Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,649 appearances
90 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 3d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 89 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
In Long Beach, California, doctor Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food.
Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time.
Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over sixty years old with two hundred dollars a month on the condition that they spend it within thirty days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.
Townsend's plan was wildly popular.
More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation's social fabric.
It also spurred Congress to action, a
Perkins recalled that Townsend startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes.
The wandering boys didn't have any votes, the evicted women and their children had very few votes.
If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote.
But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people and
FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward.
Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room.
As she recalled, Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk.
I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits.
Anyhow, we stayed in session until about two AM.
We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end, we were never going to review it again.
By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular.
The vote was three hundred and seventy one to thirty three in the House and seventy seven to six in the Senate.
When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginning of the nation.
When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in eighteen thirty five, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely, so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.
Showing 2601–2620 of 7,649 · page 131 of 383
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