By Alfred Holden
If someone took you aside and said the first American to receive an old age pension from the government got it because of your grandfather, would you swell with pride or recoil in shame?
Alfred Holden
I’ll leave my answer to that question open for a bit, but it was news to me — I read it in the newspaper — that back in 1940, U.S. Social Security check No. 1 went to one Ida Fuller, originally of Ludlow, Vt.
And that my grandfather, a Vermont legislator during the Great Depression, was responsible.
“The Wagner Act, sponsored by New York Senator Robert Wagner, didn’t make it through Congress until August 1935,” The Burlington Free Press reported, in 1985. But “Vermont was one of the first states ready to work with the newly-created Social Security system.”
It won’t surprise many, now, that Vermont was first in America with old-age pensions.
In the 21st century the state has given the country the generous conscience of Senator Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean, whose presidential plank included universal health care, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, who sleeps with a Canadian, his wife, who appears to have told him a thing or two about building a just society.
But before them, apparently, there was Alfred H. Heininger. He has no website, but I am named for him.
As a shy, tow-headed boy, around 1960, I waited in the back seat of his finned Oldsmobile, when he’d go into a gift shop near Burlington to buy straw hats, balloons, Tinker Toys and other treasures for his grandchildren.
On April 21, 1985 we read in Sunday Free Press that in the 1930s, Heininger was a Democrat in an overwhelmingly, pathologically Republican state. Only Vermont and Alaska didn’t vote for Roosevelt in 1936.
Alfred Heininger
So a question arises. How did a man who, says the article, “didn’t come across as a heavyweight,” who a reporter wrote in 1936 “has a tendency to droop his shoulders when he stands or walks,” push through America’s first old-age pension?
“He said that if they didn’t pass it, he would throw them all out of office,” is the pat answer Heininger’s wife Erna, my grandmother, gave in 1985.
But there was more to it.
In a few words, Vermont was much the same then as now — a small and neighbourly jurisdiction, rather Canadian (Welsh travel writer Jan Morris decided, in the 1990s, that Vermont, though it looked like apple pie, was not very American at all, ).
Meanwhile, America, and I’m afraid the Republican party, were not as large and mean in the 1930s as they are today.
The term “bipartisan” is relatively recent, but might apply. The Republicans were always the party of business, and the Vermont farmer was a businessman. But his margins, like his soil, were thin and there was that Canadian weather — snowstorms, floods — and ugh, Great Depressions.
If you weren’t in trouble, your neighbour was. You took your neighbour food and firewood, and the protocol was not to talk about your politics or your religion. Thrift meant being careful, it was not cover for greed. Taxes were what built the covered- and steel-truss bridges you crossed, and educated your children.
People often say disparagingly about political parties that they are alike, but over the decades in Vermont, the crossover between parties has been something of a model for politics that works, with Republican governors, like Canada’s consensus-seeking Liberal prime ministers, ranking among the best.
As ordained, a Republican, George D. Aiken, defeated my grandfather in the 1936 gubernatorial race (not mentioned in the 1985 article was a family story that has it that a rich New York progressive once said to my grandfather, “Alfred, how much money would it take to elect you governor [of Vermont]?” My grandfather replied that no amount could.)
1936 Vermont election poster
But Aiken, as governor, “broke the monopolies of many major industries, including banks, railroads, marble companies, and granite companies,” Wikipedia’s entry for him tells us. “He also encouraged suffering farmers in rural Vermont to form co-ops to market their crops and get access to electricity.”
In the early 1970s, a Republican, Dean C. Davis, brought in the state’s major environmental laws, advanced for the day. Davis is typical of a number of Vermont politicans, of various stripes, who are remembered not for being shrewdly calculating, but intelligent and fundamentally kind.
Broadly speaking, that’s how America’s first pension check got cut, a deal among people of modest means (or less, Vermont was once quite poor, millionaires are still rare), who had differences but cared about their neighbours as much as themselves.
Of course there were precedents, influences. A half-century earlier, the U.S. had given money to the families of Civil War veterans and dead. We are told Heininger, a Vermonter of German extraction, knew of Bismarck’s 19th century pension schemes, calculated to forestall a people’s revolution during the industrial revolution.
