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When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security. By Edwin Amenta. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. viii + 322 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 0-691-12473-6.
Reviewed by W. Elliot Brownlee
The "Townsend Plan" was shorthand for a movement to call on the federal government to use the proceeds of an earmarked national sales tax to provide-as its originator, Dr. Francis E. Townsend, proposed in 1933-a uniform pension of $150 a month (more than the median monthly income for a family) to all Americans who were over sixty years of age and agreed to spend the money by the end of the month. By the end of 1934, about 1,000 Townsend clubs had formed, largely in California and the West, to advance this proposal. Something approaching 150,000 Americans had joined, and about 1 million had signed petitions calling for its adoption. The very next year, Congress enacted the Social Security Act. Historians, however, have tended to downplay the influence of the Townsend Plan in shaping the legislation. They have often focused on the inept way the leaders of the movement squandered their potential influence by challenging the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and consequently marginalizing themselves in the legislative process. And historians have recognized that in 1935, and later, the federal government failed to adopt social provision along the lines of the Townsend Plan. Instead, according to the most influential accounts, experts and political entrepreneurs within the federal government caught the wave of the future by embracing an insurance rationale-tentatively in 1935, through creation of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program, and decisively in 1950, with the Social Security Act Amendments of that year.
Edwin Amenta tells a rather different story in When Movements Matter. The plan's influence, he argues, was...