Unretirement by Chris Farrell

Author:Chris Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chilling lines, aren’t they? Little wonder no one wanted to end up in such a place.

The filmmaker D. W. Griffith in 1911 shot a short silent film that captured a haunting vision of old age in industrial America for the average worker and family. (You can watch it on YouTube.)

The opening scene in What Should We Do with Our Old? has a doctor visiting the ailing wife of an elderly carpenter. The carpenter heads off to work, but soon the title card reads: “New foreman weeds out the old hands.” He’s fired and a much younger man replaces him at the factory.

Upset, discouraged, the carpenter finds out that it is: “Impossible to obtain employment at his age.”

Their savings are quickly exhausted and soon they’re facing starvation. His wife is increasingly ill. The worried husband opportunistically steals some food, but he’s caught and arrested. When he comes before the court, he’s convicted and sent to jail.

The judge is a kindly man. He wonders if the old man’s story is true. He sends a policeman to check on the wife. The policeman comes back from the apartment and confirms the story. The old man is released from jail. He rushes back home accompanied by the judge. The police with them are carrying food.

She’s dead by the time they get to the apartment. The old man is distraught, angry. The final storyboard reads: “Nothing for the useful citizen wounded in the battle of life.”

The progressive movement fought for a stronger financial safety net roughly between the 1890s and 1920s. The political coalition comprised a loose group of farmers, organized labor, urban lower classes, some from the middle-class business community, philanthropic leaders, and a number of heads from big business. The progressive movement played a role in the creation of the income tax, the founding of the Federal Reserve, the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the eight-hour workday, and prohibitions on child labor.

Among the list of progressive reforms was creating a retirement income security system for the elderly. Military veterans had access to pensions ever since the founding of the republic, although the system was capricious and unstable. (For instance, the navy’s pension fund from 1775 to 1842 had a “colorful history,” going bankrupt three times and each time having to be bailed out by Congress, according to Lee Craig, economist at North Carolina State University.) The federal government offered its civilian employees pension coverage in 1920. States and local governments were slower on the pension front, although twenty-one states by the late 1920s had established formal retirement plans for their public school teachers. Business leaders began embracing pensions after 1900. Private pension coverage expanded rapidly in the first three decades of the twentieth century, with three hundred companies offering them by 1919, covering some 15 percent of the work force, according to Sass in The Promise of Private Pensions. The companies that offered pensions to their workers ranked among the largest in the nation, like the railroads.

Why did hard-nosed profit-seeking owners and

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