Programs for the aid of the impoverished changed little in the U.S. for the first 150 years. Poverty was in most cases seen as a personal failure, and collections were taken up mostly at a local level, with the town elders deciding how to redistribute the taxes. By the 1900s that paradigm started becoming increasingly inapplicable to a society that moved from agrarianism to industrialism, and the bulk of the working force learned special trades rather than self-sufficiency. The Great Depression only hastened the search for a better model.

On this day, August 14, in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, the centerpiece of his New Deal legislation, providing pension benefits to retirees and unemployment benefits to those out of work, along with a lump-sum benefit at death. Funding for the program would come from payroll taxes.

The Act stood in stark contrast the country’s up-by-the-bootstraps ethos, and several cases went to the Supreme Court to challenge it. While many other components of Roosevelt’s New Deal program were found unconstitutional, the Supreme Court affirmed in separate cases the validity of the Social Security law.