Townsend to Burst

The Townsend Plan was ready to burst, last week, into a nine-days' wonder.

Dr. Francis Everett Townsend was born on a back-country Illinois farm in 1867. Working his way through Nebraska University's medical school, he graduated at 36, started practice in South Dakota's Black Hills where he often had to ride 150 mi. in a buggy to reach his patients. Like many a frost-bitten South Dakotan he moved, aged 52, to California. There, after a spell as assistant city health officer in Long Beach, he turned again to private practice. A kindly doctor, he brooded over his experience of human misery, and conceived a Plan.

It was so simple that he wondered why no one had thought of it before. He would pension off, at $200 per month, everyone who had reached the age of 60. Everyone, that is, who could prove that he or she had lived an upright life. That would discourage crime among the young. The pensioners must promise to work no more at any gainful or productive activity. That would open jobs for at least 8,000,000 young people.* The pensioners must be required to spend their doles within 30 days, in the U. S. That would put nearly $2,000,000,000 into circulation every month. Trade would boom, wages soar. Each $200 would keep one worker busy for a month supplying its demands. It would be Utopia. Every young person would be busy and good and free of fear for the future; every oldster would have ease and plenty without effort.

Where would the money come from? The Government would levy a sales tax on everything. The tax would average about 10%, be low on necessities, high on luxuries. No one could escape it; everyone would contribute his fair share. That was all there was to it.

Dr. Townsend opened the Plan's first office last November in the rear of a Long Beach real estate salesroom, with a one-legged man as assistant, a Salvation Army protege as janitor. Success was quick. California's myriad oldsters came in masses to his meetings. By thousands they bought his 25-c- pamphlet. They sent the word back East to the old home-folks.

By last week the flow of money from the pamphlet and contributions was enough to pay the wages of 50 people working in his Long Beach office. There were Townsend Clubs in every State except Delaware--644 clubs in all, 200 in California alone. Between 2,000,000 and 5,000,000 people had put their names to petitions begging their Congressmen to vote the Plan into effect at once. It had a scattering support from small editors, syndicated philosophers. Wrote the "Poet Laureate of California": "There seemed to be so much more sense in it than what Spengler, Ortega and all those so-called smart fellows have been saying."

But as yet the Townsend Plan had not acquired the cachet of Big Names as did Technocracy in the sad autumn of 1932. No Frank Vanderlip had drunk wine with it. It lacked the White House prestige which Anna Eleanor Roosevelt last year bestowed on the somewhat similar plan of Florida's 71-year-old Mrs. Prestonia Mann Martin whose book Prohibiting Poverty, of which Mrs. Roosevelt ordered six copies, advocated that all essential work be done free by Commons aged 18 to 26, who would thereafter engage at will in capitalistic luxury industries as public-supported Capitals* (TIME, Oct. 23). Best that Dr. Townsend could yet produce in the way of names was to say that George Creel was going to try to get him an interview with President Roosevelt. In Manhattan, on his way to Washington, Mr. Creel predicted that the Plan would presently burst upon the country.

The Townsend Plan is not to be confused with other California products. Except for the support of individual Utopians it has no connection with the Utopian Society, a mystic mixture of Technocracy, Communism and Ku Klux Klannishness which sprouted in Los Angeles and is now burgeoning throughout the West. It does not even have the sympathy of Upton Sinclair, whose EPIC plan would pension all oldsters at a mere $50 per month. Candidate Sinclair has said of it: "It would only take money away from able-bodied young people and give it to a group of old persons. It would impose an exorbitant sales tax which the masses would find impossible to pay."

Dr. Townsend, grey, gentle, diffident, lives with his wife Minnie in Long Beach, has a grown son and daughter close at hand. Happy are they in the faith that Papa's Plan will win national attention when Congress opens. That a groundswell of public sentiment for old age pensions is rising was indicated last week by results of a New York Herald Tribune questionnaire. Of nearly 5,000 U. S. newspaper and farm journal editors who replied, two-thirds reported their communities solidly behind some compulsory government sys tem of old age pensions. Of many another New Deal plank, only minimum wages and maximum working hours got a bare majority of editors' eyes. Says Dr. Townsend: "Poverty once considered a natural curse which the human race was doomed to endure, can and will be abolished in the United States within the next five years, never to return."

*The 1930 U. S. census listed only 4,198,000 persons over 60 engaged in gainful activity.

*Excerpt: "Shall we follow the young couple [just graduated from the Commons] on their first summer's long honeymoon? Supreme happiness is theirs--young, strong, healthy, independent, free and in love! Each will receive daily their necessary rations. The whole country is before them. We can picture them wandering over hill and dale. . . .

"Cold weather, however, soon drives them indoors. . . . The young husband tires of loafing, love-making begins to pall, love begins to seem to both of them not quite 'enough.' ... So he takes a job in the Capitals and proudly brings home MONEY, receives her grateful smiles and feels elated. She immediately goes shopping. Presently she calls for 'a home' and soon other wants appear. . . . They throw their energies into the Capitals."

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