Washington. -- I remember with pride the day in 1968 when the conservative Reader's Digest commissioned me to write an article about the hunger that was then so widespread in the United States.
I became appalled to learn how many children were being born in America with mental retardation, stunted bodies or organs damaged because of nutritional deprivation starting in the wombs of their ill-fed mothers. I was shocked by Sen. Ernest F. Hollings' admission of the number of children -- even old people -- in South Carolina who suffered from rickets, scurvy and other ailments because they never got enough food, let alone the right kind.
Months after my Digest piece was published, Senator Hollings wrote a book, "The Case Against Hunger," in which he said, "One of the nation's most appalling tragedies is the plight of millions of Americans for whom hunger is an everyday fact of life. Hunger destroys a man physically and mentally so that he is incapable of achieving a meaningful and productive place in society."
He and others demanded -- and got -- a national policy to combat hunger. But politicians in some states refused to make available to their children and pregnant women the nutrition programs, including school lunches, that Congress made available. "I never got no government lunch when I was a kid, and I turned out all right," one Texas official told me.
This philosophy was rejected a generation ago, and Congress established anti-hunger programs that have grown dramatically. We now have a food-stamp program that feeds 27.4 million people at a cost of $23 billion a year; a school-lunch program that nourishes 25 million children at an annual cost of $4.5 billion; A WIC (Women, Infants and Children) nutrition program that protects the health of 6.2 million Americans at an annual cost of $3.1 billion.
The flint-hearted, newly- empowered Republicans in Congress are talking of abolishing these food programs and making lump-sum grants to states. That raises the specter of a return to the days when some state and local officials absolutely refused to spend a dime to combat hunger -- the days when malnutrition was a scourge in myriad counties and precincts.
Will Americans accept a wipeout of these food programs? I say yes when I note the hyped-up hostility to all aid programs that go "to them," usually a derogatory reference to the poor. Leaders of the businesses of America, which themselves get many billions of dollars of federal "welfare" every year, will be eloquent in deploring "the welfare state."
But then I remember a 1970 speech by Donald M. Kendall of PepsiCo before the Whittier, Calif., Chamber of Commerce. He said he hoped for a welfare program that would double both the number of recipients and the amount of money spent on it. He noted that school-lunch, welfare and food-stamp dollars go to buy bread, enriching the farmers of Kansas and Nebraska; to purchase milk and butter, keeping dairy farmers solvent, and grocers, supermarket and mom-and-pop store owners and bottlers of soft drinks happily ringing their cash registers.
"If we wanted a better prop under the economy, we couldn't find one," said the PepsiCo chairman, a close friend of President Nixon.
When Republicans who represent the grain and dairy states and the landlords of welfare properties face the reality of what Donald Kendall said, I think they will say no -- that the GOP plan for abolition of welfare and hunger programs will not fly.
It is a sad little reed to lean on, but I'm guessing that no matter how much Republican congressmen hate the poor, they will not zap the destitute if it takes billions of dollars away from their country-club pals who are their big campaign contributors.
Carl T. Rowan is a syndicated columnist.