Letters from an American - August 13, 2025

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today, and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place. August 13, 2025. On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of American government. The Social Security Act established a federal system of old age

benefits, unemployment insurance, aid to homeless, dependent and neglected children, funds to promote maternal and child welfare and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net. The driving force behind the law was FDR's Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job. She served from 1933 to 1945. Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans

who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a rugged individualism in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality. Her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family's primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other. As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke,

She majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a master's degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York Office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying. The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the triangle shirtwaste factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the

doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers, some of them on fire, leaped from the eighth, ninth, and ten floors of the building, dying on the pavement. The triangle shirt-waist fire proved to Perkins that ordinary organizations would never be enough to improve workers' lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter, and that wives and children had a

support network if a husband and father died. In that system, the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive. The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said, the people are what mattered to government, and the government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life. Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of

labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old age insurance. She laid, Theta recalled, I remember he looked so startled and he said, well, do you think it can be done? Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressman had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man's willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans.

In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy. Townsend's plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country

to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation's social fabric. It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend starts, startled the Congress of the United States because the agent have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes. The evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote.

But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes. So every congressman had heard from the Townsend plan people. FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled, Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk.

I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having to be given. taken our solemn oath that this was the end. We were never going to review it again. By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate. When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexei de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted,

he thought Americans were uniquely so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed. Well, I don't know anything about the times in which de Tocqueville visited America, she said. But I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real. With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a long-standing political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of. of every man for himself. In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected, of course, the act had to be amended and has been amended and amended and amended,

until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know, Social Security is so far. firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever. And for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States. Letters from an American was written. by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. This is you know.