FDR's Forgotten Man Speech--The Speech | The Strange Death of Liberal America

FDR’s Forgotten Man Speech–The Speech

May 4th, 2007

fdr

Remember my forgotten man,
You had him cultivate the land;
He walked behind the plow,
The sweat fell from his brow,
But look at him right now!

–”Remember My Forgotten Man,” words by Al Dubin, Music, Harry Warren

On April 7, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a campaign speech that would forever redefine the American political landscape. Little known and even less remembered today, the speech ignited the popular imagination of the early 1930s, inflaming an already contentious Democratic nomination contest and even setting fire to Hollywood’s creative imagination. What is extraordinary is that the speech itself would have never lit such a fire without the inspiration of a pipe-smoking university professor named Raymond Moley.

In those times it seemed natural that Roosevelt’s speech would inspire one of the great popular songs of the 1930s. That song along with “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” (which builds on the same theme) became an anthem of the Great Depression, especially after Hollywood choreographer Busby Berkeley created one of his supreme achievements when he used it as the closing number in Gold Diggers of 1933.

Those who heard the speech delivered over the radio recognized its significance. In his autobiography actor Charlie Chaplin wrote the speech:

Lifted American politics out of its cynical drowse and established the most inspiring era in American history.

Time magazine had a different reaction, calling the speech “rabble rousing.”

Chaplin sensed that 1932 was one of those ticks in time when one era passes and a new one begins. In the cobbled together shanties of the Hoovervilles to the one room tar paper shacks of Appalachian hollows and Southern tenant farms to the frame houses that today still line the streets of many American towns to the stone castles of the nouveau riche and the blue-blooded, people could feel the awful winds of the Great Depression bearing down on them like one of those apocalyptic Midwestern dust storms.

Those winds made the hair stand up on the necks of even the most optimistic. Few dared look into the future for what lay there was only fear, a great all-consuming darkness that swallowed hopes, dreams, and whole families. In the opening of Gold Diggers, a down-on-her-luck Ginger Rogers explains her plight by saying, “It’s the Depression, dearie.”

The facts of those grim years stare back like one of those stark black and white Depression-era photographs. Manufacturing output declined 50%. Production of durable goods fell 80%. Farm prices fell 65%. Manufacturing unemployment was 40%.

The 1932 campaign bears an uncanny similarity with the current one in that the Democrats knew that Hoover’s incompetence–like that of George W. Bush–put the Party on a train that seemed destined to stop at the White House. Like the current campaign this brought out a host of candidates, only then some had more colorful nicknames. There was Oklahoma Governor Alfalfa Bill Murray, House Speaker Cactus Jack Garner, Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie, Ohio’s Newton Baker (Wilson’s Secretary of War), Owen D. Young (his Young Plan had reduced Germany’s reparations payments), and waiting in the wings, The Happy Warrior, 1928 Presidential candidate Al Smith.

Roosevelt was first out of the gate and grabbed an early lead which worried conservatives led by financiers John J. Raskob and Bernard Baruch, who set out to seek an alternative. A number of names surfaced, some of them just ploys to force others into the race, but none of the early stop-Roosevelt candidates emerged from the pack as FDR’s main challenger. It would take the April 7 speech to firmly identify FDR’s chief rival.

Back in the days before computers ran campaigns, they relied on the practical experience and instincts of battle-scarred generals whose stars came from rising up through the ranks in electoral skirmishes and pitched battles. Roosevelt had long trusted the political genius of Louis Howe, a chain-smoking former reporter who had pioneered the use of newspaper ads and direct mail in FDR’s campaigns.

Yet in 1932, Roosevelt knew that he would need more than Howe and other old campaign hands to win the presidency. He needed ideas. As Moley tells the story on page 15 of The First New Deal, Roosevelt aide Sam Rosenman knew the national issues facing the campaign were “beyond my own experience.” On page 398 of The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger, jr. quotes Rosenman as telling FDR:

Why not go to the universities of the country?

The first recruit was Moley, who had already advised the New York Governor on several occasions. He in turn enlisted fellow Columbia University professors Rexford Tugwell and Adolf Berle. As the informal leader of the group and a talented writer whose gift for words later would later land him a long-standing job as a columnist for Newsweek, Moley was the obvious choice to draft the April 7 speech.

In The First New Deal Moley uses two brief, understated sentences to explain how he wrote it:

It crowded into its short space the very general outlines of the campaign that followed it. To characterize it, I inserted the phrase “the forgotten man” which I lifted from William Graham Sumner’s famous essay.

Sumner was a Yale professor who had become one of the most popular writers and speakers during the Gilded Age, chiefly through preaching what Richard Hofstader would later term “Social Darwinism.” Sumner’s beliefs led him to condemn charity as nurturing the weak and those living in poverty as inferior beings whose lack of motivation, skills and intelligence had put them in their situation. Sounding not unlike one of today’s Republican apologists for the Bush tax cuts, Sumner preached that a society that coddled the poor would ultimately be dragged down by them.

In 1883 Harper’s commissioned Sumner to write an essay in which he wrote:

The weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant, and the vicious.

