Sacred Commodities: The New Deal’s Threat to American Children’s Bodies

The New Deal plan to restore the agricultural economy was a flashpoint for citizens because it lay at the impasse between moral obligations and capitalist imperatives, at a moment when widespread hunger and agricultural plenty were visibly concomitant. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to decrease production and, initially, to destroy livestock and crops. Many condemned the program for wasting food and land in the face of children’s hunger. By bringing the theoretical insights of performance studies to bear upon archival practice, this paper explores how promotional performances for the AAA produced by the Roosevelt administration and protests produced in opposition to this legislation staged the critical necessity of certain foods to American children’s bodies in order to render the moral stakes of the New Deal’s program.

In 1930s America, milk was a “sacred commodity.” This phrase is used to refer to a belief that certain foods were vital to Americans’ physical well-being, while participation in capitalist exchange was vital to the performance of citizenship. Milk was “vital” to forging strong American children and so it was imperative for women – the “natural” nurturers – to obtain milk for their families. Thoroughly entrenched in the social practices of capitalism, 1930s consumers’ entitlements also hinged on the exercise of choice, considered an enactment of individuality and freedom. Because consumers’ ability to purchase vital foods was imperiled by the AAA and the economic crisis so were embodied ways of being Americans and raising America’s future leaders – the children. In each protest and performance examined, this commonsense episteme of food intersected with ideologically-laden performance practices to communicate an American moral order. Each is also eloquent of how gendered, racialized, and class-based conceptions of Americanness circumscribed the notion of a human right to food, even in the midst of pervasive want.