Act 1. The First Food Stamp
Scene One: May, 1939. The Machinist and the Surplus
On the morning of May 16, 1939, Ralston Thayer stood first in line at Rochester, New York’s old post office. He was thirty-five years old. A machinist. A veteran of the Great War. He had been out of work for nearly a year.
Newspaper reporters crowded around him. Photographers jockeyed for position. Thayer was making history, and they wanted a piece of the action. He walked up to the cashier window and handed over four dollars from his latest unemployment check. The clerk gave him four dollars in orange stamps and two dollars in blue stamps, free.
The orange stamps could buy any food. The blue stamps could only buy whatever the Agriculture Department declared surplus. Eggs nobody wanted. Butter that wasn’t selling. The stuff farmers couldn’t move because nobody could afford to buy it. Grocers could exchange the food stamps of both colors at the bank for real dollars. The banks would then redeem the stamps with the US Treasury.
Ralston Thayer became the first food stamp recipient in American history.
Throughout that day, thousands of Rochester residents did as Thayer had done. They handed over cash and got back more purchasing power than they’d walked in with. That afternoon, they flooded the grocery stores with their crisp new booklets of orange and blue stamps. The grocers couldn’t believe their luck. By December, they were ecstatic. The government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps in Rochester alone. That meant hundreds of thousands in free blue stamps pumped directly into hundreds of grocery stores. It was a welfare program for retailers and banks as much as for families.
But the question nobody asked in 1939 was why: Why was Ralston Thayer hungry?
It wasn’t because there wasn’t enough food. American farms were producing too much food. The government was purchasing massive amounts of crops, transporting them, storing them, distributing them. The surplus was so large they didn’t know what to do with it. The grocery stores were full. The problem wasn’t scarcity.
The problem was that the economic system had stopped working. The Depression had destroyed demand. Thayer had worked as a machinist his entire adult life. He had fought in France. He had skills, experience, discipline. Then the Depression hit, and the work vanished. Not because he was lazy. Not because he lacked ability. The entire circular flow of the economy had frozen solid.
Three problems. Farm surpluses nobody could sell. Grocery stores with weak sales. Hungry citizens with seventeen percent unemployment.
So the government created a solution. Tax citizens. Use that money to buy surplus crops from farmers. Give stamps to the needy. Let grocery stores profit from the influx of purchasing power. Then, banks could exchange the food stamps of both colors at the Treasury for real dollars.
Supporters estimated the program would increase grocery sales by two hundred fifty million dollars a year. The grocers loved it. The banks loved it. The farmers loved it. Congress loved it. The surplus problem was solved.
It was a brilliant emergency response. And it was temporary. Everyone knew it was temporary.
The first Food Stamp Program lasted four years. From 1939 to 1943, it reached millions of Americans in half the country. Four million people at its peak.
Then it ended. Not because Congress acted to end it. Because the conditions that created it disappeared. By 1943, America’s response to World War II had created full employment. Wages rose. People could afford food again.
Many vilify President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his social programs. After all, he began food stamps in 1939. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt also ended them in 1943. Not because they didn’t work, and not by executive order. They ended because his administration made them no longer necessary. The economy had recovered. People had work. That work paid enough to buy food. The emergency was over.
FDR restored the ancient principle that by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread.
This is the decisive point relevant to today. Ending food stamps is possible when people have jobs that pay enough to buy food.
When workers could earn living wages, food stamps weren’t necessary. The government didn’t need to redistribute property through taxation because workers’ labor produced property. They could eat from the sweat of their brow.
When we mix our labor with the dirt, what we create becomes ours. The Constitution protects this. Work and eat. Your labor produces your sustenance. It is the most basic property right in human civilization.
Scene Two: 1961–1964. The Return
But then the food stamp program came back.
President Kennedy revived the program in 1961. On May 29, Mr. and Mrs. Alderson Muncy of Paynesville, West Virginia, became the first recipients. They bought ninety-five dollars in food stamps for their fifteen-person household. Their first purchase was a can of pork and beans.
