The Sympathetic State

In 1962, Francis Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor, recalled the “Roots of Social Security” for an audience of Social Security Administration staff members. The Committee on Economic Security, which had broad agreement on most issues, “broke out into a row because the legal problems were so terrible.” According to Perkins, the legal committee had deadlocked in the summer of 1934 over the crucial question of the constitutional basis for federal authority over unemployment and old age insurance. Then, as Perkins told the crowd, she paid a social call on Justice Harlan Fiske Stone's wife. The justice himself sat down to tea and asked how she was getting on. She seized the opportunity and laid before him the problem that was occupying the Committee: Well, you know, we are having big troubles, Mr. Justice, because we don't know in this draft of the Economic Security Act, which we are working on—we are not quite sure, you know, what will be a wise method of establishing this law. It is a very difficult constitutional problem you know. We are guided by this, that, and the other case. Justice Stone looked around to see if anyone was listening. Then he put his hand up like this, confidentially, and he said, “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power.”