Jamie Whitten: The Permanent Secretary of Agriculture
Kotz, Nick
Jamie Whitten: The Permanent Secretary of Agriculture by Nick Kotz With the sensitive instincts of a successful career bureaucrat, Dr. George Irving scanned the list of states scheduled for...
...Moreover, the Secretary had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the chasm between his department’s efforts and the real needs of the hungry...
...This kind of bureaucraticcongressional maneuvering, exercised between the lines of the law, is little understood, seldom given public scrutiny, and far too infrequently challenged...
...Whitten asked sarcastically...
...With his wily ability to juggle figures and cloud ideas, Whitten convinces officials unfamiliar with his technique (and lacking intimate knowledge of the facts) that he is quite a reasonable manespecially when the converstion turns to hunger and the food programs...
...Irving alerted the government's food aid network...
...In other words, this food stamp program is not to be considered a program just simply to feed people because they cannot get work...
...Sometimes we talk of leaving...
...Years before, the chairman had killed a small pilot project to teach unemployed southern Negroes how to drive tractors...
...Because a majority of these members share Whitten’s outlook on agriculture and his arch-conservative view of social action, the chairman’s will becomes the subcommittee’s will...
...That Jamie Whitten should suffer from blindness to human need is one thing...
...As Mrs...
...the Congressman answered...
...I bet you money if I ran tomorrow, and nobody voted except the colored people, I’d get the majority...
...And as soon as he left, they just turned over and went back to sleep...
...Metcalf to get outside the shack if she knew what was good for her...
...From Freeman on down, every Agriculture Department official knew that hunger spelled ”hound dog’’ to Jamie Whitten...
...At that time, the Mississippi Congressman was the youngest chairman of an appropriations subcommittee...
...As a result, farm policies which have consistently ignored their toll on millions of black - poor have contributed to a rural-urban migration, to a civil rights revolution, and to the ruin of many Americans...
...In actuality, a skillful chairman such as Whitten can control policy, alter the original authorizing legislation, and wind up virtually controlling the administration of a department...
...Since hunger means poverty, and poverty in Mississippi usually means black, any expanded aid to the hungry means one more threat to the socio-economic order in which the black worker has always been held in absolute dependency upon crumbs from the plantation owner.The 100,000 or more black Mississippi farm workers who suddenly found themselves with nothing to hold onto in the winter of 1967 were little concerned with frivolity and wine...
...By making these two helpful points, Whitten blocked the most feasible emergency measures...
...Jamie L. Whitten, as indeed must the Secretary of Agriculture, whose funds come to him through the kindness of the same Mr...
...An eloquent, middle-aged woman told Dr...
...Freeman never fought the issue...
...Oftentimes you don’t fully understand what he meant...
...His belief in the basic laziness, indifference, and unworthiness of the black poor is as strong as his belief in the virtues of a way of life that for three centuries has denied these same black poor any avenues of pursuing ambition, self-respect, or a better future for their children...
...Whitten legally holds the power of the purse, and he exercises it shreydly...
...Actually, the hopelessly inadequate $45 million for food programs Whitten “gave” to Freeman was fought, bought, and paid for by the Administration and Congressional liberals...
...Holland is a blunt man who insists that Section 32 fundsfood dollars from customs receiptsshould be held in reserve to be used at the proper time to boost prices for his state’s citrus, vegetable, and beef industries...
...Whitten wants Mississippi taken off that list," he told I Department of Agriculture food administrator Rodney Leonard...
...Testifying on the proposed food stamp law before the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1964, one Department official boldly suggested that it would not help those with little or no income...
...A suggestion, that’s all you have to have in this business,” admitted Rodney Leonard...
...I told him he had to charge people what they were accustomed to paying for food stamps because that’s what the law says...
...It said that he went through there and everybody turned out to look at him...
...Jamie Whitten truly believes in his own fairness, his idea of good works, and the imagined affection he receives from Negroes back home...
...I grew up where five or six of my closest neighbors were Negroes...
...The Agriculture Department did not halt the practice...
...The rural black does not share in the new prosperity of Mississippi, and some Negroes are worse off than at any time since the Depression...
...Now, that’s a ‘hound dog’ project, and I don’t want to see any more of them,” he had said...
...Whitten expressed concern only about the impact of civil rights sanctions as he slashed the request by two-thirds...
