Social Security

Even though few Americans alive today – even including those that qualify for benefits – likely do not remember a time before social security, the United States did not set up an official program with which to deal with the growing problem of elderly support until the mid 1930s during the worst of the depression. Before then, most areas of the country had some form of social security by means of community efforts, but, throughout the poorer regions, older Americans could face genuinely tough times trying to make ends meet once they’d grown too old to comfortably work.

Utilizing the increasing momentum toward a strong federal government which first allowed President Franklin D Rooselvelt the power to institute the New Deal, FDR then was then able to offer social security to every resident of  the country over the age of sixty five. Once again, while we may take social security for granted these days, things were quite a bit different one hundred years ago. Just a generation previous to the time when legislation was firmly enacted, the life expectancy of the average American was substantially shorter, after all, and most people just assumed they’d work about near til they’d die without ever believing something like social security could help them.

Also, remember, with transportation far more onerous and a restrained standard of living forcing families to maintain a single residence, most United States citizens would never have even imagined that their family could so splinter off into the far corners of the nation nor that grown children would find it financially feasible (and morally defensible) to travel across the country and leave the patriarchs and matriarchs ailing and desolate, absent any income at all. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, the government did initiate a form of social security insurance – through the program went by a different name and had vastly different expectations – for the former civil war soldiers who had suffered severe disabilities as well as the children and widows of the deceased combat veteran.

As indicated, there was still a great remove from these pensions when compared to the social security administration of modern times, but the sudden need to care for so many Americans definitely paved the way for the eventual social security payments which every senior citizen now counts upon for their support. With the slow and steady migration west and the growing urbanization of the country (and subsequent dissipation of traditional family and community ties), most sage political forces recognized the growing need for a public like social security well before the incredible economic cataclysm that was the great depression.

Still, owing to the traditional pressures against any progressive societal aids, there was not only no social security office but also virtually no measures in place to help the aged or poor within the United States before the stock market crashed in 1929. Churches and secular charities would do what they could in piecemeal attempts to try and deal with the yawning chasm of public need in the absence of governmental structures, but, until the larger financial underpinnings of our country grew sufficiently threatened for the bankers and industrialists to lend their tacit support to a safety net funded by tax revenues, nothing had happened.

In a way, the senior citizens of the United States could truly credit the uncertainty that spread like wildfire around economic markets following the depression for social security and all of the many additional welfare measures – unemployment compensation, food stamps, Medicaid and Medicare – which have proven so truly instrumental in assisting the lives of millions of Americans.