On the 77th anniversary of Social Security, we're celebrating what has made the program so important and why it continues to be vital today. Mark Schmitt lauds it for its ability to provide security throughout tectonic shifts in our economy and society. Read the rest of our coverage here.

If Franklin D. Roosevelt rejoined the living tomorrow, he probably wouldn't recognize Social Security, his greatest domestic legacy. That might sound like something a critic or skeptic of the program would say, as if it had broken faith with Roosevelt's vision or expanded far beyond its original intent.

But, in fact, what Roosevelt would see would be Social Security's greatest virtue: its adaptability to changing circumstances. Social Security has survived, thrived, and continued to provide a base level of economic security not only through big macroeconomic shifts (such as the inflation of the 1970s) but also the transformations and uncertainties in our individual and family lives. That adaptability and continuous reexamination and improvement is the quality most in keeping with the experimental, pragmatic nature of the New Deal.

Between 1935 and 2000, there were 30 major legislative changes to Social Security, roughly one every two years, under Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1939, it expanded its focus from the individual worker to the family, adding benefits for surviving spouses and young children. In 1950, it expanded to cover domestic and farm workers, whose omission was the atrocious compromise FDR had made to secure the support of Southern conservatives. In successive changes from 1954 through 1960, a disability program was created, and in the 1970s, benefits were indexed to inflation. Changes in 1977 and 1983 adjusted the financing of the program, changing the formula for benefits to reduce costs and build up more of a reserve (the Trust Fund) so that future retirees financed some of their own benefits. In 2000, the earnings test for Social Security recipients was eliminated. And while Social Security was created with the assumption of a male breadwinner, over 77 years it has been adjusted to account for the changing role of women in the workforce and the family.

The point of this history is a reminder that Social Security is not a fixed, unchanging thing, a jewel of the New Deal to be worshipped. Rather, it is an incredibly adaptive, responsive structure on which we've been able to build several different forms of economic and family security and adjust to radical changes in the economy, family, industry, education, and expectations over the years.

It's become routine to say that Social Security is an industrial age program that's ill suited, or at least needs to be modernized, to deal with information age challenges, but it's telling that this cliché never gets to specifics. It's true that the current era presents dramatic new challenges to economic security: household debt far larger than in the 1930s, 1950s, or even the 1980s (when most households didn't even have access to consumer credit); the rapid decline since 1979 in the number of defined-benefit pension plans; the disappearance of lifetime employment at a single employer; and, most recently, the high rates of long-term unemployment among people in their late 50s and early 60s. But for almost every one of these changes, there's an answer within Social Security that's as good as any other. We could address the insecurity around pensions by creating a universal 401(k) account, but we could do exactly the same thing, with far less complexity and hassle, simply by expanding Social Security. We could construct some new form of economic security for those who have lost their jobs in their late 50s and may never work again – or, as James K. Galbraith has proposed, we could make it less costly for people to take Social Security at age 62 (which a majority of recipients do anyway) and open up opportunities for younger workers.

There are also liberals who hold the position “never touch Social Security.” They, too, should recognize the record of adaptability and change throughout the history of the program. There are bad changes to the program (such as an abrupt increase in the eligibility age) and less bad ones. But one way or another, it's worth putting Social Security on a path that won't require a significant cut in benefits, or hike in payroll taxes, in 15 or 20 years. I'm not endorsing any specific plan here, but just pointing out that resisting any and all changes to Social Security is really a betrayal of the program's greatest strength.

There are programs that really are locked into a particular era and model of employment. Unemployment Insurance, for example, reflects some of the assumptions of the industrial era economy, such as a business cycle in which dips last about 26 weeks and workers return to their previous employer. But Social Security has a seamless versatility that has made it adaptable to all the massive shifts in the economy and our society since 1935. That, rather than any specific component of the program, is its greatest virtue and the reason that Social Security will endure. 

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

When FDR tackled an environmental crisis, he didn't just put people to work to fix it in the short-term -- he solved it for the long-run.

