Creating the “Senior Citizen” Political Identity
Dr. Francis Townsend at the White House, 1938. [Library of Congress]
A mass social movement of the elderly was arguably the major force behind Social Security old-age pensions: the Townsend movement, named after its founder, Francis Townsend, M.D.
Townsend was by far the largest social movement of the 1930s — larger than the protests of the unemployed and labor union organizing taken together. Never before had the elderly organized to advance their interests as old people. Yet despite its size and originality, it is the least studied social movement in American history. Scholars and policy wonks of its time focused almost exclusively on debunking the Townsend plan, pointing out its economic fallacies and labeling its supporters naïve and crackpot. Very few contemporary scholars have studied it. I find myself wondering, is this a sign of disdain for old people, precisely what the movement was challenging?
The Townsend movement’s influence continued even after the 1935 passage of the Social Security Act. It created a “senior citizen” political identity, now a powerful voting bloc. Townsenders insisted that the elderly should become a “guiding force in all things, political, social and moral.” This was a claim to wisdom and relevance at a time when the culture was increasingly disrespectful of old people. That claim allowed a single-issue social movement to consider itself a patriotic cause, one that could improve the wellbeing of the entire nation. Part of the Townsend movement’s appeal was that it could be both narrow and wide: its narrowness made it recognizable and straightforward, its message stickier; its width made it selfless. Its genius lay in joining its members’ material interests with altruism. Townsenders saw themselves as simultaneously beneficiaries of the nation and contributors to it, givers as well as takers.
Dr. Townsend was aware that the United States was alone among developed countries in providing no government old-age pensions. He published eight letters on the subject in the Long Beach Press Telegram between September 30, 1933 and February 20, 1934, and in those five months found he had jump-started a social movement. He soon sketched out an actual pension plan. Recruiting two partners — his brother Walter L. Townsend and real estate broker Robert Earle Clements — he created Old Age Revolving Pensions, Limited (OARP). The organization thus acquired two sorts of leaders: the doctor who led the social movement and the shrewd commission-earning businessmen who built the organization. This division of labor made the movement a juggernaut, but it also produced conflicts and allegations of corruption.
From early on it was clear that a social movement was arising. OARP’s newsletter, The Modern Crusader, soon sold 100,000 copies — granted, it cost only two cents. The proposal generated excitement throughout California, and OARP chapters appeared so fast that the headquarters could not keep track.
A committee, allegedly including statisticians, began drafting legislation, and within a year John McGroarty, the 73-year-old poet laureate of California, got himself elected to Congress, where he introduced the first Townsend bill, HR 3977.12 (The plan would be revised several times.) Its major provisions were: Every American citizen aged 60 or older would receive a monthly pension of $200, provided that they retired and refrained from wage-earning. Younger people who were “hopelessly invalided or crippled” would receive the same pension. Originally the plan proposed funding the pensions through a 2 percent sales tax — a regressive tax that would have disproportionately burdened low-income people. Later the plan substituted a tax on transactions, which continued to be regressive, would have raised commodity prices exponentially, and would have provided an incentive for vertical integration.
When McGroarty first introduced the bill, he presented it not as a pension proposal but as a plan for economic recovery, a claim often repeated by its supporters, one of whom called it a “big business” plan. It would work because the legislation would require each stipend to be spent within a month. The plan thus called itself “revolving” pensions on the theory that, after the first month, what was paid out would be recompensed by taxes, as if the same money would be cycling through the economy. The pensions would thus stimulate an economy in deep depression by boosting consumer spending.
Even better, Representative McGroarty argued that freeing up jobs held by older people would open jobs for younger people — 4 million jobs would allegedly become available. Retirement would then allow elders to become a “service class” of volunteers doing charitable work; this would allow government to operate at a “high standard,” as a supportive newspaper put it. To the criticism that government stipends would encourage passivity and dependence, Dr. Townsend responded that volunteerism should be a fundamental aspect of active citizenship. As he put it, the “secondary purpose of Townsend clubs is a desperate fight to continue the democratic spirit and form of government in these United States.” He argued that his plan would end child labor and reduce or even do away with crime, which resulted, in Townsend ideology, from poverty and unemployment. It would end war, which was also the result of poverty and inequality. Dr. Townsend’s arguments became ever more utopian and less realistic — an unusual trajectory, as over time most social movements make compromises, and their goals become more modest.
Experts in groups such as the American Association for Old Age Security, the American Association for Labor Legislation, and the National Conference of Social Work had been discussing possible welfare programs since the 1920s. Some of them would participate in writing the Social Security Act of 1935, including lions of social reform Edwin Witte, John R. Commons and Arthur Altmeyer, and social democratic feminists Grace Abbott, Sophonisba Breckenridge, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, and Mary van Kleeck (many of them part of the Hull-House network). They had promoted the 1933 Dill-Connery bill, which would have provided federal grants-in-aid for the elderly, to be matched by the states, in amounts up to $15 a month per person. It passed the House in 1933 and 1934, but failed both times in the Senate. President Roosevelt did not support it, and Massachusetts sued the Treasury Department, arguing that the program was an attack on the constitutionally reserved powers of the states. Though that argument was rejected by the conservative Supreme Court, the bill’s failure suggests the strength of resistance to such welfare expenditure — and the difficulty of overcoming opposition to the Social Security Act a few years later.
Dill-Connery’s stipends would have been too minuscule to help low-income people, and they would have been controlled by state governments, which almost guaranteed that nonwhites would be excluded. The Social Security Act to come would have equally great limitations. It excluded the majority of Americans — farmworkers, domestic workers, and most other employed women — who worked mainly for small employers who were not required to participate. Unemployed women were expected to share a husband’s stipend. Divorced women would have no entitlement to an ex-husband’s pension, and other unmarried women would get nothing.
