 At age six, he had his left arm amputated after a severe burn, and cancer took the life of his mother when he was 11. But it was the suffering of others that made him a socialist. The Great Depression radicalized him. Humphrey joined the League for Social Reconstruction, a national alliance of socialist intellectuals, to campaign for the creation of a welfare state as a remedy to capitalist insecurity. As its 1932 manifesto declared,