Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was established by the Social Security Act of 1935 as a grant program to enable states to provide cash welfare payments for needy children who had been deprived of parental support or care because their father or mother was absent from the home, incapacitated, deceased, or unemployed.
Continue Reading »The Social Security Administration (SSA) began in 1935. It became a sub-cabinet agency in 1939, and returned full-circle to independent status in 1995. Throughout the years, arguments had been heard in the halls of Congress that SSA should be returned to independent agency status. This debate was given impetus in 1981 when the National Commission on Social Security recommended that SSA once again become an independent Social Security Board.
Continue Reading »President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s philosophy was: that Government has a positive responsibility for the general welfare. Not that Government itself must do everything, but that everything practicable must be done. A critical question for F.D.R. was whether a middle way was possible– a mixed system which might give the State more power than conservatives would like, enough power indeed to assure economic and social security, but still not so much as to create dictatorship.
Continue Reading »This is a portion of Special Study #1, a lecture Dr. Bortz, the first SSA Historian,developed as part of SSA’s internal training program.
Continue Reading »Early History of Unemployment Insurance By: Abe Bortz, Ph.D., Historian of the SSA Note: This entry is a portion of Special Study #1, a lecture Dr. Bortz, the first SSA Historian,developed as part of SSA’s internal training program. Up until the early 1970s new employees were trained at SSA headquarters in Baltimore before being sent…
Continue Reading »This is a portion of Special Study #1, a lecture Dr. Bortz, the first SSA Historian, developed as part of SSA’s internal training program. It features an extensive overview of social policy developments dating from pre-history up to the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935.
Continue Reading »After 1900 several States also passed laws to safeguard women in industry. As late as 1896, only 13 States had attempted to limit by statute the hours worked by women, and only 3 States had enacted laws that were capable of enforcement. For some years, adverse court decisions retarded the adoption of further legislation, but after 1908, when the Supreme Court ruled favorably on an Oregon statute, progress was rapid and marked.
Continue Reading »This is a portion of Special Study #1, a lecture Dr. Bortz, the first SSA Historian, developed as part of SSA’s internal training program. It features an extensive overview of social policy developments dating from pre-history up to the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935.
Continue Reading »Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins’ national radio broadcast, one of the earliest popular explanations of what would become the Social Security program.
Continue Reading »Abraham Epstein is credited with recommending the use of the term Social Security: Epstein, Frankel said, was in the process of “…establishing a national organization to spread the gospel of old age assistance throughout the United States. . . the proposed American Old Age Pension Association. When I heard the word pension’ it did not sit so well with me, knowing that at that moment the word had a connotation of politically radical action which challenged the established order. I told Epstein I would not use the word pension. He naturally asked me what word I would suggest. I thought for a moment and simply said: ‘security’.”
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