Industrial Scrap Heap: Employment Patterns and Change for the Aged in the 1920s

It is not uncommon today to find aged and decrepit workers relegated to the industrial scrap-heap as useless and of no economic value. . . . The problem facing the aged today is largely the creation of the modern machine industry with its components of specialization, speed, and strain. . . . The introduction of new inventions and more specialized machinery, inevitable in the evolutionary process, while resulting in the ultimate good, always involves the replacing of men, which in the case of the aged, has an absolutely harmful effect, as it leaves them destitute [Epstein, 1972: 4–5, orig. 1922. Abraham Epstein was the founder of the American Association for Old Age Security]. By the 1920s, social reformers believed that the requirements of modern industry created an increasing disadvantage for older people “in competition with those who have the greater quickness and adaptability of youth” (Nassau, 1915: 15). Old-age poverty resulting from unemployment was considered to be an urban problem because in rural communities “there is always work . . . and rent is negligible” (Nassau, 1915: 15).