On May 29, 1961, Alderson Muncy, an unemployed coal miner from McDowell County, West Virginia, and his wife Chloe were the first recipients of food stamps in the United States. About 13,000 people had qualified for food stamps in McDowell County, and The Muncys, who had 15 children, participated in a pilot project that had been rolled out by the Kennedy administration. A food stamp program had been advocated for some years by a group of bipartisan senators, but it was Kennedy’s first-hand experience when he and his extended family saw poverty in West Virginia during the 1960 presidential primary campaign (shown in the photograph) that propelled the program. Orville L. Freeman, Kennedy’s Secretary of Agriculture, who administered the program, said “…an adequate diet is more than an economic problem, it is a moral problem.”
The successful pilot program led to the Food Stamp Act of 1964 that was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. The food stamp program was replaced by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008. When the Muncy family received their food stamps in 1961, a newspaper reporter interviewed two local supermarket managers who said “most of the purchases in their stores were for staple foods with little, if any, foolish use of the stamps.”
Sources: The Primary That Made A President by Robert Rupp, Charleston Daily Mail, United States Department of Agriculture.
