A HISTORY OF HORRORS

Reuben’s struggle for the dignity and respectful treatment of the elderly, regardless of their wealth or station, was a deeply personal one, beginning with his own family. At an early age, his preacher father had instilled within Reub a passion for care of the aged, bringing with him from his native Sweden the conviction that a pension for the elderly, no matter how rich or poor, should be provided “as a matter of right.”[1] In America, the elderly were afforded no such relief. Some, like Reuben’s mother Anne, were lucky enough to have children able to support them in their later years. Sister Olga recorded in her account of Reuben’s life that she and her brother set aside money each month for their mother’s care from the time of their father’s death in 1912 until her own passing in 1959.[2]

Most of the elderly poor, sadly, had no such help. A 1926 investigation by the federal Department of Labor (DOL) covering four states found a high percentage of those over 70 years of age “are without income, and a large percentage of these persons are of a worthy character.”[3] By 1931 the American Bankers Association cited their own figures which showed a full 80% of Americans 65 years of age and older were either wholly or partially dependent on others for their economic support.[4] Instead of living their final years in peaceful dignity, they were banished to the poorhouse.

These poorhouses—also known as almshouses, poor farms, or county homes—served as the final refuge for aged workers and widows left destitute without family, friends, or relatives for financial assistance. It was a tradition as ingrained as it was deplorable; as historian David Wagner explained:

For three hundred years…the choices of poor, disabled, elderly, and others in need were fairly bleak. With no modern social welfare, any hope of aid rested on the Elizabethan Poor Laws developed in England and taken lock, stock, and barrel into American law…If Mrs. Jones found herself widowed…or if Mr. Smith was too old to work his farm and had no children to work it, both would have no choice but to submit themselves to the will of the overseers of the poor.[5]

These overseers dumped the destitute into state-financed institutions widely viewed as wretched and awful. Such conditions were the product not merely of neglect but design. Many conservative legislators and administrators, worried about encouraging poverty, purposefully made life at the county homes meager and punishing. In the words of one poorhouse superintendent, “Our mission is to furnish everything comfortable for the inmates, kindly caring for the sick and performing all the duties which the unfortunate poor are entitled, but in no way to encourage indolence and pauperism and fill the institution with people too lazy to care for themselves.”[6]

The poorhouses of Reuben’s day were particularly deplorable. Harvey Kailin, secretary for the Illinois Committee on Old Age Security, condemned these houses as “our dumping ground, into which go our derelicts of every description. Living in this mess in insanity and depravity, this prison place for criminals and the insane, are several thousand children and respectable, intelligent old folk, whose only offense is that they are poor.”[7] An investigation of public poorhouses throughout Illinois in the mid-1920s by investigator Harry C. Evans found the word “poorhouse” had become “the threatening symbol of one of humanity’s great degradations… It is a world of hate and loathing, for it includes the composite horrors of poverty, disgrace, loneliness, humiliation, abandonment and degradation.”[8] Guy Young, a legislative representative for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) District 12 in Illinois, repeatedly recounted experience of workers forced into the poorhouse. “The degradation of it simply broke their hearts… they loathed the gate of the poor house…a great deal more than the gate of hell.”[9]

EARLY ATTEMPTS AT REFORM

This state of affairs disgusted and infuriated Reuben. Sister Olga clearly remembered, “One thing that disturbed Reuben greatly was the ‘County Poor House.’ Many were badly managed…believed this was all wrong and hoped someday he could change this.”[10] He had no idea how long a fight it would prove to be.