...Indeed, a casual Whitten statement may be so magnified as it is whispered from official to official that the response is more subservient than even the Congressman had in mind...
...Much of Whitten’s power derives from the system within the House of Representatives...
...I just know, I live down there and”1 know...
...Mr...
...This is one of the things you always run into,” he said to Secretary Freeman...
...Who’ll see to it that [funds for food] don’t go for frivolity and wine...
...When President Johnson signed an executive order giving the Agriculture Department responsibility for coordinating the rural war on poverty, Secretary Freeman created a Rural Community Development Service to give the Department a focal point for helping the poor...
...When you start giving people something for nothing, just giving them all they want for nothing, I wonder if you don’t destroy character more than you might improve nutrition...
...The only response he got was ex-marine Freeman’s outthrust jaw and a growl that he was not afraid of anyone and would not be intimidated...
...Metcalf’s safety from the local “law,” the reporter phoned Congressman Whitten in Washington...
...They walked into the Secretary’s office feeling that they yould be welcomed as helpful, authoritative reporters of the facts, and they left feeling that they had been tagged as troublemakers...
...at a July, 1967, hearing on hunger in Mississippi) he wanted to know why Freeman would not modify the food program to reach more of the hungry in Mississippi and elsewhere...
...But the white in the South could not afford to see the truth of the Negroe’s suffering, because to feel that truth would have shattered a whole way of life...
...It is a test of mental agility to remember the original course of a conversation, as one high USDA official noted: “When you check on things with him, Whitten can go all ~ around the barn with you...
...Once a subcommittee makes a decision, the full House Appropriations Committee almost always backs it up...
...Yet in Jamie Whitten’s home county, the thought of having their names known strikes terror among those who have had dealings with the local officials...
...In Southern country jargon, a “hound dog” is always hanging around, useless, waiting to be thrown scraps...
...Robert Coles and three other doctors also found out about Whitten’s influence when they appealed to Orville Freeman...
...In the quiet process of hidden power, a bureaucrat in the Agriculture Department reacts more quickly to a raised eyebrow from Jamie Whitten than to a direct order from the Secretary himself...
...In 1950 he fought for funds for a Department of Agriculture cookbook, and he warned the House it had better concern itself with human as well as animal health...
...This is particularly true with agriculture appropriations, because House Appropriations Chairman George Mahon (D-Tex...
...For 59 years, he has anesthetized his soul to the human misery and indignity only a few yards from his own home and has refused to believe that the responsibility for that indignity lies on his white shoulders...
...In the last year of his Administration, President Johnson steadily refused to adopt proposals for broadened food aid that were drafted within his Administration...
...With Whitten’s inspiration or blessing, Agriculture adopted a regulation permitting the plantation owner to deduct from the sharecropper’s government payments the amount he claimed was owed for the sharecropper’s rent, farming expenses, etc...
...Jamie Whitten's found out Mississippi is on the list and is raising hell...
...The system of seniority and temerity that gives a man such as Jamie Whitten such awesome power must come under more serious public scrutiny if the American system of government is ever to establish itself on the basis of moral concern about the individual human being...
...Time after time, Whitten has requested names and addresses of the poor who complain of ill-treatment in his home state...
...What else would I be saying, I ask you...
...You make stamps available at 30 per cent discount...
...Surplus commodities - barely enough to live on-were distributed in the winter when work ceased on the Mississippi plantation of Senator James Eastland (D-Miss...
...By opposing all studies exploring the effects of a changing agriculture upon people, Whitten helped insure that Agriculture’s farm policy would never include serious consideration of the effects of its programs on sharecroppers or farm workers...
...We were told that we and all the hungry children we had examined and all the other hungry Americans would have to reckon with Mr...
...When Senator Jacob Javits (R-N.Y...
...But the new farming has eliminated thousands of jobs for Negro plantation workers while the segregated social system denies them factory jobs...
...So you latch onto the most obvious point you can find and act on that...
...but you know it’s just no good up there either, we hear...
...You were trespassing when you crossed the fjIississippi state line,” shouted Deputy Sheriff Buck Shaw as he ordered the PBL crew to clear out...
...Thus, in August, 1967, the Johnson Administration's first meaningful attempt to ascertain the facts about hunger in Mississippi was stopped cold by an executive department's fear of one Congressman...
