Bing Crosby first appeared in a motion picture in 1930. The film was The King of Jazz, which was the title claimed, with very little justification in fact, by the bandleader Paul Whiteman. The Whiteman orchestra had for three years featured a trio of male singers called the Rhythm Boys, composed of Al Rinker, Harry Barris, and the man who would soon eclipse them and Whiteman in fame, Crosby.

By 1936 he had scored a dozen and a half chart-topping songs, one of them (“Love in Bloom,” from the film She Loves Me Not) an Academy Award nominee. He had appeared in almost as many films, no longer as just a singer but as a featured player and then leading man. In that year he starred in Pennies from Heaven, a hastily thrown-together little movie that would be quite forgotten today but for two things: The title song earned another Oscar nomination (and was also a number-one pop hit for an amazing ten straight weeks); and a black actor shared featured billing with the white cast for the first time. The actor, hired for the film and given equal billing at Crosby’s insistence, was Louis Armstrong, who also played the trumpet a bit.

The film is one of that genre that looks at the lives of some ordinary people through a Depression glass. An aging ne’er-do-well and his granddaughter are saved from being separated by a caring but rule-bound social worker through the intervention of the Crosby character, a lute-playing free spirit who in the end, of course, falls in love with the social worker. Along the way, a restaurant is opened with apparently no capital investment whatever, and it succeeds hugely until a posse of local farmers come looking for their stolen chickens, which have been appropriated (in the film’s nod to racial stereotype) by the trumpeter and his band.

California had a state pension system of sorts, but it was difficult to qualify for, indifferently administered, and parsimonious. It was then that Dr. Townsend had his idea.

Early in the film we learn that Gramp Smith, played by an actor with the wonderfully apt name of Donald Meek, is quietly confident that he can care properly for his granddaughter because he is expecting to come into a regular income. A little later, making his case to the social worker, he refers again to his expectation. How much income does he expect? he is asked, and he replies, “Two hundred dollars a month.” (Very roughly, using the Consumer Price Index as a multiplier, this would be about $3,000 today.) When will he begin receiving it? Soon; very soon. And from what source? “The Townsend Plan,” he replies, with a satisfied nod. It’s pretty clearly a punch line.

The social worker and the Crosby character exchange looks that imply that Gramp is a few drumsticks short of a chicken dinner. The audiences of 1936 might have exchanged looks that seemed to say, “I know someone just like that.” Today’s viewers may well exchange looks that say quite clearly, “Huh?”

Francis Everett Townsend was born in Illinois in 1867. He was a bit of an itinerant in his youth and worked at a variety of jobs, including farming, ranching, and mining. At the age of 33 he enrolled in a medical college in Omaha. After graduating in 1903, he practiced medicine in South Dakota and, from 1920, in Long Beach, California. He dabbled in real estate as well, and for a time served as an assistant county health officer.

President Roosevelt wisely issued a pardon before the kindly septuagenarian was sent to jail.

In his autobiography, New Horizons (1943), he refers frequently to his growing awareness of poverty—not the cash-poor farm life of his childhood but actual penury—and suggests that it stemmed originally from his early reading of Charles Dickens. His concern grew through all his experiences as a footloose laborer and as a frontier doctor. With the onset of the Great Depression he was struck particularly by the plight of the needy elderly. California had a state pension system of sorts, but like those of many states it was difficult to qualify for, indifferently administered, and parsimonious. It was then that Dr. Townsend had his idea.

In a letter to the editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, published on September 30, 1933, he set out his premise:

Of late years it has become an accepted fact that because of man’s inventiveness less and less productive effort is going to be required to supply the needs of the race. This being the case, it is just as necessary to make some disposal of our surplus workers, as it is to dispose of our surplus wheat or corn or cotton. But we cannot kill off the surplus workers as we are doing with our hogs; nor sell them to the Chinese on time as we do with our cotton.

And then the nub of the plan:

It is estimated that the population of the age of 60 and above in the United States is somewhere between nine and twelve millions. I suggest that the national government retire all who reach that age on a monthly pension of $200 a month or more, on condition that they spend the money as they get it.

