America's Third World hunger
A CBS documentary and two political rivals transformed food policies, proving the strength of bipartisan work
On May 21, 1968, CBS News aired “Hunger in America” narrated by correspondent Charles Kuralt that showed scenes of severe malnutrition in four pockets of America. Doctors spoke of death and disabilities from hunger with video showing the despair in the children and adults interviewed.
“The most basic human need must become a human right,” Kuralt said.
This was Third World level hunger in neighborhoods of wealthy U.S. cities. This was America before the social nets of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program, modern school lunch programs and Women, Infants and Children benefits.
Americans immediately put pressure on elected officials to fix this social problem. Government wasn’t viewed as an impediment but rather as the vehicle to best enact such massive change.
The documentary argued that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was designed to protect farmers, not feed hungry Americans. It stated the agency refused to use its emergency authority to get food into all areas of the country, including sending millions of unspent aid back the Treasury Department. This happened in a year farmers slaughtered and buried 14,000 hogs because they had no market for them.
New York Times journalist Jack Gould wrote: “The graphic portrayal of youngsters permanently handicapped by malnutrition and the disheartening death rate among neglected citizens in many ways was more vivid than the TV scenes of the poverty march on Washington. ‘Hunger in America’ successfully pricked the conscience of the viewing citizen, especially when seen in conjunction with a companion spot announcement glamorously proclaiming the consumer as ‘king.’”
The documentary aired when my father was a freshman in college, who would be 75 today. This hunger crisis didn’t happen that long ago. How quick we are to forget history’s lessons.
Bipartisan strength
The aftermath serves as an example of how bipartisan work makes for strong solutions to big problems. It’s a model on how to best prioritize U.S. needs.
A collaboration formed between two partisan rivals. Their dedication and eventual friendship transformed food and farm programs in the U.S. and globally. The late conservative Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, and the liberal Sen. George McGovern, D-South Dakota, established anti-hunger programs of food stamps, school nutrition expansions and WIC.
McGovern recalled wondering why a news station was examining hunger. That wasn’t a priority issue he saw in the nation. He was stunned at an interview with a young child who described having no food, not for breakfast and nothing to bring for school lunch. The boy said he felt “shame” not having money and watching other kids eat.
“I said to my family that was watching the documentary with me, ‘You know, it’s not that little boy who should be ashamed, it’s George McGovern, a United States Senator, a member on the Committee on Agriculture.’”
The next day, McGovern introduced and passed a resolution creating the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. He served as the chairman, and Dole was the ranking Republican.
McGovern said that they had some “heal-the-wounds” sessions at the beginning. Dole was the Republican Party National chairman when McGovern unsuccessfully ran for president in 1972 against Richard Nixon.
“But we did that,” McGovern said. “We found the one place we agreed was that nobody ought to be hungry in this country, especially children.”
McGovern noted, “There was never one word of partisanship, not a hint, in the 10-year history of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.”
Dole agreed differences were set aside when the business was anti-hunger.
“We had a lot of bipartisanship in the Senate when George and I were there. I joined him because we had a lot of things in common when it came to hunger.”
The members held field hearings to determine the depth of the problem. They confirmed what Kuralt and other news media were reporting.
“You saw it first-hand and you knew it wasn’t something some network maybe dreamed up or whatever and found some isolated cases. I think we began to understand it was widespread and needed to be addressed,” Dole said.
Data emerge
The U.S. did not track hunger, making that an objective of the committee.
The United Public Health Service in 1968-1969 surveyed 12,000 households in low-income census tracts, finding 80% earned less than $5,000 annually (or about $46,500 in today’s dollars). It uncovered one-third of children younger than 6 and 15% of the total population were anemic and vitamin deficiencies in 16% to 33% of children severe enough to harm vision and bone and tooth formation.
Their findings built an understanding about the connection between nutrition and school and work readiness. The next objective was establishing a better system to get food to vulnerable Americans.
In 1972, WIC was created as an amendment to the Child Nutrition Act of 1966. Dole worked with Rep. Shirley Chisholm, D-New York, to start this as a pilot program then pushed for its passage into law with co-sponsor Sen. Hubert Humphrey, D-Minnesota.
Food stamps started as a pilot program during the Great Depression, requiring people pay for the stamp coupons to make their dollars stretch. For example, a person would pay $4 and get $6 in stamps. The program lasted through the 1940s and came back in the 1960s in the war on poverty.
People in severe poverty could not afford the stamps. It was rife with fraud on the retailer side with some charging higher prices on items bought with the stamps.
“If you didn’t have that money to put up then you weren’t eligible for the program. It didn’t make any sense to me,” Dole said.
More egregious were the ways states, particularly in the South, abused the system as a way to block or control access to food to Black residents. This was done by adding requirements above the federal eligibility standards.
Food stamps would be taken out of Black sharecroppers’ incomes, limit purchases to more expensive items or restrict where products could be purchased with the stamps. These were meant to block Black usage of the assistance. Some states designed obstacles to keep the most destitute from the program to keep costs down.
The committee determined the entire system was ineffective at feeding hungry Americans.
Policy legacy
In 1977, landmark legislation passed called the Food Stamp Reform Act, which created SNAP (formerly known as food stamps). It made the program completely federally funded to prevent abuses at the state level and eliminated the stamp purchase requirement.
The McGovern-Dole leadership created The Emergency Food Assistance Program and the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservation, which gets food and commodities into banks, pantries and Indigenous-operated programs.
McGovern and Dole reformed the school lunch and breakfast program. In 2022, the two created the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program that takes U.S. agriculture surplus to provide school meals in poverty-stricken countries. It has served life-saving meals to more than 31 million children globally.
The Trump administration in May cancelled contracts with this program, leaving more than 780,000 children across 11 countries without daily school meals provided by the aid group Catholic Relief Services. Trump has proposed in his budget for 2026 to completely eliminate the program.
In 2008, Dole and McGovern were awarded the World Food Prize for their work in anti-hunger domestic and international initiatives.
In 2019, Dole was 95 and asked by the Food Research & Action Center in a video about whether U.S. hunger was eradicated. He did not believe so.
“We need to have more focus on how widespread hunger is,” Dole said.