...said Whitten...
...Agriculture officials virtually begged that the special school lunch assistance budget be raised from $2 million to $10 million annually to give meals to an added 360,000 children in poor areas...
...Whitten’s explanations of food programs may have appeared perfectly reasonable to Freeman, Sargent Shriver, and many members of Congress, but their total impact was to stop any reform that would get food to the hungry, His own strongly held view is that the food programs should serve the farm programs, not vice versa, and his actions over the years have halted any kind of aid the Agriculture Department might have directed toward the poor...
...reported after a lengthy investigatiqn that “we have found concrete evidence of chronic hunger and malnutrition in every part of the United States where we have held hearings or conducted hearings,” even the Pentagon rallied to the defense of Jamie Whitten’s system...
...The author of the Defense document, Dr...
...You read The Wall Street Journal...
...The House at large rarely has challenged Agriculture budgets because most nonfarm-bloc members find the subject too complex or dull and rarely take the trouble to inform themselves about it...
...It was designed to coordinate protams meeting all the needs of the rural poor- housing, education, water, foodnot only within the Agriculture Department, but throughout the federal government...
...Jamie Whitten: The Permanent Secretary of Agriculture by Nick Kotz With the sensitive instincts of a successful career bureaucrat, Dr...
...Jamie Whitten’s considerable power is enhanced by his scholarship...
...Do you contemplate having a pilot dinner program-evening meals-called supper where I grew up...
...But it’s no good...
...To strike a happy medium is always a real problem...
...The entire 107,000-man department is tuned in to the Mississippi legislator's every whim...
...He’s with them...
...Halfway down the column his glance froze, and he quickly dialed Congressman Jamie Whitten, the man known in Washington as the "permanent secretary of agriculture...
...Thus Whitten shares some power with Bob Poage of Texas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee...
...Chairman, they've got Mississippi on that malnutrition study list, and I thought you'd want to know about it," dutifully reported Irving, director of the Agriculture Department's Research Service...
...The four congressional committees with which Agriculture must deal undoubtedly are the least receptive of any in Congress to attempts to provide meaningful help to the hardcore rural poor...
...As chairman, he also has a hold over staff appointments...
...Whitten’s decisions are not always understood by the uninitiated...
...Unfortunately, you folks and the folks up here don’t know how to get along...
...then they want them at 50, then 75...
...George Irving scanned the list of states scheduled for the National Nutrition Survey which was to measure the extent of hunger in America...
...When the rural serfs were no longer needed, having been slowly replaced by machines, even that support vanished as the government stopped free commodities in favor of food stamps which the poorest rural people could not afford...
...I think more and more American people are coming to that conclusion...
...He is adamant about suggestions that food programs be moved to the more liberal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...For the better part of 18 years as chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, dapper Jamie L. Whitten has held an iron hand over the Department of Agriculture's budget...
...The kids aren’t eating enough, and you’d have to be wrong in the head, pure crazy to say they are...
...The doctors have not submitted any names,” he wrote one concerned northern lady, assuring her that he would be “most sympathetic and helpful in trying to work this matter out...
...Arnold Schaefer, the project chief...
...After the School Lunch Act was liberalized in 1964, they managed to refuse funding free school lunches for more than two years...
...We swapped vegetables...
...Blacks who declined to turn over their checks were kicked off hundreds of plantations...
...Suddenly the trucks lunged off the highway into the shack’s front yard, surrounding the television crew’s two station wagons: A rifle or shotgun was mounted in the rear window of each truck...
...In theory, an appropriations subcommittee only considers requests for funds to finance programs already approved by Congress...
...and Republicans Odin Langen of Minnesota, Robert H. Michael of Illinois, and Jack Edwards of Alabama...
...Only the beginning of a paunch detracts from a physical sense of strength and energy that radiates from Jamie Whitten...
...For years, Whitten has been in absolute control of all bills before his subcommittee, from the first markup session to the final House vote...
...The House system, therefore, assures more inherent power for its subcommittee chairmen, and Jamie Whitten has been vigorous and skillful in pursuing it...
...threatened to take the fight to the floor...
...Perhaps the white southern politician is no more to blame than are whites anywhere...
...There is no doubt as to the motives of Whitten and the other Congressmen who run the Agriculture Department...
