1. Sherrill, Robert, “Why Can’t We Just Give Them Food?” New York Times Magazine, 22 March 1970, 98Google Scholar.

2. Eisinger, Peter K., Toward an End to Hunger in America (Washington, D.C., 1998), 36Google Scholar. The two other significant social programs administered by the USDA were surplus commodity distribution, discussed below, and the school lunch program, whose legislative history is well told in Levine, Susan, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, The Food Stamp Program: History, Description, Issues, and Options, 99th Cong., 1st sess., 1985, 171Google Scholar.

4. On Congress and the food stamp program, see Berry, Jeffrey M., Feeding Hungry People: Rulemaking in the Food Stamp Program (New Brunswick, 1984)Google Scholar; Ferejohn, John, “Log-Rolling in an Institutional Context: A Case Study of Food Stamp Legislation,” in Congress and Policy Change, ed. Wright, Gerald C. Jr., Rieselbach, Leroy N., and Dodd, Lawrence C. (New York, 1986), 223–54Google Scholar; King, Ronald, Budgeting Entitlements: The Politics of Food Stamps (Washington, D.C., 2000)Google Scholar; Maney, Ardeth, Still Hungry After All These Years: Food Assistance Policy from Kennedy to Reagan (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. On congressional reform, see especially Rohde, David W., Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheppard, Burton D., Rethinking Congressional Reform: The Reform Roots of the Special Interest Congress (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Zelizer, Julian E., On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000 (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

5. Fenno, Richard F., Congressmen in Committees (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. See also Deering, Christopher J. and Smith, Steven S., Committees in Congress, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C., 1997), 63–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. For the argument that “the 1970s reforms had the greatest impact on policy committees,” see Deering and Smith, Committees in Congress, 72–74.

7. Three major contending theories emphasize differing sources of committee power, or differing respective “principals”: outside interest groups and constituencies; the congressional party caucuses; and the parent chambers themselves. For the first model, see especially Shepsle, Kenneth A. and Weingast, Barry R., “The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power,” American Political Science Review 81 (1987): 85–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Weingast, and Marshall, William J., “The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets,” Journal of Political Economy 96, no. 1 (1988): 132–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the second, see Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Matthew D., Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993)Google Scholar, and Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; for the third, see Krehbiel, Keith, Information and Legislative Organization (Ann Arbor, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A deft effort to incorporate institutional context and change over time into a “conditional model of committee behavior” is Maltzman, Forrest, Competing Principals: Committees, Parties, and the Organization of Congress (Ann Arbor, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. The term is Kenneth A. Shepsle’s. See Shepsle, , “The Changing Textbook Congress,” in Can the Government Govern? ed. Chubb, John E. and Peterson, Paul (Washington, D.C., 1989), 238–66Google Scholar.

9. On contemporary party polarization and its manifestation in Congress, see, most recently, Sinclair, Barbara, Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making (Norman, Okla., 2006)Google Scholar.

10. For accounts of the original food stamp program, enacted in 1939, see Berry, , Feeding Hungry People, 21–24Google Scholar; and Poppendieck, Janet, Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression (New Brunswick, 1986), 234–42Google Scholar.

11. Leonor Sullivan, interview with Katie Louchheim, 2 September 1976, Katie Louchheim Oral Histories, 1974–1976, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

12. Sullivan interview, 2 September 1976, Louchheim Oral Histories. Also see Ripley, Randall B., “Legislative Bargaining and the Food Stamp Act, 1964,” in Congress and Urban Problems, ed. Cleaveland, Frederic N. (Washington, D.C., 1969), 282–88Google Scholar.

13. Sullivan interview, 2 September 1976, Louchheim Oral Histories.

14. In a break with the New Deal precedent as well as Sullivan’s bill, which signified a relative shift in program rationale away from farm support and toward social policy, Freeman’s staff decided to allow stamps to be exchanged for any food sold by participating retailers rather than only specific commodities in surplus.

15. Ripley, “Legislative Bargaining,” 291. Less hostile Senate appropriators managed to restore $5 million of that cut in conference committee.

