1939: The Original Food Stamp

Another find from cleaning out my mother’s basement

Many Americans think of Food Stamps as the program started in the 1960s; but those “food stamps” were never stamps! They were coupons. (And now they are plastic with the EBT card). Years before that, at the end of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt set up the first food stamp program. It ended with the end of the Depression and the buildup of WWII, but when Johnson started up the new program, people still remembered the stamps, and the name stuck.