Pensioners

Because they believe it impious to sign contracts, thriftless to accept charity, the hardworking, straight-laced Mennonites of Eastern Pennsylvania firmly flouted the late AAA. Farming Mennonites voluntarily reduced acreage in accordance with the Act's spirit but put their names to nothing accepted no benefits (TIME, March 18, 1935). In Lancaster, Pa. last week the Mennonite Board of Missions revealed that the new Social Security Act is equally incompatible with the sect's tenets. The Board wrote the Philadelphia office of the Social Security Board declaring that, although Mennonites will gladly pay the taxes the law demands, they would rather not accept old-age pensions when they fall due. An attorney for the Board wrote back to the Mennonites that this would be perfectly all right.

Some 1,200 of these Mennonites may not accept old-age pensions when they begin to come due in 1942, but 26,000,000 other U. S. citizens doubtless will. Among them is John David Sweeney Jr., blue-eyed, sturdy, unmarried, 23. After graduating last June from Princeton, where he belonged to Colonial Club, he took a month off in Bermuda, then went to work as shipping clerk in his father's business the Royal Eastern Electrical Supply Co. of Brooklyn. He lives with his family in a 15-room house in suburban New Rochelle, N. Y. Like his father, mother and younger brother, he voted for Landon last month. Last week in Baltimore when his card appeared atop the first batch of Social Security applications, he became the first U. S. wage earner to be registered for a Government pension at 65. Said John David Sweeney Jr. when reporters and photographers found him in the bar of Manhattan's Princeton Club: "It's a Iong way off."

Largest classes of workers excluded from the pension provisions of the Social Security Act are farmers and domestic servants. Included in the Act as originally written, they were stricken out by the Senate after Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau's protest that it would be virtually impossible to collect taxes from them and their employers. Last week in Washington it was made known that the Social Security Board was preparing to propose to Congress the creation of a voluntary Government insurance system for these 16,000,000 pensionless citizens. To be administered by the Board, it would accept premiums of as little as $1 per month, pay maximum annuities of $50 per month.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.