16. House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on H.R. 5733, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1963, 35.

17. House Committee on Agriculture, H.R. 5733, 89.

18. USDA congressional liaison Ken Birkhead wrote in a memo to Freeman, “Off the record, at least one of the five Democrats who voted for tabling said, personally, that this was an anti-Administration, anti-civil rights vote.” Kenneth M. Birkhead to Orville Freeman, 4 February 1964, War on Poverty, 1964–1968: Selections from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, microfilm, Reel 16.

19. The definitive account of these founding log-rolls remains Ripley, “Legislative Bargaining,” 296–306.

20. Orville Freeman to Lyndon Johnson, 29 June 1968, War on Poverty, Reel 16.

21. See, e.g., “Restoration of North-South Democratic Bloc Seen in House,” Washington Post, 25 March 1975Google Scholar; and Biggs, Jeffrey R. and Foley, Thomas S., Honor in the House: Speaker Tom Foley (Pullman, Wash., 1999), 49–50Google Scholar. Ferejohn discusses the gradual institutionalization of these legislative trades in the form of the omnibus farm package after 1973 in “Logrolling in an Institutional Context,” 223–54.

22. On his pre-chairmanship clout, see Poage, W. R., My First 85 Years (Waco, Tex., 1985), 91Google Scholar.

23. Described in Birkhead to Freeman, 4 February 1964, War on Poverty, Reel 16; and Orville Freeman to Lawrence F. O’Brien, 21 April 1967, War on Poverty, Reel 16.

24. Barefoot Sanders to Lyndon Johnson, 22 June 1967, War on Poverty, Reel 16.

25. Mike Manatos to Lyndon Johnson, 21 June 1967, War on Poverty, Reel 16.

26. For the best account of civil rights and antipoverty activism related to hunger, and the explosion of national attention on hunger issues in the late 1960s, see Maney, Ardith L., Still Hungry After All These Years: Food Assistance Policy from Kennedy to Reagan (New York, 1989), 69–112Google Scholar.

27. See excerpts in Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Poverty: Hunger and Federal Food Programs, Background Information, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1967.

28. See Fenno, , Congressmen in Committees, 140–41, 169–77Google Scholar, and Smith, and Deering, , Committees in Congress, 72–74Google Scholar.

29. Citizens’ Board of Inquiry, Hunger, U.S.A.: A Report (Washington, D.C., 1968)Google Scholar.

30. Transcript in Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, Hunger in America, 1968, 120–33.

31. Kotz turned his Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper reporting on hunger into a book in 1969. Kotz, Nick, Let Them Eat Promises: The Politics of Hunger in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969)Google Scholar.

32. DeVier Pierson to Lyndon Johnson, 12 July 1968, War On Poverty, Reel 16.

33. The CBS special, for example, ended with a suggestion that food stamps be transferred from the USDA’s jurisdiction to HEW’s, given the former’s evident lack of commitment to the program.

34. Freeman made his personal anguish over the criticism palpably clear in a five-page memo to the president in June; Freeman to Johnson, 29 June 1968, War on Poverty, Reel 16.

35. Schlossberg, Kenneth, “Funny Money Is Serious,” New York Times Magazine, 28 September 1975, 12Google Scholar.

36. Reprinted, Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Hunger in America: Chronology and Selected Background Materials, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 1968, 162.

37. Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, Hunger in America, 161, 167.

38. Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States: Hearings, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 1968, 4. Republican Jacob Javits cosponsored the proposal, reflecting a limited bipartisan dynamic in hunger-related Senate politics that saw a few key Republicans establish reputations as feeding program advocates in the 1960s and 1970s.

39. Congressional Record, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 114: 24161.

40. Congressional Record, 24162.

41. “Capitol Traffic Jam,” Wall Street Journal, 18 February 1969Google Scholar.

42. “Senate Rescinds Hunger Study Cut,” New York Times, 19 February 1969Google Scholar.

43. W. R. Poage, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 9 July 1970.

44. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Nutrition and Human Needs: Hearings, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, 2131.

