STATE CAPITOL NEWSLETTER: `Nip and tuck’
Social Security marks its 75th anniversary this week, but it almost didn’t happen, according to the Wisconsin citizen who played a key role in its development.
Passage was doubtful in the Senate Finance Committee “in part because there was no popular demand for old-age insurance, or very little, and still more because there were grave doubts about constitutionality,” said Edwin Witte in a 1955 interview.
Witte, then a University of Wisconsin economist, was tapped in 1934 to be the executive director for the Committee on Economic Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt to develop a program of old-age assistance. He was widely known as the “father of Social Security.”
Witte, who also had been head of the Legislative Reference Bureau for the Wisconsin Legislature for a dozen years, had a staff of fewer than100 persons who developed the Social Security legislation in just over six months in late 1934. It was a campaign promise by FDR.
“To say there was any great demand for this would be false,” Witte remembered at Social Security’s 20th anniversary. Witte said it had been “nip and tuck” in the House Ways and Means Committee.
In the final days of committee action in the U.S. Senate, defeat seemed to loom in the wings. If a vote would have been taken earlier, the bill would have died in committee, Witte indicated.
But stunning change came on the final day of work in the Senate Committee. Witte recalled that Committee Chair Pat Harrison, a Mississippi Democrat, had a surprise. He had secured a proxy from a hospitalized Sen. James Couzens of Michigan, the ranking Republican member of the committee. Also absent were several Democrats. Harrison also had collected the proxies of three Democratic senators who were opposed to the idea.
Some committee members, thinking it would be ruled unconstitutional, didn’t fight the committee passage, historical documents suggest. This may have a familiar ring to it.
The final roll call votes for passage of the Social Security Act were 372 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate. But the closeness of the issue is better remembered in Witte’s comments and speeches preserved by the State Historical Society.
Social Security would be one of FDR’s singular achievements even though some denounce it as a clear example of socialism, so dreaded by many these days. Two years later, Harrison would turn against Roosevelt and oppose other New Deal legislation.
Witte did much of the testifying before the Senate Labor Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. It was in the House committee that the insurance program became known as “Social Security” rather than an “assistance” bill. The welfare commissioner of New Jersey had suggested the name, Witte said.W
hile there was no wild public support for the idea, more than one million Americans over the age of 65 were on relief in 1935. Relief amounted to an average $15 per month at the time.
The committee didn’t have time to look at the health-care issue in 1934. A final report suggested it would look at that later. The American Medical Association flooded Congress with telegrams suggesting that mentioning a possible study was a “nefarious plot.” The idea died.
Witte, born near Watertown, studied at the University of Wisconsin under Frederick Jackson Turner and John Commons. Witte carried on the Progressive era Wisconsin Idea that government and academic experts could work to help solve society’s problems
Witte was honored at the 20th anniversary celebration. Then Social Security Commissioner Charles Schottland said Social Security became reality through Witte’s “great conviction for protecting the American public against the hazards of economic insecurity.” Witte died in 1960 at the age of 73.