...Do you expect the government, because they cannot catch fish, to feed them until the fish are there...
...By assigning the broad rural poverty responsibility to the Department of Agriculture, President Johnson, Iike President Nixon after him, indicated either a great naiveti, about the Department or a lack of seriousness in his proposals...
...Bureaucratic officials who are familiar with Whitten’s oblique way of expressing his ideas know also that the Mississippian can rattle off complicated economic statistics and arguments with precise logic and organized thought...
...But that he can use this blindness as an excuse to limit the destiny of millions of Americans is another matter, one which should concern anyone who believes in the basic strengths of this country’s constitutional guarantees...
...No one’s with us but ourselves, and no matter how many of us there are, we don’t have what they have...
...Johnson was then trying to get his income surtax bill through the Congress, and he needed the support of Whitten and the rest of the small group of Southern hierarchs...
...When Whitten and Holland act in unison-as they often do-the results are predictable...
...We were told of the problems that the Agriculture Department has with Congress, and we left feeling we ought to weigh those problems as somehow of the same order as the problems we had met in the South-and that we know from our work elsewhere existed all over the country,” recalled Coles...
...They had lost their sole supply of food, as Mississippi counties switched over from the inadequate but free surplus commodities to a food stamp program the poor could not afford...
...The FBI men, who are assigned to the House Appropriations Committee, in effect intimidated people who had provided evidence of hunger...
...Affection, Not Cash Whitten’s affection for black constituents like this woman does not extend to federal measures to assist their lot in life, Of the 24,081 residents of Tallahatchie County, 18,000 have family incomes less than the poverty level, of $3,000 a year, and 15,197 make less than $2,000...
...One of Whitten’s sharecropper constituents, trying desperately to find food for her family, gave her own intuitive view of her Congressman’s attitudss: “He’s probably with the bossman’s side, don’t you know...
...man is literally being starved out by the new prosperity...
...I suspect Deputy Shaw’s like I am,” Whitten snapped...
...Committee Chairman Allen J. Ellender (D-La...
...I know that in my state we had a number of fishermen who were unable to catch fish,” retorted Ellender...
...Robert Coles about the plantation owner for whom her husband works, about his wife, about food, and about life in America: “He [the plantation owner] doesn’t want us trying to vote and like thatand first I’d like to feed my kids, before I go trying to vote...
...In an attempt to insure Mrs...
...They, in turn, anticipate his scrutiny by checking planned moves with him, thus extending to him a virtual veto on the most minute details...
...He had heard, the chairman said, that “organized groups” sought to make food stamps free to the poor...
...You’re trespassing...
...For all his dynamic presence, Whitten has d way of confounding a listeneror potential critic-with silky southern rhetoric...
...Once you fully understand his do’s and don’ts and establish rapport with him, life is a whole lot easier...
...Part of the power of a chairman stems from his apparent invincibility-and the image must be preserved...
...Whitten and the other powerful southern Congressmen who share his views insured that the Department would focus only on the cotton planter and his crop...
...If some members, or the public, are roused to the point where a challenge develops, the House’s committee chairmen generally pull together to defeat the move...
...And I pointed out to him that the law forbids selling food stamps and distributing commodities in the same counties...
...Johnson declined to risk possible loss of critical votes on the war- and inflation-related surtax...
...You remember when Martin Luther King went through my town...
...She tells me we get along fine down here and I says ‘yes’ to her...
...Committee members follow to insure that they will have the chairman’s support for their own pet bills - and to keep sacrosanct the whole system of mutual support and protection...
...Mississippi's out - politics !" Silver said curtly...
...Whispers of “planned starvation” emerged from the economic crisis of 1967, when the combination of production cutbacks in cotton, automated machinery, and the end of free commodities left the Deep South with thousands of blacks who were unneeded - and hungry...
...I think we'd better drop it," Leonard said...
...Silver, recalling HEW Secretary Wilbur Cohen's order to "avoid unnecessary political friction" in choosing the sample states for the hunger survey, called Dr...
...Where agriculture legislation is concerned, Whitten must share power to some measure with Senator Spessard Holland, a Florida Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture...
...Surplus Serfs What the food stamp program was “supposed to be” was a substitute for a free commodity program that had outlived its usefulness- to Southern plantation owners...