45. Senate Select Committee, Nutrition and Human Needs: Hearings, 1969, 2095.

46. King, Budgeting Entitlements, 54.

47. “The Advocate: Robert Choate, Cereal Critic and Media Age Reformer—A Special Kind of Washington Causist,” Washington Post, 28 October 1973Google Scholar.

48. Berry, , Feeding Hungry People, 59–76Google Scholar.

49. Ibid., 81.

50. Butz said this in a 28 April 1971 trade association speech, reprinted in Congressional Record, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 117: 42703–4.

51. “U.S. Restores Full Food-Stamp Benefits to All Eligible Needy,” Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1972Google Scholar.

52. The number of counties with a food stamp program more than doubled between fiscal years 1968 (1,027) and 1973 (2,228); 1975 would be the first year that every county in the country ran a program. Berry, , Feeding Hungry People, 72Google Scholar.

53. In his definitive history of congressional reform, Julian Zelizer distinguishes the “reform coalition” of the late 1960s and 1970s from the “liberal coalition” preceding it, emphasizing that procedural principles were becoming increasingly central to reformers in the later period, eclipsing substantive considerations of liberal policy goals or the strengthening of a more programmatic Democratic Party. On issues such as campaign finance, over which various liberal stakeholders divided, this distinction is quite useful, but in the fight for committee and seniority reform, as the case of Poage indicates below, liberal policy goals and the empowerment of the party’s ideological majority remained the central motivating factors throughout this period. Zelizer, On Capitol Hill, 108–205.

54. “Liberal Democrats Chafe Under the Seniority System,” Wall Street Journal, 27 March 1969Google Scholar. The DSG would also target Whitten, advocating in 1971 that the caucus strip seniority benefits from all five Mississippi House members as punishment for their having run under the banner of a segregationist state party faction rather than the officially recognized organization. Stripping their seniority would “reaffirm the right of the caucus to enforce party discipline,” according to the DSG. “Democratic Study Group Special Report,” 14 January 1971, Series 20, Box 5, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Papers, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

55. McCarthy, Colman, “Hunger: Yesterday’s Crisis, Today’s Yawn,” Washington Post, 29 June 1970Google Scholar.

56. “New Lobby Fights ‘Special Interests,’” New York Times, 3 February 1971Google Scholar.

57. “Common Cause Urges Defeat of Three Hill Chairmen,” Washington Post, 3 January 1971Google Scholar.

58. “A Common Cause Manual for the 1972 Congressional Elections,” Box 114, Common Cause Records, 1968–91, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. Common Cause singled out Poage in this manual as an exemplar of “the abuse of seniority and secrecy”: As Agriculture Chairman, Poage “is well-placed to protect large subsidies to agri-business but does his best to block programs to feed hungry children.”

59. John W. Gardner, testimony before the Mathias-Stevenson Ad Hoc Hearings on Congressional Reorganization, 5 December 1972, Box 146, Common Cause Records.

60. Box 4, Records of the House Democratic Caucus, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

61. Zelizer, , On Capitol Hill, 156–76Google Scholar.

62. Poage, , My First 85 Years, 147Google Scholar.

63. “Report on House Committee Chairmen,” 13 January 1975, Box 126, Common Cause Records.

64. “Hearings Before the Committee on Early Democratic Caucus for the Organization of the 94th Congress,” 529, Box 5, Records of the Democratic Caucus.

65. “Four More Chairmen Reportedly Facing Ouster,” New York Times, 19 January 1975Google Scholar.

66. “Early Democratic Caucus for the Organization of the 94th Congress,” 22 January 1975, Box 5, Records of the Democratic Caucus, 662.

67. Ibid.

68. Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, Hunger in America, 5.

69. “Conferees Agree on Food Bill,” Washington Post, 23 December 1970Google Scholar.

70. “Upheaval in the House: Assault on Seniority Expected to Affect Way Committees Function,” New York Times, 17 January 1975Google Scholar.

