Word: townsends
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Townsend Plan was ready to burst, last week, into a nine-days' wonder...
...Francis Everett Townsend was born on a back-country Illinois farm in 1867. Working his way through Nebraska University's medical school, he graduated at 36, started practice in South Dakota's Black Hills where he often had to ride 150 mi. in a buggy to reach his patients. Like many a frost-bitten South Dakotan he moved, aged 52, to California. There, after a spell as assistant city health officer in Long Beach, he turned again to private practice. A kindly doctor, he brooded over his experience of human misery, and conceived a Plan...
...Townsend opened the Plan's first office last November in the rear of a Long Beach real estate salesroom, with a one-legged man as assistant, a Salvation Army protege as janitor. Success was quick. California's myriad oldsters came in masses to his meetings. By thousands they bought his 25� pamphlet. They sent the word back East to the old home-folks...
...last week the flow of money from the pamphlet and contributions was enough to pay the wages of 50 people working in his Long Beach office. There were Townsend Clubs in every State except Delaware?644 clubs in all, 200 in California alone. Between 2,000,000 and 5,000,000 people had put their names to petitions begging their Congressmen to vote the Plan into effect at once. It had a scattering support from small editors, syndicated philosophers. Wrote the "Poet Laureate of California": "There seemed to be so much more sense in it than what Spengler, Ortega...
...Townsend Plan had not acquired the cachet of Big Names as did Technocracy in the sad autumn of 1932. No Frank Vanderlip had drunk wine with it. It lacked the White House prestige which Anna Eleanor Roosevelt last year bestowed on the somewhat similar plan of Florida's 71-year-old Mrs. Prestonia Mann Martin whose book Prohibiting Poverty, of which Mrs. Roosevelt ordered six copies, advocated that all essential work be done free by Commons aged 18 to 26, who would thereafter engage at will in capitalistic luxury industries as public-supported Capitals* (TIME, Oct. 23). Best that...