Ida May Fuller's First Check and the Building of Social Security

Ida May Fuller lived in Ludlow, a small town in the hills of south-central Vermont, and for years she worked as a legal secretary. In November 1939, having retired, she stopped by the local Social Security office, mostly out of curiosity, to ask about the new programme she had been paying into. A few weeks later the government mailed her a check dated January 31, 1940. It was for $22.54, and its number was 00-000-001. She was the first American to receive a monthly Social Security retirement benefit. She had paid a little under $25 in Social Security taxes over the three years she worked under the system. Then she did something no actuary could have planned for her individually: she lived to be 100. By the time she died in 1975, she had collected nearly $23,000 in benefits. Her story is often told as a joke about a bad bargain for the government. It is better understood as a picture of what the programme was built to do.

In short: The Social Security Act of 1935 created old-age insurance, but it excluded about half of American workers, including farm and domestic workers, who were disproportionately Black and female. Monthly checks began in 1940. Over the next four decades Congress added survivors, the self-employed, farm and household workers, disability insurance and automatic cost-of-living increases, turning a narrow programme into the foundation of retirement for nearly everyone.

What the law of 1935 actually built

Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935. It was the product of a Committee on Economic Security that Frances Perkins, his labour secretary, had chaired the year before, and it was less a single programme than a bundle of them. It created unemployment insurance, run by the states with federal incentives. It funded aid to the elderly poor, to dependent children and to the blind, also through the states. And it created a federal system of old-age insurance, financed by a tax on wages paid by both workers and employers, which is the part most people now mean when they say Social Security.

The pressure for it was intense and came from several directions. The Depression had wiped out savings, and many older Americans had no pension and no way to work. A California physician named Francis Townsend had built a mass movement around a plan to pay everyone over 60 a monthly pension of $200, an enormous sum then, on the condition that they spend it within the month. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana was promising to share the nation's wealth. Roosevelt's planners wanted a programme that was fiscally sound and politically durable, and they thought the best way to get both was to tie benefits to work and finance them with contributions.

That design choice explains a great deal about why the programme has lasted. Because workers paid in, benefits were understood as earned rather than as charity. Roosevelt is often reported to have said that payroll contributions were there so that no politician could ever take the programme away, because people would feel they had a legal and moral right to what they had paid for.

The first checks, and why they came early

Under the original law, monthly benefits were not supposed to start until 1942. Payroll taxes began in 1937, and in the meantime retirees received a single lump-sum payment. The first of those went to a Cleveland streetcar motorman named Ernest Ackerman, who retired a day after the system started collecting. Having paid a nickel in tax, he received 17 cents.

In 1939 Congress rewrote the programme significantly. It moved monthly payments up to 1940. It also added benefits for the dependents of retired workers and for survivors, the widows and children of workers who died. That second change transformed the programme from individual old-age savings into something closer to family insurance, and it set the template for how Social Security works today.

Ida May Fuller's check came out of that rewrite. Her benefit was modest, about $22 a month, and it would rise over the years as Congress increased payments and, eventually, as automatic cost-of-living adjustments kicked in. By the end of her life her monthly benefit was several times what it had been in 1940.

Who was left outside

Here is the part of the story that the anniversary speeches often skip. The old-age insurance programme of 1935 did not cover everyone who worked. It excluded agricultural workers, domestic workers who worked in private homes, the self-employed, government employees, workers at nonprofit organizations and casual labourers. By most estimates, about half of the workforce fell outside the system at the start.

Those exclusions did not fall evenly. In the 1930s a large share of Black workers, especially in the South, worked on farms or in other people's houses. Domestic work was also one of the largest occupations for women of every race. A system that excluded farm and household labour left most Black workers and many working women without old-age insurance in its early years.

Why were they left out? Historians disagree, and the disagreement is worth laying out fairly. One school, associated with scholars such as Ira Katznelson and Robert Lieberman, argues that Southern Democrats, who held key committee chairs in Congress, insisted on the exclusions to keep federal benefits from undermining the region's low-wage, racially segregated labour system. They point out that the same exclusions show up across New Deal laws, including the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Another view, argued in detail by the Social Security Administration's own historian, Larry DeWitt, holds that the main reason was administrative. Collecting payroll taxes from millions of farm employers and households, many of whom kept no records, looked impossible with the tools of the time. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau recommended the exclusions on those grounds, and other countries' early programmes had made similar choices.

Both accounts can be partly right. The administrative problem was real, and it is also true that no one with power in Congress was pressing to solve it for the workers who were left out. The result was the same either way: the people with the least security were the last to be included.

Closing the gaps, one law at a time

What happened next is the part that should hearten anyone who thinks laws are fixed once they pass. Over several decades, Congress widened the programme step by step, usually with support from both parties.

The 1950 amendments, signed by Harry Truman, were the biggest single expansion. They brought in regularly employed farm workers and domestic workers for the first time, along with most of the non-farm self-employed, and they raised benefits sharply, which had fallen far behind postwar prices. In 1954, under Dwight Eisenhower, coverage was extended to self-employed farmers and more farm workers. Eisenhower, a Republican, signed several expansions and treated Social Security as a settled part of American life.

