The $100,000 in dispute seemed hardly a sum to spur debate in the Senate, which routinely approves multimillion-dollar measures. What prompted Senate Majority Whip Ted Kennedy to lead a successful floor battle against the cut in a minor committee's budget last week was the conviction that something much bigger was at stake.
In the fight to meet the original budgetary needs of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Kennedy and other Democrats decided that the time had come to rebel against the Senate's Pavlovian habit of slashing non-defense appropriations while passing military spending bills unscathed. The grim testimony presented to the "hun- ger committee" proved the validity of that position.
Largely ignored, millions of Americans are hungry and sick in poverty pockets across the nation. Yet in some areas, especially the South, local, state and federal officials have refused even to acknowledge the problem in their own bailiwicks. Last week their disingenuous silence was broken by Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina.
While Governor of the state (1959-63), the junior Senator admitted, he had supported "the public policy of covering up the problem of hunger" in order to attract new industry to South Carolina. Hollings told the committee of the misery he had encountered there on a recent ten-day tour of impoverished counties. "There is hunger in South Carolina," said Hollings. "There is pellagra, a disease supposedly nonexistent in this country. [There are] rickets and scurvy." He was especially shaken by the high incidence of parasitic worms among the rural, poor, who often live without even the most primitive forms of sanitation.
Even crueler than the physical disabilities that accompany chronic malnutrition is the apparent mental retardation suffered by children who barely survive on deficient diets. Says Hollings: "Many is the time that friends have pointed a finger and said, 'Look at that dumb nigger.' The charge is all too often accurate. But not because of the color of his skin. He is dumb because we denied him food. Dumb in infancy, he has been blighted for life."
Hollings' testimony was supported by several nutrition experts and social welfare workers who stressed the problem of parasites. Of 177 children they examined in Beaufort County, S.C., 98 were infested with intestinal worms, which sometimes grow to a foot in length. They reported that many of the children get only 800 calories a day. That, asserted Vanderbilt University Pediatrician Dr. James P. Carter, is "certainly not enough to support the child—and rarely enough to support the worms."