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| 1935 |
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| Eleanor Roosevelt championed minority and women's rights in the White House and lobbied extensively on their behalf. Partly under her influence, FDR appointed Francis Perkins secretary of labor, the first woman to hold a cabinet-level post. | 1 |
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| Aug. 9 |
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| The Motor Carrier Act placed interstate bus and truck lines under control of the Interstate Commerce Commission. | 2 |
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| Aug. 14 |
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| Social Security Act. Its primary objects were: (1) to provide, in cooperation with each of the states, systems in the states for the payment of support to the needy aged; (2) to pay sums to persons during limited periods after their loss of employment. Provision was also made for federal aid toward states' aid for needy, dependent children, for crippled children, for neglected children, for the vocational rehabilitation of the disabled, for health-service agencies, and for the blind. The purpose of the old-age pensions was to be effected in the first instance by the government's matching states' allowance to needy persons over the age of 65 years, up to $15 a month for each case. A tax on employees and a tax at an equal rate on the payrolls of employers was to be levied starting in 1937 at 1 percent, and rising by steps to 3 percent in 1949, to provide a fund out of which, not before Jan. 1, 1942, qualified employees retiring at 65 would receive to the end of their lives payments of from $10 to $15 per month. | 3 |
| To help states pay allowances to persons losing employment the act created a separate tax of 1 percent the first year, 2 percent the second, and 3 percent the third and thereafter, on employers' payrolls, starting with the payrolls of 1936. | 4 |
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| Aug. 26 |
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| Public Utility Holding Company Act. Purpose: (1) doing away with holding companies among the public-utility enterprises serving communities with electricity except where such companies might be needful; (2) regulating the relations of remaining holding companies and their relations with the subsidiary companies that they controlled. The Federal Power Commission was made the administrative agency for these purposes. It was charged to proceed after Jan. 1, 1938, to limit each holding company system to a single integrated public-utility system, save for minor and appropriate transgressions of the exact limit. | 5 |
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| Aug. 30 |
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| Guffey-Snyder Bituminous Coal Stabilization Act. Provisions of the act followed in great measure those of the bituminous coal code under the NRA. A national Bituminous Coal Commission was created to administer the act, particularly to establish a code for the industry, embodying mandatory features detailed in the law obliging employers to accept labor organizations and negotiate with representatives of the employees' own choosing. Declared unconstitutional in May 1936. | 6 |
| Wealth-Tax Act. Use of federal power of taxation as a weapon against “unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.” Increased surtaxes on individual yearly incomes of $50,000 and over. | 7 |
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