HYDE PARK, NY.- To mark the historic 75th anniversary of the most far reaching social program in American history -- Social Security -- the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum will present a special exhibition on the history and legacy of the Social Security Act. This new major exhibition, entitled “Our Plain Duty: FDR and America's Social Security" opens Sunday, August 15, 2010. It will be integrated into a series of public events at the Library in the Fall and Winter of 2010 commemorating the year 1935 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt transformed the mission of the New Deal from one of relief to one of reform, launching what some historians refer to as the Second New Deal. The FDR Presidential Library will offer free admission on Sunday, August 15, 2010 to celebrate the opening of the exhibition. The Home of FDR National Historic Site is also free to the general public on the 15th as part of the “Fee-free Weekend.”

This exhibition was developed in a unique collaboration with the Social Security Administration. It will feature items drawn from the unparalleled historical collections at the Roosevelt Library and the Social Security Administration’s archive. These will include rarely seen documents and artifacts, along with photographs, film, audio, posters and other items from the Library and Museum's collections.

The crown jewel of FDR’s New Deal, Social Security is his greatest legacy to the nation. Historians concur on its singular importance. “No other New Deal measure proved more lastingly consequential or more emblematic of the very meaning of the New Deal,” notes Stanford historian David M. Kennedy. Roosevelt would have agreed. “He always regarded the Social Security Act as the cornerstone of his administration,” Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins recalled, “and . . . took greater satisfaction from it than from anything else he achieved on the domestic front.”

“Our Plain Duty: FDR and America's Social Security" opens Sunday, August 15, 2010 in the William J. vanden Heuvel Gallery at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.