who administered it and those who benefited from it, "How?" "Why?" "Has it closed the gap?" and finished when the contradictory conceptions are reconciled, "that we have too much to eat over here," "We must achieve," "Will it last?"
Will it survive, odor of starvation in the midst of plenty, "what effect will it have on national effort?" What effect on unemployment? What war-time needs, and after-war expansion? ANY attempt to find the answers to those questions must start with remembering what the situation was when the food stamp plan was created and what it was meant to cure.
Vice President Wallace, who sparked the idea, an emergency measure only, recently stated its first principle:
"First, we had to find a market for farm surpluses, and we found that a man plus at one price might be a roll-out at another... spectacle of people hungry from too little food while we were suffering from too much... Senator Vandenberg... better do it by pointers and let our own folk eat it for nothing."
In other words, the food stamp plan is the latest method of dealing with the most curious domestic problems ever faced us, a giant "plague of plenty" or "paradox of abundance" which we have not yet solved... felt before the New Deal came in, and over which it had... been tried in the hope of curing or concealing it... largest markets went on shrinking... acreage was restricted, marginal land was retired from cultivation... domestic agriculture... was making it possible to feed more and more people on... that remained, two blades of wheat, two ears of corn, two stalks of cotton, two blades of grass... where one blade, one stalk, one wormy apple had grown before.
Farmers did not know where or how to sell them at a profit.
Foreign markets were vanishing... bilateral trade agreements fostered in an effort to hold on... "self-sufficiency"... of food products alive while every nation, including our own, was frantically trying to make itself self-sufficient and cut out all foreign buying. Domestic markets—but it is here that the food stamp plan comes in.
Thanks to a long period of unemployment, the domestic market had shriveled like the foreign one. Administration experts discovered that men at work eat three to four times as much as men on relief spent only half that. And for ten years... we have had some millions of fellow-citizens on relief... shrunken domestic market remained the major hitch.
Foreign markets dried up... Our own people needed the bare necessities of life... problem was how to get them to buy more than they had been buying.
IT was in an attempt to give new life to the shrunken domestic market that the stamp plan was created after other schemes had been tried and discarded.
First, the needy... were also used surplus wheat; direct distribution of foods by welfare agencies... lunches to school children; encouragement of... adequate or unsatisfactory.
In the Fall, President... Secretary of Agriculture, told him: "We talk over new budgets... we get the trick.
Then, Milo Perkins, that practical dreamer... came along... and the ideas and went into the silences and came out with the plan... blue and orange stamps, and a plan which fundamentally... may turn out to have wider importance than we know now."
The technique of the food stamp plan is now as well known in New York City as in Rochester... try out and its first enthusiastic applause... in more than 250 areas, and new areas are coming in every week. It is believed as many as 350 will be benefiting by the end of 1941, when state-wide plans applied to Washington.
In part, the reason for this popularity is indicated by the statement of Commissioner Hodson... New York City's Department of Welfare... a year which direct distribution of government-purchased surpluses was tried. "You,"... "the food-stamp plan will cost only $77,000 for the city's share... budget for relief cases... give people a healthy diet and let them buy what they need when they need it, the way the rest of us do."
AS for other reasons, Milo Perkins, late last Spring... Surplus Marketing Administration, saving it at the Town Hall... summarized various reactions.
"'For consumers... it,' he said, 'gulping some of Brazil's surplus coffee crop... regular trade channels... They feel safer about it than they did... They feel safer about it this way than if we carted... food up in old, pre-war... machinery of handling.
In the second place, they... power for things they feel it is disgraceful... like nourishing food. And in the third place, they buy... When the plan started... you'd find them talking about... tivity ends, and they see in this gingham-apron... may stave off post-war breadlines if the going gets tough," he said.
"The liberals like it because they are fed up with the 'dole' of money, and they have an obscure feeling that these blue-and-orange tickets give the needy an added to do what he thinks they may want to have.
