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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins’ national radio broadcast, one of the earliest popular explanations of what would become the Social Security program.
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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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On August 15, 1935, the Social Security Act established a system of old-age benefits for workers, benefits for victims of industrial accidents, unemployment insurance, aid for dependent mothers and children, the blind, and the physically handicapped.
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In 1974 the expansive social policy system that had prevailed in the postwar era ended, and a more restrictive system that would characterize the rest of the seventies and the early eighties began to take its place.
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We tend to think of the expansion of social security as something impersonal and bureaucratic. It is almost as if the program expanded by itself. The basic old-age insurance program never posed issues that defined the political or cultural character of an era. Yet we know that the process of social security’s growth was neither smooth nor straight forward.
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Having recently completed work on a documentary history of the Social Security program1, several insights suggest themselves which might be useful in framing the (inevitable) future debates over Social Security policy. The first and most salient realization is that to a remarkable degree the policy debates in Social Security seem to contain some hardy perennials.
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