Arthur Joseph Altmeyer

Social Security," the Wisconsin labor official who helped write the federal safety net and then ran it. He was born in De Pere on May 8, 1891. His parents divorced. At fourteen he was office boy in an uncle's law office at $10 a week, sending eighty percent to his grandmother for board. He stayed in high school until nineteen, worked a year to save tuition, and entered the University of Wisconsin at twenty-one, finishing Phi Beta Kappa in three years. At De Pere High he had met Ethel Thomas, his history teacher and four years older; she later became his wife and supported his graduate years while he sat at John R. Commons's elbow and wrote the pamphlet math of workmen's compensation.

He served as secretary of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission from 1922 to 1933 and helped build the nation's first unemployment-insurance system. Frances Perkins pulled him to Washington. He drafted the June 8, 1934, presidential message that promised an economic-security bill, then the executive order creating the Committee on Economic Security. He joined the Social Security Board in 1935, became chairman in 1937, and served as the first Commissioner of Social Security from 1946 to 1953. He told clerks they were a social agency, not a claims desk, and fought an 1835 statute that said no federal officer should "encourage a claim." The 1939 Amendments he pushed turned a worker's retirement plan into family insurance covering survivors and dependents. In 1938 he offered to switch jobs with executive director Frank Bane, a demotion, if Bane would stay.

Eisenhower's administration abolished his job by changing a preposition from Commissioner for to Commissioner of, twenty-seven days before he could retire. He refused a thirty-day consultant's make-work. He died in Madison on October 16, 1972. The Baltimore Social Security headquarters building still carries his name. He dedicated The Formative Years of Social Security (1966) to Ethel, writing in her copy that her love, wisdom, and concern for people had guided him throughout the years.