Why did food stamps come back? Kennedy had campaigned in West Virginia and Appalachia. He was appalled by what he saw. Children in poverty. Families living on surplus lard and corn meal. But those families weren’t living on lard and corn meal because there was a famine.
This wasn’t the Depression. The national economy was growing. Unemployment was falling. The problem wasn’t that the entire economic system had collapsed. The problem was that prosperity wasn’t reaching everyone. Entire regions had been left behind.
President Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and declared it would be one of the most valuable weapons for the war on poverty.
Johnson’s choice of the word ‘war’ is interesting. War is the continuation of politics with other means. Everything in war is simple, but even the simplest thing is difficult.
A simple goal. Eliminate poverty. The challenge is setting conditions for success when you know that success will be fleeting. Victory is temporary. People adapt. Conditions change. So you set limited, measurable, achievable objectives. You define what winning looks like. You establish the conditions that will allow you to declare victory and go home.
FDR understood this. His food stamp program had a clear objective: keep people from starving during an economic collapse. The conditions for success were equally clear: full employment and rising wages. When America met those conditions, the program ended. Mission accomplished.
Johnson declared a war on poverty but never defined victory. No conditions for winning. No way to know when the war could end. We have never tried to figure it out.
If we don’t set conditions for success, temporary relief becomes permanent. If we don’t define victory, emergency becomes normal. If we don’t make and achieve limited objectives, war becomes endless.
That’s what happened to Johnson’s war on poverty.
Scene Three: Today’s Constitutional Failure
More than sixty years later, we call the food stamp program SNAP. SNAP reaches forty-one million people nationwide. Ten times the peak participation of the original program. Half of American children will rely on food assistance at some point during childhood.
Ralston Thayer needed food stamps because unemployment hit seventeen percent and the Depression destroyed the economy. What’s our excuse now?
The problem in 1939 was no work. The problem now is work that does not pay.
Ralston Thayer could not find a job. Today’s SNAP recipients have jobs. They work forty hours a week. They stock shelves at Walmart. They flip burgers at McDonald’s. They go to work, they sweat, they come home exhausted. But they can’t afford to buy food.
A 2020 government report found that 70% of SNAP recipients worked full-time. The government still redistributes property through taxation. Grocery stores still profit. But now corporations benefit from cheap labor subsidized by taxpayers instead of unemployment checks.
Businesses are not the villain here. They are doing exactly what businesses are supposed to do. Maximize profits within the rules Congress sets. The problem is the rules Congress set.
Let’s follow the money. Businesses pay wages competitive enough to attract workers. Workers apply for SNAP. Taxpayers fund the benefits and support business wages. Workers spend SNAP benefits at businesses.
This is not business corruption. This is the system working exactly as Congress designed it. Congress created the conditions where paying low wages and relying on SNAP makes perfect business sense. Any rational business would do the same.
This is not a market failure. This is a constitutional failure.
When a man works and cannot eat from the sweat of their brow, someone is stealing his property. The question is who.
Act 2: The Government’s Duty
The answer begins with an agreement made before there were governments.
Even before Adam and Eve, hands blistered from work, and children’s bellies ached for food that depended on that work. When we work, we are entitled to the bread we create. The oldest law of life itself. Older than the Ten Commandments by maybe fifty thousand years.
This human condition is the foundation of all property rights. You own yourself. You own your labor. When you mix your labor with the world, what you create belongs to you. The American Founders built this philosophy into the Constitution.
The Fifth Amendment says government cannot take your property without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment extends this protection against the states.
But … what is property?
Most people think property means things. Your house. Your car. Your land. The Founders saw it more deeply.
James Madison, more responsible for the US Constitution than any other, wrote that a person has property in their opinions, in their religious beliefs, in the safety of their person. And most importantly, they have property in their labor.