The Townsend plan was better. True, it relied on discriminatory funding, like Social Security. Townsend proposed funding by sales taxes, while Social Security was funded by a percentage of earnings, so the poor who needed help most would get least. But the universality and the size of Townsend plan pensions would have mitigated inequality, by providing the same level of support to all Americans. Moreover, it would include people of both sexes and all races, a nondiscriminatory policy that might have set a precedent for future programs. The Townsend plan might also have ideological influence, contributing to a positive view of government responsibility for the public welfare. Put simply, the Townsend plan was advancing a democratic understanding of citizens’ entitlements. By contrast, most New Deal programs were discriminatory, offering more to those who needed less, by excluding the great majority of people of color and white women.
Although the Townsend plan would have been redistributive across class, sex, and race lines and could thus be categorized as a left or progressive plan, it was also redistributive along age lines, and this was problematic. It called for transferring massive resources from young and middle-aged adults to older ones. One opponent calculated that it would give half the national income to one-eleventh of the population. A historian recently estimated that a quarter of U.S. GDP would move from those under 60 to the elderly. Either figure confirms the plan’s unfairness toward younger people and their needs. Townsenders countered with a moral argument: “We supported our children in youth, is it not right and just that in old age we shall be taken care of by youth?” This sentiment, consistent with traditional family values, brought in socially conservative supporters.
Dr. Townsend’s Socialist Party history, during a period of the party’s strength, must surely have influenced his concern to help the needy. Nevertheless he took care to dissociate his plan from socialism. He frequently insisted that the plan did not undercut the profit system “or any part of the present administration of business.” This political ambiguity made the plan seem inconsistent, even incoherent to its opponents. Yet it was a “masterly synthesis of conservatism and radicalism,” in the words of one scholar. Townsend supporters were not naïvely “falling for” this political fusion of left and right, as their opponents charged. While Townsenders were supporting an impossible means of financing the pensions, as opponents pointed out repeatedly in every conceivable medium, they might be classified as intuitive social democrats — believing, and hoping, that a rich capitalist country could become a welfare state. For some, that belief was more emotional than political, and few of them had a broad conception of a welfare state. But the critics’ disdainful appraisal of Townsenders as fools was itself foolish. They were as educated and informed as any middle-class Americans.
While anyone could join and everyone would be entitled to a pension in the Townsend plan, the movement’s racial and religious composition was extremely homogeneous and almost identical with that of the Klan — white and Protestant, particularly evangelical. One writer commented that “one sees no foreign-looking faces.” There were a few exceptions. In one upstate New York industrial county, most votes for the Townsend/Democratic Party candidate came from immigrant voters, and one organizer pleaded for literature in Yiddish, Polish, and Italian. But the national Townsend organization never crafted appeals to immigrants, “ethnics,” or Black Americans. There were a few African American clubs and a few integrated clubs, mostly in California — Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Stockton — but the overwhelming majority of clubs were 100% white.
Townsend national leaders probably had little concern for elderly Black people or people of color in general. The demographics of southern California may have played a role here: in 1930 African Americans constituted only 1.4% of the state population. On the other hand, the state’s population included tens of thousands of people of color who rarely appear in material by or about Townsend: 415,000 people of Hispanic origin, about 7%, and 169,000 of Asian origin, just under 3%. No doubt the whole movement had not only a white but a Protestant evangelical appearance and discourse, and most nonwhite people in the western states had learned caution about entering unknown “white” spaces. Certainly the Townsend movement and its clubs did not attempt to recruit them.
As with the Klan, many Townsend movement members were businessmen and white-collar workers, with some professionals. Its demographics contrasted with the Klan’s in several ways however — it had more big-city dwellers, more women, of course more gray hair, and fewer young and middle-aged people. But while most active Townsenders were middle class, conceived broadly, that label meant something very different in the midst of an economic depression: the majority had probably experienced a sudden economic collapse rather than chronic deprivation. Some West Coast members, especially the poorest ones, were refugees from the “dust bowl.” But regions of chronic poverty, such as the southern states, did not produce many Townsend clubs. The universality of proposed pensions, which threatened to include African Americans, no doubt repelled many white southerners. As a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper editorialized, “The average Mississippian can’t imagine himself chipping in to pay for able-bodied Negroes to sit around in idleness.”
The Townsend movement was a business. Millions flocked to it because of the pension plan and the doctor’s hokey charisma, but also because it offered them a chance to make a bit of money. Clements introduced the same recruitment-by-commission arrangement that had so ballooned the KKK. Previously an organizer for the Anti-Saloon League (like quite a few Klan organizers), he “hired” some three hundred organizers, aka recruiters, many of them also former Anti-Saloon League employees, some of them ministers. There were no wages, only commissions: they earned 20%, or 2.5 cents, from every 12 cents that new members paid. One early organizer claimed that the doctor promised him “handfuls” of money from the work.
At first the doctor worried about the opportunities for embezzlement created by the commission system, but his staff clung to the system because it was so cheap. Understandably, Townsenders appreciated the opportunity to earn in the midst of the still worsening Depression. Members felt even better because they were earning by bringing people into a just cause. Dr. Townsend defended the system by arguing that it freed the organization from having to solicit large donations from the rich. Recruitment by commission was more democratic, he said — it meant that the needy supported the movement themselves and would not be beholden to big money. Yet the doctor also defended this approach with an argument that justified and flattered his personal leadership: “Townsend … is a Program of Proxy … Thousands of the world’s best people do not possess the high qualifications for personal leadership . . . yet they can partake in the program by letting their money become proxy for them. . . . Your dollars can become you.”
Excerpted from Seven Social Movements That Changed America. Copyright © 2025 by Linda Gordon. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved
