Good Tuesday Morning!
1. Question – Who took care of the aged and poor
before Social Security and welfare programs?
2. Thought – Just about everyone-except the
government. For centuries, up to the Great Depression of
the 1930s, families traditionally took care of
grandparents and aging parents. Imagine Nana and Poppa
sharing your kitchen, your outhouse, your fireplace, and
maybe even your bedroom. Now you know why people in those
nineteenth-century daguerreotypes (an early photograph
produced on silver [da gerr’ oh types]) never
smiled.
Few people had health insurance, so if someone lost a job
or broke a leg, family members were supposed to provide
support. If that wasn’t enough to keep bread on the
table, churches, fraternal clubs, and lodges had special
funds to aid families in need. The Red Cross and other
organizations like it stood by ready to help. In big
cities, where immigrant populations were high, aid
societies for different ethnic groups sprang up to offer
loans, employment, and even shelter during tough periods.
The system worked fairly well for a long time. But when
the stock market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression
ensued, charitable organizations were overwhelmed.
Basically, they had functioned by soliciting donations
from the wealthy, but now many of these well-to-do
citizens were impoverished, too. The crash and subsequent
bank failures wiped out the savings of countless families,
wages plummeted, businesses closed at a frightening rate,
and nationwide unemployment averaged 25%.
President Herbert Hoover refused to put more money into
employment programs or relief – he was not about to
turn the government into a welfare agency. But the
Depression deepened, and by the end of his term, the
embattled Hoover, a Republican, approved giving states big
federal loans that were to be distributed to the needy.
But it was too little, too late. Hoover was voted out of
office-he was replaced by a Democrat, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.
In the mid-1930s, Roosevelt’s New Deal programs set
up Social Security as old-age and disability insurance,
not as a charity. Roosevelt also designated millions of
federal dollars to programs that put people back to work,
and he convinced states to start unemployment insurance.
The U.S. government has been in the welfare business ever
since. (Who-What-Where-When by Publication’s
International)
“Remember always that you have not only the
right to be an individual, you have the obligation to
be one.”
(Eleanor Roosevelt)