The 1960 debate between presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy was a seminal moment in the history of politics on television, and hunger played a central role in the debate. In his opening statement, Kennedy referred to his campaign tour of Appalachia, where he witnessed hunger and joblessness in the Coal Country of West Virginia. He cited the region as a symbol of all the poor and working people left out of the purported prosperity of the Eisenhower-Nixon years.

CBS debuted “Harvest of Shame” the day after Thanksgiving 1960, spotlighting the living conditions of migrant agricultural workers in America. Respected journalist Edward R. Murrow followed farmworker families along the U.S. eastern seaboard, interviewing parents, teachers, and doctors about the scope and impact of childhood malnutrition and starvation in the farm camps. While the film was intentionally designed to evoke shock in its American audience and galvanize action, Murrow insisted that it not be broadcast globally so that it would not be used as Soviet propaganda during a moment of renewed Cold War tensions.

Just weeks after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, his successor President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” that would be the signature policy objective of his administration. “No single weapon will suffice” in the battle against poverty, President Johnson argued in his first State of the Union Address in 1964, but rather a “special effort” with multiple legislative components including economic development, youth employment projects, expanded minimum wage laws, and action to expand the Food Stamp Program. 

In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to pass the Civil Rights Act. During the  ceremony, Dr. King echoed President Johnson, declaring his own war on poverty, not only in the U.S. but in “every country and colony” across the world. His Nobel Prize speech highlighted hunger, casting the right to “three meals a day” as fundamental to human dignity.

The 1968 broadcast of Hunger in America returned hunger to the center stage in American politics. References to hunger had been part of the War on Poverty and the Poor People’s Campaign, but the CBS documentary exposed malnutrition as an aspect of everyday life. The program detailed the harmful effects of malnutrition on children’s physical and cognitive development, introducing an 11-year-old child forced into sex work to feed her family, and overturning the fallacy that all malnourished people are skinny. Hunger in America also emphasized the shortcomings of the Food Stamp Program, which fed only 5 million out of the estimated 15 million hungry people in the country. Personal stories added moral and emotional weight to the documentary, providing a shocking yet vital education about the persistence of hunger. And it roused viewers to take action, including a bipartisan array of legislators ranging from liberal Senator George McGovern to conservative Senator Robert Dole.

In 1968, Senator Robert F. Kenney launched his presidential campaign against then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey based on the administration’s failures to solve the problem of hunger. The previous year, Kennedy witnessed firsthand the devastating situation in the Mississippi Delta after attending hearings in Jackson about the lives of poor tenant farmers. In one particularly impactful moment, Kennedy, the father of ten children, met a boy with a swollen belly who had been left lying on a dirt floor and attempted to soothe the hungry, unresponsive baby. Through tears, Kennedy turned to reporter Nick Kotz and said, “My God, I didn’t know this kind of thing existed. How can a country like this allow this.” A year later, after he won the California primary, Kennedy gave an impromptu victory speech where he highlighted campaign themes of labor and racial justice, ending the speech with an urgent call to help those suffering from hunger. Just after walking out, Kennedy was assassinated, leaving his campaign promises.

A period of racial unrest followed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968. That summer, CBS News presented Of Black America — a groundbreaking series of seven one-hour documentaries exploring various aspects of history and the state of the Black community. The fifth episode, “The Heritage of Slavery,” featured the famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who spoke about the staggering and persistent poverty and hunger in her home state of Mississippi. While the expression of racism may have grown more subtle, shootings and lynchings of Black southerners were supplanted by economic deprivation and hunger.

In Merle Haggard’s ballad “Hungry Eyes,” the singer blames the unjust and inescapable work conditions on “another class of people” who “put us somewhere just below.” Haggard’s musical catalog featured this populist cry amid a long list of more conservative-leaning songs, projecting pride in being white descendants of Dust Bowl migrants, rage at anti-war protests, and disdain for anyone who sought handouts from the government. These songs resonated with people who valued whiteness over the country’s racial and ethnic pluralism, and self-reliance over dependency.