Social Security Act signed

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in Washington after Congress approved one of the central domestic statutes of the New Deal. The law created a federal old-age insurance program financed by payroll taxes, established unemployment insurance through federal-state cooperation, and authorized aid to dependent children, the elderly poor, and the disabled. Roosevelt signed the measure after recommendations from the Committee on Economic Security, which had worked under Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

The act addressed the political and economic shock that the Great Depression had inflicted on wage earners, retirees, and unemployed workers who had almost no national safety net in 1935. Roosevelt and New Deal supporters argued that the federal government had to provide a permanent floor of social insurance after bank failures, mass unemployment, and local relief systems proved unequal to the emergency. Conservative critics warned that payroll taxes and federal benefits would expand Washington's authority too far, but the administration treated Social Security as a stabilizing alternative to recurring economic desperation.

The Social Security Board began operating in 1935 as the direct institutional result of the act, and payroll tax collection started in 1937 to finance future benefits. The Supreme Court upheld the law's core structure in Helvering v. Davis and Steward Machine Co. v. Davis in 1937, securing Social Security as a permanent federal commitment that later Congresses repeatedly expanded.