“Saving Babies for Two Dimes a Day": The Politics of Race, Poverty, and Malnutrition after the Fall of Jim Crow

America “discovered” hunger within its own borders in the mid-1960s, as civil rights activists dramatically exposed the extremes of poverty that persisted despite legal triumphs over racial segregation. As local struggles against poverty and malnutrition captured attention, federal officials, journalists, and physicians organized investigations, hearings, legislative efforts, news stories and television documentaries. Collectively, these disparate efforts pressured President Nixon into sponsoring a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health, held in late 1969. The revelation that malnutrition afflicted large numbers of poor people in the U.S., particularly children, marked a departure from dominant public policy. Since the conclusion of World War II, U.S. foreign policy and international development agencies had designated hunger and the illnesses it caused as problems of the developing world. In a striking reversal, hunger in the U.S. became an international news story fixated on whether the presumptive global leader in democracy would be able to solve its domestic crisis. Yet the ramifications of these international relations went beyond world politics. Transnational medical research into the causes, results, and solutions to malnutrition, in sites as diverse as Guatemala and Taiwan, along with similar projects in the U.S., helped shape beliefs about health and hunger. The resulting federal policies were organized around such principles as the view that “saving babies for two dimes a day” – by distributing nutritional supplements – could stave off future social unrest and unfit citizens. As this paper shows, such perspectives competed directly with – and ultimately won over – ideas of liberation and self-determination espoused by many poor African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans who struggled to end hunger