Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Then, of course, we had a lot of other plans: The Technocrats were busy. Technocracy was so engaging, so interesting, that the people used to stop and read the literature in store windows which the Technocrats hired. Great crowds would gather around a bulletin in the store windows all over the country to hear about the Technocrats' plan. I have forgotten myself what it was, but it wasn't social security, you can rest assured of that. It was a somewhat crazy, extreme plan, but I am sure it was based upon good feeling and a good idea.

Social planning and social thinking had begun in the American people, whereas they never had been really vital ideas before. We had always sort of bumped into things. A group of reformists got an idea and our social legislation was based largely on what a group of reform people had been able to do. Workmen's compensation legislation was put through in the United States, State by State, under our preconceived ideas of the relationship between the States and the Federal

Government and the regular constitutional rulings of the Supreme Court on that matter. Thus, we took it for granted that anything in the way of social legislation had to be done State by State. The American Association for Labor Legislation, however, took the lead in devising a model law on workmen's compensation insurance, and first recommended it after the Pittsburgh survey of 1908. Compensation was then talked about for a few years until in 1910 and 1911, the first laws were passed in Wisconsin and the State of New York. Nearly all social legislation has originated in one of those two States, it seems.

Thus, out of this plan of the American Association for Labor Legislation, sprang the beginnings of workmen's compensation. I won't bother to go into the horrors -- of uncompensated industrial accidents because many of you know all about that anyhow. And I find that many young people are simply astonished when you say, "Oh, yes; people used to get their arms pulled out in a laundry mangle. No, they didn't get any money." "Didn't they get anything?" "No; nothing." "Well, what did they do?" "I don't know what they did," is all you can say. Somewhere or other they buried themselves away in the general population. Girls got scalped in the textile machinery, even in the sewing machines of the dress industry in New York City. You'd get down under the machine to pick up a bobbin that had fallen and the wheel would cut your head off. It was a terrible accident. Men fell into the molten iron pots in the Pittsburgh district and, of course, were never seen again. This horrible situation was accepted by the American people. They thought, "Well, this is what it is. Too bad! John was a good man, but it was an awful dangerous trade he was in." These things were commonly accepted, and it took the efforts of the American Association for Labor Legislation and thousands of individuals to start the movement toward making a systematic recompense for injury and disability arising out of an accident in the course of employment.

The beginnings of old-age insurance came about largely, I think, by the crisis of the times, by the studies of some of the intellectuals and through the impact of the old-age predicament, and of the Townsend organizations on the politicians.

This, of course, is an important victory. Once you get the ear of a politician, you get something real. The highbrows can talk forever and nothing happens. People smile benignly on them and let it go. But once the politician gets an idea, he deals in getting things done. Many are extraordinarily able in devising political plans that hold water, not only in the matter of votes but administratively.

THE KEY TO ACTION

Without the ability to convert the politicians and to convince the politicians of the necessity and wisdom of making provisions for old age, we would never have had the old-age and survivors insurance system or any of the other social insurance systems. Sometimes a little guidance helps them; sometimes they develop this pattern entirely on their own account. Don't ever scorn the politicians. They are really the key to these situations in which we now deal. And I want to say this right now: the need for unemployment insurance was even more critical at that time, in 1933, than the need of the aged who could have been handled under large appropriations for relief without having their relief come as a matter of right through insurance. But the unemployment insurance idea was full of hazards for many people, and particularly for the politicians, who tended to take the old-fashioned view that there was something wrong with people who were unemployed, and that they ought to bear the burden of their own sins. If you go back to medieval writing, and on into early 19th-century writings, you find this theme coming up all the time. There are some people who won't work and, of course, they will always be unemployed and stagger along somehow. Now you know and I know that there are an extraordinarily few persons who will always be unemployed and who either don't want to, or can't, because of physical or other disabilities, get the kind of work they can do. But it's always easy to say, "Well, he should have learned to do something" and "No, he shouldn't be covered." Thus, when the bill was debated in Congress there was always opposition to the unemployment insurance based on opinions such as: "Well, a man shouldn't be taxed with this and for that when it isn't his fault." "The employer should not have to pay a tax into the unemployment insurance fund because he's not to blame for it. He can't help it."