The title of that essay was “The Forgotten Man,” whom Sumner characterized as the hard-working wage-earner who was ignored by the reformers of his time. Sumner advocated:

The next time that you are tempted to subscribe a dollar to a charity, I do not tell you not to do it, because after you have fairly considered the matter, you may think it right to do it, but I do ask you to stop and remember the Forgotten Man and understand that if you put your dollar in the savings bank it will go to swell the capital of the country which is available for division amongst those who, while they earn it, will reproduce it with increase.

Moley’s genius lay in grasping that what many people feared most in 1932 was the return of Sumner’s values. Moley would use Sumner’s phrase to pull off one of the most brilliant and important feats of political rhetoric in American history: he would turn Sumner upside down making the poor, “the weak”–the true heroes.

The speech would combine empathy for all those Americans who sat uncertainly in their living rooms with a statement of values that would substitute Liberal America’s belief in the level playing field for Sumner’s top down economics. By contemporary standards the speech was quite short-only ten minutes-which is not much longer than the time used by some candidates to answer a presidential debate question.

Roosevelt began the speech by immediately moving beyond partisan politics–a signal that he was already looking ahead to the presidential campaign.

I do not want to limit myself to politics. I do not want to feel that I am addressing an audience of Democrats or that I speak merely as a Democrat myself. The present condition of our national affairs is too serious to be viewed through partisan eyes for partisan purposes.

He then moved to a historical section that summoned forth his own public service and the unity of the nation during World War I. With the nation focused on the Bonus Marchers who were then encamped in Washington, the rhetorical tactic of evoking the War and Roosevelt’s own role in it as Secretary of the Navy served to take the nation back to a time of national greatness and unity, a time when a popular Democratic president commanded the nation. The personal references also served to dispel talk that FDR was a political lightweight.

The generalship of that moment [Wilson] conceived of a whole Nation mobilized for war, economic, industrial, social and military resources gathered into a vast unit capable of and actually in the process of throwing into the scales ten million men equipped with physical needs and sustained by the realization that behind them were the united efforts of 110,000,000 human beings [national unity with purpose] . [Comments mine.]

This was followed by the first memorable phrase of the speech, one that would ripple through the Depression and continues to resonate even today.

It was a great plan because it was built from bottom to top and not from top to bottom.

“From bottom to top, not from top to bottom.” Think about those words. That one phrase separates FDR from Sumner’s essay. In 1933, before management consultants made hefty fees touting “bottom up” decision-making, the idea of beating the Depression by starting with the people at the bottom was radical talk.

Roosevelt made it clear that the situation in 1932 was worse than 1917 because the Hoover administration’s top-down solutions were not working. Likening Hoover’s strategy to Napoleon’s mistakes at the Battle of Waterloo (a metaphor that had to have stung), Roosevelt continued his military metaphor, saying Hoover:

Has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.

Sentence by sentence, Roosevelt lay the bricks and mortar for a new political edifice whose architecture stemmed from Liberal America’s long-standing belief that government exists to keep the playing field level. In the next paragraph he deliberately turns Sumner upside down:

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. [My emphasis.]

Imagine an American family huddled by the radio listening intently to this speech, wondering how this man plans to keep the darkness from descending and you hear these words. FDR was not merely mouthing the common sentiment of the times about aiding victims of the Depression, but asking people to “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Notice the carefully-chosen word “faith.” People had to have known they were listening to something quite extraordinary and that this man deserved their support.

The speech then shifted to what I term the “Brain Trust section” where Roosevelt placed before the American people some of the ideas that would define his administration. To do this he switched metaphors from the military to the medical, a brilliant rhetorical tactic designed to allay the fears that it would take something akin to a dictatorship to end the Depression. According to Roosevelt, it was necessary to kill “the bacteria in the system” rather than “treat external symptoms.” This would later inspire cartoons of him as Doctor Roosevelt.

The speech proposed three programs. First, said Roosevelt, farmers must receive a fair return on their labor. Directly invoking Lincoln he stated:

This brings home to every city worker that his own employment is directly tied up with the farmer’s dollar. No Nation can long endure half bankrupt. Main Street, Broadway, the mills, the mines will close if half the buyers are broke.

He then announced the second part of his plan which was to keep “the home-owner and the farm-owner where he is, without being dispossessed through the foreclosure of his mortgage.” He proposed:

Here should be an objective of Government itself, to provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations. That is another example of building from the bottom up.

Notice the rhetoric again: the folksy use of “little fellow” in contrast to the “large banks and corporations. Roosevelt had framed the Depression in David against Goliath terms that would resonate with any American.

Finally, Roosevelt pledged to reconstruct tariff policy, a direct slap at the GOP’s regressive and despised Harley-Smoot tariff. The speech ended on an urgent note that served to highlight the differences between himself and Hoover:

It has sought temporary relief from the top down rather than permanent relief from the bottom up. It has totally failed to plan ahead in a comprehensive way. It has waited until something has cracked and then at the last moment has sought to prevent total collapse. It is high time to get back to fundamentals. It is high time to admit with courage that we are in the midst of an emergency at least equal to that of war. Let us mobilize to meet it.

This conclusion cleverly uses the word “fundamentals” to describe what later some would call “radical” even “socialistic.” The use of “us” in the last sentence also reassures everyone his presidency will be no dictatorship, but a collaborative effort–a slap at what had become Hoover’s increasing isolation in the White House.