Cradle to Grave to Pigeonhole

Franklin Roosevelt's postwar social security program plumped last week into the lap of Congress. Thumbing through the 721 type-packed pages, hoisting the 5 3/4 Ib. of solid weight, blinking at the long footnotes. Congressmen tried valiantly to say something equally weighty.

Florida's Senator Claude Pepper, who loves the New Deal, took the easy out: he called the report "nothing short of magnificent." Mississippi's Congressman John Rankin, who hates the New Deal, called it "the most fantastic conglomeration of bureaucratic stupidity ever sent to Congress." Neither could have read through it at the time they commented.

But most Congressmen merely mumbled. Murmured Speaker Sam Rayburn: "I have not studied it completely yet, but I do feel that some of the suggestions are very good." House Majority Leader John W. McCormack ducked: "This is one of the most important issues we have to face."

Most citizens read a few paragraphs of the news summaries, then gave up.* In bar and barbershop, the program went widely undiscussed. Until it was cut down into specific projects, polished with hard detail, and most important, implemented by a concrete discussion of ways & means to carry it out, Franklin Roosevelt's plan would merely gather dust in the most respectable of Congressional pigeonholes.

Ersatz Beveridge. In London last week, the sun pouring through the windows of Claridge's ballroom illuminated the kindly, beaked old face of Sir William Beveridge, author of the British "cradle-to-grave" social security report,/- whose principle Parliament has adopted. Sir William, explaining his 200,000-word plan to Americans in London, admitted that it will be feasible financially only if the peace is made to bring full employment to the British people. His next task: to draft a plan to lick postwar unemployment. To that end, he will soon visit the U.S. and Canada to study their postwar economic problems.

In the light of Sir William's new mission, the U.S. could see the deep functional weaknesses of the President's plan. The report sent up by NRPB was a huge grab bag of all the extensive leftover plans which the war had forced the New Deal to shelve, plus a collection of new plans, adding the latest in social theory. There was something in it for everybody, some one thing that might seem politically popular to any group--from giving Labor a voice in management to reducing corporate taxes. Advance notices had called the program the "American Beveridge Plan," but this was a whopping misnomer. Sir William's plan was specific to a farthing: it proposed a pounds-&-shillings schedule of social security payments for unemployment, illness, accident, old age, marriage, birth and death. It set the cost to workman, employer and Government. And it went no farther than these specifics in discussing Government's responsibility for the security of its citizens.

Franklin Roosevelt's program was vaster but much vaguer. It bespoke, but did not provide for, Government protection against poverty from cradle to grave. Under its terms the Government would provide funds for destitute children, give all school children free lunches, help the needy through school and college, guarantee jobs in adulthood, set up health, dental and housing service for those who could not otherwise afford it, grant its citizens allowances during illness and unemployment, pension them in their old age.

The grand aim, never before attempted, was to protect all citizens from destitution resulting from any type of social accident --the accident of being born poor, of lacking money for education, of becoming ill or losing a job in depression times. But two basic questions, carefully documented in the Beveridge Report, were left unanswered: 1) How much would the benefit payments be in dollars. & cents? 2) How much would the program cost the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. taxpayer?

Whereas Sir William was now on the further enormous task of finding out exactly how the British economy could be kept going full tilt, this question was largely evaded by the U.S. plan.

Not Yet. The NRPB, headed by the President's kindly old uncle, Frederic A. Delano, 79, had been putting the grab bag together since autumn 1939. The plan went to Congress with a Presidential wish: "Because of their basic importance to our national welfare during the war and after the war, it is my earnest hope that the Congress will give these matters full consideration during this session. . . ."

The President well knew that the 78th Congress 1) could not possibly legislate anything concrete out of 480,000 words of foggy good will, 2) was in no mood to do it anyway. NRPB had already been disowned by Congress: the House had refused to approve a $1,400,000 appropriation to keep it alive next year.

At week's end Congress had, as one man, turned its face away from the plan. Without a word of debate, the Senate set up its own postwar economic committee, headed by Georgia's conservative Walter F. George, whom the President had tried to purge in 1938. Said Senator George: "About the only thing we can accomplish is to get a start on hearings. . . ."

Franklin Roosevelt announced blithely that the burden of planning now rested entirely on Congress. His plan, widely unread, widely undebated, the flop of the year, was now just a matter of record, stuffed away in a Congressional pigeonhole.

To implement this program and to carry it through, the President would need a wholly new and reinvigorated political group behind him, such as he has not had since 1937. Yet he had not just thrown his plan down a rain barrel. He has remarked to friends that social security is a powerful mixture to keep in mind for 1944. As a Fourth Term campaign issue, the Roosevelt social security program was better unacted on than passed.

*Most violent reaction was reported by the Emporia (Kans.) Gazette: "Walter A. Jones, lawyer-cattleman, got up this morning, read about President Roosevelt's new social-security program, and went back to bed."

/- Dubbed by British wags "security from womb to tomb."

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