J. D. Brown, Social Security Founder, Dies

J. Douglas Brown, the last of the three prime architects of the Social Security system, is dead at 87.

The labor economist and former president of the Princeton University faculty died Jan. 19 at the Meadow Lakes Retirement Community in Hightstown, a few miles from the university where he was educated and taught for more than four decades.

He was one of the three experts who crafted the old-age pension plan for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security in 1934 and who continued to help shape the Social Security system into the 1980s. He also was chairman of the first advisory council in 1937-38 that persuaded Congress to add benefits for spouses, children and survivors, and he served on four later councils.

Brown joined the Princeton faculty in 1921, a year after receiving his bachelor’s degree. From 1926 to 1955 he directed the university’s industrial relations section, which pioneered the idea of holding campus seminars for mid-career business executives and union experts. Brown served as faculty dean from 1946 to 1966 and spent his final year before retirement in 1967 as Princeton’s first provost.

Six Books in Retirement

He wrote six books in retirement, including “An American Philosophy of Social Security” and “The Enjoyment of One’s Older Years.”

Brown and Murray W. Latimer were honored Aug. 14 as “founding fathers” at a ceremony marking Social Security’s 50th birthday at the agency’s headquarters in Baltimore. Latimer died two months later at 84. The third team member was Barbara N. Armstrong, a law professor, who died earlier.

A native of Somerville, N.J., Brown entered Princeton in 1915. His education was interrupted by World War I, when he enlisted in the medical corps and took part in four campaigns in France with the 42nd (Rainbow)Division of the 167th Infantry.

In 1940, Brown carried out a confidential, one-man study for Roosevelt of the manpower problems that would face the aircraft, machine tools and steel industries if the United States were to be drawn into war. During World War II he was a branch chief for the War Production Board and a manpower consultant to the war secretary.