The Forgotten Man (original) (raw)

In his speeches, Franklin Roosevelt would often invoke the image of "the forgotten man," a term he used to describe those Americans who were suffering the most during the Great Depression. The term is orginally credited to the 19th century Professor and Episcopal clergyman William Graham Sumner in a lecture he gave in 1883 in Brooklyn, which was entitled "The Forgotten Man." The lecture was later published in 1918 (Sumner had died in 1910).

For Sumner, the term meant something different from the way it was used by FDR. To Roosevelt, the forgotten man was the person in need of aid because of poverty, destitution and economic or social suffering. Sumner used the term to describe those persons who had to pay for reformist programs, essentially the middle class. He expressed the concept in the form of a mathematical formula:

"As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X... What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. he is the man who never is thought of. I call him the forgotten man. He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays."

Roosevelt spoke of a different "forgotten man," not the payer, but the intended beneficiary of his social programs. For example, in a radio address he gave on April 7, 1932, prior to his election, FDR told his audience:

"These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid."

The speech was Roosevelt's first national radio address, and it was broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). It was sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. Raymond Moley, one of FDR's top advisors, took credit for inserting the phrase into the speech. In a letter to his sister Nell, he wrote:

"When I was working on it with him [FDR} I was trying to suggest the ideas, words and phrases that would make the picture of him over the radio and would fix the image in the public consciousness. I scraped from my memory an old phrase, 'The Forgotten Man,' which has haunted me for years."

In 2007, a book by author Amily Shlaes was published entitled The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, published by HarperCollins in 2007. In the book, Shlaes reexamines the events of the Great Depression, and in particular, questions whether or not Franklin Roosevelt brought the nation out of the Great Depression, or whether his experimenting and spending policies prolonged it or exacerbated it. The book is also critical of Herbert Hoover and of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and suggests that Roosevelt pursued erratic policies that froze investment and failed to take the steps needed to but the brakes on the Depression. Shlaes used the term "forgotten man" in the same sense that Sumner did when he coined the term.

Shlaes notes in her book that some of FDR's advisors disagreed with Roosevelt, arguing that his ideas were "contrary to the philosophy that had prevailed in Washington since 1921, that the object of government was to provide prosperity for those who lived and worked at the top of the economic pyramid, in the belief that prosperity would trickle down to the bottom of the heap and benefit all." (The Forgotten Man, page 128). Shlaes contends that FDR did not believe in "trickle down economics" as this thinking came to be referred to.

Political polarization being what it has been in this century, Shlaes arguments were embraced by conservative politicians and historians, and criticized by those on the left of the political spectrum. (I'm currently reading this book, and hope to give my own "objective" opinion in an upcoming book review in this community.)