SOUP KITCHENS

Soup kitchens are establishments that prepare and dispense food to the needy on a regular basis, usually soup, sandwiches, bread, and other minimal dietary essentials. The soup kitchens of the Great Depression era were one small part of larger collective community-based efforts that included penny restaurants, welfare cafeterias, and milk lines that came into being to combat the negative impact of the Depression. Although soup kitchens existed in cities during the decades following the Civil War, and continue to exist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number swelled during the 1930s.

During the early years of the Depression, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's predecessor, Herbert Hoover claimed that "No one has starved," soup kitchens provided food assistance when the federal government would not. In the absence of any substantial local or federal relief programs, Americans did as they had done in the past: They turned to churches and civic organizations for help. Despite the scarcity of government-sponsored support during the years that preceded the New Deal, the growth of these establishments was so extensive that virtually every town and city in America had a substantial number of private organizations offering food to those in need.

One charitable organization, the Ohio Fraternal Order of Eagles, opened a free cafeteria in 1930 serving soup, bread, milk, and cheese to an average of two hundred persons per day. Within a year, the number of people served quadrupled. In November 1929, a Franciscan order expanded its longstanding tradition of feeding the poor from the door of its monastery by opening a soup kitchen in Detroit to respond to the increasing number of unemployed. In the beginning, the Capuchin Soup Kitchen served only rolls and coffee. At its peak, the kitchen fed well over seven hundred people daily using donations from local bakers, farmers, and merchants. So generous were the donations that the director of the kitchen boasted that the soup could be eaten with a fork. The infamous mobster Al Capone even joined this collective struggle against hunger by opening a popular soup kitchen in Chicago. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst did the same, opening soup kitchens at opposite ends of New York City's Times Square that served sandwiches from trucks plastered with posters advertising his paper's philanthropic efforts.

But the "good work" of feeding the indigent was not limited to established organizations and wealthy businessmen. Countless individuals supplemented those efforts, many volunteering in soup kitchens that were set up in abandoned or makeshift structures and horse-drawn carriages. In New York, samaritans like "Lady Bountiful" fed thousands of men daily in lower Manhattan. Urban Ledoux, known as Mr. Zero, handed out wagonloads of day-old doughnuts in Times Square, and a man called Mr. Glad not only gave out food, but also nickels and gloves. The beloved minister Father Divine opened his Long Island home to those in need and was convicted of disturbing the peace when his middle-class neighbors became appalled by the sight of busloads of hungry worshippers flocking to his doorstep.

Acquiring the food offered by soup kitchens was no simple task. Regardless of the weather, long lines (or breadlines) began to form outside soup kitchens at dawn. Many of the people waiting in breadlines did not have shoes or coats to protect them from rain or snow. To avoid public humiliation, women often sent children to collect the day's offering. Families could use the pail of soup (mostly broth) to supplement food acquired through their own efforts and the limited resources acquired from other relief agencies. Single persons and married couples without children in their households relied more heavily on soup kitchens than families did because they were not eligible for such relief as cash grants, food orders, food baskets, and commissary privileges. However humiliating the experience was for most Americans, soup kitchens provided a benevolent alternative for those reduced to begging for food, eating dandelions, or even worse, scavenging for discarded fruits and vegetables in the city dump.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bicknell, Catherine. "Detroit's Capuchin Soup Kitchen." Labor History 21, no. 1 (1983): 112–124.

Glasser, Irene. More Than Bread: Ethnography of a Soup Kitchen. 1988.

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