The Return of the Forgotten Man?

Julia Shaw / January 05, 2011

During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to act in the name of “the forgotten man,” that is, the poor man, the old man, the man “at the bottom of the economic pyramid” in need of government help.  Amity Shlaes explained that FDR redefined the forgotten man and his plight. “As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be 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 A, B, and C shall do for X.”  C is the forgotten man, the one whose property is redistributed to someone else.

But FDR labeled X as the forgotten man. “This redefinition of the Forgotten Man and the government’s responsibility toward him was the end of limited government and the beginning of a new tradition,” comments  The Honorable Janice Rogers Brown in her exceptional Constitution Day speech. “Whereas the American Revolution was a taxpayer revolt that emphasized individual liberty and protection of private property, the Roosevelt revolution cultivated dependent constituencies and class warfare.” (more…)