LET THEM EAT PROMISES: THE POLITICS OF HUNGER IN AMERICA

By Nick Kotz '55. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice-Hall, 1969. 272 pp. $6.95.

The copy of this book given to the reviewer was bound with the cover upside down. The error may well have constituted a symbolic act - symbolic of the derangement of priorities which forms the subject matter of Mr. Kotz's story.

Actually, the author simultaneously weaves together two stories - the problem of hunger in America and the politics of hunger in Washington. The first is told deadpan. Facts, statistics, expert testimony, statements by poor people all tell the same tale — 14 million Americans wake up hungry in the morning and go to bed hungry at night. While the message could have been conveyed more subtly, to grace his prose with irony would have required the author to slip into the callousness of the pragmatists which he so vividly captures in his second story.

The politics of hunger is the politics of immobilism in the face of a problem of crisis proportions. It is the sad politics of food distribution programs controlled by the agricultural appropriations subsystem in Congress, that is to say, by the likes of Rep. Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, known affectionately on the Hill as the "permanent Secretary of Agriculture." It is the politics of conflicting presidential priorities — of a weary President, preoccupied with Vietnam and willing to horse-trade hunger programs with conservative legislators for increased tax revenues to pay for war. Finally, it is the politics of an increasingly closed pluralism, with producer interests like Big Agriculture and the food industry calling all the shots.

Mr. Kotz has written a book which close students of politics will find very revealing. Although he ends with a series of plausible programmatic recommendations, he is so- phisticated enough politically to realize that any comprehensive effort to eradicate hunger is likely to be given short shrift, so long as the institutional arena within which the politics of hunger is acted out remains unchanged.

Mr. Smith is an Instructor in Governmentat Dartmouth.