"Please, Mr. Machine, give this to a human to read" : electronic data processing, systems management, and Great Society idealism in the Social Security Administration, 1965-1974

Senior Social Security Administration officials in the mid-1960s made a series of operational and policy-implementation decisions intended to leverage their organization's well-regarded data processing capabilities in an effort to align the New Deal-era agency more closely with the poverty-eradication goal of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This thesis seeks to illuminate the ways in which Great Society idealism motivated the Social Security Administration's embrace of increasingly complex computerized management during the period from 1965 to 1974, and the ways the unrealistic expectations foisted upon such machines reached their most visible failings in the implementation of Social Security Insurance in 1974.