Edwin Witte: The Father of Social Security
As the executive director and research synthesizer for the President's Committee on Economic Security in 1934, Witte undertook the major responsibility for writing the entire report of the Committee on Economic security to Roosevelt and also for explaining and defending the proposed legislation before both the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Finance Committee in 1935. |
Witte’s peculiar intellectual talent was his ability to grasp quickly ideas in the air around him, synthesize them, and put them to use. In his maturity it was this aptitude, rather than an outstanding ability to generate startlingly new, original, untested ideas, that underlay his reformism.
- Theron Schlabach, Cautious Reformer
Christened “the Father of Social Security,” his expert pragmatism played a unique and crucial role in making the act viable and effective: Edwin Witte successfully made the Wisconsin Idea an American Idea.
The Wisconsin reformers have accomplished the extraordinary results for which the whole nation owes them so much.
- Former President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
![Picture](/uploads/1/5/7/0/15701644/8376513.jpg?624)
"Neils Ruud, 824 E. Dayton Street, receiving the first unemployment compensation check issued in Wisconsin from Voyta Wrabetz, chairman of the state industrial commission. Also shown is Edwin Witte, university economist and author of the national social security act, Professor John Commons, university economist, and Ruud's employer H.H. Brockhausen." Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society. Image ID: 3491
For the conception, drafting, and passage of that act, and in its administration and development through 40 years of controversy, the people and ideas that had given [Wisconsin] a golden age of progressive social legislation went national.
- Wisconsin State Journal, August 1975
Witte and his pioneering work on the SSA represent the idea that took hold in the period and has since stuck; to be truly democratic, a nation must have a system to meet the basic material needs of its people.