The Rockefellers and Social Security

[Excerpted from Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era, Patrick Newman, ed. (Auburn, Al.: Mises Institute, 2016), chap. 11.]

The Rockefellers and their intellectual and technocratic entourage were, indeed, central to the New Deal. In a deep sense, in fact, the New Deal itself constituted a radical displacement of the Morgans, who had dominated the financial and economic politics of the 1920s, by a coalition led by the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, Kuhn-Loeb, and the Lehman Brothers investment banking firms.35 The Business Advisory Committee of the Department of Commerce, for example, which proved highly influential in drawing up New Deal measures, was dominated by the scion of the Harriman family, W. Averill Harriman, and by such Rockefeller satraps as Walter Teagle, head of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Here we have space to trace only the influence of the Rockefellers, allied with the Wisconsin progressives and the graduates of the settlement houses, in creating and imposing on America the Social Security System. Here, too, was the end product of a gradual but sure process of secularization of the messianic ideal of the postmillennial pietists. Perhaps it is only fitting that a movement that began with postmillennial Yankee harridans going out into the streets and trying to destroy saloons would conclude with Wisconsin social scientists, technocrats, and Rockefeller-driven experts manipulating the levers of political power to bring about a top-down revolution in the form of the welfare state.1

Social Security began in 1934 when President Franklin Roosevelt commissioned a triad of his top officials to select the membership of a Committee on Economic Security (CES), which would draw up the legislation for the Social Security system. The three officials were Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration Harry Hopkins, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. The most important of this triad was Perkins, whose department came closest to jurisdiction over social security, and who presented the administration’s viewpoints at Congressional hearings. Perkins and the others decided to entrust the all-important task to Arthur Altmeyer, a Commons disciple at Wisconsin who had been secretary of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission and had administered Wisconsin’s system of unemployment relief. When Roosevelt imposed the corporatist collectivist National Recovery Administration (NRA) in 1933, Altmeyer was made director of the NRA Labor Compliance Division. Corporatist businessmen heartily approved of Altmeyer’s performance on the task, notably Marion Folsom, head of Eastman Kodak, and one of the leading members of the Business Advisory Council.

Altmeyer’s first choice to become chairman of the CES was none other than Dr. Bryce Stewart, director of research for the Industrial Relations Councilors (IRC). The IRC had been set up in the early 1920s by the Rockefellers, specifically John D., Jr., in charge of ideology and philanthropy for the Rockefeller empire. The IRC was the flagship scholarly and activist outfit to promote a new form of corporatist labor-management cooperation, as well as promoting pro-union and pro-welfare-state policies in industry and government. The IRC also set up influential Industrial Relations departments in Ivy League universities, notably Princeton.

Bryce Stewart, however, was hesitant about so openly taking charge of the Social Security effort on behalf of the IRC and the Rockefellers. He preferred to remain behind the scenes, do advisory consulting to the CES, and co-direct a study of unemployment insurance for the Council.

Turned down by Stewart, Altmeyer turned to his successor as secretary of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission, Commons disciple Edwin E. Witte. Witte became Executive Secretary of the CES, with the task of appointing the other members. At the suggestion of FDR, Altmeyer consulted with powerful members of the BAC, namely Swope, Teagle, and John Raskob of DuPont and General Motors, about the makeup and policies of the CES.

Altmeyer and Witte also prepared names for FDR to select an Advisory Council to the CES, consisting of employer, union, and “citizen” members. In addition to Swope, Folsom, and Teagle, the Advisory Council included two other powerful corporatist businessmen. The first, Morris Leeds, was president of Leeds & Northrup, and a member of the corporate, pro-union, pro-welfare-state American Association for Labor Legislation. The second, Sam Lewisohn, was vice president of Miami Copper Company, and former president of the AALL. Selected to head the Advisory Council was an academic front man, the much beloved Southern liberal, Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina.

Altmeyer and Witte appointed as the members of the key Technical Board of the CES three distinguished experts, Murray Webb Latimer, J. Douglas Brown, and Barbara Nachtried Armstrong, who was the first female law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. All three were IRC affiliates, and Latimer and Brown were, indeed, eminent members of the Rockefeller-IRC network. Latimer, chairman of the Railroad Retirement Board, was a long-time employee of the IRC, and had compiled the IRC’s study of industrial pensions, as well as having hammered out the details of the Railroad Retirement Act. Latimer was a member of the AALL and helped administer insurance and pension plans for Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of Ohio, and Standard Oil of California.

