America’s First Food Stamp Program: Ten Years After the Great Depression Started

With reports at the time of this article that food stamp (or “Electronic Benefit Transfer” card) recipients are now becoming people who have Masters Degrees and who are battling out a topsy-turvy American economy that can’t even provide jobs for college-educated people, you have to give thanks that a food stamp program still exists from the federal government. It certainly could have been threatened by the Bush Administration in the last eight years, though you would have seen a whole demographic disappear in America had that happened if not protests by more astute senators and reps unlike you’ve never seen before. There really wouldn’t have been any loopholes in getting rid of it anyway when the program has never had strong evidence of abuse, despite accusations in the past that some people managed to get on the program when they didn’t have to financially.

You’d think the federal government would have considered a food stamp program within a month after the stock market took a nosedive in October of 1929. But despite soup lines set up in local towns and cities or people just sparing a dime to people down on their luck, the Hoover Administration did nothing (other than the limited Reconstruction Finance Corporation for jobs) that could help people obtain food a little easier. Needless to say it was easier to be a farmer and grow your own food on your own land rather than having to scrounge for food in the city or beg for it in the streets.

It doesn’t have to be said that those the most affected by the Depression died of hunger or from having to live on scraps for so long that wouldn’t provide a healthy diet to live a sustainable life. By the time Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1932, thoughts turned to job stimulation rather than fixing a commodities system that had been started, but was really failing to get food out to people who really needed it. You can’t blame Roosevelt for focusing on job stimulation through his New Deal, because you have to correct the source of the problem first before fixing everything that follows. Certainly Roosevelt’s second wave of his New Deal and his WPA program, that finally provided construction jobs to millions of people, made the economy slightly better until a new recession in 1937 almost ruined everything it helped.

Ultimately, the prospects of war in America incited the Roosevelt Administration to get serious about doing something about hunger in America when the earlier commodities relief system was an ultimate failure. The persuasion to do something was supposedly from a picture his cabinet saw of a town somewhere in Middle America that showed two nearby farms where one had plenty of surpluses and the other had nothing at all with starving people living there. Flabbergasted at the prospect that a family can be starving right next door to another family who was doing fine, members of Roosevelt’s cabinet managed to get the President to start a federal program that would allow people to obtain food when they really needed it. Back in an age when doing everything off a credit card was hardly being implemented yet, it’s amazing that the federal government actually made it simple to get on the food stamp program. What could be simpler than colored pieces of paper?

How the first food stamp program worked…

It seems colored pieces of paper had a lot of symbolism at one time in America. Some corporations used various colored pieces of paper for official correspondence to employees–and it almost always was some kind of color in the family of red. Maybe it’s why FDR’s implementation of this country’s first food stamp program utilized official orange slips of paper that those on the dole had to buy to equal the expenses of their food bill. For each orange slip they received, they’d receive a blue slip in the mail that would equal 50 cents toward food that the government would select for the individual or family. With the orange slips, though, the person could buy any grocery store item they wanted, as long as it was human food and not buying pet food. Nothing has changed in the latter scenario.

Of course, those colored slips of paper would get more complicated in later food stamp programs, even getting all the way to green slips in the 1970’s and 80’s that, in a contrived way, tried to look like real currency. The first food stamp program was probably the best procedure of all without any red tape or a credit card that can sometimes malfunction (as happens frequently today for those on the modern EBT program). President Roosevelt ultimately created one program in the government that worked to the peak of efficiency in addition to helping millions of people who otherwise would have nearly starved to death or died early from not eating healthy.

This first food stamp system helped about 20 million over a period of time in America up until 1943 when it finally stopped. And that’s one whopping number during a time when the American population was yet to experience its population boom during the post-WWII years.

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If only America could currently experience a year similar to 1943, though. While it wasn’t a happy one in U.S. losses overseas during the war that’s not much different to what’s happening now, economic prosperity had finally returned to America through general labor and production jobs that helped supplies in the war. Things were good enough economically that the food stamp program was shut down because even the poorest of the poor were able to find a job if they really wanted one. There wouldn’t be another food stamp program implemented in America until 1961 under a President Kennedy promise to re-implement, even though legislation had been attempted to get it reborn for over a decade despite economic prosperity through the 1950’s.

In a country that once supplied jobs to help out a war, it seems shameful now that private enterprise is raking in profits on making materials for the current war rather than industry hiring public citizens to help build things for the cause. If this was a true, united war effort (which it unfortunately never will be), there wouldn’t be a food stamp crisis if war effort industry jobs provided a living to thousands if not millions of people.

Now we have people with Masters Degrees living on the dole that nearly takes us over the line of saying the American Dream is dead or in dire need of CPR. The only saving grace is that the food stamp program allows a person in need to buy any food necessary–meaning healthy food that has a lot of sustenance and allows a person with a lot of financial pressures to at least keep their health by eating well.

And when the pressures of the world get out of control for people who shouldn’t be having those pressures–keeping your dietary health is essential. In that regard, the food stamp program (even with its reforms in recent years) is still the most efficient and fair government program extant…