...The key to this phenomenal powerwhich goes beyond that of budget controllies in Whitten’s network of informants within the Department, and his skill in directing their activities and operations...
...There were as many Negroes as whites at his father’s funeral, Whitten asserts-and he keeps on his desk a yellowed 1936 newspaper editorial that praised District Attorney Jamie Whitten for successfully prosecuting the white man who burned some Mississippi Negroes to death...
...George, we're not going to have another smear campaign against Mississippi, are we ? "declared Whitten to his informant...
...he asks...
...The stocky, 59-year-old Congressman is not shy about his meteoric rise from a country store in Tallahatchie County to a key position in the nation's capital...
...Indeed, in many parts of the Deep South the black...
...Other government programs, including state tax inducements, have promoted wide industrialization, and rural white workers have found a new affluence in the hundreds of factories and small shops that have sprung up...
...He’s got the most phenomenal information and total recall,” one Agriculture official says of Whitten...
...How can you help’ me with Whitten...
...He is a conscientious student of every line of the Agriculture budget, and his hawk’seye is legendary among department officials...
...I’m no kingfish...
...Rodney Leonard...
...In the spring, when the $3-a-day planting jobs opened up, the food aid ended...
...The decisions of the white supremacists in Congress, supported by the subservient Department of Agriculture, contributed to that result...
...Jamie Whitten has wielded that kind of influence since the mid-l940’s, when he killed an emerging Agriculture study which tried to anticipate the social and economic problems of Negro GI’s returning from World War I1 to the feudal cotton South...
...but once Whitten discovered the grant program in operation, he killed all further appropriations for it...
...Under the feudal system of the plantation, however, the sharecropper never had any legal guarantee that he would receive his fair share of profit for the crop he produced...
...A news team from television’s Public Broadcast Laboratory, interviewing a black housewife in Whitten’s home town of Charleston, felt the danger involved in “naming names...
...more than one million persons, including 100,000 in Mississippi, were forced to drop out of the food program...
...In fact, as George Irving pointed out about his conversation with the Congressman that lad to dropping Mississippi from the national hunger survey, “He wasn’t saying ‘don’t go to Mississippi,’ he was just suggesting that we think about other places...
...His steely self-confidence, studied informality, and carefully conservative clothes suggest anything but the stereotype of country-lawyer-cometoWashington...
...he sends a free copy to newlyweds in his district...
...Whitten thought the Service smacked of social experimentation and civil rights ,” a Department of Agriculture official said...
...George Silver, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, who was responsible for the joint USDA-HEW malnutrition survey...
...Whitten’s power goes beyond the Secretary to the Presidency itself...
...The subcommittee chairman also denies that he paralyzed Freeman on the hunger issue: “I helped the Secretary by making two points with him,” Whitten insists...
...The lines in my face would be deeper except for you,” Mahon inscribed his own portrait in the Mississippian’s office...
...Yet when viewed against the background of Tallahatchie County and its social history, these views, and their interpretations through Agriculture programs, take on a different meaning...
...The Pentagon-financed Institute for Defense Analyses published an attack on Hunger USA, the book that contained the Board of Inquiry report...
...I just know my people and my people get along...
...Therefore, Whitten went along with the Nixon Administration’s full budget request for food aid in 1969, knowing there was sufficient pressure for a much bigger appropriation...
...Whitten’s view on welfare, so strongly felt through the Department of Agriculture, are shared by many Americans...
...Getting Along With Whitten Even the Secretary himself feels he must bend to the power of the “permanent Secretary...
...Secretaries of Agriculture come and go, but Jamie Whitten remains, a product of Mississippi’s political oligarchy and the seniority system in Congress...
...They eat better, but they have had things up there I hear, rats as big as raccoons I hear, and they bit my sister’s kid real bad, “It’s no kind of country to be proud of, with all this going on-the colored people still having it so bad, and the kids being sick and there’s nothhg you can do about it...
...Sharecroppers, who provided most of the cotton labor force, were supposed to receive their “share” of government payments for idle land...
...Bureaucratic allies of a particular Congressman may be able to inject that Congressman’s political views (or their own) into laws or programs sponsored by the Administration without the consent, or even the knowledge, of the department head...
...Against Whitten’s statements about how he is respected by Negroes and would get their vote, about how close his relationship and understanding with Negroes has been, about how quiet and peaceful life is in Charleston, another point of view appeared, as one of his black constituents spoke on the same subject-rambling much as Jamie Whitten does...
