It should not have been surprising that the Trump administration would use the cover of a government shutdown to withhold food-assistance benefits from the 42 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). After all, Republicans have had it in for food stamps for nearly as long as the federal government has tried to address hunger.

Federally funded food assistance was first introduced in the United States in 1939, with the twofold goal of helping farmers offload surplus crops that were depressing prices and helping Depression-era unemployed people get food. A classic New Deal initiative—partly the brainchild of Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Iowa-born secretary of agriculture and later vice president who ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket—the food-stamp program began as a way to connect people who needed food but couldn’t buy it with people who had far too much food but could not sell it. It allowed low-income Americans to buy orange stamps equal to their normal food budget and receive additional blue stamps for free, which could be used to purchase surplus farm goods.

Writing in The Nation in 1940, the journalist Jane Whitbread celebrated this early version of food stamps as “a triumph of simplicity,” an elegantly designed program that had managed to win “wholesale acclaim.” She wrote: “With remarkable deftness the stamp plan smooths hurt feelings by helping the farmer, feeding the needy, and paying the grocer, too.”