HISTORY RESOURCES AT SSA

This display panel depicts events prior to the 1935 Social Security Act in the context of the general problem of economic security. There is information regarding the first social insurance system in Germany in 1889, and Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 presidential campaign in which he called for the nation to adopt social insurance. Of particular note is a copy of Thomas Paine's 1795 pamphlet calling for an early social insurance scheme.

The Problem of Economic Security

The problem of economic security is an eternal and universal human problem. All people throughout all of human history have faced the problem of providing for their financial needs in old age, in disability, when work is unavailable, and when a family breadwinner dies. President Franklin Roosevelt would refer to this as "the hazards and vicissitudes of life."

Traditional approaches to this problem relied on the fact that most people lived on the land in extended families and could provide their own subsistence. However, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, Americans left the family farms, moved to the cities in nuclear families, and became wage-earners. This meant that the traditional strategies for coping with the problem of economic security were undermined.

In Europe in the late 19th century a new idea arose for dealing with these eternal human problems: social insurance. Under social insurance governments manage a pool of funds used to meet the basic needs of a nation's citizens--an approach that would eventually be called "social security" in America. Germany became the first nation to adopt social insurance in 1889. By the time the U.S. embraced this idea in 1935, 34 European nations already had social security programs.