Milk for Health Campaign, 1922
In September of 1921, the LSU Extension Service contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dairy Division to ask whether the Department could assist in mounting a campaign in New Orleans to advertise the “food value of milk.” LSU pointed out that “the per capita consumption of milk in New Orleans is lower than that of any other city of its size in the United States.” The proposal was favorably received and over the next few months, various agencies worked together to formally plan the “Milk for Health Campaign” to be conducted from April 17-22, 1922. The New Orleans Association of Commerce was brought in as a partner with representatives of the City administration, the State and City Boards of Health, the New Orleans Public and Catholic schools, the Child Welfare Association, the State Department of Agriculture, the Housewives’ League, milk producers and distributors, newspapers, retail stores, and restaurants worked together on the push for milk consumption in New Orleans. The campaign employed a wide variety of methods to educate the public, including presentations to schools, bulletins, news stories, exhibits and demonstrations in store windows, motion pictures, pageants, posters and cooking demonstrations using dairy products.
A variety of committees were formed to do the work of the campaign, including a “Committee on Scrap Book,” charged with collecting all material used in the campaign and placing it in “suitable book form for a permanent record of the Campaign.” The images included here are taken from the scrapbook that the committee produced. On these pages, captions in quotation marks were taken from the scrapbook itself or from the reverse of loose pictures filed at the back of the book.
During Milk for Health Week, trained workers from the Extension Service, the Home Demonstration Agency, local women from Catholic organizations, Board of Health and public school nurses and Home Economics teachers visited schools to present educational material about the benefits of drinking milk. Posters were put up in classrooms and the campaign workers gave talks to students and, in some cases, taught them to sing “Doctor Milk” (to the tune of “Peggy O’Neil”):
Doc-tor Milk is a ver-ry wise man,
List-en what he has to say,
For he’ll put you wise,
So you’ll rec-og-nize,
The value of Milk today;
—— Chorus ———
If her eyes are dim and sad,
She needs some milk,
If he’s a thin and puny lad,
Why, he too, needs some milk,
Milk gives kiddies some vim and some pep,
It makes the o-ld folks wa-tch their step,
It gives personality, lots of mentality,
M-I-L-K, Milk.
The Milk for Health campaign claimed to have reached more than 60,000 school children.
A survey taken among public school children at the beginning of the Milk for Health Campaign found that of the more than 30,000 children surveyed,
46% have milk daily
69 % have tea and coffee daily
11 %have soft drinks daily
50 %are underweight
Although Milk for Health Week ended in April, follow-up activities continued for some time afterwards, notably a grand parade to promote milk drinking, which took place during Carnival season, 1923, specifically on February 10. Children from 16 different school decorated cars and trucks and competed for a first place prize of a $10 gold piece. Although similar Milk for Health campaigns had been conducted around the country, the New Orleans campaign was the first to include a parade among its activities. Anna S. Clayton, the Agent in charge of the campaign’s follow-up activities, wrote in her report that she had received a number of inquiries from around the country about the parade and had sent photos with full descriptions to a creamery in San Antonio. The loose parade photos in our scrapbook, with the descriptions handwritten on the back, may be extra copies of these photographs.
The images and some descriptions used in this post previously appeared as part of the Image of the Month in September 2004. Reformatted and edited by Brittanny Silva in 2023