The severe drought that has afflicted more than half of the country this summer has led some commentators to wonder whether the country might be headed for another Dust Bowl. The consensus among most experts is that the answer is no – and the reasons for this stem in part from the lessons learned and the actions taken by the Roosevelt administration in response to the unprecedented environmental crisis that the nation suffered in the early to mid-1930s.

As those who lived through it will attest, the Dust Bowl was unlike any previous environmental catastrophe the United States had ever experienced. The dust storms it generated buried homes and farm equipment, killed livestock, and on some occasions even darkened cities on the East Coast. The dust storms also represented a serious health risk to humans. At the height of the crisis, for example, physicians across the Midwest reported thousands of cases of what came to be known as “dust pneumonia,” which sometimes resulted in the death of the patient. The Dust Bowl laid bare millions of acres of farmland, left roughly half a million Americans homeless, and forced hundreds of thousands of people off the land. Indeed, between 1932 and 1940 it is estimated that 2.5 million people abandoned the plains for other regions of the country, with an estimated three to four hundred thousand heading to California alone.

In response to this unprecedented social and environmental catastrophe, the Roosevelt administration established a number of programs, such as the Resettlement Administration, that were designed to help those who had been driven off the land by the disaster. But it also recognized that the only way to deal with the crisis over the long term was to attack the root causes. In other words, it had to address the environmental degradation that led to the conditions that helped give rise to the Dust Bowl in the first place. Foremost among these was the state of the soil, which, thanks to over-plowing and grazing, the planting of inappropriate crops, and poor husbandry, was in abysmal shape.

Thanks in part to his experience as an amateur farmer and forester, FDR recognized that the key issue was soil conservation, and he established the Soil Erosion Service within his first six months in office. This initiative, which in 1935 became the Soil Conservation Service and later the Natural Resources Conservation Service, marked the first major federal commitment to the preservation of privately held natural resources. Under the auspices of this program, farmers learned new agricultural techniques, such as contour plowing, that helped preserve and protect the fertility of the soil. Equally significant was FDR’s initiation of the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. Here the goal was to create a “shelter belt” from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border. This program literally changed the face of the nation. Over the course of the next seven years, the U.S Forestry Service, working in conjunction with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the newly established Works Progress Administration (WPA), and local farmers, planted roughly 220 million trees, creating 18,000 miles of windbreaks on some 30,000 farms.

It is thanks to the New Deal’s establishment of the Soil Conservation Service and the planting of the Great Plains Shelter Belt that we have not experienced another Dust Bowl—even in the face of such severe conditions as this summer’s dry spell or the even more extensive drought the nation experienced in 1956. As was typical of most New Deal infrastructure projects, the programs the government designed to combat this unprecedented environmental disaster were not developed merely as a means to provide jobs and short-term work relief to those who were suffering unemployment. Rather, they were part of a large-scale effort to bring about a long-term solution to a very difficult environmental problem. This emphasis on long-term environmental planning, which recognizes the need create a balance between stewardship and managed exploitation and which sees the federal government as playing a crucial role in establishing the parameters of that balance, is now referred to as sustainable development.

In confronting the terrible conditions of the Dust Bowl, FDR once urged the American people to be ready “to fit and not fight the ways of nature.” Today, as we face the consequences of what the vast majority of scientific opinion recognizes as climate change—whatever its immediate causes—we would do well build on this lesson. If nothing else, this summer’s drought should remind us of our responsibility to ourselves and to our children to protect and preserve both our environment and our natural resources. With the right vision and political will, we too could turn the onset of the Great Drought of 2012 into an opportunity to provide millions of unemployed Americans work in developing green energy while at the same time building a cleaner, more secure future for our children. 

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

Drought land image via Shutterstock.com.

Obama's attacks on Bain follow in FDR's 1936 re-election footsteps except for one key aspect: a full-throated case for government.

