- “Our task of reconstruction does not require Clicking Here the creation of new and strange values. It is rather the finding of the way once more to known, but to some degree forgotten, ideals and values. If the means and details are in some instances new, the objectives are as permanent as human nature.
- “Among our objectives I place the security of the men, women, and children of the Nation first.
- “This security for the individual and for the family concerns itself primarily with three factors. People want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where then can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours…”
The Social Security Act of 1935 initially authorized federal financial participation in three state administered cash assistance programs: Title I: Grants to States for Old-Age Assistance; Title IV: Grants to States for Aid to Dependent Children; and Title X: Grants to States for Aid for the Blind
An Executive Order was issued June 29, 1934 that delegated to five Cabinet officers the responsibility to study methods of providing “security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life” with the primary purpose of developing a workable social insurance system. She selected as key staff Arthur J. Altmeyer, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, and Edwin E. Witte, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin. A final 50-page committee report was filed on January 15, 1935 and sent to the Congress for hearings two days later, accompanied by draft legislative language. Following seven months of Congressional hearings and negotiations, on August 14, 1935 President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. The law was a landong other things, the basic framework that guided the nation’s public welfare system for sixty years.
The Social Security Act consisted of 11 separate “titles” and it established three distinct types of programs designed to provide economic protections to different populations in different ways: 1) a system of state administered Unemployment Insurance programs designed to provide temporary financial assistance to able-bodied workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own; 2) the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Program?, a universal and contributory social insurance program for eligible wage-earners who retired or died, leaving a spouse or family; and, 3) a system of state-federal public assistance programs for aged, blind, and dependent children deemed unable to earn wages and therefore participate in the social insurance programs.
The framers of the Act also recognized that certain groups of people had needs for particular services which cash assistance alone could not or should not provide
To meet these needs small formula grants for the states were authorized in relation to: Maternal and Child Health, Crippled Children, Child Welfare, and medical assistance for the aged. A fourth program of public assistance – Aid to the Disabled – was added in 1950.
The basic shape of the state-federal public welfare system formed by the Social Security Act of 1935 remained largely intact until 1973 when Congress combined the cash assistance programs serving needy adults (Aid for the Aged, Blind, and Disabled) into the Supplementary Income (SSI) program, making it a federally administered program under the U.S. Social Security Administration. In 1975, Title XX of the Act was enacted, consolidating most of the social services provisions of the various cash assistance titles into a single program of social services for needy citizens. In 1996, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, a federally funded block grant program, was enacted to replace AFDC.