Your labor is yours. The wages you earn through that labor are your property. This is not a metaphor. It’s constitutional law. When you work, you are exercising a property right. Your employer pays you for property you have transferred to them. Your time. Your effort. Your skill.
The government exists to protect this exchange. That is its first duty. We give up some freedom to live under laws to secure our property rights. This is the social contract. We consent to be governed in exchange for protection.
So the government’s duty has two parts, but one comes first.
First and foremost, government must protect the American people’s ability to acquire property through labor. A person must be able to work full-time and afford food. If they cannot, their right to their labor is violated. The government must create conditions where honest work produces enough to live. That isn’t redistribution. It’s preservation of the social contract.
Second, it must protect citizens from government itself, from seizing property through taxation to benefit private interests. Congress cannot use taxation to pick winners and losers.
These duties reinforce each other. When labor pays enough to live, redistribution becomes unnecessary. Property flows naturally from work to worker. The system functions as designed.
But when government fails its first duty, the second duty is violated as a consequence. Workers can’t eat from their labor, so government redistributes through taxation. The constitutional failure isn’t SNAP itself. It’s the abandonment of labor that made SNAP necessary.
We can’t end SNAP by cutting it first. We can only end it by making it unnecessary, by restoring the conditions where labor returns a fair value, where work yields enough to live.
Ending relief before restoring wages isn’t reform. It’s theft. The same theft that created the need for relief in the first place.
Act 3. 1939: The President and the Empty Mills
September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland.
Within weeks, Europe erupts into total war. Norway falls. Denmark falls. Belgium. France. By June 1940, the swastika flies over Paris.
Across the Atlantic, America remains mired in the Great Depression’s final years. Unemployment hovers around 15 percent. Eight million people without work, nearly a decade after the initial crash. Factories sit dark. Steel mills run cold. In Rochester, New York, the federal government distributes food stamps to Ralston Thayer and thousands of others just to keep people fed.
Some say World War II ended the Depression in America, but that hot take is short sighted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership ended the Depression.
FDR saw something his contemporaries missed.
He understood that food stamps addressed the symptom, not the disease. They fed people today. But he wanted to restart the American engine. Rebuild the connection between sweat and bread that the Depression broke.
Roosevelt analyzed economic signs like a general reading battlefield terrain.
The challenges in 1939 were not small. Seventeen percent unemployment. Agricultural surpluses rotting in silos. Private capital paralyzed by uncertainty. Congress unwilling to authorize deficit spending at scale.
Roosevelt didn’t see these as discrete problems requiring separate solutions. He saw one frozen system. A failure of the institution that led to a lack of belief.
The question wasn’t whether America could produce. The question was whether the American people could be made to believe that work led to wages, wages to food, and food to hope.
Europe’s Collapse Became Roosevelt’s Opportunity
The world was fighting for its survival. It needed planes, engines, trucks, and wheat. America had the capacity, idle but ready. What we lacked was belief and consensus.
In May 1940, Roosevelt revived the old Council of National Defense and created the National Defense Advisory Commission. He filled it with seven men, each responsible for a key piece of the economy: industry, labor, agriculture, transportation, raw materials, employment, and price control.
He didn’t just work through government. He recruited from both sides of American power. He used business leaders for war planning. William Knudsen from General Motors. Edward Stettinius from US Steel. Sidney Hillman from organized labor. Later, the War Production Board with even broader authority.
Academic elites miss that the state doesn’t need to nationalize production. It needs to create conditions to incentivize private business to voluntarily work toward national goals. Strategic institutional design.
When Roosevelt asked Knudsen to serve, the man was making half a million dollars a year, roughly ten million today! Knudsen resigned and accepted a government salary of one dollar.
Roosevelt offered defense contracts with capped profits. Enough to guarantee stability, not enough to encourage greed. He formed the War Labor Board to hold wages steady, prevent strikes, and protect jobs.
The Institutional Design That Restored Prosperity
Roosevelt offered defense contracts with guaranteed profit margins. Modest, predictable, and capped to prevent war profiteering. He established labor stability through the War Labor Board. Wage floors, minimal work stoppages, employment security.
This was the invisible hand of institutional design. Government had to intervene. Laissez-faire market forces would not generate an economy to dominate our adversaries.
Businesses knew they could invest in defense production without catastrophic loss. Labor knew it could work without exploitation or arbitrary dismissal. The economic machine fired up again, not because of fear but through incentives.
By 1941, American industrial output began its historic expansion.
Detroit’s automotive plants converted from making Buicks to bombers. Bethlehem Steel operated at capacity, pouring liberty ship hulls continuously. Women entered manufacturing labor markets in unprecedented numbers.
The unemployment rate fell below 10% in 1941, the first time it had dropped below 10% since the Depression began. For the first time in over a decade, ordinary Americans could see economic progress.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt didn’t scramble to improvise a mobilization strategy. He accelerated the machinery already in motion.
Roosevelt branded our transformation “The Arsenal of Democracy,” but the phrase hid the achievement.
This was institutional engineering at constitutional scale. Roosevelt reconstructed the broken connection between property rights, labor compensation, and general welfare.
No corporation earned a profit without expanding hiring. No one willing to work went hungry. Every wage, every contract, every loaf of bread became part of one living circuit. National incentive led to effort and to bread. That bread led to more effort, which generated national capability.
By 1943, the transformation was complete.
Industrial output doubled. National income tripled. Unemployment fell to 1.9 percent, what economists now call full employment.
From 1942 to 1945, America made approximately 40 percent of global munitions. Aircraft production alone went from fewer than 6,000 planes in 1939 to over 85,000 by war’s end.
Without America’s manufacturing might, the Allies would not have won World War II.
The Department of Agriculture terminated the Food Stamp Program in spring 1943. The program ended as FDR’s leadership made it no longer necessary. In four years, it had served 20 million Americans. Now, those same citizens left relief rolls because work that paid a living wage replaced the need for social programs.
War Destroys Wealth
Yes, the war provided the catalyst. Europe’s desperation created demand for American production. But demand alone doesn’t end depressions. Other nations had demand during World War II and remained poor. What mattered was Roosevelt’s institutional design that channeled that demand into full employment at living wages.
War destroys wealth. Steel that could have become tractors became tanks. Oil that could have powered industry was burned in battle. Labor that could have built homes was spent producing weapons designed to be destroyed.
But Roosevelt didn’t just produce for war. He reconstructed the relationship between work and wages. He proved that strategic government action, not laissez-faire chaos, could restore the constitutional promise that honest labor produces property.
He didn’t seize from one group to feed another.
He built the conditions where every person could feed themselves through work. That is why food stamps ended in 1943. Not through budget cuts or political theater, but through prosperity that made them unnecessary.
Social programs are warning lights. They flash when the connection between labor and sustenance breaks down. When work no longer earns bread. When we restore that connection, the warning light will go dark.
We forgot this lesson. Since the 1960s, we’ve treated welfare as permanent infrastructure rather than emergency repair. We’ve funded the symptom while ignoring the disease.
Ending SNAP tomorrow would solve nothing. Before we can withdraw relief, we must restore what made relief unnecessary in 1943: conditions where honest work puts heat in the house and food on the table.
So…are food stamps theft?
Yes, but not in the way most people think.
The theft isn’t SNAP taking from taxpayers. The theft happened earlier, when government abandoned its duty to protect labor’s value. SNAP is just the cost of that original theft, paid over and over, year after year.
We can end the theft. Not by cutting relief, but by restoring what was stolen: the dignity of work that feeds a family.
Until then, every SNAP dollar is a reminder that we’ve given up on the oldest law: by the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread.
May God bless the United States of America.
Music from Epidemic SoundArtist: RoofSong: The Grim Reaper
