Elderly

The Great Depression and World War II had a significant impact on the lives of people over the age of 65. As the nation entered the depression years, the elderly found themselves a particularly vulnerable age group economically. Campaigns to provide a national old-age pension, notably the one led by Dr. Francis Townsend, brought their plight to national attention, and the Social Security Act of 1935 addressed the economic insecurity of old age. Mobilization for World War II finally ended the depression, and the need for war workers opened up job opportunities for the elderly. By the postwar period, the elderly constituted a growing proportion of the nation’s population, had an expanding safety net, and formed an increasingly important political constituency.

The elderly as a group had been growing since the turn of the 20th century, as advances in medicine and public health helped to increase life expectancy from 47 in 1900 to 60 in 1930. By 1930, those over age 65 were estimated at 6.5 million people, or about 5 percent of the United States’s population. But the elderly were a vulnerable group, disproportionately likely to live in poverty. Most did not have access to private pensions (only an estimated 150,000 elderly lived on private pensions in the 1930s), and for those who planned to live on their savings, the banking crisis of the depression wiped out many accounts. State old-age assistance programs were in no better shape—by 1934, only about 180,000 elderly were receiving state elderly aid, with an average monthly payment of less than $20. Families, which had been the traditional safety net for the elderly, found themselves increasingly unable to assist elderly parents and relatives as the unemployment rate continued to rise. Compounding this was the fact that the elderly tended to be among those first fired, and their unemployment rates were consistently higher than the national average.

The condition of the elderly became part of the national agenda during the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As the depression continued, several grassroots movements of the elderly began gaining momentum. The largest was the Townsend Movement, begun by a California physician, Dr. Francis Townsend. Townsend’s impracticable but popular program proposed a $200 per month pension to every person over age 60, to be spent by the end of the month and financed by a national sales tax. Townsend clubs began springing up around the nation and by 1935 had almost 500,000 dues-paying members. Concurrently, the President’s Committee on Economic Security, created in 1934, was working on its recommendations that included addressing old-age poverty, and became the Social Security Act of 1935.

In the long run, the most significant part of the Social Security Act was the Old-Age Insurance program (OAI, changed to Old-Age and Survivors’ Insurance in 1939), popularly known as Social Security. A federally administered retirement program, OAI was funded through employer and employee payroll taxes, with the amount of benefits tied to the worker’s employment history. But benefits were not scheduled to begin until 1942 (changed to 1940), and the elderly needed immediate relief. Partly to address this gap, the Social Security Act also created a public assistance program, the Old-Age Assistance program (OAA), which absorbed the estimated 700,000 elderly receiving aid from the Federal Emergency Reliee Administration and provided financial assistance to the elderly not covered under OAI. At its peak, OAA supported over 2.7 million elderly persons in 1950, though by 1951 the number of OASI recipients exceeded those under OAA.

World War II showed that the elderly could be, and often wanted to be, productive members of the workforce. The war years saw a critical shortage of workers and the elderly helped to fill this need. The number of elderly receiving old-age assistance declined each year as they reentered the workforce, although demobilization put many back into retirement after 1945. The number of persons over 65 on OAA and OASI climbed once more, even as the elderly were becoming a larger proportion of the population (8 percent by 1950). A by-product was that the economic independence OAA and OASI provided the elderly meant that they were less dependent on their families and were increasingly less likely to live with their adult children or other relatives.

Through the efforts to provide them with economic security, the elderly also found their political voice by the postwar period. Social Security, as it was expanded over the decades to include most workers and benefits were also increased, became one of the “sacred cows” of American politics, and any perceived threat to the program could bring out large numbers of voters. The years 1929-45, then, ameliorated the economic plight of the elderly and helped create one of the strongest political lobbying groups in the United States.

Further reading: Carole Haber and Brian Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Report of the Committee on Economic Security of 1935 and Other Basic Documents Relating to the Development of the Social Security Act (Washington, D. C.: National Conference on Social Welfare, 1985).

—Katherine Liapis Segrue