They have a pleased feeling the plan reaches certain types of things that can't be covered by general they think our present system of distributing 'dole' something that they'd far rather have government-purchased food distribution of food than for buying or something to make things go 'kerfloo'.
"As for the middle-of-the-road man, he likes it because it makes sense to him. He's found some of the surplus-removal programs very hard to tie in with his own knowledge, and he likes this as it the hungry eat the surplus and that 'is that'."
THERE seems to be little question that the food-stamp plan has demonstrated all the way it has gone. But before hailing it as the complete panacea that will bring crops and markets into balance, banish farm and on government intuitions, all well to examine certain practical in the plan's own record its performance and its possible future.
The plaudits heaped upon it tend to obscure the fact that the total amount of surplus it gets is still very large and the blue stamps cover only a small part. In 1940 there are no absolute figures on the quantity of our 600,000,000,000 food trade, but a single of fresh apples left a million bushels over our domestic needs, and that is just one fruit-and-extra-million-bushel carry-over from previous years.
That year the Surplus Marketing Administration spent $195,809,425 on five varied programs, only one which the food-stamp plan, the baby of took less than 10 per cent of the total. The fact that stamps increased substantially in 1941 may mean a quick springing popularity, or it may mean that spot; or it may mean that among various surplus that proving more popular than others. All these factors point to a contradiction of the operations plan, which the plan is said to rest.
VICE PRESIDENT WALLACE is reported to have said lately "If the problem of hungry people and surplus food we might full employment and a living wage, and they will be able to buy the food their families need. When every one has to spend the surpluses will disappear."
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(1941) A BIGGER ROLE FOR FOOD STAMPS? FOOD STAMPS' ROLE
By MILDRED ADAMS
New York Times
18 May 1941
THE food stamp plan celebrated its second birthday last Spring amid national applause. Farmers like it, government officials, relief administrators, chambers of commerce approve it.
Some thirty-odd foreign countries, inquiring whether a similar mechanism might be helpful in post-war relief abroad, look on it as an oracle credits it with "the somewhat equivocal achievement of proving that this is an intelligently administered subsidy can broaden the distribution and be made to serve broad social purposes without disrupting normal trade or its general profit-and-loss principles."
Meanwhile, it has become a popular feature, the stamp plan, and there is talk of extending it from surplus to non-surplus foods.
This very popularity arouses hopes and questionings in the lay mind. Especially in those usually accompanying an emergency measure.
When an official device, an orange economic gadget has apparently brought in the millennium to those who administered it and those who benefited from it, "How?" "Why?" "Has it closed the gap?" and finished when the contradictory conceptions are reconciled, "that we have too much to eat over here," "We must achieve," "Will it last?"
Will it survive, odor of starvation in the midst of plenty, "what effect will it have on national effort?" What effect on unemployment? What war-time needs, and after-war expansion?
ANY attempt to find the answers to those questions must start with remembering what the situation was when the food stamp plan was created and what it was meant to cure.
Vice President Wallace, who sparked the idea, an emergency measure only, recently stated its first principle:
"First, we had to find a market for farm surpluses, and we found that a man plus at one price might be a roll-out at another... spectacle of people hungry from too little food while we were suffering from too much... Senator Vandenberg... better do it by pointers and let our own folk eat it for nothing."
In other words, the food stamp plan is the latest method of dealing with the most curious domestic problems ever faced us, a giant "plague of plenty" or "paradox of abundance" which we have not yet solved... felt before the New Deal came in, and over which it had... been tried in the hope of curing or concealing it... largest markets went on shrinking... acreage was restricted, marginal land was retired from cultivation... domestic agriculture... was making it possible to feed more and more people on... that remained, two blades of wheat, two ears of corn, two stalks of cotton, two blades of grass... where one blade, one stalk, one wormy apple had grown before.
Farmers did not know where or how to sell them at a profit.
Foreign markets were vanishing... bilateral trade agreements fostered in an effort to hold on... "self-sufficiency"... of food products alive while every nation, including our own, was frantically trying to make itself self-sufficient and cut out all foreign buying. Domestic markets—but it is here that the food stamp plan comes in.