71. Biggs, and Foley, , Honor in the House, 49Google Scholar.

72. See the document labeled “Committee Assignment Requests” in Series 5, Box 11, Folder 4, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Papers.

73. “House Raises Committees’ Funds by 79%,” New York Times, 12 March 1975Google Scholar.

74. Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing, Consumer Relations, and Nutrition, and the Full Committee of the House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on H.R. 4844, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977, 613.

75. Deering, and Smith, , Committees in Congress, 110Google Scholar.

76. Sinclair, , Party Wars, 91–92Google Scholar.

77. Indeed, whereas House committee leaders earned a party support score (a Congressional Quarterly measurement) of 47.2 percent in 1971, by 1980 that score had increased to 71.3 percent; importantly, during that same period the score for all southern Democrats in the House experienced a smaller increase, from 47.5 percent to 56.3 percent, suggesting that reform had an independent effect beyond southern realignment and liberalization in altering the incentives of committee chairmen toward greater partisan discipline. Deering, and Smith, , Committees in Congress, 146Google Scholar.

78. Sherrill, “Why Can’t We Just Give Them Food?” 92–93.

79. Berry, , Feeding Hungry People, 81–82Google Scholar.

80. Schlossberg, , “Funny Money Is Serious,” New York Times Magazine, 70Google Scholar.

81. “An angry public forces new look at food stamps,” Chicago Tribune, 17 August 1975Google Scholar.

82. Helen Lyons to O’Neill, January 21, 1975, Series 3, Box 1, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Papers.

83. House Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing, Consumer Relations, and Nutrition, Hearings on H.R. 4844, 919.

84. A particularly influential series in the Washington Star alleged that the USDA made $797 million worth of overpayments in food stamps between the summers of 1974 and 1975; the Star pieces are reprinted in Subcommittee on Agricultural Research and General Legislation of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, Food Stamp Reform: Hearings, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 722–28.

85. Address by William Simon before the 32nd Annual Junior Achievers Conference, Bloomington, Indiana, 12 August 1975, reprinted in Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Food Stamps: The Statement of Hon. William E. Simon, Secretary of Treasury, With a Staff Analysis, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1975, 4.

86. “President Gerald R. Ford’s Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress Reporting on the State of the Union,” 19 January 1976, accessed at Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Web site, http://www.ford.utexas.edu/LIBRARY/speeches/760019.htm. A federal district court invalidated this second round of USDA-imposed changes in June 1976, saying that Ford had exceeded the authority granted to him by Congress.

87. “Reagan Urges Shifting of U.S. Programs to States,” Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1975Google Scholar.

88. Schlossberg, , “Funny Money Is Serious,” New York Times Magazine, 70Google Scholar.

89. Berry, , Feeding Hungry People, 87–88Google Scholar.

90. “An Angry Public Forces New Look at Food Stamps,” Chicago Tribune, 17 August 1975Google Scholar.

91. Subcommittee on Agriculture Research and General Legislation of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, Food Stamp Reform: Hearings, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1975, 2.

92. “Hill Moves to Bar Food Stamp Rise,” Washington Post, 31 January 1975Google Scholar.

93. The $200,000 figure is reported in “Food Stamp Bill to End Alleged Abuses Is Sent to Floor by Senate Farm Panel,” Wall Street Journal, 25 February 1976Google Scholar.

94. House Committee on Agriculture, Food Stamp Program: Staff Study, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1976.

95. See, e.g., Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Options for Reforming the Food Stamp Program: Hearing, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1975; and Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, The Food Stamp Controversy: Background Materials, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1975.

96. House Committee on Agriculture, Food Stamp Program: Hearings, 94th Cong., 2d sess., 1976, 3.

97. Ibid., 1107.

98. Ibid.; Greenstein, 163–79; Grassley, 54; Poage, 145, 371.

99. Bergland credits Mondale in Robert Bergland interview, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Jimmy Carter Presidential Oral History Project, 21 November 1986.

100. Ibid.

101. Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing, Consumer Relations, and Nutrition, and the Full Committee of the House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on H.R. 4844, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977, 174, 923–24.

102. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, General Farm and Food Legislation: Hearings, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977, 1046.

103. Bergland interview, Miller Center, 21 November 1986.

104. Ferejohn, , “Log-Rolling in an Institutional Context,” in Congress and Policy Change, 242–45Google Scholar. In accounting for the Senate Agriculture Committee’s inability to prevent the elimination of the purchase requirement from passing in 1977, it is also worth noting the general fact that the institutional environment in the Senate, as much prior to as following the reform efforts of the 1970s, has always made it more difficult for either committee chairmen or party leaders to exercise effective legislative blocking power compared to their counterparts in the House. Among the reasons for this is the lack of germaneness requirements or the option of special rules regulating the introduction of amendments on the floor. See Deering and Smith, Committees in Congress, 131–32.

105. Weaver, R. Kent, Automatic Government: The Politics of Indexation (Washington, D.C., 1988), 107Google Scholar.

106. Bergland interview, Miller Center, 21 November 1986. Bergland cited another, related example of the change wrought by reform: “I could afford to take on Jamie Whitten, and I did a couple of times.”

107. King, Ronald F., Budgeting Entitlements: The Politics of Food Stamps (Washington, D.C., 2000), 91–114Google Scholar.

108. Pierson, Paul, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This was as true regarding food stamps as it was for other social policies; see, in addition to King, Pierson, Budgeting Entitlements, 115–67Google Scholar, and Eisinger, , Toward an End to Hunger, 36–56Google Scholar.

109. Out of the enormous political science literature on polarization and partisan trends in the postreform Congress, see especially Rohde, , Parties Leaders in the Postreform HouseCrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sinclair, , Party Wars, 3–109Google Scholar. An important early study linking growing partisan discipline directly to the 1970s-era reforms is Crook, Sara Brandes and Hibbing, John R., “Congressional Reform and Party Discipline: The Effects of Changes in the Seniority System on Party Loyalty in the U.S. House of Representatives,” British Journal of Political Science 15 (1985): 207–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110. For a recent example, see Schulman, Bruce and Zelizer, Julian E., eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass., 2008)Google Scholar.

111. A useful review of this literature that engages the three major theories’ premises and implications is Shepsle, Kenneth A. and Weingast, Barry R., “Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions,” in Shepsle, and Weingast, , eds., Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions (Ann Arbor, 1995), 5–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112. Distributional exchange theorists like Shepsle, Weingast, and Marshall emphasize the autonomy of committees as producers of policy; informational theorists like Krehbiel see committees as expertise-generating agents of their parent chambers whose members are not preference outliers. Krehbiel explicitly argues that his informational model of committee power applies to both the pre- and postreform eras in Information and Legislative Organization, 257–58, 287–90. As for party cartel theorists, Cox and McCubbins argue that the “negative” agenda-setting power of the majority party—its ability to prevent legislation from being passed that is not supported by the median member of the caucus—existed in both the pre- and postreform eras, though they acknowledge that the 1970s reforms, along with the diminishment of intra-Democratic factional distance, did lend the majority new capacities for “positive” agenda-setting. See Cox and McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan, 250–54, and Setting the Agenda, 201–19. This latter component of their analysis, specific to the postreform era, resembles the argument of conditional party government theorists like John H. Aldrich and David Rohde. See, most recently, Aldrich, and Rohde, , “Congressional Committees in a Partisan Era,” in Congress Reconsidered, ed. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Oppenheimer, Bruce I., 8th ed. (Washington, D.C., 2004), 249–70Google Scholar.

113. Maltzman, Competing Principals, 30–40. Smith and Deering echo Maltzman’s arguments concerning the relationships between issue salience, party cohesion, and committee autonomy in Committees in Congress, 183–228.

114. Recent popular works on the baleful effects in Congress include Mann, Thomas E. and Ornstein, Norman J., The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing and How to Get It Back On Track (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Eilperin, Juliet, Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; and Brownstein, Ronald, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.