In 1832, the town of Sandown, New Hampshire auctioned off three impoverished women ─Anna Harvey, Ruth Collins, and Molly Blough─to the lowest bidders.
Each “purchaser” agreed to these two requirements:
- to move the person or persons “off to the place where he intends to support them”;
- to provide “suitable Meats, and Drinks, Bedding mending, Nursing, & Tobacco if needed.”
No bidder was to be selected unless, in the opinion of the town’s three selectmen, he had the means to support the pauper. The town agreed to pay for clothing and a doctor.
Anna Harvey was successfully claimed by Captain Daniel Hoit who bid 75 cents a week. The other two women were taken by David Pressy who bid 74 cents for Ruth Collins and 80 cents for Molly Blough.
This is what happened to some of the aged poor in one New Hampshire town in the 19th century and other places as well. Approaching local government for help meant agreeing to a loss of freedom. The impoverished person could also be required to work without pay, making the arrangement come perilously close to a form of slavery.
The legal document behind this arrangement can be seen online in the town clerk’s handwriting. The web site can be found at http://www.poorhousestory.com/AUCTION_POOR.htm
Later on, “workhouses” were established in many places as a way of curing people from laziness, the alleged cause of their poverty. These institutions were later succeeded by “poor farms” or “poorhouses” where aged people were sent to live with others, often including the mentally ill and criminals.
I have discovered this slice of history through a new book, Aging Nation, written by two scholars personally known to me. Robert Binstock, one of the authors, is a political scientist who used to teach at Brandeis where long ago I took his course on aging and public policy. The other, James Schulz, an economist, is an emeritus professor at the same university.
The authors’ main reason for recalling the way the aged poor were treated in earlier America is to show the difference that Social Security has made. Starting in 1935, this federal program, initiated by Franklin Roosevelt, has gradually helped assure most older Americans of at least some financial independence.
Binstock and Schulz emphasize how Social Security, in freeing people from dependence on their children and from the often humiliating means testing required by other programs, gives older Americans the kind of revenue system they feel comfortable with.
Social Security fits comfortably with our tradition of independence and self-reliance, they point out. Recipients have paid into the program and it is seen as an insurance system rather than a dole.
The system also has other virtues that most people have little awareness of. A notable feature is the way Social Security, from the beginning, has been skewed to favor lower earners. Some with insufficient contributions to the program have been enabled to receive more than they were strictly speaking eligible for.
Both authors believe strongly in the advantages for Americans at large assured by a system that has always paid out what it owes. By contrast with many pension benefits promised by private employers and not delivered, Social Security has never missed coming through with payments.
The writers deeply distrust schemes such as the Bush plan that would privatize Social Security by relying on so-called “personal accounts.” Though they think it wise for the system to invest some of its money in the financial markets, they stress the undesirability of having recipients take charge of managing their own accounts.
Most Americans do not possess the expert knowledge necessary to make wise choices in complicated money matters. Nor are they interested in managing the dollars invested for them by the federal government. For spending our time, most of us have found more interesting ways than that.
I certainly qualify on both these counts and feel fortunate to have found assistance in basic planning from some knowledgeable and trustworthy professionals. Beyond that, I am ill-equipped to go, and much prefer sports, music, and the other arts to financial planning.
Public programs of the magnitude of Social Security are best handled by public authority. As the authors of Aging Nation state: “Only governments can secure the benefits promised in old age─given the economic vicissitudes of global, regional, and community shifts in economic opportunity in the face of such things as changing product demand, technology, the competitive milieu, and macroeconomic events associated with recession and inflation.”
Unfortunately, some Americans are still impoverished in late life. But when you consider the way old age relief was handled before the advent of Social Security you have to be grateful for this life-saving program. The United States was not the first nation to adopt this response to the plight of impecunious elders and it was not easy to get the Congress to approve it in the middle 1930s.
However, in time its arrival would make the New Hampshire town’s response to the poverty of three women look primitive indeed.
Richard Griffin