Dr. Francis E. Townsend was a California physician who was best known for his revolving old-age pension proposal during the Great Depression. He first made his proposal in a letter to the editor of a Long Beach, California newspaper in 1933. The letter proposed a way of alleviating poverty among the elderly, and resulted in a massive response, with the impromptu formation of Townsend Clubs to promote his plan. In January, 1934, Francis Townsend officially founded Revolving Old Age Pensions, Inc. to promote his plan. At their peak, the Townsend Clubs had around 2.2 million members with about 7,000 active Townsend Clubs.
The Townsend Plan called for a guaranteed monthly pension of $200 (in 1930s dollars) to every retired citizen age 60 or older, to be paid for with a national sales tax of 2%, with the stipulation that each pensioner would be required to spend the money within 30 days. This, he reasoned, would end poverty among the elderly, and pull the nation out of the Great Depression with the additional money that would circulate in the economy.
Townsend attempted to promote his plan by pursuing political alliances with various politicians, first with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who rejected the Townsend Plan as unworkable. Next, Townsend allied his movement with the 1934 campaign of Upton Sinclair for governor of California. Sinclair was a former Socialist who was running for governor of California as a Democrat on a platform known as EPIC, or End Poverty In California. In 1936, Townsend brought his movement into a short-lived alliance with radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and with Gerald L. K. Smith, in support of the Union Party candidacy of William Lemke for President.
Finally, in response to the continued growth of the Townsend movement, the delivery of a petition to the U.S. Congress with 10 million signatures in support of the Townsend Plan, and the increasing likelihood that the United States Congress was going to pass some variation of the Townsend Plan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed his own old-age pension plan, known as Social Security, which was a less radical pension plan than the Townsend Plan.
After Social Security took effect in January 1937, support for the Townsend Plan quickly eroded, although Francis Townsend continued to promote his plan well into the 1950s. The Townsend movement continued to exist in some form until as recently as the early 1980s.
