The New Welfare State

Almost 30 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act. At the moment of signing, he issued a statement that, in retrospect, sounds almost apologetic: "We have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age. This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions."

Social security was mostly an emergency act in a nation still struggling out of the depths of a depression in which, in F.D.R.'s famed phrase, more than one-third of the nation was "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." The change since then in American life has never been more apparent than last week, when Congress acted on two bills that projected a new sort of welfare state beyond Roosevelt's wildest dreams. First, the House of Representatives passed and sent to the Senate, where it faces certain swift approval, the Johnson Administration's $6 billion-a-year medicare bill. The next day the Senate passed and sent to the President to be signed into law the $1.3 billion aid-to-education bill.

Vast Thrusts. Earlier in the session, Congress had steamrolled ahead several other Johnson-sponsored antipoverty bills--the Manpower Training and Development Act, a proposed Administration on Aging, passage of aid to Appalachia. The new bills call for vast new federal thrusts into the area of federal paternalism. In F.D.R.'s day, both undoubtedly would have been denounced as socialistic, if not part of a downright Communist scheme to undermine American private enterprise and individual initiative.

Action on both bills came not in time of depression but in the midst of the most prosperous year that the affluent society has ever known. There were a few squawks about presidential pressure, but it was widely accepted that both measures would achieve great good in making the U.S. even more affluent without turning it into a socialistic society. It was generally conceded that both bills, despite the vastness of their scope, were aimed not at increasing the power of the Federal Government, but at eradicating some remaining blemishes in the Great Society.

The education bill seeks simply to provide the school construction and facilities that state and local governments have been unable--or unwilling--to furnish. The medicare bill (see box, next page) will relieve older citizens of the worry of spending their savings on medical bills, thereby add to their general purchasing proclivities, inspire consumer-spending and drive another nail into the coffin of cyclical depression.

Proud Daddy. Hardly anyone had a legitimate protest to offer. In the House debate on the medicare bill, Iowa Republican H. R. Gross forced Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and floor manager for the measure, to admit that he had "overlooked" a relatively small cost factor. No matter. Without amendment, the House passed the bill by a vote of 313 to 115, and at the announcement of the tally Democrats rose to their feet with a great shout. Speaker John McCormack rushed up to Mills, grabbed his hand and cried: "Congratulations, my dear friend. Magnificent!"

In the Senate debate on the education bill, Republicans were bitterly vocal about the President's demands that the measure be passed without any change whatsoever. A G.O.P. minority on the Senate Education Subcommittee had signed a statement saying: "This important and complex piece of legislation is to pass this body without a dot or comma changed, this by fiat from the Chief Executive." Republicans sent up amendment after amendment; all were voted down. Finally, as Colorado's Senator Peter Dominick stood at his desk shouting, "I for one resent the whole procedure," the education bill was passed by a vote of 73 to 18.

For the most part, Johnson's bills received such overwhelmingly favorable action because there seemed to be a popular consensus for them. They also passed because Johnson knows how to get along with Congress better than any President before him--including his great hero Franklin Roosevelt. Johnson loves to recall how, as a young Congressman from Texas, he was befriended by F.D.R., who became "just like a daddy to me." As of this week--the 20th anniversary of Roosevelt's death--Daddy would have been proud.

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