Excerpt from "The Roots of Social Security"

Reprinted from the Social Security Administration Web site, available at http://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html

"The total economy had gone to pieces; just shook to pieces under us, beginning, of course, with the stock market crash. Everybody felt it … In less than a year it was a terror."

Frances Perkins

On October 23, 1962, eighty-two-year-old Frances Perkins (1880–1965) went to the Social Security Administration headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, and delivered a riveting, lengthy speech on how the Social Security Act of 1935 came into being. Early in the speech she described the situation and conditions facing Americans in the earliest, worst years of the Great Depression, 1929 to 1933. According to Perkins, as quoted in "The Roots of Social Security," the whole U.S. economy...