The current Social Security debate presents a great example of an issue on which history has changed my mind. Before graduate school--and a forced march through the literature on American social history--I was one of those post-baby boomers who thought Social Security was a big crock, an outmoded boondoggle that transferred wealth from younger workers starting families to older people who did not need it, while still not paying retirees enough to live comfortably. Back in the '80s, I was encouraged in these views by a series of articles in neoliberal magazines like the Washington Monthly, the Atlantic, and my journalistic alma mater, the New Republic. While out-and-out conservatives openly pushed privatization (much more openly than President Bush does now with his disingenuous talk of saving Social Security by taking money out of the program, the destroying-the-village-in-order-to-save-it option), the magazines I was reading often took the reasonably liberal position that some sort of smaller, means-tested old-age pension program, paid for through progressive taxation, would be greatly preferable to FDR's universal entitlement.Go read the rest. I, too, used to accept the conventional wisdom--Social Security was a Ponzi scheme--and that it wouldn't still be around by the time I retired. The SCLM really had me brain-washed.
What Social Security actually accomplished rarely came up in the 1980s debates, any more than it does today. That requires some knowledge of what went before Social Security and the other forms of retirement assistance that now go along with it. Here is where the facts start to cause problems.
For reference, here is Jeffrey L. Pasley's list of Further Reading. Go do your homework before spouting off about Social Security:
While I presume that much literature on the social and policy history of aging has come out in the last fifteen years, it seemed fair given the premise of this piece (and less time consuming, too), to rely on my old comps reading. Thus most of the detail above, except for the congressional debate on revolutionary pensions, comes from David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1978); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976); Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970); Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840 (New York, 1989); and Gary B. Nash, "Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser, 33 (1976): 3-30. It is my own spin, however, so none of these authors should be blamed for my lapses. I first learned about the Civil War pension system in Theda Skocpol's American Political Development seminar, and her book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, 1995) controversially places great interpretive stress on this lost first welfare state. To remind myself about the 1930s, I exhumed a couple of other books I have had for years: Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1983), and William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York, 1963). The neoliberal case against Social Security as I knew it is summarized in Phillip Longman, Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America (Boston, 1987). The best coverage of the current Social Security debate is appearing at Talking Points Memo, a blog edited by Joshua Micah Marshall, the only prominent political journalist I am aware of with a Ph.D. in early American history. I suspect he remembers his comps reading, too. The Florida "dictator professors" bill, one of several Horowitz-inspired measures around the country, came to my attention via the editor of Common-Place and a posting by the king (sultan?) of historian bloggers, Juan Cole.And I'll add one more resource: the very useful Center for Economic and Policy Research. Look for the Social Security Reporting Review, where stories about Social Security are analyzed--see what the SCLM neglects to report...
God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988
