Mainly for people who were already alive, how did they get social security numbers and ids? Was it possible for people to “stay off the grid” so to speak and never get a number?
In: Economics
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As for your last question, absolutely. Even today we have serious issues, mostly with elderly people, concerning their ability to vote because they were born at home, never got a birth certificate, never got a SS number. Not that many decades ago you could manage pretty well without all the documents we have to have today. And back in the 30s it was far easier for people to not be recorded on any kind of federal level. They might have a Baptism record, but some folks didn’t even have that. There simply had never been a need for such things before.
So Social Security was created as people across the country were struggling to recover from the Great Depression. Millions of people still couldn’t find work, millions had lost whatever retirement savings they’d managed to save up, so the government created what was basically an insurance program to help ensure that the elderly, retired people, young children, and people who couldn’t find jobs would have at least enough money to keep from starving. America at this point in time was a newly emerging world leader, and the last thing we wanted was for the rest of the world to think that we just let our most vulnerable citizens die, plus we realized that the economy wasn’t going to get better if the majority of citizens couldn’t afford to buy anything.
In January of 1937 they started giving people identification numbers so that their benefits could be tracked and recorded accurately. Since the federal government didn’t yet have the resources to handle a nation-wide campaign to get people to fill out the form to sign themselves up for a number, the U.S. Post Office took care of that task. The person who received the lowest number Grace Dorothy Owen of New Hampshire. Her SS number was 001-01-0001.
While Social Security was not the first social welfare program in the U.S., it was the first nation-wide, federally run program. Before this there had been various types of employer-sponsored retirement programs, state-run welfare, and even local city or church-run programs going back to the 1600s, and those were largely modeled on various welfare/poverty-relief programs that have existed in various parts of Europe for ages.
I know it’s common now for people to get a Social Security number soon after birth, but I did not get one until I was 15 years old — because I needed one for work. I think for many people in my generation (born 1969) this was the case. You only need it if you intend to work or open a bank account, so we just waited until one of those needs arose.
My father was born in 1922 and I don’t think he applied for a Social Security number until he was 17 and went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corp
The only way to “stay off the grid and never get a number” is if you never plan to get a legitimate job, open a bank account, or apply for government benefits.
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