The plan was simplicity itself. A national sales tax (in later versions a levy more like a value-added tax) would pay for the plan. A couple of billion dollars would be needed to get it rolling, but the increase in economic activity at all levels sparked by those millions of retired people spending $200 a month each would soon have the program paying for itself. Hence the name Old Age Revolving Pension, Ltd., under which Townsend and an associate incorporated in January 1934. A pamphlet published by OARP declared:

THE PLAN demands that the Congress of the United States remove the power over the circulation of money from the banks and assign that power to the government of the nation where it belongs. No one doubts or fears the integrity of the United States. Many of us have good reason to doubt the integrity and judgment of bankers as individuals and distrust the wisdom of consigning to them the nationally important task of keeping an adequate volume of money circulating to do the business of the country.

What happened next may well have inspired another motion picture. In 1934 the United States was a country with many pressing questions and desperate for answers or anything that resembled an answer. In California, the Socialist and novelist Upton Sinclair was running for governor on his EPIC (“End Poverty in California”) platform; in the Senate, Huey Long of Louisiana was pushing his “Share the Wealth” plan under the motto “Every man a king!”; another California-born scheme for relief of the unemployed was called simply “Ham ‘n Eggs” and demanded “$30 every Thursday,” the dollars being in the form of state-issued scrip. These and other schemes attracted their followers, but none like Dr. Townsend’s Plan. As the saying goes, it swept the nation.

Townsend clubs soon sprang up everywhere. Newspaper editorials, pro and (mostly) con, the organization’s own publications, and revival-style mass meetings spread the word and rallied the faithful. A Townsend newspaper, The Modern Crusader, published a call in the fall of 1934 for a national meeting:

Largest Mass Meeting in World’s History

More than twenty million persons in attendance. Five thousand auditoriums packed to capacity. Millions of prayers for success of the movement. The largest band the world has ever seen, all playing in unison the “Star Spangled Banner.” The largest choir in the world’s existence, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” This, in a word, tells the story of the gigantic Mass Meeting planned for Sunday, October 28th, to promote the interests of the Townsend plan of Old Age Revolving Pensions.

By the time of the first actual national convention, held in Chicago in October 1935 and attended by nearly 7,000 delegates representing every state in the union, there were, according to Dr. Townsend, more than 4,550 Townsend clubs; thousands more were chartered over the next few years.

Just add an ambitious newspaperwoman (Barbara Stanwyck) and a plutocrat with fascistic dreams of power (Edward Arnold), and you have Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), in which some homespun thoughts on neighborliness from “John Doe” (Gary Cooper) inspire an eerily similar national movement.

A bill providing for the essential elements of the plan was introduced in Congress in January 1935. It has been plausibly suggested that this spurred President Franklin D. Roosevelt to hurry along his plan for what became Social Security, which was submitted the very next day.

Under the Townsend Plan, its supporters claimed,

Humanity will be forever relieved from the fear of destitution and want. The seeming need for sharp practices and greedy accumulation will disappear. Benevolence and kindly consideration for others will displace suspicion and avarice, brotherly love and tolerance will blossom into full flower and the genial sun of human happiness will dissipate the dark clouds of distrust and gloom and despair.

Similar claims have been made on behalf of nearly every social movement, of course, from Brook Farm and Prohibition and Dress Reform to Fletcherizing and Graham crackers. None ever struck such a resounding note with so many.

Dr. Townsend underwent some unfriendly questioning before congressional panels and at one point incurred a contempt citation rather than submit any further. President Roosevelt wisely issued a pardon before the kindly septuagenarian was sent to jail.

The Social Security system won, an outcome that was never really in doubt. But the Townsend clubs lingered on here and there, and as late as 1956 the doctor wrote to President Eisenhower to urge his plan. He died in 1960.

The Social Securityb Administration’s website has a good historical section that pays due and gracious acknowledgement to Townsend and also provides a clear analysis of why the plan was economically impossible. At bottom, underneath the grand vision, it was a form of Ponzi scheme, though without the usual peculation. But then, so is Social Security.

Robert McHenry is the former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica. His articles for The American include “What’s in a Name?,” on technology and anonymity, “When an Epoch Began,” on how IBM, the census, and Emily Dickinson define an epoch, and “About That Message to Garcia...,” on a signature American homily that offers lessons on initiative, loyalty, hard work, and enterprise.

Image by Dianna Ingram/Bergman Group.