The enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935 was a watershed event in American history and laid a new foundation for the nation’s social safety net. The law created the Old-Age Insurance program to deliver income security for retired workers and provided unprecedented amounts of federal funding to help the states administer unemployment insurance programs, maternal health and child welfare initiatives, and economic relief efforts for single mothers, the blind, and low-income seniors.

During the Act’s congressional consideration and in the years following its passage, the Old-Age Insurance program was attacked by members of Congress and other critics. They claimed that the program would:

• Amount to a “cruel hoax” because workers’ contributions would be redirected to pork barrel projects and other programs (Kansas Governor and 1936 presidential candidate Alf Landon)
• “[P]lace all American industry, business, and individual liberties under the control of Government here in Washington” (Representative Charles Eaton)
• Create a bureaucracy “[g]reater than anything of its kind to be found in Russia, Germany, or Italy under the three dictators [Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini]” (Representative Daniel Reed)
• Be doomed to fail because “no democratic government would [be able to] undertake such an impossible task” (American Association for Social Security)

In contrast, President Franklin Roosevelt predicted that the law would be a first crucial step toward providing economic security for all Americans, stating:

“This law ... represents a corner stone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete ... that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”

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Over the last nine decades, President Roosevelt’s prediction has been proven correct and those of his opponents wrong. Subsequent Congresses and administrations repeatedly expanded the Old-Age Insurance program to cover workers’ surviving dependents and Americans with disabilities. Today, Social Security is the largest and most successful anti-poverty program in American history and has helped guarantee the economic and retirement security of hundreds of millions of Americans.