Yes, there are still determined groups…[who would]…steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to carry the property and the interests entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics…

The principle that they would instill into government if they succeed in seizing power is well shown by the principles which many of them have instilled into their own affairs: autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment. Autocrats in smaller things, they seek autocracy in bigger things. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

In seeking to identify Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as an unfeeling member of the nation’s wealthy elite, President Obama is using tactics reminiscent of those used by Franklin Roosevelt in his own bid for re-election in 1936. In that campaign, FDR sought to draw a clear distinction between what he and his Democratic colleagues represented—the interests of the average working American—versus what he saw as the Republican promotion of a return to the economic status quo. But unlike FDR, President Obama is shying away the argument that government must be the countervailing force against entrenched financial interests.

By 1936, conservative critics of the New Deal had launched a persistent and hard-hitting campaign against FDR's policies, labeling them un-American and contrary to the Constitution. At the forefront of this effort was the American Liberty League, a privately funded anti-government organization that ruthlessly attacked his economic policies as little more than a drive to usurp the constitution and take the United States down the path toward socialism. But thanks to the fact that the Liberty League was never a truly populist movement (although it tried to portray itself as such), as well as the fact that it was financed by some of the most powerful business interests in the county, including the leaders of the DuPont Company, Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, and a number of other wealthy individuals and corporations, FDR was able to discredit its efforts as little more than a poorly concealed attempt to restore the country to the laissez-faire economic policies of the past.

In doing so, FDR reminded the American people again and again that the rightwing drive to restore these policies was not based on the elite’s desire to protect and promote free enterprise, but rather based on their unabashed desire to protect and promote their own wealth and power. Under such an economic system, which had been in place during the 1920s, the “savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age,” what FDR rightly called “other people’s money,” were the tools with which the economic elite dug itself in. Indeed, as he went on in perhaps his most famous 1936 campaign address, it was critical not to forget how:

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

In our own era marked by declining wages, the outsourcing of jobs, and an ever-increasing share of the nation’s wealth residing in the hands of the financial barons of Wall Street—whose willingness to risk “other people’s money” has hardly diminished—FDR’s assault on what he identified as “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties” rings as true today as it did in the mid 1930s.

It is for this reason that President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record as the head of Bain Capital have proven so effective. Having been burned in the 2007-2008 financial collapse that led to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people still harbor a good deal of hostility towards the bonus- and bailout-receiving bank executives whose reckless behavior brought the nation and the rest of the world to the brink of economic ruin. Based on the response to the president’s efforts to paint Romney as one of these elite, it also appears that they remain skeptical of the financial titans' ability to pull us out of the Great Recession. What is missing from the president's attacks, however, is the one key element that FDR used in convincing the American people that they should support his re-election in 1936: the clear and unequivocal case for government.

In the wake of the more than 30-year assault on government launched by Ronald Reagan in 1980, President Obama and the Democratic Party may be loath to use the case for government as part of their strategy to win the 2012 election. But as FDR pointed out in the mid 1930s, we have now reached a point like the 1920s where for too many of us “the political equality we once had won” has become “meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” Why? Because, as was the case in America’s gilded age, “a small group” has “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other  people's labor—other people's lives.”  As a consequence, we also find, as FDR did, that “for too many of us life…[is] no longer free; liberty no longer real; men…[can] no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.”

To counter such entrenched economic interests, FDR insisted that “the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government,” and he urged his fellow citizens to vote for him and his party as the best means to ensure that government by, of, and for the people would continue to flourish. For, as he often noted, what was really at stake in this struggle between the average citizen and the interests of the wealthy was the state of democracy itself. In the same election speech, for example, he also observed:

Unhappy events abroad have re-taught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

FDR’s belief in the need for government to serve as an active instrument of social and economic justice won him the greatest electoral landslide in American history. It also helped preserve American democracy in an age when democratic government was under siege worldwide. Surely these are two lessons the Obama administration might turn to as it struggles to win the hearts and minds of the American people at this critical moment in our history.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

Despite the handwringing, neither president suffered a huge political blow at the hands of the Supreme Court.

