Of course, workmen's compensation met great opposition when the agitation for it began in 1908 — and that was already late in our social development. They had it in Germany, in England, and in Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries for a long time. Americans going to Europe had particularly observed the German system which, in the usual German way, was much more thorough and logical than English or Scandinavian systems, although they all worked very well.
So we knew a little bit about social insurance, and even the words "social insurance" had come to be at least academic words. People who studied the matter — students and highbrows — generally could understand what it meant, but they seem never to have thought of insuring against other social hazards. Social problems were taken care of by the States, which appropriated money and provided homes or institutions for the victims of the toughest types of hazards; and by voluntary organizations which did all they could to relieve the sufferings caused by particular hazards. So we went along amiably, you know, always in our genial American optimistic way, believing that everything would turn out all right.
IT'S PEOPLE WHO SUFFER
Two or three studies (of social insurance) were started at one time or another. Nearly always a report of some sort was made, but before the report got written and filed, the crisis was over, and so we forgot about the problem. "That will never happen again," we said. This was notably true in 1919, just after the First World War.
New York City had a terrific problem of unemployment, which was hazardous because it involved so many people. The experience was short, sharp, and painful. The unemployed and homeless were allowed to sleep in the churches, I remember. Henry Brewer and Paul Kennedy, who was then the head of the New York Association for Labor Legislation, opened a place down on the Bowery called the Hotel de Gink, which was a clean, cheap, and honest lodging-house where a man could get free lodging if necessary and could do just about as he pleased. If he was a low-down fellow, nobody ever noticed it unless he was a thief. He couldn't steal; but almost anything else he could do. That wasn't true, of course, of the municipal lodging-house. If he was badly behaved, he just got turned out; whereas at the Hotel de Gink, he could do anything. He could sing vulgar songs and make vulgar jokes and make a noise and all that kind of thing. On the other hand, one didn't see the women and children, or the families dependent on other people. They were known to be part of the problem, but they did not show.
When we came to the problem of doing something for the "poorer kind of people" (as John Garner called them) in 1933 after the Roosevelt administration took office, we, of course had had a very recent experience with poverty. Since 1929 we had experienced the short, sudden drop of everything. The total economy had gone to pieces; just shook to pieces under us, beginning, of course, with the stock market crash. A banking crisis followed it. A manufacturing crisis followed it. Everybody felt it. In less than a year it was a terror.
NOT HIRING
People were so alarmed that all through the rest of 1929, 1930, and 1931, the specter of unemployment--of starvation, of hunger, of the wandering boys, of the broken homes, of the families separated while somebody went out to look for work--stalked everywhere. The unpaid rent, the eviction notices, the furniture and bedding on the sidewalk, the old lady weeping over it, the children crying, the father out looking for a truck to move their belongings himself to his sister's flat or some relative's already overcrowded tenement, or just sitting there bewilderedly waiting for some charity officer to come and move him somewhere. I saw goods stay on the sidewalk in front of the same house with the same children weeping on top of the blankets for 3 days before anybody came to relieve the situation!
These were the years in which developed, you remember, in New York City — and later in other cities — the pattern of the apple sellers. Some kindhearted man who had a surplus of apples — because the farmers were in this depression, too — thought of getting rid of his apples (which he couldn't sell) by giving them to the unemployed to sell. So they got them every morning somewhere down in the market. Nobody asked them to prove they were unemployed. I'm sure they were because no man in his right mind would have taken a big basket of apples to try and sell at 5 cents apiece in a poverty-stricken community--out of which he would make just a little bit of pocket money — unless he had been out of work, out of wages, out of money, out of everything.
Some of you may remember how strange the ideas of the public were about the apples. I tell you this because it's a clue to the public mentality of the times — 1929 to 1935. In The New Yorker magazine there was a cartoon of two sort of prissy-looking ladies with their hands crossed, walking down the street and looking as if they were not unemployed themselves. Here was the big basket of apples, and here was the man selling them with a little sign saying: "Unemployed — Apples 5 cents." As they looked at the apples, one lady said to the other, "They look perfectly delicious." "Oh, they do, indeed," said the other, "I wish I could have one." "oh no, you mustn't," said the first. "They're for the unemployed."
Though you may find it difficult to believe, ideas as silly as that were actually broadcast in the community. And many other strange notions added to the confused situation.
I've always said, and I still think we have to admit, that no matter how much fine reasoning there was about the old-age insurance system and the unemployment insurance prospects — no matter how many people were studying it, or how many committees had ideas on the subject, or how many college professors had written theses on the subject — and there were an awful lot of them — the real roots of the Social Security Act were in the Great Depression of 1929. Nothing else would have bumped the American people into a social security system except something so shocking, so terrifying, as that Depression.
The wandering boys were a source of terror. But it was the most natural thing in the world for a great big grownup boy 14 to 17 years old to go wandering. Consider the case of a boy who found himself in a family where the breadwinner was unemployed, where there were other children around, where his mother was distracted by the lack of anything to buy food with, and to feel himself, not unwanted, but one more mouth to feed, and a great big mouth at that.
"I ate so much," one boy said to me, "I couldn't stand it. The kids, the little children were hungry. So I went out to find a job, and I went out of town."
