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10. “Hunger in America” and the Power of Television: Poor People, Physicians, and the Mass Media in the War against Poverty
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10 “Hunger in America” and the Power of Television Poor People, Physicians, and the Mass Media in the War against Poverty LAURIE B. GREEN 211 in the most riveting scene of the 1968 CBS documentary“Hunger in America,”prominent white pediatrician Raymond Wheeler asks black fourteen-year-old Charles, who is seated beside his younger brother and sister in their grim, dimly lit home in Hale County,Alabama, what he has for lunch at school. “Nothing,” responds Charles shyly, as the camera zooms in. He has told Wheeler that he has peas for breakfast, but only sometimes. His school provides subsidized lunches, but Charles says he doesn’t have the twenty-five cents to pay.“Well, what do you do while the other children are eating?”queries Wheeler.“Just sit there.”“Where do you sit?”“I sit where all the children be seated,” Charles tells him. “How do you feel toward the other children who are eating when you don’t have anything?” “Be ashamed,” Charles admits, now in a near whisper. “Why are you ashamed?”“Because I don’t have any money,” the boy says. A voice-over by famous CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt earlier reported that Charles’s family couldn’t afford food stamps, which were not free but had to be purchased monthly. Wheeler, examining Charles’s younger brother and sister before turning to the boy, has told us that such children“get up hungry, go to bed hungry, and never know anything else in between.”The resulting malnutrition impairs children’s physical and mental development, he asserts,“and they never catch up. Malnutrition impairs their performance for life.”1 For most people who watched“Hunger in America,”Charles and his siblings represented the most vulnerable faces of hunger in the United States, which in 1967 had been “discovered” in the Mississippi Delta by Robert F. Kennedy and other senators. Kennedy and the rest of the 212 LAURIE B. GREEN committee had reported their shock at finding conditions they associated with world hunger—that is, hunger in poor nations.2 Produced by Martin Carr and associate produced by Peter Davis, the show aired on May 21, 1968, as part of the network’s CBS Reports documentary series.3 Besides the Hale County segment, three others featured Mexican Americans in San Antonio, whites in Loudoun County, Virginia, and Navajos in Tuba City, Arizona. Television allowed viewers to imagine these malnourished children as individuals and to see beyond the immediate crisis to the potential for permanent developmental damage and psychological scarring. Viewers could identify with the children’s suffering; by helping them, one could secure hope for their future. So, too, did another medical sequence stir powerful responses, this one occurring a few minutes into the documentary and filmed in an emergency pediatric ward in San Antonio. The camera focuses on a doctor’s attempt to resuscitate an infant, who unexpectedly died as this footage was being shot. We hear Kuralt’s voice-over: “Hunger is easy to recognize when it looks like this.” He continues, “This baby is dying of starvation. He was an American. Now he is dead.”This is not an intimate scene that stirs compassion and hope. It establishes that hunger is a tragedy striking American citizens. These two stunning scenes, opposite in many ways, melded the shame felt by the individual child with the shame of the American public for its government’s inaction. “Hunger in America”captured more attention than any other salvo in the fiercely contested political battle over hunger that erupted in the late 1960s. It also provoked more response than had any television documentary to date. CBS News president Richard Salant reported to his colleagues that 300 callers had phoned the night the show aired, many to inquire about how to send money to the people in the program , and that callers had kept two secretaries busy the entire next day.4 The broadcast also prompted a hail of criticism from southern congressmen, the secretary of agriculture, and citizens who accused CBS of fabricating the existence of starvation. “Hunger in America” swept all the major television awards, even as CBS contended with a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiry. Eleven months earlier, in June 1967, the publication of Hungry Children by Wheeler and five other physicians who toured Mississippi [3.93.59.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:53 GMT) “HUNGER IN AMERICA” 213 after the “discovery of hunger” had cemented their harrowing...