Historically Speaking: The Long Road to Pensions for All

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

From the Song Dynasty to the American Civil War, governments have experimented with ways to support retired soldiers and workers

The Wall Street Journal

April 6, 2023

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me,/When I’m sixty-four?” sang the Beatles in their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These were somewhat hypothetical questions at a time when the mean age of American men taking retirement was 64, and their average life expectancy was 67. More than a half-century later, the Beatles song resonates in a different way, because there are so few countries left where retirement on a state pension at 64 is even possible.

Historically, governments preferred not to be in the retirement business, but self-interest sometimes achieved what charitable impulses could not. In 6 A.D., a well-founded fear of civil unrest encouraged Augustus Caesar to institute the first state pension system, the aerarium militare, which looked after retired army veterans. He earmarked a 5% tax on inheritances to pay for the scheme, which served as a stabilizing force in the Roman Empire for the next 400 years. The Sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, probably could have been avoided if Roman officials had kept their promise to pay his allied troops their military pensions.

In the 11th century, the Song emperor Shenzong invited the brilliant but mercurial governor of Nanjing, Wang Anshi, to reform China’s entire system of government. Wang’s far-reaching “New Laws” included state welfare plans to care for the aged and infirm. Some of his ideas were accepted but not the retirement plan, which achieved the remarkable feat of uniting both conservatives and radicals against him: The former regarded state pensions as an assault on family responsibility, the latter thought it gave too much power to the government. Wang was forced to retire in 1075.

Leaders in the West were content to muddle along until, like Augustus, they realized that a large nation-state requires a national army to defend it. England’s Queen Elizabeth I oversaw the first army and navy pensions in Europe. She also instituted the first Poor Laws, which codified the state’s responsibility toward its citizens. The problem with the Poor Laws, however, was that they transferred a national problem to the local level and kept it there.

Before he fell victim to the Terror during the French Revolution, the Marquis de Condorcet tried to figure out how France might pay for a national pension system. The question was largely ignored in the U.S. until the Civil War forced the federal government into a reckoning. A military pension system that helped fewer than 10,000 people in 1861 grew into a behemoth serving over 300,000 in 1885. By 1894 military pensions accounted for 37% of the federal budget. One side effect was to hamper the development of national and private pension schemes. Among the few companies to offer retirement pensions for employees were the railroads and American Express.

By the time Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary, ushered in Social Security in 1935, Germany’s national pension scheme was almost 50 years old. But the German system started at age 70, far too late for most people, which was the idea. As Jane Austen’s Mrs. Dashwood complained in “Sense and Sensibility,” “People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid to them.” The last Civil War pensioner was Irene Triplett, who died in 2020. She was receiving $73.13 every month for her father’s Union service.

Historically Speaking: The Martini’s Contribution to Civilization

The cocktail was invented in the U.S., but it soon became a worldwide symbol of sophistication.

Wall Street Journal

December 18, 2020

In 1887, the Chicago Tribune hailed the martini as the quintessential Christmas drink, reminding readers that it is “made of Vermouth, Booth’s Gin, and Angostura Bitters.” That remains the classic recipe, even though no one can say for certain who created it.

The journalist H.L. Mencken famously declared that the martini was “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet,” and there are plenty of claimants to the title of inventor. The city of Martinez, Calif., insists the martini was first made there in 1849, for a miner who wanted to celebrate a gold strike with something “special.” Another origin story gives the credit to Jerry Thomas, the bartender of the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, in 1867.

Actor Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, with his signature martini.
PHOTO: MGM/EVERETT COLLECTION

Of course, just as calculus was discovered simultaneously by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, the martini may have sprung from multiple cocktail shakers. What soon made it stand out from all other gin cocktails was its association with high society. The hero of “Burning Daylight,” Jack London’s 1910 novel about a gold-miner turned entrepreneur, drinks martinis to prove to himself and others that he has “arrived.” Ernest Hemingway paid tribute to the drink in his 1929 novel “A Farewell To Arms” with the immortal line, “I had never tasted anything so cool and clean. They made me feel civilized.”

