Hello, this is Michael Moss.

Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today, and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter.

So I will be reading it in her place.

August 13, 2025.

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.

While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the

depression, this law permanently changed the nature of American government. The Social Security

Act established a federal system of old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children, funds to promote

maternal and child welfare, and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the

relationship between government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR's Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins.

She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the

longest tenure in that job. She served from 1933 to 1945. Perkins brought to the position a vision

of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s.

While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced

the idea of a rugged individualism, in which men provided for their families on their own,

Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children

was more myth than reality. Her own husband suffered from

bipolar disorder, making her the family's primary support. She understood that Americans had

always supported each other. As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she

was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine,

surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics,

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