An Underdeveloped Country

The $100,000 in dispute seemed hardly a sum to spur debate in the Senate, which routinely approves multimillion-dollar measures. What prompted Senate Majority Whip Ted Kennedy to lead a successful floor battle against the cut in a minor committee's budget last week was the conviction that something much bigger was at stake.

In the fight to meet the original budgetary needs of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Kennedy and other Democrats decided that the time had come to rebel against the Senate's Pavlovian habit of slashing non-defense appropriations while passing military spending bills unscathed. The grim testimony presented to the "hun- ger committee" proved the validity of that position.

Largely ignored, millions of Americans are hungry and sick in poverty pockets across the nation. Yet in some areas, especially the South, local, state and federal officials have refused even to acknowledge the problem in their own bailiwicks. Last week their disingenuous silence was broken by Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina.

While Governor of the state (1959-63), the junior Senator admitted, he had supported "the public policy of covering up the problem of hunger" in order to attract new industry to South Carolina. Hollings told the committee of the misery he had encountered there on a recent ten-day tour of impoverished counties. "There is hunger in South Carolina," said Hollings. "There is pellagra, a disease supposedly nonexistent in this country. [There are] rickets and scurvy." He was especially shaken by the high incidence of parasitic worms among the rural, poor, who often live without even the most primitive forms of sanitation.

Even crueler than the physical disabilities that accompany chronic malnutrition is the apparent mental retardation suffered by children who barely survive on deficient diets. Says Hollings: "Many is the time that friends have pointed a finger and said, 'Look at that dumb nigger.' The charge is all too often accurate. But not because of the color of his skin. He is dumb because we denied him food. Dumb in infancy, he has been blighted for life."

Hollings' testimony was supported by several nutrition experts and social welfare workers who stressed the problem of parasites. Of 177 children they examined in Beaufort County, S.C., 98 were infested with intestinal worms, which sometimes grow to a foot in length. They reported that many of the children get only 800 calories a day. That, asserted Vanderbilt University Pediatrician Dr. James P. Carter, is "certainly not enough to support the child--and rarely enough to support the worms."

Few Free Lunches. Paul Matthias, director of the South Carolina Council on Human Relations, told the committee that school-lunch programs have been stopped in six of the 15 South Carolina school districts where federal funds have been withheld for noncompliance with the federal school-desegregation law. This eliminated the only real meal that many poor children ever got during the day. Matthias also testified that in the town of Union, all schools were given additional federal food funds except one all-black high school, where only 300 of the 1,000 students receive lunches, and only ten children get them free. He reported that some Negro children, after switching to integrated schools, were told to go back to black schools if they wanted free lunches.

Too Big a Lump. Mrs. Landon Butler, a volunteer worker among the poor, testified that only 15% of the 18,000 people with incomes below $3,000 participated in the food-stamp program in Beaufort County. The stamps, which cost as little as $2 per month for those with incomes of less than $100 per month, were simply too high. Said Mrs. Butler: "The lump sum outlay of cash required to purchase the stamps makes it impossible for a majority of the low-income families to benefit from the program. The response I received from those eligible but not participating was the same over and over again: 'I can't afford it. It costs too much.' "

This problem may be at least temporarily relieved in some areas of South Carolina. Following his testimony, Hollings and South Dakota Senator George McGovern, chairman of the committee investigating hunger, met with Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin. Within a week, said Hardin, free food stamps should be available to needy families in Beaufort and equally deprived Jasper County. When Hollings walked into a Democratic Campaign Committee luncheon the day after Hardin's Anouncement. Ted Kennedy stood, shook his hand and said: "Well, I'll be damned!

You did in one day what Bobby tried to do for a year and a half."

While the testimony thus far has focused on South Carolina, the committee will investigate hunger in impoverished areas in a dozen states. In two weeks, the committee will hold hearings on hunger among migrant workers in Florida's Collier and Palm Beach counties.

Later in March, it will investigate Boston's school-lunch program. These field trips will be followed by others to Appalachia, to Indian reservations and to the Mexican American ghettos. By exploring and exposing the plight of the poor, sick and undernourished, the hunger committee will surely demonstrate that for a sizable segment of its populace, the U.S. is an underdeveloped country.

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