Today’s Forgotten Man
FDR made the “forgotten man” idea popular. What most people don’t realize is that FDR used the idea incorrectly. The father of the idea of the forgotten man was a Yale professor named William Graham Sumner. Sumner’s forgotten man was a part of an algebra equation that goes as follows: Person A and Person B want to help Person X. This equation describes a true charitable impulse. The forgotten man appears when we change the equation to look like this: Person A and Person B join together to pass a law that forces Person C into co-funding their project for Person X. In this equation the forgotten man is Person C.
Person C is the common or forgotten man, not Person X. Person C does not take from the government or others; he only contributes and because he does not need or want the government’s help, he is soon forgotten for he cannot be purchased with a program.
FDR twisted the concept to refer to Person X and in so doing became the first president on a large scale to essentially buy voting blocks of forgotten men. Under this scenario the floodgates of government spending have ballooned, because special interest groups under the guise of the forgotten man are pleading for ever increasing dollars for their particular forgotten man. A most recent example is the current SCHIP bill being debated, which now says that the vast middle class America is now a forgotten man. Forgive my cynicism here, but the middle class is not forgotten man, though this is the forgotten man that surprisingly enough was the group of forgotten men that benefitted most from FDR’s welfare policies and not the poor.
As we look at our current battles in the US Legislature over porkbarrel politics and earmarking, perhaps we may find our answer or counter in bringing back to the minds of voters the true concept of the forgotten man as espoused by Sumner and by adding this new forgotten man to the debate: our children and grandchildren who will be paying for our excess.
In closing let me share some comments from Amity Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist and the author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
“The overall lesson of this is that we can continue to respect many aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency today. But we shouldn’t have false nostalgia about it. After all, it was Roosevelt’s political machinations in the 1936 campaign…that gave us the ‘earmarks’ that bedevil Congress today…the new forgotten men are the grandchildren who will pay if we do not give up some of that costly nostalgia.” (”The Legacy of the 1936 Election”, Amity Shlaes, Imprimis, September 2007, v. 36, No.9)
