A Chicken In Every Pot

One of the most disastrous of election promises came in 1928, when Herbert Hoover expressed his confidence in the American future by foreseeing a time soon to come when Americans would be so prosperous that there would be, in Hoover’s words, “A chicken in every pot.” “Chicken every Sunday” seemed then an extravagant promise. Chicken was then an expensive meat, and turkey was even more expensive, so that Hoover’s promise was one of great prosperity.

Hoover won the election but gained a mocking public contempt for his promise when, in late 1929, the stock market crash led to the Great Depression. Political action did not solve the crisis. At the start, about 1,500,000 were unemployed; by late 1931, this had gone up to 3,000,000. F. D. Roosevelt took office, and, with a variety of emergency measures, doubled that number, and, by 1936, had 16,000,000 unemployed people to contend with. Only by entering the conflict in Europe, World War II , did the figures of the unemployed decrease. But with the end of World War II , a return to the Depression economy was forestalled simply by a continuing military build-up and production for global conflicts. With President John F. Kennedy, and Robert MacNamara, another strategy was devised to keep the economy going, lending money to “Third World” countries to enable them to buy armaments from the U.S. (and other Western nations). By this means, depression was for a time suppressed artificially.

But what about Hoover’s promise of a “Chicken in every pot”? At the time, chicken was indeed expensive, and various recipes were devised to make a chicken stretch into several meals. One popular and tasty recipe was “chicken a la king,” widely used to make one chicken last a while.

But, since Hoover’s much-ridiculed promise, an economic revolution has taken place, and chicken has become cheaper than beef. It is, in fact, both cheap and plentiful.

Agricultural experts, and university agricultural departments, devised means of producing four-pound chickens in fifty days. At Cornell University, Robert Baker invented 52 processed-chicken products since 1960.These included chicken steak, chicken chili, chicken baloney, and the popular chicken hot dog, which soon won almost twenty percent of the hot dog market. Then in 1950 Colonel Harland Sanders of Louisville, Kentucky “created” the Kentucky Fried Chicken, which, in less than twenty years, was grossing more than one billion dollars a year in thirty-nine countries. That income then doubled.

Instead of a “chicken in every pot” becoming a symbol of unrealistic hope, it had become cheap food, and many children were complaining to their mothers, “Not chicken again!” All this happened, not because of politics, but because of economic initiative in the private sector. Today large installations grow chickens and turkeys by the thousands, package and freeze them, and make them available to housewives all year long.

But this is only one of a number of economic developments that have vastly improved the diet of Americans, and of other peoples as well. The economic sector, when free, has again and again shown that it can accomplish remarkable things.

I can recall living a half century ago in high mountain country a hundred miles from any bus or train line. The winter weather was, at 5,400 feet, often sub-zero. Only two vegetables could be trucked in without freezing, cabbages and carrots. Our table one day would have cooked cabbage and raw carrots, and, the next, raw cabbage salad and cooked carrots! Then came frozen foods, not by any act of Congress but as a result of the free market and its initiative. In an election year, too many people look to politics for an answer, and they thereby limit economic freedom and their own future. Neither Hoover and the Republicans, nor F. D. Roosevelt and the Democrats, could give us “a chicken in every pot,” but economic freedom did. Now too many people want to shut the windows of economic opportunity by political action. Politics cannot give us “a chicken in every pot,” but politics and controls can take away the chicken and our freedom. By the way, should not Robert Baker of Cornell get more credit for our economic growth than our Washington, D.C. experts?