PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENT SIGNING THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT. AUGUST 14,1935
F.D.R.’s statement on signing the Social Security Act reminds us to pay attention to ‘reform’ or schemes to ‘privatize’
PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENT SIGNING THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT. AUGUST 14,1935
Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.
We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.
If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.
Social Security History – the 1940s
Chronology
1940s
January 1, 1940 Monthly benefits first became payable under old-age and survivor’s insurance to aged retired workers and their dependents and to survivors of deceased insured workers. The Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund was established as a separate account in the United States Treasury to hold the amounts accumulated under the old-age and survivors insurance program. Basic provisions for hearing and review instituted by the Social Security Board under authority to establish procedures, hold hearings, and take testimony in relation to determination of rights to old-age and survivors insurance benefits (Office of Appeals Council).
January 31, 1940 Ida M. Fuller became the first person to receive an old-age monthly benefit check under the new Social Security law. She paid in $24.75 between 1937 and 1939 on an income of $2,484. Her first check, dated January 31, was for $22.54. …