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January 1939. "Sign near Weslaco, Texas." Thinking back to high school civics or Trivial Pursuit, some of us may hazily recall the Townsend Plan's having something to do with old-age pensions and Social Security. 35mm nitrate negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
The Who was going to restore America somehow, maybe with a free Concert?
E. B. White wrote a Letter from the East in The New Yorker about going to a meeting to hear Dr. Townsend propound his plan. He observed that Townsend sounded perfectly smooth and confident as long as he stuck to his script, but was flustered by questions, even those from a largely friendly audience.
From the SSA website: This cartoon stamp was part of a series produced by the Republican party for the 1932 presidential election. The series was designed to attack the Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, and other stamps in the series depicted FDR as a Frankenstein monster run amok, as using the Constitution to light his cigarettes, and the like. This stamp was intended to imply that FDR would drain the pockets of America's workers to fill the pot of America's elderly, by pushing through the Townsend Plan if elected President. This particular stamp is doubly ironic, since FDR was a vehement opponent of the Townsend Plan, and many Republicans advocated Townsend-type flat-benefit schemes as alternatives to Social Security in the years following the 1932 election.
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