Highlights Archives
Social Security at 70: the Wisconsin Connection
August 14, 2005, marks the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act into law in 1935. Drafted by Wisconsinites Arthur Altmeyer and Edwin Witte, the Social Security Act established a national retirement-age insurance system; federal-state unemployment compensation; aid to homeless, neglected, dependent and crippled children; and federal aid to state and local public health agencies. To a nation besieged by crippling economic stagnation, bank failures and rising unemployment, Social Security offered welcome federal relief. Another Wisconsin native, Witte's prize student Wilbur Cohen, would go on to assist Altmeyer in administering Social Security while Witte returned to his faculty post as an economist at the University of Wisconsin. Cohen made a career of Social Security, effectively running the program in the 1960s during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Many of the programs developed by Wisconsin Progressives to respond to the needs of a struggling state population were echoed or expanded at the federal level in President Roosevelt's New Deal. The conceptual underpinnings of Social Security grew directly from the "Wisconsin Idea," the concept that government and academic experts should help solve social and economic problems together. The original Progressive Era designers of the Wisconsin Idea, such as economist John R. Commons and Legislative Reference Bureau chief Charles McCarthy, were mentors to Witte and other authors of the Social Security Act. Wisconsin had, in fact, enacted the nation's first unemployment compensation law in 1932, after two decades of lobbying by John Commons. This law became a model for the nation and led to Altmeyer and Witte's appointment to the Committee on Economic Security in 1934.
The Society's Library-Archives division in Madison owns more than 60 collections of manuscripts detailing the origin and history of Social Security, including personal papers and other manuscripts of Witte, Altmeyer and Cohen. The papers of those three figures total more than 600 boxes of unpublished records that are consulted regularly by University of Wisconsin students and faculty as well as by scholars from around the nation.
After 70 years, Social Security has been back in the news of late due to political interest in reforming parts of the program.
:: Posted August 9, 2005
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