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100 Early medical inspections’ revelation that a sizable proportion of urban schoolchildren showed signs of malnutrition and underfeeding did not come as a complete surprise to either school hygienists or the general public. That a significant number of city schoolchildren might be going to school hungry or suffering from the consequences of poor and inadequate nutrition had been the object of public discussion since at least 1904, when a muckraking moderate socialist and former Hull House worker named Robert Hunter ventured in Poverty, his influential survey of the extent, nature, causes, and consequences of poverty in the United States, that “there must be thousands—very likely sixty or seventy thousand children—in New York City alone who often arrive at school hungry and unfitted to do well the work required.”1 A structuralist who tied poverty to changes in work and family life wrought by industrialization and urbanization, Hunter considered his estimate relatively cautious and just one of many he used to illustrate the extent of poverty among urban laboring families.2 Yet nothing else he wrote in the book received such an immediate and dramatic response. He later recalled: “Quite incidentally in my book Poverty I made an estimate of the number of underfed children in New York City. If our experts or our general reading public had been at all familiar with the subject, my estimate would probably have passed without comment, and, in any case, it would not have been considered unreasonable. But the public did not seem to realize that this was yet another way of stating the volume of distress , and, consequently, for several days the newspapers throughout the country discussed the statement and some instances severely criticized it.”3 Hunter was not exaggerating in his description of the response. A Bureau of Education Building Up the Malnourished, the Weakly, and the Vulnerable Penny Lunches and Open-Air Schools Chapter 4 Building Up the Malnourished, the Weakly, and the Vulnerable 101 report noted that “this cautious statement of Mr. Hunter was so garbled by sensational papers that the report was soon in circulation that Robert Hunter had said that there were 60,000 to 70,000 starving children in New York. The result was hysterical excitement.”4 Indeed, especially after New York School Superintendent William Maxwell declared in a 1904 National Education Association meeting at the St. Louis Exposition that there were hundreds of thousands of hungry children in the nation’s urban schools, starving city schoolchildren became something of a cause célèbre, with newspapers and magazines around the nation picking up the story and quoting principals and teachers on the number of children who came to school hungry.5 One reason that Hunter’s and Maxwell’s assertions and the observations of interviewed educators caused such a furor was that neither the American public nor the press had previously considered child hunger a serious national problem. Although the severe depression that began in 1893 had exposed the depth of poverty in American cities, and muckraking journalists like Jacob Riis had given some visibility to poor urban children, most Americans seemed to believe that the overall number of hungry children in the nation was relatively small. After all, the United States was distinguished by its plentiful and comparatively affordable food supply, and American workers were widely believed to be better fed and bigger than their European counterparts.6 Widespread child hunger, evidenced by urban schools filled with the empty-bellied children of the laboring classes, was believed to be a feature of European and especially English cities, not American. In fact, for decades Americans had been reading about the ragged and hungry schoolchildren that compulsory education laws were purportedly pulling into schools in London and Paris. More recently, US newspapers and magazines had widely reported the findings of Great Britain ’s Committee on Physical Deterioration, which estimated that 16 percent of London schoolchildren were seriously malnourished and fingered poor nutrition in childhood as a primary reason why so many recruits from the laboring classes had been rejected as unfit for military service during the Boer War.7 Referencing the reports of hungry schoolchildren on the other side of the Atlantic, Edward Devine, of the New York Charity Organization Society, offered the following observation about the furor provoked by Hunter’s estimate: For some years there have come stories from over the sea that compulsory education was revealing an appalling degree of wretchedness in the towns of England and on...

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