August 14, 1935, 90 years ago: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law. It becomes the keystone of his domestic program, the New Deal.
By the 1930s, America was the only modern industrial country without any national system of pensions for older people. In the depths of the Great Depression, a physician named Francis Townsend rallied support for a proposal to issue direct payments to the elderly.
Responding to that movement, Roosevelt organized a committee led by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to develop a major social welfare program proposal. Roosevelt presented the plan to Congress in January 1935. An ally of his from his tenure as Governor of New York, and from that of his predecessor in that office, Alfred E. Smith, FDR had made Perkins the 1st woman appointed to any post in the President's Cabinet, upon taking office in 1933.
The actual bill was written by Senator Robert F. Wagner, a fellow New Yorker, who would write another key piece of New Deal legislation, the National Labor Relations Act. His son, Robert F. Wagner Jr., would serve as Mayor of New York City from 1954 to 1965. However, these Robert Wagners were not related to the actor Robert Wagner.
The program was expanded to provide payments to widows and dependents of Social Security recipients. Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers.
As a result, 65 percent of the African-American workforce, and 27 percent of white workers, were excluded from the initial Social Security program. Many of these workers were covered only later on, when Social Security was expanded in 1950, and again in 1954.
The program was funded through a newly-established payroll tax, which later became known as the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA). Social Security taxes would be collected from employers by the States, with employers and employees contributing equally to the tax.
In addition to creating the program, the Social Security Act also established a state-administered unemployment insurance system and the Aid to Dependent Children, which provided aid to families headed by single mothers.
As with many other American "reforms," compared with the social security systems in Western Europe, the Social Security Act of 1935 was rather conservative. However, it was the first time that the federal government took responsibility for the economic security of the aged, the temporarily unemployed, dependent children, and the handicapped.
It's important to note that, in 1935, the average life expectancy for an American man was 67 years -- two years past the age when Social Security kicked in. This was a time before the wide availability of antibiotics, the polio vaccine, seat belts in cars, speed limits, raising the drinking age to 21, the prohibition of lead in paint, most environmental regulations, and the Surgeon General's warnings about the dangers of smoking.
FDR himself didn't even live to be 65: He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 63, due in large part to his constant smoking, and the pressures of World War II, driving his blood pressure sky-high. The first person to receive a Social Security number also didn't make it: On November 24, 1936, SSN 055-09-0001 went to John Sweeney, a 23-year-old electrical supply clerk from New Rochelle, New York, who was scheduled to collect an estimated $85 per month beginning in 1978. Except he died in 1975, at the age of 61.
Senator Wagner lived to be 75, Secretary Perkins to be 85. In 1936, the Republican nominee for President, Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, ran on a Party platform that called for the repeal of Social Security, and he lost 48 out of 50 States. Ironically, he lived to be 101, the longest-lived major-party nominee in the history of Presidential elections.
Today, with men and women just about equally in the workforce, the average life expectancy at around 79, and living to be 100 or more becoming less of a novelty, the Social Security age has been raised to 67.