Reuben’s mentor, John E. Williams, was one of the earliest campaigners against poorhouses. Like many other reformers, he started by pushing for the creation of mothers’ pensions. Explicitly created “so that mothers (of a good moral character) would not have to abandon their children and go to the poorhouse, but could stay at home and keep their children,” these early pension efforts served multiple purposes.[11] While Williams and his compatriots wanted to provide support for those in need, they also sought to destigmatize the idea of pensions. One of labor’s most important missions was shifting public perception of such support. They held the then-radical view that financial support for the elderly was a duty of government. In the words of Frank E. Hering, brother of the Fraternal Order of Eagles and chairman of their Old Age Pension Commission, “The trouble is that all forms of poor relief are based upon a fundamentally false assumption… they are credited to charity, while most of them should be promoted by the simple sense of justice.”[12]

As a state representative, Reuben wasted little time continuing his mentor’s cause. In 1927 he helped expand the debate from pensions for mothers to all elderly with his introduction of the Old Age Pension Act. For months, Soderstrom worked tirelessly in the Illinois House to pass what was, for him, the most important piece of legislation since his Injunction Limitation Act. Opposition was every bit as fierce as when he first attempted to pass that signature reform, with the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association branding it “European parasitism.”[13] Government, they claimed, had neither the need nor the right to create a pension scheme. What gave Springfield the right, they asked, to tax the productive to pay for those who had failed to prepare for old age?

Reuben delivered an eloquent and profound response. Speaking on the floor of the House, Soderstrom masterfully asserted that government had both an interest and a duty in ensuring dignity for the aged and poor:

The home is the unit of our society, the one stabilizing factor of our government. Is the government less interested in its dignified, dependent old citizens than its strenuous youth? Paraphrasing Lincoln’s splendid summary of government: “I hold that government should be by and for men and women.” This implies a humanitarian note into governmental functions. It puts a greater value on human flesh than on the dollar. I find no pride in the poorhouses of our state, into which aged men and women are cast and crowded together as so much worthless refuse. I want less of these scrap-baskets of humanity and more homes…

When you pause to consider the chief aim of any true government is the welfare of its people… and the destitution of any class, old or young, is a matter of governmental duty… you will realize I seek to introduce no revolutionary principles… but am merely endeavoring to recognize and to declare in a definite and specific manner this important moral duty.[14]

Government was not only allowed but compelled to do this, Reuben argued. The right to a dignified death was as central to the American ideal as the pursuit of happiness, and the state can and should do all it can to ensure it. Time and again, the Illinois chamber had affirmed that it had such power, from the creation of criminal codes to animal protection laws:

How considerate we have been of dumb animals! Our statutes abound with acts calculated to prohibit and punish cruelty to beasts. But what little attention we have paid to human beings, whose all has been swept away by the ill winds of misfortune, and who face the winter of their lives weak, penniless, helpless and friendless! We leave these people in the isolation of their weakness and poverty until they become a public charge, and then for lack of a better way, herd them together and send them to a Poor Farm…The silver lace of old age touches me more deeply than the flash and color of youth. I claim the right to die comfortably is just as desirable in the hearts of men and women as the right to live prosperously.[15]

Despite his stirring plea and a very modest proposal—Reuben’s proposed bill provided recipients a mere $260 annually—Soderstrom’s act went down to narrow defeat, ultimately falling two votes shy of the 75 required for a constitutional majority.[16] Undaunted, Reuben brought the bill up again before the legislature as the first piece of labor-backed legislation of the session. This time, he won the vote in the House by a count of 84 to 49, only to see the bill strangled by a series of procedural tricks performed by Senate Judiciary Chair James Barbour and others.

Reuben refused to give up, though he did change his tactics. At the end of the 1931 legislative session, Soderstrom was appointed by the Governor to a committee created by the Senate to conduct a two-year study of “Poverty and Dependency in Old Age.”[17] Unfortunately, the body proved incapable of action, and in 1933 asked for an additional two years for further study. Reuben submitted his pension act regardless and penned a strongly worded dissent from the committee’s ruling, calling for immediate passage of the bill.

Again, Reuben’s call fell on deaf ears. The Senate Committee of Public Welfare voted to send the bill to a sub-committee, guaranteeing it a slow death by discussion. In the House, Speaker F.W. Lewis, who used an endless series of postponements to put most of labor’s legislative agenda on hold, made sure Reub’s bill never saw the light of day. Furious, Soderstrom attacked Lewis in the press, calling the speaker’s actions “either mismanagement or stupidity. Some observers insist that it is a combination of both.”[18]

Hope emerged in 1935, however, with the election of John P. Devine, a political ally of Soderstrom’s, to replace the obstructionist Lewis as Speaker of the House. The new Speaker stood ready to give Reuben—and old age pensions—his full support.

