Social Security marks its 75th anniversary this week, but it almost didn?t happen, according to the Wisconsin citizen who played a key role in its development.
Passage was doubtful in the Senate Finance Committee ?in part because there was no popular demand for old age insurance, or very little, and still more because there were grave doubts about constitutionality,? Edwin Witte said in a 1955 interview.
Witte, then a University of Wisconsin economist, was tapped in 1934 to be the executive director for the Committee on Economic Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt to develop a program of old-age assistance. He was widely known as the ?father of Social Security.?