Newt Gingrich was for 'food stamps' before he was against them

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and now front-running Republican presidential candidate, has made calling Barack Obama the "food stamp president" his calling card. But Republicans, Gingrich included, have had a strong hand in the expansion of food stamp use.

Gingrich claims (falsely, it turns out) that Obama has "put more Americans on food stamps than any other president in history." (That honor actually goes to George W. Bush.) It's part of Newt's larger narrative that "urban" and low income Americans lack worth ethic -- they should demand "paychecks, and not be satisfied with food stamps," and child labor laws should be relaxed to allow their children to learn the value of earning, rather than stealing, a dollar.

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It's part of Gingrich's long-running rhetorical drive to push America back to a more "moral" -- largely fictional -- past; what a 1994 New York Times editorial called Gingrich's "generalized moral authoritarianism."

Gingrich's grandiose pronouncements about food stamps are seen by many as a subtle appeal to racial tribalism among working class whites, who Gingrich might want to note, happen to make up the majority of food stamp recipients in the U.S. But they are also part of a long-running antipathy to federal aid to the poor among some Republicans that predates Newt.

And they fit into a long running battle by Gingrich and his fellow conservatives to begin to dismantle the "welfare state" created by a Democratic president during the New Deal.

An experimental program

Food stamps have their origins, not in "welfare" for the poor, but in federal attempts to help struggling American farmers during the 1930s. Before that time, private charities and the Red Cross were the only entities to provide for needy Americans. The federal government did not provide aid or subsidies to farmers.

After World War II, when agricultural prices collapsed, farmers clamored for federal loan and other assistance. Two Republican presidents during the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, objected to federal intervention in the agricultural sector, fearing it would distort the market. But by 1930, pressure from farmers forced the Hoover administration to create the Farm Board, which started buying up surplus wheat and other products, and storing it.

As the Great Depression set in, Americans grew outraged at the thought of the government buying and storing food in warehouses while people were starving. Distribution of surplus agricultural products, first to feed livestock in drought-affected states in 1932, and later to the unemployed and the poor, was more a public relations plan than an attempt to create government-funded welfare. And even the modest food aid programs that took place in the early years of the Great Depression happened over the objections of conservatives like Hoover, who thought it undermined the spirit of American work ethic and self-reliance.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed that, starting a pilot program in 1939 that allowed Americans to buy coupons that they could use to purchase the surplus food the Agricultural Department was storing. The "food stamps" were bought, say, for $4 -- and the buyer received $4 worth of orange stamps that could be used to buy any food item, plus another $2 in blue stamps, which could only be used to buy what the government deemed to be surplus. The "face value plus one half" stamps helped struggling Americans buy more food, but the main beneficiaries were still American farmers, and grocery stores, who profited from the spending.