In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, creating a program that would fundamentally transform the experience of aging in America. Before Social Security, growing old in the United States almost invariably meant growing poor. The program did not merely provide checks to retirees. It flipped the entire economic relationship between age and poverty, turning what had been an almost guaranteed descent into destitution into something resembling financial security for tens of millions of Americans. The scale of elderly poverty before Social Security is difficult for modern Americans to comprehend. In the early 1930s, more than half of all Americans over sixty-five had incomes below subsistence level. Poorhouses, those grim institutional warehouses for the destitute elderly, were a routine feature of the American landscape. Fam ...