Francis Everett Townsend

• Francis Everett Townsend
• Born: January 13, 1867
• Died: September 1, 1960

Physician and originator of the Old Age Revolving Pension Plan (OARP), was born in a log cabin in Fair-bury, Illinois, one of seven children of George Warren Townsend and Sarah Ann (Harper) Townsend, poor farmers of early American pioneer stock. When he was a boy the family moved to Nebraska in search of better land. In 1887 Townsend and a brother went to California, hoping to profit from a land boom. Nothing came of their hopes, however, and in 1890 Townsend returned to the family farm in Nebraska to complete his education at Franklin Academy.

Despite his family’s unhappy experiences with farming, Townsend filed a homestead claim on a farm in Kansas, but he had to abandon it when he could not keep up the payments. Working at odd jobs, he earned enough money to enroll in 1899 in Omaha Medical College. He paid his way by working as a salesman, accountant, furnace tender, and newspaper deliverer. Graduating in 1903, he established a practice among the ranch hands and miners of the Black Hills of South Dakota, but he often had to travel great distances and did not make much money. Still, he was able to marry Wilhelmina Mollie Brogue, a nurse, in October 1906. Their family included Wilhelmina Townsend’s seven children and their own four children, one of them an adopted daughter.

When the United States went to war in 1917, Townsend enlisted in the Army Medical Corps. After the war he left South Dakota for Long Beach, California. Here he met fierce competition from other doctors, and with the Great Depression of the 1930s his savings were lost. Through an old acquaintance he was appointed to the Long Beach Health Office—employment that spared his family temporarily from the deprivation that so many others were experiencing. When this last source of income was cut off, Townsend found himself in a desperate situation. He was now in his sixties, had long suffered ill health, and had no prospects for employment. In Long Beach he saw elderly people searching through garbage cans for food.

The idea that elderly working people could lose their savings through no fault of their own and be left with no means of support violated Townsend’s deeply engrained belief in a benevolent God who cares for the welfare of people. During 1933 he formulated his Old Age Revolving Pension Plan. Though he insisted that the plan was of his own devising, Townsend probably was influenced by similar schemes. He called for the federal government to provide a $200 monthly pension for every retired American over the age of sixty, the funds to be raised by a two percent tax on all business transactions. Townsend contended that this pension would serve two major purposes—it would enable the elderly to live in dignity and security, and it would bring about an end to the depression, as the pensioners would be required to spend each allotment within the month, thus stimulating the entire economy. He publicized the plan in a newspaper.

To Townsend’s surprise, his plan attracted immense support, particularly from older Americans of middle-class background and of old-stock ancestry who regarded the breakdown of the economy as unnatural and unacceptable. Growing numbers hailed the Townsend plan as a simple solution to their plight and that of the nation.

Aware of his own inability as a promoter, Townsend sought out someone to fill that role. He took on Robert Earl Clements, who had been involved in real-estate development in southern California before the onset of the depression. Under Clements’s guidance a nonprofit organization, Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd., was incorporated. Agents were dispatched throughout the nation to organize local clubs, and an estimated 2.25 million people joined, paying dues of twenty-five cents a year. The profits from a weekly newspaper and other commercial ventures brought large sums of money into the national headquarters. Frank Merriam’s victory over Upton Sinclair in the 1934 California gubernatorial election was partly due to Merriam’s endorsement of the OARP.

Despite the appeal of Townsend’s plan, economists ridiculed it. They argued that it was impossible for the government to raise the billions of dollars—more than 20 billion yearly—that enactment of the pension plan would have required. They also refuted the argument that the plan would bring an end to the depression.

To Townsend and his followers, however, these objections meant nothing. With the slogan “$200 every Friday,” they believed they had found a real solution, and by the end of 1935 Townsend was exerting political pressure to have his plan enacted. He soon discovered that neither the New Deal administration nor Congress was about to embrace his proposal and denounced them both.

In response to Townsend’s attacks, the administration supported a congressional investigation into the operation of his organization in the spring of 1936. Townsend was embarrassed by the financial irregularities that were revealed. The responsibility for most of them lay with Clements, who had resigned as an OARP director just before the investigation began and who was a key witness.

Townsend found a new promoter in Gerald L. K. Smith, who had worked with the demagogic Louisiana senator Huey P. Long on his Share-the-Wealth program. Smith lacked Townsend’s simple faith and na]veté. He simply craved power. He prodded the doctor into joining forces with other opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, including Charles Coughlin, the reactionary Catholic priest and anti-Semitic propagandist, in supporting the radical agrarian William Lemke on the Union party ticket in 1936.

Townsend, who dismissed as ineffective the Social Security program enacted in 1935, agreed to support Lemke simply because of his hatred of Roosevelt and his desire to prevent his reelection. But by no means did Townsend campaign actively for Lemke or expect great things of his candidacy. The Union party turned out to have little effect on the election, in which Roosevelt won a landslide victory.

In 1937 Townsend was convicted of contempt of Congress for walking out of the investigation the previous year. He was sentenced to prison, but his sentence was commuted by Roosevelt. Though interest in his plan fell off, he never gave up. Until his death in 1960 he continued to promote the cause that had brought him to prominence during the Great Depression. He died in Los Angeles at the age of ninety-three.

Townsend’s writings include The Townsend National Recovery Plan (1934); Old Age Revolving Pensions (1934); and his autobiography, New Horizons (1943). For biographical material see D. H. Bennett’s sketch in The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 6 (1980). Bennett discusses Townsend at greater length in his Demagogues in the Depression (1969). See also A. Holtzman, The Townsend Movement (1963).