The proposal of Trump administration officials to replace part of the SNAP program popularly known as food stamps with boxes of home-delivered nonperishable food is certain to raise the ire of advocates for the poor. Ironically, this “Blue Apron-style program” (as Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, described it) harkens back to liberal, Depression-era relief programs that infuriated capitalists and led to the creation of the food stamp program in the first place.

In October 1933, Congress created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation as part of the New Deal. The FSRC was charged with raising farm prices by creating artificial scarcity. FSRC agents purchased surplus crops and livestock and then distributed them to the needy through local charities—killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. In January 1934, for example, the FSRC paid $3.5 million for 234,600 hogs, which were “processed and distributed among the needy unemployed throughout the country.”

Farm prices rose. Farmers were happy.

Millions of hungry Americans were fed. They were happy.

But food retailers believed the FSRC was unfair competition. They were furious.

When the FSRC announced plans to open a huge “goods exchange” or “commissary” outside Nashville in the fall of 1934, bypassing local charities to distribute free food directly to the needy, grocers nationwide cried foul. The Utah Retail Grocers Association complained that such commissaries would be an “unnecessary infringement on private business and direct competition.”

The Roosevelt administration yielded to the grocers. Officials scrapped the commissary plan, and the FSRC agreed that grocers should be more involved in food relief programs.

Together, they created the food stamp program.

Blue stamps bought only surplus foods—dairy products, eggs, citrus fruits, prunes, and fresh vegetables, Wikimedia Commons.

Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace is usually given credit for coming up with the idea, though it was surely the collective product of his young and imaginative staff. It was a Byzantine scheme. Eligible recipients, who were mainly WPA workers and those on relief, purchased orange-colored stamps, which could be redeemed at face value for any food products. In addition, recipients also received blue-colored stamps in an amount equal to half the amount of orange stamps purchased. The blue stamps could be redeemed only to purchase foods that the government declared to be in surplus from time to time.

The stamps could be redeemed at any grocery store. Grocers could then exchange all the stamps they received, orange and blue, at any bank for their face value in cash. The banks, in turn, would redeem the stamps with the Treasury.

Supporters estimated the food stamp program would increase grocery sales by $250 million a year—about a 3 percent increase.

Federal relief administrators decided to test the new program in five medium-sized cities “chosen for their representative character.”

The first was Rochester, New York.

So, early on a dreary Tuesday morning in May 1939, several dozen people lined up outside the Old Post Office on Fitzhugh Street in downtown Rochester. At the front of the line was a 36-year-old unemployed machinist named Ralston Thayer. When the doors were unlocked at nine o’clock, Taylor strode into the imposing brown sandstone building and approached one of the clerks standing behind a long counter. He placed four one-dollar bills on the counter. The clerk handed Thayer several small booklets filled with orange and blue stamps. Ralston Thayer, a proud veteran of the Great War, was the first person in American history to receive food stamps.

Orange stamps were good for any grocery item except drugs, liquor, and items consumed on the premises, Wikimedia Commons

For the four dollars he plunked down on the counter, Thayer was given four dollars’ worth of orange stamps and two dollars’ worth of blue stamps. With the orange stamps he could buy any foods he wanted. With the blue stamps, however, he could only buy products that the government deemed in surplus at the time: butter, eggs, flour, beans, citrus fruits, and cornmeal.

The new system worked. Rochester grocers were ecstatic. By early December, the government had already sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps, meaning more than a half-million dollars’ worth of “free” blue stamps had been doled out—and pumped directly into the city’s 1,200 grocery stores.

It was, in effect, a welfare program for the city’s retailers.

The food stamp program proved so successful that it was operating in nearly half the nation’s counties by the end of 1940.

The government phased out the food stamp program during the Second World War, but President John F. Kennedy, who had witnessed rural poverty while campaigning in West Virginia, revived the program shortly after taking office in 1961. Kennedy’s version eliminated the special stamps for surplus foods, but recipients were still required to purchase their stamps, which now came in denominations of $1, $5, and $10. The price that recipients paid for the stamps varied based on factors such as age, income, and family size.

Even this purchase requirement proved burdensome to the nation’s poorest families. At a Senate hearing on poverty held in Neon, Kentucky, in February 1968, an unemployed father of fifteen named Cliston Johnson explained. He told Senator Robert Kennedy that his monthly income was just $60, out of which he paid $26 for $112 in food stamps, leaving him just $34 for all other expenses. “The more children you’ve got,” Cliston advised Kennedy– himself the father of ten– “you just add a little more water to the gravy.”

Congress finally lifted the purchase requirement with the Food Stamp Act of 1977.

Beginning in 1990, the Agriculture Department phased out stamps entirely and replaced them with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. These are essentially debit cards attached to a recipient’s benefits account. With stamps obsolete, Congress officially renamed the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in 2008.

And that is where we stand today. SNAP has become an essential program for the nation’s poor. In fiscal year 2016, more than 44 million Americans—roughly 14 percent of the country’s population—received SNAP benefits. On average, participants received $125.51 a month in assistance, a total of $70.9 billion.

But SNAP has also become an important source of income for the 25,000 retailers nationwide who accept EBT cards. Although retailers are neither required nor inclined to reveal how much of their income comes from customers redeeming SNAP benefits, the business consultant AlixPartners estimates that the single largest beneficiary of this largesse is Walmart, where 18 percent of all SNAP benefits were redeemed in 2013 (the most recent year for which figures are available). That amounts to about $13 billion—roughly 4 percent of Walmart’s total sales in the United States.

AlixPartners estimates that all the Trump administration’s proposed SNAP cuts would cost Walmart about a billion dollars a year in sales. Target, the second-largest beneficiary, would lose about $500 million.

A “Blue Apron-style” program of home-delivered food would further erode sales by taking grocers out of the food stamp chain. In effect, the Trump administration is proposing a return to the kind of direct government intervention that retailers opposed so bitterly during the Depression.