Prohibition was a golden age for the martini. Its adaptability was a boon: Even the coarsest bathtub gin could be made palatable with the addition of vermouth and olive brine (a dirty martini), a pickled onion (Gibson), lemon (twist), lime cordial (gimlet) or extra vermouth (wet). President Franklin D. Roosevelt was so attached to the cocktail that he tried a little martini diplomacy on Stalin during the Yalta conference of 1945. Stalin could just about stand the taste but informed Roosevelt that the cold on the way down wasn’t to his liking at all.

The American love affair with the martini continued in Hollywood films like “All About Eve,” starring Bette Davis, which portrayed it as the epitome of glamour and sophistication. But change was coming. In Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel “Live and Let Die,” James Bond ordered a martini made with vodka instead of gin. Worse, two years later in “Diamonds are Forever,” Fleming described the drink as being “shaken and not stirred,” even though shaking weakens it. Then again, according to an analysis of Bond’s alcohol consumption published in the British Medical Journal in 2013, 007 sometimes downed the equivalent of 14 martinis in a 24-hour period, so his whole body would have been shaking.

American businessmen weren’t all that far behind. The three-martini lunch was a national pastime until business lunches ceased to be fully tax-deductible in the 1980s. Banished from meetings, the martini went back to its roots as a mixologists’ dream, reinventing itself as a ‘tini for all seasons.

The 1990s brought new varieties that even James Bond might have thought twice about, like the chocolate martini, made with creme de cacao, and the appletini, made with apple liqueur, cider or juice. Whatever your favorite, this holiday season let’s toast to feeling civilized.

Historically Speaking: The Pleasures and Pains of Retirement

Since the Roman Empire, people have debated whether it’s a good idea to stop working in old age

The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2019

The new film “All Is True,” directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, imagines how William Shakespeare might have lived after he stopped writing plays. Alas for poor Shakespeare, in this version of his life retirement is hell. By day he potters in his garden, waging a feeble battle against Mother Nature; by night he is equally ineffectual against the verbal onslaughts of his resentful family.

In real life, people have been arguing the case for and against retirement since antiquity. The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero was thoroughly against the idea. In his essay “Cato the Elder on Aging,” Cicero argued that the best antidote to old age was a purposeful life. “I am in my eighty-fourth year,” he wrote, “yet, as you see, old age has not quite unnerved or shattered me. The senate and the popular assembly never find my vigor wanting.” Cicero lived by the pen—he was the greatest speechwriter in history—but he died by the sword, murdered on the orders of Mark Antony for his support of the waning Roman Republic.

Knowing when to exit from public life is a difficult art. The Roman Emperor Diocletian (ca. 245-316) retired to his palace in Split, in modern Croatia, after ruling for 21 years. According to Edward Gibbon, Diocletian was so content for the last six of years of his life that when emissaries from Rome tried to persuade him to return, he replied that he couldn’t possibly leave his cabbages.

For most of history, of course, the average person had no choice but to carry on working until they died. But in the 18th century, longer lifespans created a dilemma: The old were outliving their usefulness. Not realizing that he had two more productive decades left, the 60-year-old Voltaire told his friend Madame du Deffand: “I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities…. It is the only pleasure I have left.”

By the end of the 19th century, it had become possible for at least some ordinary people to spend their last years in retirement. In 1883, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck bowed to popular opinion and announced that all retirees over 65 would receive pensions. With that, 65 became the official age of retirement.

But some critics argued that this was the thin end of the wedge. If people could be forced out of careers and jobs on the basis of an arbitrary age limit, what else could be done to them? Troubled by what he regarded as ageism, the novelist Anthony Trollope published “The Fixed Period,” a dystopian novel about a society where anyone over the age is 67 is euthanized for his or her own good. The naysayers against any form of government retirement plan held sway in the U.S. until President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, by which time half of America’s elderly were living in poverty.

Today, the era of leisurely retirements may be passing into history. Whether driven by financial need or personal preference, for many people retirement simply means changing their occupation. According to the AARP, the number of adults working past age 65 has doubled since 1985.

Even the rich and famous aren’t retiring: President George W. Bush is a painter; the Oscar-nominated actor Gene Hackman is a novelist; and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is saving the planet. In this day and age, flush from his success on Broadway, a retired Shakespeare might start his own podcast.