There is no question that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act represents a major victory for Barak Obama’s presidency. Struggling in the polls thanks to the continued sluggish performance of the economy, a defeat on the constitutionality of this signature piece of legislation had led many analysts to predict that, had the decision gone the other way, President Obama’s ability to effect further change would be finished. Others argued that a ruling striking down the health care law would have meant the end of President Obama’s political career. But if history is any guide, these dire predictions may have been too severe.

Roughly 75 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt was engaged in his own struggle with the Supreme Court, it appeared for a time as if the fate of his presidency—and the New Deal—also hung in the balance. In May of 1935, for example, the Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, two key provisions of the New Deal. FDR was livid and, fearing for the fate of such landmark pieces of legislation as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and Social Security Act, he eventually decided to take on the Supreme Court by unleashing his famous “Court Packing Plan” in February 1937. The plan argued that the president should be allowed to add up to six new judges to the bench in cases where a sitting justice who had served at least ten years on the bench refused to retire after reaching his seventieth birthday.

The president was perfectly within his legal bounds to request a change in the make-up of the Court, and he certainly was not alone in his call for judicial reform. But given the widespread support for the make-up at the time and the means by which the president unveiled his proposal—it was launched without warning and without any effort to secure congressional support before it was put forward—the plan soon ran into fierce opposition, even from some members of Roosevelt’s own party. As time went on, what congressional support there was for the plan eroded, and after some months the bill was quietly allowed to die in the Senate before it ever came to a vote.

Most historians agree that the launch and demise of FDR’s court packing scheme was a major political blow which, when coupled with the Roosevelt recession of 1937, resulted in the strengthening of the anti-New Deal coalition in Congress in the midterm elections of 1938. This certainly made it harder for FDR to push further New Deal reforms in the coming years, but it did not bring about the judicial reversals that FDR feared. On the contrary, from that moment forward the Court upheld every New Deal statute that came before it, launching a new era of jurisprudence that fundamentally altered its character and the nature of its decisions.

The setbacks that President Roosevelt experienced at the hands of the Court in the mid 1930s, then, did not result in the undermining of the New Deal. Thanks to a shift in attitude in the Court about the role of government in the maintenance of the social and economic health of the nation, we still enjoy Social Security, unemployment insurance, a federal minimum wage, and a host of other New Deal provisions. Nor did the Court’s action’s result in the political demise of Franklin Roosevelt, who would go on to win reelection to an unprecedented third and fourth terms.

In the decades since Roosevelt’s showdown with the Supreme Court, a debate has raged about how much his decision to confront the Court may have led to the change in attitude among the justices regarding the constitutionality of the New Deal. A number of historians—and Roosevelt himself—have claimed that the president may have lost the battle but won the war. In other words, it was the pressure from the president that led to the shift in the Court’s outlook.

But more recent scholarship tends to support the idea that the Court’s about-face reflects the slow evolution of 20^th century constitutional law that predates the New Deal. The court, in essence, was heading toward supporting greater federal intervention in the economy, but had not quite reached this point when FDR launched his flurry of programs and reforms. One strong argument in favor of this view stems from the fact that in early 1937—before FDR announced his court reform proposal—the court reversed itself and ruled in favor of two other New Deal provisions that had been brought before it. Ironically, one of the justices who changed his position was Owen Roberts, a conservative Hoover appointee who would continue to serve on the court until 1945. Given his change in attitude, it is Associate Justice Owen Roberts—a man whom the current chief Justice John G. Roberts (no relation) apparently admires—who is most often credited with saving the New Deal or, as was said at the time, carrying out “the switch in time that saved nine.” Today, it appears that it was Chief Justice Roberts, who cast the decisive vote in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, who will make it possible for millions of uninsured Americans to finally gain access to what many consider a fundamental human right: affordable health care. 

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.