Guide To Social Security ARCHIVES

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MELVIN H.WUNSCH PAPERS, 1929-1986

WUNSCH, MELVIN H. (1912-1992). PAPERS, 1929-1986. 2.0 c.f. (1 record center carton and 3 archives boxes) and photographs.

Abstract
Papers of a career officer with the U.S. Social Security Administration (1936-1973), consisting of original documents gathered by Wunsch to illustrate his career and lengthy explanatory notes on agency policy, procedures, and personnel composed by Wunsch between 1973 and 1986. Major topics include the Social Security system; its management, field service, and administration; automation; Medicare; public relations; and staff training and development. Among the notable correspondents are Robert M. Ball and H. L. Mencken, as well as a variety of middle-level federal administrators. A small file of personal papers supplies additional information about Wunsch and illustrates his personal style and political convictions through correspondence with a range of friends and relatives. Photographs also document Wunsch's career and places of residence (1936-1945) and the Wunsch and Blocki families in Wisconsin.

Presented by Melvin H. Wunsch, Baltimore, Maryland, 1973-1986. M73-174; M74-215 and 587; M75-206 and 587; M84-227; and M86-248.

Processed by Brian J. Mulhern-FGH intern, 1987

Biography
Melvin H. Wunsch, an administrator of the Social Security Administration during its formative years, was born on January 9, 1912 in Rockland (Manitowoc County), the youngest son of Carl Wunsch. His father was a farmer of Prussian descent who taught his son the value of discipline and frugality. From 1929 to 1934 Wunsch was a student at the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in journalism, studied with Selig Perlman and John Hicks, and was active in journalistic and forensic activities. After graduation, his studies led Wunsch to a series of short-term news and public relations jobs until a long-forgotten civil service application brought him to Washington, D.C., late in 1936 in the first batch of recruits to be trained for the new Social Security Administration.

Wunsch's ensuing activities consisted of a series of geographic assignments and a gradual string of promotions in civil service grade classifications. Beginning as an assistant personnel clerk (grade 3), Wunsch ended his days at the Social Security Administration as an assistant division chief (grade 15). For the majority of his career, he served on the Social Security field staff, beginning in Minneapolis in 1936, and moving successively to Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oshkosh, Lafayette, Muncie, Rockford, Indianapolis, Chicago, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, and Kansas City. In the field, his public relations skill, early emphasis on training functions, and managerial skill in trouble-shooting organizational problems won him a reputation as an able administrator. As the years passed, Wunsch was promoted to increasingly large urban centers.

After brief stints in a public relations capacity for Social Security in Chicago and Baltimore from 1947 to 1948, Wunsch shifted to supervisory duties as assistant regional representative in Chicago from 1948 to 1951, where he served as a liaison to a large network of Social Security field officers. For a brief period from December 1951 to May 1953 Wunsch left the Social Security Administration and served with the Bureau of the Budget as budget examiner in the Chicago regional office, where he had duties similar to those he had held with the Social Security Administration. Upon dissolution of the Budget Bureau regional offices, Wunsch returned to the Social Security system once again as assistant regional representative, first in Cleveland and then in Kansas City.

A move to the Baltimore office in May 1963 represented a major shift in career direction, as Wunsch took a place on the central planning staff. The bulk of his work there revolved around management of information systems in the Social Security Administration. Bureaucratic struggles in the central office ultimately led him to join the systems staff of the Bureau of Health Insurance, which was responsible for implementing Medicare. He briefly headed this division in 1971 and 1972; before retiring in January 1973.

Melvin Wunsch married Margaret Blocki on May 7, 1946.

Scope and Content
The Wunsch papers consist largely of extended memoirs composed by the donor between 1973 and 1986 about his career with the Social Security Administration together with illustrative original documents. The papers are arranged substantially as received from the donor -- chronologically by assignment and analytically within these headings. In addition, there is a small series of reference documents and a file of miscellaneous personal papers.

The bulk of the collection consists of Wunsch's CAREER NARRATIVE, a running commentary on his career composed between 1973 and 1986, to which he appended documents to substantiate his observations on the policies, personnel, and procedures of the Social Security Administration. While many of the documents concern the routine activities of various midwestern regional centers, the cumulative effect of Wunsch's collection is a vivid impression of agency administration from the level of middle management. In this regard, the collection complements the Historical Society's holdings on such major figures in the Social Security system as Arthur J. Altmeyer, Wilbur Cohen, and Edwin E. Witte.

As a field officer in the Midwest for the bulk of his career, Wunsch was privy to a wide array of administrative problems and management styles during the first 35 years of the Social Security system. His notes self-consciously reflect on motivations and consequences of successive developments in this major American agency and his own continuing anxieties concerning his career and status within the organization.

Major topics in the papers include the management, administration, and field service of the Social Security system; automation; Medicare; public relations; and staff training and development. Throughout the collection there is repeated reference to Wunsch's German-American origins and their relevance to his ongoing government service. This topic is particularly reflected in a brief exchange (Box 4, Folder 7) with H.L. Mencken on American regional dialects. Other notable correspondents include George E. Rawson, Hugh A. McKenna, Albert A. Kuhle, and Thomas M. Tierney, with occasional contributions by Robert M. Ball.

The CAREER REFERENCE SERIES, which consists of more lengthy original documents, follows. This series supplies additional documentation for Wunsch's observations in the career narrative series. Included here is the lengthy Total Data Systems Plan, numerous SSA and Bureau of the Budget internal memoranda, and copies of in-house newsletters to field staff.

A small accumulation of PERSONAL PAPERS included with the collection supplies additional information about Wunsch and illustrates his personal style and political convictions via correspondence with a range of friends and relatives. There are extended communications with four friends: two college chums, Bud Jens and Norm Beier; and two Social Security colleagues, A. Dale Smith and William J. Rhynsburger. The personal files are arranged chronologically by the initial date of the file and topically thereunder.

A collection of personal photographs and negatives illustrating aspects of Wunsch's career and the locales in which he lived, 1936-1945, and earlier pictures of the Wunsch and Blocki families in Wisconsin were received with the papers. They have been removed to the Visual and Sound Archives where they are uncatalogued.