SOCIAL SECURITY: Nothing’s Too Good for Grandpa

Ever since the depression, noisy prophets had been springing up along the Pacific Coast to lead the aged in holy wars on the nearest state treasury. They were an odd lot—power-hungry Communists, vote-hungry politicos, sharp-eyed promoters and croupy and lugubrious old bucks with top-heavy cargoes of park-bench economics. They herded the “senior citizens” into irascible pressure groups, made pensions a permanent political issue, and damned those who opposed them as monsters who would starve their own grandmothers.

The average citizen in California, Oregon and Washington voted for pensions with something of the attitude of a nightclub sot listening to Mother Machree—it was hard to be critical because the words were so sad. Furthermore many of the old folks had a legitimate case. But this summer thousands of taxpayers were recalling their own generosity with purse-clutching alarm. The Pacific Coast had become a minor-league welfare state of its own, and new pension and welfare plans seemed to be pushing the states toward the brink of bankruptcy.

No Embarrassment. California’s grandiose Proposition 4, voted in as an amendment to the state constitution last November, had not only boosted pensions for the aged to $75 a month, but made the money delightfully easy to get. It lowered the age limit from 65 to 63 and ended the embarrassment of proving pauperism; old folks could have $3,500 in real estate, a car, furniture and jewelry, $1,500 in liquid assets, be supported in part by relatives, and still qualify.

The expense was appalling. In six months pensioners had increased from 198,000 to 245,000. The cost of paying them had jumped to more than $17 million a month and had all but broken the bank at Sacramento. Last week California newspapers and businessmen were engaged in an all-out battle to get the plan modified at a special election in November. They had begun in typical California style by hiring one Joe Robinson—the same professional signature collector who had raised the funds and gotten the signatures to put Proposition 4 over in the first place.*

But exuberant, mellow-voiced George H. McLain, the husky, 48-year-old Los Angeles promoter, who is the self-appointed leader1 of California’s aged, was ready. McLain, a former Ham & Eggs organizer, who sometimes kneels in public to show his followers how he prays for them, was already making five radio speeches a week over 22 stations, setting up a vast precinct system to “protect the old folks against future dangers.” California faced the biggest political fight in years.

Saved by the Bell. Oregon was in less perilous financial condition. Its voters passed an initiative measure like California’s last autumn. They were rescued by their own shortsightedness—they voted for pension increases which would have cost more than the whole expense of running the state, but they failed to provide any means of paying them.

When investment houses refused to buy Oregon bonds on the grounds that the state was technically insolvent, the state attorney general ruled the measure invalid. But pensions would still cost $26 million for the next two years—as compared with $300,000 in 1933-34.

Big as a Dam. The state of Washington, through apathy, ignorance and sympathy, found itself stuck with a welfare system that was even gaudier than California’s Proposition 4. One out of every twelve persons in the state would get financial assistance for two years and the other eleven would pay almost as much to keep them as the Government spent building Grand Coulee Dam. Unless it instituted a sizable new tax program, the state was almost certain to go into the red.

The state’s troubles were largely due to initiative 172, a pension measure put over last autumn by the Communist-dominated Washington Pension Union and its president, a crafty, smooth-talking party-liner named William J. Pennock, 33. Under its terms the old folks not only get money for mortgage payments, rent, tax assessments, insurance, food & clothing, but free medical & dental care, free hospitalization, free home-nursing service and free medicines, glasses and artificial limbs.

They had used the medical services so enthusiastically (the state paid $258 for the removal of 43 embarrassing warts from one elderly woman’s face) that last week the state medical board was introducing a rigid screening of patients in an attempt to reduce the state’s gargantuan hospital and drug bill. Meanwhile, the Washington Pension Union, an organization with limitless gall, was calling for even higher pensions for the future.

Despite the alarm of the ordinary taxpayer, there was no guarantee that pension payments might not go right on—and up —in all three states. The old folks were a powerful people in the West.

*Robinson charges $126,000 for a postcard campaign, $195,000 for one by letter, gathers signatures impartially for any side. Says he: “People think I’m doubling, but I’m not. Hell, 1 wouldn’t work for both sides at the same time.”