In 1956 Congress added disability insurance, initially for workers aged 50 to 64 who could no longer work. The age limit was later removed. In 1965, Medicare was written into the Social Security Act by amendment, giving health insurance to people over 65. And in 1972, a Democratic Congress and a Republican president, Richard Nixon, added automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments, beginning in 1975, so that benefits would keep pace with prices without a new vote each time. The same 1972 law created Supplemental Security Income, which replaced the state-run aid programmes for the elderly poor, the blind and people with disabilities with a single federal one.

By the 1980s, nearly all American workers were covered. The big remaining exception was some state and local government employees whose employers had their own pension systems, and the rules about how those workers' benefits were reduced became a long-running fight in their own right, until the Social Security Fairness Act repealed two of the reduction provisions in January 2025.

What it did to old age in America

The effect on poverty among older Americans was enormous. When the Census Bureau began publishing official poverty rates around 1960, more than a third of Americans aged 65 and over were poor. Today the official rate for that group is around one in ten. Not all of that change is due to Social Security; Medicare, private pensions and rising wages all played a role. But researchers who estimate what elderly poverty would look like without Social Security benefits consistently find that it would be several times higher than it is.

Social Security also changed what old age looked like. Before it, many older people who could no longer work moved in with their children or depended on charity. After it, retirement became a normal stage of life for working people, not just for the well-off. Widows with young children, who in the 1930s faced near-certain poverty if a husband died, received monthly survivor benefits. People who became disabled had something to fall back on.

The other side's case, then and now

From the start, Social Security had serious critics, and their arguments have not disappeared. In 1935, many Republicans in Congress tried to strip the old-age insurance part out of the bill, arguing that it would be costly, that payroll taxes would hurt business during a depression, and that compulsory government insurance was a step away from individual responsibility. When that effort failed, the final bill passed both chambers by wide margins, and over the following decades most Republicans came to support the programme.

Today the critique comes in different forms. Some argue that individual accounts invested in markets would produce higher returns. George W. Bush made that case in 2005, proposing to let workers divert part of their payroll taxes into private accounts; the plan drew little support in Congress and never came to a vote. Others argue that the programme's finances are unsustainable as the population ages and that benefits must eventually be cut. That concern is real, and the choices it raises deserve their own explanation.

The best answer to the private-accounts argument is in Ida May Fuller's story. Social Security is insurance, not just savings. It insures against outliving your money, against a market crash just before retirement, against becoming disabled or dying young and leaving children behind. A private account can be a good addition to it. It cannot do what an insurance pool does.

Why her check still matters

I think the lesson of Ida May Fuller is not that she got a great deal, though she did. It is that the programme was designed so that people who lived long, or were unlucky, or had little, would not be left alone. She received far more than she paid in because she lived longer than average, and others who died young received less. That is how insurance works. It pools risk so that nobody faces the worst outcome alone.

The excluded workers of 1935 are a reminder that even the best-designed programme can leave people out, and that it can take decades of pressure to bring them in. The expansions of 1950, 1954, 1956 and 1972 are a reminder that it can be done, and that it was done with votes from both parties.

The family the programme imagined

The 1939 amendments built Social Security around a particular picture of the American household: a husband who worked for wages and a wife who mostly did not. A retired worker's wife could receive a benefit based on his record, and his widow could receive a survivor's benefit after he died. Those provisions were a lifeline for millions of women at a time when many married women did not work outside the home. They also wrote assumptions about gender into the law that took decades and a lawsuit to undo.

One of those lawsuits came from a widowed father in New Jersey named Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife, a teacher, died in childbirth. Social Security paid benefits to widowed mothers caring for young children, but not to widowed fathers. A young lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued his case, and in 1975, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, the Supreme Court held that the distinction violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. The ruling meant that a working woman's contributions earned the same protection for her family as a man's.

Other changes followed the way American life changed. Women gained the option to claim reduced benefits at 62 in 1956, and men in 1961. Divorced spouses who had been married long enough gained access to benefits based on a former spouse's record. Each change widened the programme to fit families as they actually were, rather than as the planners of 1939 had imagined them.

What you can do

• Know who represents you on this. Social Security's future will be decided in Congress, probably in the 2030s if not sooner. Find your representative and senators, with their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, and tell them which choices you want them to make.
• Watch for rule changes. The Social Security Administration and other agencies sometimes publish rules that affect how benefits are claimed and paid. The open comment list shows federal rules accepting public comments now, closing soonest first, with guidance on writing one.
• Help someone navigate the system. Many older and disabled people struggle to apply for benefits or appeal a denial. The organizations directory lists legal-aid and senior-services nonprofits by state, many of which need volunteers.
• Read the wider fight over the safety net. Social Security is the largest piece of the safety net, but it sits beside Medicare, Medicaid, SSI and food aid. Understanding how they fit together makes the case for each one stronger.