In his 1932 campaign for president, Franklin Roosevelt frequently invoked the theory of the “forgotten man,” someone poor and dispossessed, left adrift in the wake of the Great Depression. FDR said, “These unhappy times call for building of plans 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.”
Actually, he was incorrectly attributing William Graham Sumner, president of Yale in 1883: “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 propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X. What I want to do is look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. He is the man who is never thought of…he works, he votes, generally he prays…but he always pays.”