Before pensions and welfare, poor farms were where the desperate — typically the disabled and elderly — were required to do manual labor in exhange for nominal shelter and rations. My grandfather was said to have been told by his German-born father, “Alfred, if you should ever be in a position to abolish the poor farm, that should be your mission.”
“It is a sad fact,” Alfred Heininger said in a speech to Vermont legislators, successfully bidding for Republican support for the country’s first pension bill, “that here in America, where one man can raise food for a thousand, that some 20 per cent of our people have to die in the poor house, or dependent upon their relatives.
“Today, 41 countries have old-age pension systems of some sort,” he said, as though he were talking about medical care today. “The United States shares with India and China the unenviable position of being the only large countries left in the world without a national old page pension system.”
Republicans have not always been angrily hard-assed, and the bill passed.
As recently as 1984, Ronald Reagan pledged never to cut pensions. “Americans, Reagan felt, would not tolerate cuts in a program they had come to rely upon after retirement,” says the article about my grandfather.
But in the feudalistic tug of war over the fruits of society’s labors, the Republican party and its offshoots have evolved perverse talents. Claiming thrift while running up debt. Thumping bibles while starting wars. Demanding lower wages for others, without guilt. And lately, fixing bankers’ meltdowns with average folks’ money.
Whether it’s the Republican plan or not, debt-shackled governments can, finally, do little for their people, and paradoxically the economic reward Republicans promise finally accrues to relatively few.
“More Americans slid into poverty in the past year than at any time in the past four decades,” a recent article in AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) magazine reports.
But then it goes on to say that the “most vulnerable were people 55 to 64, one in 10 of whom now live below the poverty line. Over 800,000 people 45 to 64 lost health insurance.
“By contrast, the economic turmoil of the past year drove far fewer Americans over 65 into poverty. No surprise. That’s the segment of the population protected by medicare and by Social Security.”
To partially answer my initial question, I was surprised, more than anything, to be, with cousins and brethren, grandchild of a founding father of old-age pensions in America. As for Ida, the Fullerstory is documented on the U.S. government’s official Social Security website.
“Ida May Fuller was the first beneficiary of recurring monthly Social Security payments. Miss Fuller (known as Aunt Ida to her friends and family) was born on September 6, 1874 on a farm outside of Ludlow, Vt. She attended school in Rutland, Vt. where one of her classmates was Calvin Coolidge. In 1905, after working as a school teacher, she became a legal secretary. One of the partners in the firm, John G. Sargent, would later become Attorney General in the Coolidge Administration.
“Miss Fuller filed her retirement claim on November 4, 1939, having worked under Social Security for a little short of three years. While running an errand she dropped by the Rutland (Vt.) Social Security office to ask about possible benefits. She would later observe: ‘It wasn’t that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I’d been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it.’ ”
The U.S. government website offers an interesting caveat, given Republican hopes to upend Social Security, and the certainty of future Republican administrations: “This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current documents and policies.” Notwithstanding Republican angst, the percentage of the U.S. budget that goes to Social Security has stayed about the same, at 22 per cent, for three decades.)
For the record, Ida Fuller’s first check, no. 00-000-001 in the system, dated January 31, 1940, was for $22.41.
“She received payments for the next 35 years,” the Free Press article reported, and died “on Jan. 27, 1975, at age 100.”
Ida Fuller wasn’t rich. More importantly, she wasn’t poor, either.
Alfred Holden has had one foot in Canada and one in the U.S. all his life. His first job was as a janitor but he has mostly been a journalist, most of that time as a reporter, or editor, at theToronto Star, whose Atkinson Principles — that people should help each other — he embraces. He’s written, or assigned, countless newspaper articles about urban and natural landscapes, and advocates good stewardship of places, people, and when warranted, things too. As he has written on his resume, Alfred believes the leaders of any endeavour should set “a welcoming tone for staff and collaborators, that inspires loyalty and frees people to do their best work.” He was born in Montreal of parents from Burlington, Vt., grew up in Ottawa, Ont. and, except when studying for his Master’s in historic preservation at the University of Vermont, has lived in Toronto since 1981.
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