Thanks to a long period of unemployment, the domestic market had shriveled like the foreign one. Administration experts discovered that men at work eat three to four times as much as men on relief spent only half that. And for ten years... we have had some millions of fellow-citizens on relief... shrunken domestic market remained the major hitch.
Foreign markets dried up... Our own people needed the bare necessities of life... problem was how to get them to buy more than they had been buying.
IT was in an attempt to give new life to the shrunken domestic market that the stamp plan was created after other schemes had been tried and discarded.
First, the needy... were also used surplus wheat; direct distribution of foods by welfare agencies... lunches to school children; encouragement of... adequate or unsatisfactory.
In the Fall, President... Secretary of Agriculture, told him: "We talk over new budgets... we get the trick.
Then, Milo Perkins, that practical dreamer... came along... and the ideas and went into the silences and came out with the plan... blue and orange stamps, and a plan which fundamentally... may turn out to have wider importance than we know now."
The technique of the food stamp plan is now as well known in New York City as in Rochester... try out and its first enthusiastic applause... in more than 250 areas, and new areas are coming in every week. It is believed as many as 350 will be benefiting by the end of 1941, when state-wide plans applied to Washington.
In part, the reason for this popularity is indicated by the statement of Commissioner Hodson... New York City's Department of Welfare... a year which direct distribution of government-purchased surpluses was tried. "You,"... "the food-stamp plan will cost only $77,000 for the city's share... budget for relief cases... give people a healthy diet and let them buy what they need when they need it, the way the rest of us do."
AS for other reasons, Milo Perkins, late last Spring... Surplus Marketing Administration, saving it at the Town Hall... summarized various reactions.
"'For consumers... it,' he said, 'gulping some of Brazil's surplus coffee crop... regular trade channels... They feel safer about it than they did... They feel safer about it this way than if we carted... food up in old, pre-war... machinery of handling.
In the second place, they... power for things they feel it is disgraceful... like nourishing food. And in the third place, they buy... When the plan started... you'd find them talking about... tivity ends, and they see in this gingham-apron... may stave off post-war breadlines if the going gets tough," he said.
"The liberals like it because they are fed up with the 'dole' of money, and they have an obscure feeling that these blue-and-orange tickets give the needy an added to do what he thinks they may want to have.
They have a pleased feeling the plan reaches certain types of things that can't be covered by general they think our present system of distributing 'dole' something that they'd far rather have government-purchased food distribution of food than for buying or something to make things go 'kerfloo'.
"As for the middle-of-the-road man, he likes it because it makes sense to him. He's found some of the surplus-removal programs very hard to tie in with his own knowledge, and he likes this as it the hungry eat the surplus and that 'is that'."
THERE seems to be little question that the food-stamp plan has demonstrated all the way it has gone. But before hailing it as the complete panacea that will bring crops and markets into balance, banish farm and on government intuitions, all well to examine certain practical in the plan's own record its performance and its possible future.
The plaudits heaped upon it tend to obscure the fact that the total amount of surplus it gets is still very large and the blue stamps cover only a small part. In 1940 there are no absolute figures on the quantity of our 600,000,000,000 food trade, but a single of fresh apples left a million bushels over our domestic needs, and that is just one fruit-and-extra-million-bushel carry-over from previous years.
That year the Surplus Marketing Administration spent $195,809,425 on five varied programs, only one which the food-stamp plan, the baby of took less than 10 per cent of the total.
The fact that stamps increased substantially in 1941 may mean a quick springing popularity, or it may mean that spot; or it may mean that among various surplus that proving more popular than others. All these factors point to a contradiction of the operations plan, which the plan is said to rest.
VICE PRESIDENT WALLACE is reported to have said lately "If the problem of hungry people and surplus food we might full employment and a living wage, and they will be able to buy the food their families need. When every one has to spend the surpluses will disappear."
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