SNAP got its start in West Virginia, and it’s thanks to JFK

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WOWK) — Food stamps have been an integral part of many impoverished Americans’ lives for decades, and they got their first proper start in a West Virginia county.

The first attempt at a food stamp program was in New York in 1939. It ran for nearly four years, managing to reach millions of people across half the United States before ending due to the downturn in motivating issues like unmarketable food surpluses and widespread unemployment.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as it is known in modern times got its start with the Food Stamp Act of 1964. The purpose of the act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was to improve Americans’ quality of life by giving poor families a way of fighting off hunger and malnutrition, now improved with years of proposals and research after the last attempt.

But before the act was signed, pilot programs were launched via President John F. Kennedy’s first Executive Order in 1961, after he campaigned in West Virginia on the promise of providing such aid.

According to the USDA, “The pilot programs would retain the requirement that the food stamps be purchased, but eliminated the concept of special stamps for surplus foods.”

West Virginia Senators Jennings Randolph and Robert C. Byrd also greatly promoted the creation of such programs.

And so on May 29, 1961, Alderson and Chloe Muncy of Paynesville, West Virginia, became the first food stamp recipients.

They were ceremoniously driven to Welch and either given or purchased $95 worth of food stamps for a 15-children household. The first food item they bought was a can of pork and beans from Henderson’s Supermarket.

The pilot programs would expand to 22 states, covering 380,000 participants by the time the Food Stamps Act was signed in 1964.

West Virginia would then go on to be the first state to implement the program statewide.