Word: townsends
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...nearly five years the Congressmen in the audience had been listening to just such well-meaning, naive schemes for ending Depression overnight, insuring Prosperity forever & ever. But none of them laughed at 67-year-old Dr. Francis Everett Townsend. Some of them even joined the Congressmen's Townsend Club which he organized after his speech. For the good doctor's Old Age Revolving Pensions scheme, better known as the Townsend Plan, had by last week become one of the biggest political facts in the U.S. The early California groundswell of sentiment in its favor had grown...
Three months ago some 2,000,000 citizens had put their names to petitions urging Congress to enact the Plan into law (TIME, Oct. 15). Last week Dr. Townsend claimed 25,000,000 such signatures. The 644 Townsend Clubs of last October had become 25,000. At last week's Washington rally Oregon's Representative William A. Ekwall spoke the mind of many & many a Congressman when he declared: "About 120,000 people in my district have signed a Townsend petition. When I first heard of this I laughed at it. Then I got the smile...
Plan. Dr. Townsend proposes to pay every U. S. citizen over 60 (except habitual criminals) a pension of $200 per month, on condition that he or she retire from all gainful work, promise to spend the whole $200 within the month in the U. S. The money - about $20,000,000,000 per year - is to be raised by a Federal tax, how large or on what Dr. Townsend seems undecided. At first he proposed a 10% retail sales tax. As late as last week he was talking of a 2% tax on all financial transactions. But when...
...Townsend has been in Washington since mid-December, expects to stay until mid-February when the monster petition being assembled at his headquarters in Long Beach, Calif, should be ready for submission to Congress. A bill embodying the Plan has not yet been drafted. So great is the rivalry among Congressmen for the privilege of introducing such a measure, says Dr. Townsend, that a movement is under way to have it proposed jointly by all favoring Congressmen. Undismayed by the House's new gag rule (see p. 13), California's Representative John Steven McGroarty, who is also...
Opposition. Manufacturers leap to fight the 30-hr. week. Bankers line up solidly against inflation. Catholics battle birth control. For almost every other economic or social measure there can be found a body of citizens who, through self-interest or principle, will offer organized opposition. But for the Townsend Plan no such body exists. Contemplating a scheme which would alter the whole economic and social structure of the U. S., no individual citizen has yet felt personally & sufficiently aggrieved to organize an anti-Townsend club. Most thinking citizens have ignored the Plan, or dismissed it as too remote or fantastic...