...When Agriculture Department officials explained that “a hungry child in the morning is not able to take full advantage of the schooling that is offered,’’ Whitten wanted to know why the government should be supplying what the family should have supplied before they left home...
...In addition to Chairman Whitten, the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee has seven members: Democrats William H. Natcher of Kentucky, W. R. Hull, Jr., of Missouri, George Shipley of Illinois, and Frank Evans of Colorado...
...Of these thousands legally defined as poor, only 2,367 qualify for public assistance, and 6,710 receive food stamps...
...As counties throughout the nation changed from commodities to food stamps, participation fell off by 40 per cent...
...Just back from a study of hunger in Mississippi in April, 1967, Dr...
...It wasn’t so peaceful about three o’clock that afternoon with those hardeyed men threatening Mrs...
...To this day, Whitten insists that the Agriculture Department keep the book in print...
...Metcalf, the reporter explained...
...In addition, Whitten’s brother-inlaw, one of many cronies who have filled Agriculture jobs over the years, had clashed with Robert G. Lewis, the idealistic Wisconsin progressive who headed the program...
...highway about 50 yards from her plantation shack...
...The checks and balances of a reasonable democratic republic have gone completely awry when a huge bureaucracy and the top officials of an administration base their actions concerning deepest human need on their fearful perception of what one rather limited man seems to want...
...and on the huge Texas ranches...
...With his implicit power, Whitten doesn’t have to threaten or be specific...
...Metcalf began to explain why the food stamp and school lunch programs were not helping her family, a task force of sedans and panel trucks began to cruise back and forth on the US...
...Now, I have heard reports that some of the organized minority groups are insisting they be provided free of charge...
...Nevertheless, faced with Jamie Whitten’s power over his department, and fed information by a Whitten-conscious bureaucracy, Freeman had failed for two years to take measures to fnsd more of the hungry poor in America...
...Every one of them would give any amount of money if they could go to sleep feeling as safeboth races-as my folks will...
...shares Whitten’s views on farm policy, welfare spending, and racial issues...
...Executive branch officials learn to protect their own jobs, adjusting their loyalties to the legislative branch in a way the founding fathers may not have envisioned when they devised their splendid system of checks and balances...
...Whitten and his fellow white Mississippians point with great pride to the economic progress their state has made in recent years...
...His wife- the boss man’s- she’ll come over here sometimes and give me some extra grits and once or twice in the year some good bacon...
...The able-bodied usually head north, leaving the very young, the very old, and the unskilled to cope with “progress...
...indignantly dismissed this complaint against the bill, revealing clearly his own legislative intent...
...Good God, Chicago, Washington, Detroit...
...Whitten’s opposition to any program resembling social welfare-or aid to Negroescontributed to the failure of war on poverty programs for rural America...
...When a delegation headed by Richard Boone of the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty had asked Orville Freeman to provide free stamps and commodities to help the hungry in Mississippi, the Secretary told them: “I’ve got to get along with two people in Washington- the President and Jamie Whitten...
...We played together as kids...
...This is not what it is supposed to be...
...A few years later, a new cotton program provided advance payments to cotton farmers for withdrawing some of their acreage from production...
...When another project-a requested million dollars for a pilot school breakfast program to help the neediest youngsterscame up, Whitten’s patience wore thin...
...Robert Coles and Harry Huge, “We Need Help,” The New Republic, March 8, 1969...
...When a private group investigating hunger, the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry...
...Congressman at 31 (in 1941), and chairman of an appropriations subcommittee at 36...
...Whitten responded here only to the politics of the issue, not the substance, for he still complained to Senator George McGovern that hunger was not a problem, that “Nigras won’t work” if you give them free food, and that McGovern was promoting revolution by continuing to seek free food stamps for the poorest Americans...
...No work, no money, and now, no food,” was their outcry, and they desperately sought a reduction in the price of stamps at the very moment when Jamie Whitten was starting his annual review of the Department of Agriculture’s budget, with its accompanying discourses on the nature of the poor man...
...We all recognize that the type of home from which some children come affects them in many, many ways, but there is a problem always as to whether the federal government should start doing everything for the citizens...
...Within a year, the Rural Community Development Service was dead...