This is what the boys did — not a few of them — thousands of them. They wandered around the country and were a problem to every charity and relief organization, to every State aid or Federal-and-State relief station; and the railroads were terrified of them. These boys, following the road, would steal a ride under the bumpers, and the railroads were frightened all the time that there would be accidents; that somebody would be killed; and I believe some were. It's a dangerous business to ride the rods. I remember I went out to see some of the boys. They finally gathered them in — the railroaders did. They sort of herded many of them into the St. Louis yards, and let them pitch a camp. Well, there they lived in the camp — in the St. Louis railroad yards — a hazard to the community — picking up whatever they could. I'm sure some of them learned to steal. Some of them learned be panhandlers. All kinds of things happened. These were really alarming situations. They were alarm because of the demoralization an because of the general hazards t the community and to the total economy.
But everything was down. Nobody could get a job. The grocer didn't employ the young boys to deliver goods any more. He couldn't afford to. The grocer himself finally went bankrupt and closed up. He had given too much credit. I mean the people who were out of work ha credit at the grocery store at fir and they could eat; but they couldn't pay their bills, and finally, the grocer couldn't pay his bills; and eventually somebody came and sold him out. It went on like that all the time. One thing led to another, and we began to realize how cruel, how very deep, how almost irreversible this situation had come to be. This was the situation which faced people who began to be aware of the problem early as 1930.
THE PEOPLE SPEAK
A lot of private thinking went on. When I got to my office as Secretary of Labor in 1933, I found on desk over 2,000 plans. These were "plans" for curing the depression. All kinds of people with nothing else to do, being out of work, began to plan — to think. This was social planning. It was extraordinary how many people in their social plans had hit upon something that sounded like social insurance. Often the planners were almost illiterate; often the work wasn't very thoroughly done. Often, however, they were good; well set up, typewritten, sharply organized-A, B, C; 1, 2, 3, under it, you know--very good plans. But the extraordinary thing was that there should have been 2,000 of them filed with the Secretary of Labor in the previous year. And many more — thousands more — on the President's desk, because everybody had apparently taken to making a social plan. This, I think, was stimulated by the Townsend Plan. The word "plan" had never been a political word before, but the Townsend Plan was wonderful. I mean it sounded so good — "$30 every Thursday; but you would have to spend it right away. This was for everybody over 65. This was to cure the Depression effects upon the aged. Thirty dollars every Thursday would do it, and if they spent it all before the next Thursday, it would penetrate the market. It would revive the market for goods. That would establish and strengthen the manufacture industries. Industrial concerns would need money from the banks. That would revive the banking industry. Everything would be fine — $30. (Ed. note: $30 every Thursday was the rival "Ham & Eggs" plan; the Townsend Plan promised $200 per month.)
This was a great watchword. This was a real stimulus to thinking in this country. Although it started out as a most crooked — I don't mean dishonest, I mean wavering — plan, it became a political move of considerable importance. When I saw that old Dr. Townsend had died just this last winter, I couldn't help but say to myself, "God rest his soul; he was a good old man!" He meant well. He didn't have any learning, but he was sorry for himself and the other old people, so he thought of $30 every Thursday and started us all thinking. In particular, he startled the Congress of the United States, because the aged 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.
Then, of course, we had a lot of other plans: The Technocrats were busy. Technocracy was so engaging, so interesting, that the people used to stop and read the literature in store windows which the Technocrats hired. Great crowds would gather around a bulletin in the store windows all over the country to hear about the Technocrats' plan. I have forgotten myself what it was, but it wasn't social security, you can rest assured of that. It was a somewhat crazy, extreme plan, but I am sure it was based upon good feeling and a good idea.
Social planning and social thinking had begun in the American people, whereas they never had been really vital ideas before. We had always sort of bumped into things. A group of reformists got an idea and our social legislation was based largely on what a group of reform people had been able to do. Workmen's compensation legislation was put through in the United States, State by State, under our preconceived ideas of the relationship between the States and the Federal
Government and the regular constitutional rulings of the Supreme Court on that matter. Thus, we took it for granted that anything in the way of social legislation had to be done State by State. The American Association for Labor Legislation, however, took the lead in devising a model law on workmen's compensation insurance, and first recommended it after the Pittsburgh survey of 1908. Compensation was then talked about for a few years until in 1910 and 1911, the first laws were passed in Wisconsin and the State of New York. Nearly all social legislation has originated in one of those two States, it seems.
Thus, out of this plan of the American Association for Labor Legislation, sprang the beginnings of workmen's compensation. I won't bother to go into the horrors of uncompensated industrial accidents because many of you know all about that anyhow. And I find that many young people are simply astonished when you say, "Oh, yes; people used to get their arms pulled out in a laundry mangle. No, they didn't get any money." "Didn't they get anything?" "No; nothing." "Well, what did they do?" "I don't know what they did," is all you can say. Somewhere or other they buried themselves away in the general population. Girls got scalped in the textile machinery, even in the sewing machines of the dress industry in New York City. You'd get down under the machine to pick up a bobbin that had fallen and the wheel would cut your head off. It was a terrible accident. Men fell into the molten iron pots in the Pittsburgh district and, of course, were never seen again. This horrible situation was accepted by the American people. They thought, "Well, this is what it is. Too bad! John was a good man, but it was an awful dangerous trade he was in." These things were commonly accepted, and it took the efforts of the American Association for Labor Legislation and thousands of individuals to start the movement toward making a systematic recompense for injury and disability arising out of an accident in the course of employment.
The beginnings of old-age insurance came about largely, I think, by the crisis of the times, by the studies of some of the intellectuals and through the impact of the old-age predicament, and of the Townsend organizations on the politicians.
This, of course, is an important victory. Once you get the ear of a politician, you get something real. The highbrows can talk forever and nothing happens. People smile benignly on them and let it go. But once the politician gets an idea, he deals in getting things done. Many are extraordinarily able in devising political plans that hold water, not only in the matter of votes but administratively.
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