A BILL WHOSE TIME HAD COME

Along with Speaker Devine came a host of new democratic legislators whose constituents were clamoring for pension legislation. In the wake of Reub’s earlier attempts to pass old-age pensions, the Chicago Tribune sent its Inquiring Reporter out on the streets to ask everyday citizens: “Do you approve of the bill introduced at Springfield giving aged people financial aid?” The answers were telling:

“That’s a good idea. Something ought to be done to assist elderly people who are in need.” -George Prince, salesman

“I don’t see any reason why some scheme like that would not be practical.” - Mrs. Bessie H. Anderson, advertising

“I am heartily in favor of that bill.” -R.B. Higbe, real estate and a veteran of the Spanish American War

“That bill is a sign of respect by our state for our needy aged people.” -H.E. Williams, president of McCoy Healthway Motor Company

In fact, the only opinion voiced against Reuben’s bill cam from a broker, Mrs. C.E. Snyder, who didn’t want the bill “if the rest of us are to be taxed for it.”[19]

Those who claimed to worry about cost had precious little ground to stand on. Investigations by both federal and state agencies documented the relatively high cost of operating a poorhouse as compared to a pension system. An official report from the state of Illinois calculated an average cost of $250.57 annually to keep a person in an almshouse in Cook County, and $441 per resident downstate.[20] These figures did not include the cost of land, facilities, or equipment. Operations, staff salaries, wages and other overhead represented 69% of costs with only 31% left for maintenance of inmates. The most exhaustive study ever conducted on the cost of an inmate at a poorhouse by the Pennsylvania Old Age Commission found “for the sum expended annually upon almshouses… more than three times as many persons could be cared for by the pension system.”[21]

Another argument commonly raised by outside opposition groups like the Civic Federation of Chicago—that a pension system would lead to widespread fraud and abuse—proved equally as hollow. Abraham Epstein, the executive secretary for the American Association for Old Age Security, pointed out that of the 7,000 pension applications in California, only 400 had been rejected, most for simple technical mistakes. “Old age pensions have not proved burdensome to the taxpayer,” he stated, citing numerous surveys. “The number of persons who have tried to take advantage of these laws is negligible.”[22]

California wasn’t alone. Partly in response to a concerted campaign by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), seventeen states had passed an old-age pension law by 1935, all of them without major incident. Reuben decried the fact that Illinois had failed to protect its aged poor. He thundered against the do-nothing Illinois congress that would sooner talk his bill to death than take action. As the 1935 legislative season began, Reuben promised those he represented, both as a legislator and as President of the ISFL, that this was the year they would see their right to security and stability in their final days come due. This was the year he would pass his greatest accomplishment—the Old Age Pension Act! As Soderstrom declared from the House floor:

Each step forward has come through united action, by intelligence and reason, and the labor movement bears the marks and scars of this endless conflict. The trade union movement, in spite of all prejudice, all opposition, all persecution, is leading the way to a better and brighter day for every man and woman who of necessity must work for a livelihood. Lead the way ye brave unionists, ye men and women of honest toil… keep the flaming torch of freedom, liberty, equality and progress burning constantly. Step by step, week by week… we are coming closer and closer to that promised period of peace and plenty… Our dreams of justice, right, power and happiness are coming true. I want liberty instead of imprisonment for the old…I ask it in the name of Illinois, I ask it in the name of Christianity, I ask it in the holy name of Labor, Justice and Right, and destitute aged humanity.[23]

Soderstrom’s exhortation, while dramatic, was well-suited to the moment. Indeed, the 1936 fight for dignity in old age would prove the greatest—and costliest—struggle of Reuben’s political life.

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