Richards and Robert Hunter: Advocates for School Lunch Programs
Poverty Revitalizes the School Lunch Movement
While some may have recognized the benefits of school lunch programs as Richards claimed in 1899, the majority of Americans did not believe that such programs were needed at the time. However, after Robert Hunter, a self-trained sociologist and social reformer, published Poverty in 1904, the public’s opinion changed. The author’s vivid account of the impact of malnourishment on children’s physical and mental health convinced Americans that properly fed children developed into polite and efficient adults. As a result, the number of school lunch programs in America greatly increased (2).
Left: Jane Addams’s Hull House, Chicago, n.d, from http://www.janeaddamsbooks.com/
In the late 1890s, Hunter resided at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house that provided immigrants and struggling families with recreational, educational, and health care services. During his time at the settlement house, he worked with many influential reformers, such as Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop.
Every observant mother or teacher has noted the restlessness and the tendency to irritability and ill temper shown by the child when it is kept even a short time from the accustomed meal, especially if it be the noon meal. This condition of mind and body is not favorable to study, and many a child has been called stupid when he was only hungry (9).
It is utter folly, from the point of view of learning, to have a compulsory school law which compels children, in that weak physical and mental state which results in poverty, to drag themselves to school and to sit at their desks, day in and day out, for several years, learning little or nothing. If it is a matter of principle in democratic America that every child shall be given a certain amount of instruction, let us render it possible for them to receive it…by making full and adequate provision for the physical needs of the children who come from the homes of poverty” (2).
Richards and Hunter's Argument
In their respective works, Richards and Hunter both put forth their case for the mass development of school lunch programs across the nation on the argument that students who do not eat an adequate noon meal were incapable of focusing on their studies (2, 9).
Richards’s Plea:
Hunter's Plea:
Hunter’s Appeal
Richards provided her audience with a thorough account and analysis of her scientifically crafted school lunch program. Hunter, however, chose to study the issue of poverty from a humanist’s perspective. In the introduction to his book, he acknowledges that Poverty is not in any way a scientific study of poverty. Hunter did not want to rely upon shocking statistics because “figures come before the eye and are forgotten. [But a person never forgets] one sight of a hundred of these little ones if they were marched out of the mills, mines, and factories before our eyes” (2). Hunter’s ability to produce images of impoverished and malnourished children in the mind of his reader ultimately made his argument more compelling than Richards’s well-written, but dry, scientific report (2, 9).
