Eight Letters to the Editor: The Genesis of the Townsend National Recovery Plan

Abstract

The Townsend National Recovery Plan and the clubs which were organized around it provided one of the greatest grass roots political movements of the twentieth century. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has pointed out, [Dr. Francis] Townsend and his followers were calling attention in a definitive way to a cruel problem which the American people had too long shoved under the rug. Now the nation could never ignore its old again.1 Yet the whole movement was largely accidental, stemming from eight letters to the editor written by an obscure sixtyseven-year-old physician down on his luck.2 Born on a homestead farm near the frontier community of Fairbury, Illinois, in 1867, Dr. Francis E. Townsend was a resident of Long Beach, California, when he first formulated his recovery plan. This he did in a letter to the editor of the Long Beach Press Telegram in late September 1933In all of his previous sixty-seven years the doctor had achieved little that could be interpreted in the conventional terms of outstanding success. The waning months of 1933 found him, after a lifetime of hard work, unemployed and his meager savings rapidly dwindling. Townsend had sought his fortune in one vocation after another first as a hay-farmer in California, then as a cowboy. He later filed a homestead claim in western Kansas. Though not himself well-educated, the young Townsend taught school to supplement the meager returns from his homestead. Finally, beaten by the drought, he sold his homestead and headed for Colorado where he worked briefly in the mines at Cripple Creek. Having decided in the fall of 1899 that the good earth gave up her generous bounty much too reluctantly, Townsend, now age thirty-one,