Lets talk about cycles and Los Angeles, California, and has anyone ever heard of Frances E Townsend? The Townsend Plan? Mark Twain? How about Social Security?
"By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has
happened once must happen again and again and again-and not
capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own
period, not another's, and each obeying its own law . . . the same
Nature which delights in periodical repetition in the skies is the
Nature which orders the affairs of the earth. Let us not underrate
the value of that hint." -Mark Twain
Townsend is a character from the same time and place as the more well known figure Manly P Hall - Los Angeles 1928-1988 It seems Townsend was born in 1867, in a log cabin in Illinois, just a couple of years after Lincoln was assinated. In 1919 he moved to Long Beach, California after living in many other places. This was the same year Manly P Hall moved to Los Angeles.
The Townsend Plan was a rally for care of the aged. It has a lore of coming into being after Townsend witnessed three haggard very old women digging in the garbage cans for food. This was in the 1930's depression era. In 1935 came the Social Security Act as a remedy.
In 2030 the "social security" of that act is supposed to run out. Will this current era be the cyclic loop back to social lack of security?
Is anyone familiar with the FSC, The Foundation For The Study of Cycles? Is anyone familiar with Astrology?
Here we are a century later, coming up to the 2030's, and we have in California not just the aged digging in garbage cans for food. A part of the Townsend Plan purpose was also to "get rid of the poor houses". It seems in this modern day Los Angeles, and elsewhere, there is a re-establishing of "poor houses" under a modern terminology.
There are pages on the Social Security website dedicated to The Townsend Plan history and Frances Townsend. Also a book printed in 1970, Old Age Politics In California -by Jackson K Putnam, that details more of this period in history. The 1971 book on this era of California is an interesting read and points can be compared to the current day info on the Social Security website.
But the point here is... It would seem that Cycles move the world. Whether we understand cycles as economic trends, phases of the moon, rush hour traffic, a calendar, a weekend, or astrology.
Edward Russel Dewey, Born in 1895, was an economist and founder of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles (FSC). In 1931 he was appointed chief economics analyst for the U.S. Department of Commerce and was given the specific task of finding out what had caused the stock market crash in 1929, two years earlier.
Foundation for the Study of Cycles was incorporated on January 10, 1941, by Edward R. Dewey after he discovered coincident cycles in nature and business.
In 1971 the book C Y C L E S -rhe Mysterious Forces That Trigger Events , authored by Dewey, was first published. The opening chapter begins
For over a million years man has been trying to predict his
future. He has always failed-and his failures are buried in the dust of
history.
and then it goes on to say, that in the decade of the 1970's and earlier
But, working quietly behind the scenes, thousands of scientists
in fields as unrelated as history, botany, anthropology, mammal-
ogy, terrestrial magnetism, sociology, and economics-to name
only a few-are accumulating facts and figures that promise to
make this age-old dream of foretelling the future at least a partial reality.
At this point in the year 2025 more than 55 years have passed and it is a current curiousity whether what Edward R Dewey suggested has likely come to be?
A new science which deals with the behavior of events
recurring at reasonably regular intervals throughout the universe
may ultimately enable us to predict, scientifically and accurately,
the events of tomorrow.
But was this even a new science actually? Or an Ancient science really?
Included in some of the emprical laws of cycles found by Dewey were "Cycles outside the earth are related to cycles on earth. This was a conclusion that he came to reluctantly because it sounds like astrology."
The FSC continued on into the mid 1990's but after Dewey's death in 1978 it narrowed the research focus on cycles within the stock market.
If a society, a culture or mere individuals are to lead our own self to higher levels it seems always useful to have a grasp of the past. Otherwise we mistake the rerun, repeate, or remake, for a brand new era.
In the words of Manly P Hall -
"To avoid a future of war, crime, and bankruptcy, the individual must begin to plan his own destiny, and the best source of the necessary information comes down to us through the writings of the ancients."
From the preface of the Diamond Jubilee Edition Oct 1 1988 of The Secret Teachings of All Ages
SCHOOLERS HISTORY CYCLES GLOSSARY
