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American Association of Retired Persons

The Oxford Companion to United States History

American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).The American Association of Retired Persons arose out of an effort by a prominent Los Angeles high school principal to improve the status of retired school teachers. Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus founded the National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA) in 1947 to lobby for health‐insurance coverage and increases in state pensions for retired educators. NRTA's membership, twenty thousand in 1955, soared after Andrus arranged with Leonard Davis, an insurance agent, to offer NRTA members insurance coverage; the pair established AARP so others might be eligible. Chartered in 1958, NRTA–AARP retained separate boards of directors but shared office space and staff.

Membership grew from 150,000 to 1,000,000 between 1959 and 1969. By 1982, the American Association of Retired Persons had outgrown its parent organization, and NRTA became a division within AARP. More than 33 million members belonged to AARP by the mid‐1990s, making it, after the Roman Catholic Church, the nation's second largest voluntary association.

The AARP offers members a variety of services, from travel advice and discounts on mail‐order prescriptions to auto, life, and insurance programs. Concern over its ties to Leonard Davis's Colonial Penn Insurance Company in the late 1970s led AARP to choose other underwriters for its insurance plans. By the end of the twentieth century, AARP had become a key voice for older Americans in Washington, lobbying against age discrimination and for health‐care reform. Its influence, however, was mixed, as it experienced difficulty in mobilizing its membership in a consistent manner.

Bibliography

David D. Van Tassel and Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer, eds., U.S. Aging Policy Interest Groups, 1992.
Henry J. Pratt , Gray Agendas: Interest Groups and Public Pensions in Canada, Britain and the United States, 1993.

W. Andrew Achenbaum

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© The Oxford Companion to United States History 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001.