Lisa Levenstein and Jennifer Mittelstadt: Obama and His Food Stamp Fight

Lisa Levenstein is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of "A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia." Jennifer Mittelstadt is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of "From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965."

The nation's food stamp program is an essential part of the American safety net. Why? Because people can't be productive — in school, at work or looking for work — if they are hungry and fearful about not having enough food to feed their families....

Food stamps were first conceived during the Depression as part of a Keynesian approach to priming the economic pump. And it was the grocery industry, not social welfare advocates, that pushed for them. The architects of the program emphasized that it bolstered household consumption and shored up the retail economy.

Food stamps aimed to replace the government's in-kind food distribution, which had forced the hungry to line up for government cheese and excess produce, sometimes off the back of trucks. Grocers preferred to have people standing in lines in their stores than standing in lines to take surplus food. Once the program was started, the grocery industry advertised the stamps to homemakers as smart, money-saving shopping tools....