J. Douglas Brown was head of Princeton’s IRC-created Industrial Relations Department and was the point man for the CES in designing the old-age pension plan for Social Security. Brown, along with the big-business members of the Advisory Council, was particularly adamant that no employers escape the taxes for the old-age pension scheme. Brown was frankly concerned that small business not escape the cost-raising consequences of these social security tax obligations. In this way, big businesses, who were already voluntarily providing costly old-age pensions to their employees, could use the federal government to force their small-business competitors into paying for similar, costly, programs. Thus, Brown explained, in his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1935, that the great boon of the employer “contribution” to old-age pensions is that

it makes uniform throughout industry a minimum cost of providing old-age security and protects the more liberal employer now providing pensions from the competition of the employer who otherwise fires the old person without a pension when superannuated. It levels up cost of old-age protection on both the progressive employer and the unprogressive employer.2

In other words, the legislation deliberately penalizes the lower cost, “unprogressive,” employer and cripples him by artificially raising his costs compared to the larger employer. Also injured, of course, are the consumers and the taxpayers who are forced to pay for this largess.

It is no wonder, then, that the bigger businesses almost all backed the Social Security scheme to the hilt, while it was attacked by such associations of small business as the National Metal Trades Association, the Illinois Manufacturing Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers. By 1939, only 17% of American businesses favored repeal of the Social Security Act, while not one big business firm supported repeal.

Big business, indeed, collaborated enthusiastically with social security. When the Social Security Board faced the formidable task of establishing 26 million accounts for individuals, it consulted with the BAC, and Marion Folsom helped plan the creation of regional SSB centers. The BAC got the Board to hire the director of the Industrial Bureau of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce to serve as head registrar, and J. Douglas Brown was rewarded for his services by becoming chairman of the new, expanded Advisory Council for the Social Security Administration.

The American Association for Labor Legislation was particularly important in developing the Social Security system. This leftist social-welfare outfit, founded by Commons and headed for decades by his student John B. Andrews, was financed by Rockefeller, Morgan, and other wealthy

corporate liberal financial and industrial interests. The AALL was the major developer of disability and health insurance proposals during the 1920s, and then in 1930 turned to work on model state bills for unemployment insurance. In 1932, Wisconsin adopted the AALL’s plan and, under the force of AALL lobbying, the Democratic Party incorporated it into its platform. In developing Social Security, key CES Technical Board and Advisory Council posts were staffed with AALL members. Not only that, but in early 1934, Secretary Perkins asked none other than Paul Rauschenbush, the AALL’s Washington lobbyist, to draft a bill for Social Security which became the basis for further discussions in the CES. The AALL was also closely associated with Florence Kelley’s National Consumers League.

Paul Rauschenbusch had a fascinating pedigree in his own right. Paul was the son of the leading Social-Gospel Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch. Paul studied under John R. Commons and was the principle author of the Wisconsin unemployment insurance law. There was even more of a progressive cast to Rauschenbusch, for he married none other than Elizabeth Brandeis, daughter of the famed progressive jurist. Elizabeth also studied under Commons and received a Ph.D. from Wisconsin. What’s more, she was also a close friend of the Marxist Florence Kelley and helped edit her aunt Josephine Goldmark’s loving biography of Kelley. Elizabeth also helped write the Wisconsin unemployment compensation law. She taught economics at Wisconsin, rising to the post of full professor.

We can conclude by noting, with historian Irwin Yellowitz, that all these reform organizations were dominated and funded by “a small group of wealthy patricians, professional men, and social workers. Wealthy women, including some from New York society, were indispensable to the financing and staffing.”3

1The Rockefellers were originally ardent postmillennialist Baptists, John D. Sr., hailing originally from upstate New York. John D. Jr., headed the moral as well as philanthropic wing of the Rockefeller Empire, heading a grand jury in New York City in 1920 dedicated to stamping out vice in that city. After World War I, however, the Rockefeller family’s handpicked personal minister, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, spearheaded the drive of “liberal Protestantism,” a secularized version of postmillennialism, in order to repel a rising tide of premillennialist “fundamentalism” in the church. Harry Fosdick became head of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the mainstream liberal Protestant organization. In the meanwhile, John D., Jr. made Fosdick’s brother, Raymond Blaine Fosdick, head of the Rockefeller Foundation and eventually John D., Jr’s official biographer. Fosdick had been a settlement house worker. The Fosdicks were born in Buffalo to a New England Yankee family. On the Fosdicks, see Murray N. Rothbard, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 92–93, 120. [Editor’s remarks] See Chapter 13 below, pp. 414–19.
2Jill Quadagno, The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 112; Jill Quadagno, “Welfare Capitalism and the Social Security Act of 1935,” American Sociological Review 49 (October, 1984): 641. Also see G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990).
3Irwin Yellowitz, Labor and the Progressive Movement in New York State, 1897–1916 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 71. See in particular J. Craig Jenkins and Barbara G. Brents, “Social Protest, Hegemonic Competition, and Social Reform: A Political Struggle Interpretation of the American Welfare State,” American Sociological Review 54 (December, 1989): 891–909; and J. Craig Jenkins and Barbara Brents, “Capitalists and Social Security: What Did They Really Want?” American Sociological Review 56 (February, 1991): 129–32.