shouldn’t be in the hands of the federal government. Look—just think what would happen if all the power was concentrated here, and Huey Long became president!” So against their better judgment, the CES experts left unemployment relief largely to the states. If the Supreme Court should declare the federal law to be unconstitutional—an acute worry in the judicial atmosphere of 1934–35—at least the state laws would remain on the books. The final act thus spawned a profligately disparate set of 50 separate bureaucracies running 50 separate unemployment compensation plans. Benefits were neither uniform nor portable, but Perkins consoled herself that this was better than nothing.

Old-age pensions, even today the most celebrated and controversial part of the Social Security Act, remained to be dealt with. Three complicated and devilishly interconnected considerations proved especially challenging: how to fund the pensions; when the initial payments should begin; and who should be covered.

Roosevelt and the CES planners agreed from the outset that employers and employees alike should contribute to the pension system. But the experts, noting that countries with such systems already in place typically financed them out of general revenues, envisioned a modest employee contribution and a substantial subvention from general Treasury funds. To proceed otherwise would necessitate a steeply regressive tax on workers, which, not incidentally, would have mischievously deflationary effects in the midst of the ongoing Depression. Roosevelt nonetheless demurred. “No dole,” he said. “No money out of the Treasury.”

The planners persisted. If they were to honor the president’s wish to begin payments to the first beneficiaries within the next five years, the earliest retirees’ benefits would far exceed their contributions, creating an accrued liability that by 1980 would need to be covered out of general revenues. Nothing doing, said Roosevelt. “This is the same old dole under another name. It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980. We can’t do that.” FDR later claimed that he fully understood the fiscal rationale for the planners’ recommendations. “But those taxes were never a problem of economics,” he said. “They are politics all the way through. We put those taxes in there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions. . . . With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau broke the impasse with a proposal to limit future liabilities by excluding certain categories of employees from any coverage whatsoever —some 10 million farm laborers, domestic servants, and workers in establishments with fewer than 10 employees.

“This was a blow,” Perkins wrote afterward. “But there were enough people afraid of the deflationary effects . . . enough people afraid of too large a system, and enough people confused about the desirability of social legislation by the Federal Government,” that Morgenthau’s solution was adopted.

Perkins shared Roosevelt’s regret that his big bill “had been chiseled down to a conservative pattern.” His separately enacted

full-employment proposals proved short-lived. Universal health care had disappeared. Unemployment insurance constituted no kind of consistent national plan. And all but uniquely in the developed world, contributory taxes for old-age insurance defined America’s old-age pension system as a property right, not a civil right. Meanwhile, millions of the least secure and neediest workers—a disproportionate number of them black farmworkers and black female domestics—had been denied coverage.

And yet Perkins ultimately affirmed Roosevelt’s conclusion that the Social Security Act was the “cornerstone of his administration.” It may not have conformed to his highest aspirations, but it has benefited hundreds of millions of Americans—retirees and the unemployed alike—for three-quarters of a century. It laid the foundation on which Medicare, Medicaid, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 were later erected. It’s not too much to say that it rewrote the American social contract. As Roosevelt envisioned, it made life more secure for generations to come. And were it not for the abundant compromises that attended the Social Security Act’s enactment, none of those things might have come to pass.