Katherine Sullivan

We'll be occasionally dropping into your What's News feed over the next few months with stories that interrogate, celebrate, and make sense of our economic history.

This is Episode 3, America's Road to a DIY Retirement.

James Chappell is a professor of history at Duke University and the author of the book Golden Years, How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.

I asked him about when the idea of retirement began to take hold in the U.S.

This was a new concept.

Until this point, most people just worked until they died or were cared for by their families or went to spend their last years in poor houses.

There wasn't yet a vision of older people moving to Florida en masse and organizing their lives around golf or pickleball.

But during this time, groups had begun to advocate for a government pension.

These groups came from all ends of the political spectrum.

One of the most popular and also one of the most outlandish was started by a man called Francis Townsend.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration was focused on pulling the country out of the Great Depression.

And to that end, the Townsend Plan had a straightforward demand.

$200 a month for everyone over the age of 60, funded by a 2% sales tax.

That's about $5,000 a month in today's dollars.

The catch?

You had to spend the whole benefit within the month.

Here's a newsreel of Dr. Townsend fielding questions about the program from senior citizens.

Townsend's slogan was Youth for Work, Age for Leisure.

The idea took off.

Over 7,000 Townsend clubs formed across the country, working to advocate for the plan.