From the Publisher / Arnold G. York
We’re on the brink of passing a national healthcare bill, which has been a political objective of a number of past presidents ever since the Social Security Act in 1935. It now looks like when it finally passes, assuming it doesn’t blow apart in conference committee, it will pass without a single Republican vote, and with large numbers of the population against it, or at least deeply apprehensive. The process has not been pretty, with often angry and vile attacks on the Democrats for bringing a version of socialism to America. I couldn’t help but notice that many of the most vociferous opponents seem to be senior citizens who certainly look old enough to be receiving Social Security and Medicare. It perplexed me. How could people who were the obvious recipients of two government programs that certainly had their roots in European socialism be so upset that medical care was going to be extended to the rest of the population? I couldn’t find any easy answer other than the process was so contentious it frightened many people.
The political process, particularly in the Senate, hasn’t been very pretty to watch. Since the Democrats needed all 60 votes to beat a Republican filibuster, it meant that every single Democratic senator had to be on board, along with the two independents. That gave a great deal of negotiating leverage to every renegade senator who figured that if they were going to be vote number 60, they expect something extra for their state in return, and most of them got it.
The entire process left many of us with a sort of sickening feeling that government was dysfunctional and it shouldn’t happen this way.
Then I began to wonder. Had the road to Social Security been any different? And, in time, do people just forget all the hardships of the trip and only remember arriving at the end of the journey?
In the old days some of those answers might have required days in the library plodding through the stacks, but not today. I went to Google, typed in “Social Security history,” focused the search a bit, and out came a library of information.
Let your mind go back to the year 1935 with the White House occupied by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a New York patrician and a descendant of the original Dutch settlers. The country and the world were in the throes of the Great Depression. The country was nearly bankrupt, as were many other countries of the world. In both the House and the Senate, the Democrats were strongly in control; in fact, more than 60 percent of each house was in Democratic hands, which meant no filibuster by the Republicans was possible. In 1935 the Republicans were largely politically irrelevant, having been trounced in the 1932 election. But the Democrats of 1935 were not the Democrats of today. In those days, some of the most conservative people in the House and the Senate were Southern Democrats, and they had seniority and controlled the major committees that held the fate of Social Security in their hands. Not only were they conservatives, but many were also segregationists and outspoken racists. That left the political question of how do you put together the Democrats from the industrial union-led north into agreement with the Southerners who controlled Congress to pass Social Security?
Well, they did it, and again it wasn’t pretty. There was no question in anyone’s mind that it was a gigantic welfare program. In those days it covered both retirement and unemployment insurance. No one had paid anything into the system and yet they would begin to start drawing assistance immediately. I don’t have to tell you that it was highly controversial. Opponents said it would cause a loss of jobs or bankrupt the country or lead us down the road to socialism, which in those days was probably a code word for Communism.
They put together the necessary votes in a way that you couldn’t conceive of today. To handle the objections of the conservatives, particularly to mollify the Southerners, they excluded most minorities-and that included women-from the new Social Security system. This meant they couldn’t get either Social Security or Unemployment Insurance. They did it cleverly and nastily by covering only those occupations and employment that were typical white male categories and patterns. They excluded job categories like agricultural workers, domestic service, government employees and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians and social workers, specifically-all job categories that were dominated by women and minorities. The exclusions did their job because, by some estimates, more than half of women and two-thirds of African Americans were not covered. But, overall, politically it worked, and they were able to cobble together enough votes to pass Social Security. Of course, once they had the votes everyone jumped on the bandwagon. It passed overwhelmingly with 81 percent of the Republicans voting for it in the House and 64 percent of Republicans voting for it in the Senate.
Within a few years most of the limitations that had been put in to exclude women and minorities from Social Security were gone, and it became a very popular program and gained support from both Democrats and Republicans. Today, if you said that Social Security was really a socialistic plot, I suspect most people would just laugh at you.
My guess is that in time the same thing will happen with the healthcare bill. Healthcare coverage will grow, there will be dozens of programs to try and limit costs, and the legislators will keep tweaking it until they get it reasonably right. It will never be perfect but it will be a major improvement over what the system is today. And 10 years from now it will become another third rail of the American political scene and I can absolutely guarantee you that the politicians who voted against it will have memory lapses and be taking credit for the bill.