...asked Agriculture Secretary Freeman, “What are you afraid of in Mississippi...
...In 1968, when the drive for a bigger food program began to gather steam nationally, Whitten sent out the FBI to disprove the evidence of the problem...
...growled the plantation manager as he pushed his way past the TV reporter and ordered Mrs...
...And his record is impressivetrial lawyer and state legislator at 21, district attorney for five counties at 23, U.S...
...Why, I gave him more money for those food programs than he could spend...
...They built a lot of character in Mississippi that winter, where the disruption caused by the abrupt changeover to food stamps contributed to the kind of wholesale destitution not seen in this country since the Great Depression...
...Back at the Department of Agriculture, food administrator Leonard snapped at Jamie Whitten's informant, "You couldn't have killed the project any better if you had planned it...
...As he tells it, he was a pioneer on the the nutrition issue...
...There were too many other matters, other appropriations, that were more important to him, so the embryonic effort to coordinate rural poverty programs through the Department of Agriculture ended as little more than a passing idea...
...this was what was left after Whitten and Holland whittled down the original $100 million, three-year authorization won by liberals on the House floor...
...If a challenge happens to get out of hand, the first commandment of a subcommittee chairman is “Never let yourself in for a battle on the House floor if there is any chance for defeat...
...They recognized when you crossed that state line you had no good intention in your mind...
...In the early 1960’s, when the Kennedy Administration was momentarily concerned for the poor of Appalachia, Agriculture found a way to provide housing grants to aid the hardest-core poor...
...Only a few blocks from Whitten’s own white frame home, Negroes live in shacks without toilets, running water, electricity-or food...
...You may end up with a certain class of people doing nothing to help themselves...
...The federal government eased the planter’s responsibility by keeping his workers alive during the winter, then permitted the counties that administered the program to withdraw that meager support during planting season-forcing the workers to accept near-starvation wages for survival...
...Out of work and out of money, few Mississippi Negroes could afford to give their children 25 cents a day for a school lunch, and few schools provided the free lunches which the law technically required for the poor...
...But the chairman did not seem to think his black constituents were learning the character lesson well enough when it came to the school lunch and new school breakfast programs...
...Each time a group of doctors, team of reporters, or other investigators produced firsthand reports of hunger in the South, Whitten launched his own “investigation” and announced that parental neglect is largely responsible for any problems...
...Leonard, in turn, called Dr...
...Jamie Whitten’s power is greater than Holland’s, however, not only because appropriations usually originate in the House, but also because in the smaller body of the Senate there is less hesitation to overturn subcommittee decisions than in the tradition-bound House of Representatives...
...The Johnson Administration had sought only $2-3 million to help some of the estimated five million poor children who got no benefits from the lunch program, but all the funds were held back in committee until Senator Philip Hart (DMich...
...The Mississippi Congressman demands that the poor, if they are to get any benefits, must prove they are hungry on a case-by-case basis...
...Time after time, a few words from Jamie Whitten can harden into gospel at the Department of Agriculture...
...Why, I grew up hugging my Momma, and my Momma hugging them...
...You’ve got to understand how Jamie feels about ‘hound dog’ projects,” a career official explained...
...Herbert Pollack, took the position that ignorance was at the root of any hunger problems in the U.S.-the same position taken by Whitten and his Congressional allies...
...You boys should be thinking about a national survey-and do some studies in Watts and Hough and Harlem...
...In this case, Whitten struck it by cutting all $6.5 million requested for breakfast funds from the budget...
...Wine for Mississippi Although much of the legislation he favors has enriched American agricultural business with government funds, Whitten’s stock answer to any proposed liberalization of the Department of Agriculture food programs is that they are “food programs, not welfare programs...
...His appropriations subcommittee [doles out funds for every item in the Agriculture Department’s $7 billion budget, and it does not take long for Washington bureaucrats to realize that the chairman’s wrath can destroy precious projects and throw hundreds of people out of jobs...
...Whitten simply cut off the funds, and pigeonholed the coordinating powers of RCDS by placing the responsibility with the docile, conservative Farmers Home Administration...
...Improved farming methods, conversion of marginal cropland to timber and other uses, and a strong soil bank program have gre3tly enriched the commercial farmer in Mississippi...
Vol. 1 • October 1969 • No. 9
