California passed the first state old-age assistance law in 1883. Helen Valeska Bary, who had worked at the California State Department of Social Welfare and later became the 8th employee of the Social Security Administration, recalled,
"Back in 1883 a law had been passed giving money to anybody over sixty who was in need. It provided no system of administration. It could be just given out by the counties and was an open end drain on the State Treasury. That was the first law in this country for what you would say was an old age pension. That went on until 1895 when the country ran into the depression of the '90s and the State Treasury was being drained. By that time, the number of people getting pensions had increased so much that the legislature had to abolish it." (University of California/Berkeley Oral Histories Project: Helen Valeska Bary)
Robert Lansdale, a professor who headed up a study of state old-age assistance programs for the Social Security Administration in 1936, thought that people in the West were particularly sensitive to the need of the poor elderly. He said,
"In Colorado and on the Pacific Coast one found more general concern for old people than was encountered in the East. The social economists who have written the history of the old age pension movement in this country have looked largely to the industrial nations of Europe for origins because that was the source of their own ideology. They have never satisfactorily accounted for the fact that California had a program of state aid for the aged in the 1870's and 1880's and that the first two old age pension laws in this country were passed by Alaska and Arizona in 1914. This early action did not arise in an industrial economy. For want of a better explanation, I ascribe this movement in the West to a concern for the pioneer. In the East, down to the Great Depression, economic success was generally attributed to individual acumen, and failure to personal inadequacies. In the Far West, it appeared to me that there was greater tolerance for the old person who had not "struck it rich," attributable perhaps to the fact that those who had, knew that good luck rather than superior virtue accounted for their success." (Robert T. Lansdale,1960.)