Forgotten Man, The

by Amity Shlaes

  And Roosevelt’s mind focused. He had decided, by now, that he was running for president. He wanted a new kind of adviser. Of the industrialists, the financiers, the political leaders, his adviser Sam Rosenman said to him, “I think we ought to steer clear of those. They all seem to have failed to produce anything constructive to solve the mess we’re in today.” Instead Rosenman had a novel idea: “Why not go to the universities of the country?” Roosevelt wanted to stick with the bright thinkers he already knew; and he wanted a small group of scholars, including some new ones, to write him up memoranda on agriculture, tariffs, the important issues of the crisis. Rosenman suggested Ray Moley of Barnard, whom the president had known and worked with since his friend Louis Howe had introduced the pair in 1928. Moley in turn brought his own list of advisers: it included Adolf Berle, newly married and cutting quite a figure in the world of corporate law—Berle could do credit. “Agriculture” was also down on the president’s list as a topic, Moley later remembered, and “‘Agriculture’ suggested Rex Tugwell.” But whom should the governor meet first? “I suggested Tugwell first,” Rosenman later recalled. “Roosevelt wanted to lay great emphasis on the sad plight of those who lived by agriculture.”

  The governor liked Tugwell—an upstate man, after all. And Tugwell now gave up his interest in Belle Moskowitz and Al Smith and switched to the Roosevelt team. His ebullient personality pleased them. “Tugwell was like a cocktail,” Moley would later recall. “His conversation picked you up and made your brain race along.” The fact that there was what Moley called “a rich vein of melancholy in his temperament” made Tugwell seem intriguing. Roosevelt probably also liked Tugwell’s love of discussion, his joy in writing policy. The following year Tugwell would choose as an epigraph of a book on industry a quote from the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the great believers in the science of economics, Francis Amasa Walker: “the long debate of reason resulting in the glad consent of all.” The phrase corresponded to Roosevelt’s attitude about his new experiment. If they discussed and analyzed enough, he and his new friends might solve the big problems.

  What a change of fortune this seemed to Tugwell and the other misfits, who had believed themselves doomed to abide at the edge of the world. Before they knew it Moley, Tugwell, Berle, and Rosenman were working morning, afternoon, and night composing briefs for the governor. Roosevelt, now an official candidate, was away in Warm Springs; Rosenman brought the briefs down. Roosevelt read others when he came back. Tugwell believed that “Roosevelt was the first governor who had really understood the hill farmers’ troubles,” and thought of his own father. At one point Roosevelt, in a conversation with a reporter, referred to his advisers as the “brain trust” and coined a phrase. When it came time for instruction, there would be a meeting, often at the governor’s baroque mansion: “The governor was at once student, a cross-examiner, and a judge,” Moley later wrote.

  The energized professors wanted to fashion for Roosevelt a dramatic message, certainly something that went farther than the old antitrust arguments, such as Louis Brandeis’s thesis of the “curse of bigness.” “We are no longer afraid of bigness,” wrote Tugwell. “Unrestricted individual competition is the death, not the life of trade.” Marketing too was important. Franklin Roosevelt had to offer something more than his cousin TR’s “Square Deal.” Stuart Chase, aware that Roosevelt now represented the best possible bearer of the progressive message, was writing articles in the New Republic on the importance of reform and the new sense of experiment. He was also publishing his book, the one that he had been thinking about since the Russia trip. He still had in mind the question that had come to him while traveling with Tugwell: Why should Russians have all the fun? Hunting for a title, he decided on a phrase that had been in the air, both in the context of Roosevelt and elsewhere. The title played off the Square Deal of Teddy Roosevelt: The New Deal.

  Roosevelt was not an ideologue or a radical. He tended to think in political, legal, moral, or military terms; his formative experience, outside New York government, had been as assistant secretary of the navy. He thought a lot about agriculture, too, and conservation, and water, just as his cousin Teddy had. Economics had to be in the mix, of course, but it nearly always came last. This time, though, he thought the pilgrims and progressives might be right, and he could see that their ideas resonated. What’s more, he enjoyed some of them, like Frances Perkins, a bluestocking like his wife Eleanor, a good deal. He might not agree with the bright bulbs on everything, but their spirit and willingness to experiment cheered him out of his physical pain and discomfort, at least for an hour or two.

  Meanwhile the economy continued to flounder, and both Roosevelt and the other obvious candidate for the Democratic nomination, Smith, assailed Hoover on the tariff. Their assaults turned out to be so similar that it proved embarrassing. The New York Evening Post one night carried under the headline “A Deadly Parallel” the following quote from Smith: “The consequences of the Hawley-Smoot Bill have been tremendous, both directly and indirectly.” Beside it was a quote from Roosevelt: “The consequences of the Hawley-Smoot Bill have been tremendous, both directly and indirectly.” Europeans must be stopped when they moved to “raise their own tariff walls.” It turned out that one brain truster, Lindsay Rogers at Columbia, had read aloud to Belle Moskowitz of the Smith campaign the same material on tariffs that he had provided to the Roosevelt team.

  And what policy—beyond opposing tariffs—would come out of that team? In April 1932 the new candidate Roosevelt gave his first national radio speech, a coast-to-coast hookup organized by the National Broadcasting Company and sponsored by the cigarette company Lucky Strike. FDR and Raymond Moley, who worked on the speech, knew that they wanted to talk about the underdog. The next week Moley recalled his effort at formulation of the text in a letter to his sister Nell: “When I was working on it with him I was trying to suggest the ideas, words, and phrases that would make that picture of him over the radio and would fix the image in the public consciousness.” In the end, Moley wrote, “I scraped from my memory an old phrase, ‘The Forgotten Man,’ which had haunted me for years.”

  Moley probably did not realize it, but the phrase also could be found in William Graham Sumner, Fisher’s mentor at Yale. Sumner’s “forgotten man” was the hidden taxpayer, the average citizen—not someone who received, rather someone who paid in. But that did not matter; who, at this moment, would be pedantic enough to point out the provenance of a quotation? Rosenman, however, remembered Sumner and realized that this use of the phrase was a shift: “the philosophy of the ‘forgotten man’ speech was entirely 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. Roosevelt believed that prosperity did not ‘trickle’ that way…”

  On the air, Roosevelt laid out his program. The common man was “the infantry of our economic army.” America needed “the forgotten, the unorganized but indispensable units of economic power.” It must offer “a real economic remedy” to that man. Public works were merely a “stopgap”—that was what Hoover had done. The 1929 tariff was disastrous, for it had killed trade. He would stand up for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” As Sam Rosenman recalled later, the novelty was not merely the message but the messenger. Most rich people believed that wealth came from the top, that it trickled down. But Roosevelt was showing himself to be different. The candidate also did not mind assailing the wealthy, a feature rare in the loyal culture of his class.

  All this horrified some Democratic colleagues. Al Smith gave a speech at the Democrats’ Jefferson Day dinner, taking issue with the way Roosevelt and others seemed willing to assail others: “We seem to seek negative victory rather than affirmative victory,” he told his party. “I will take off my coat and fight to the end agains
t any candidate who persists in any demagogic appeal to the masses of the working people of this country to destroy themselves by setting class against class and rich against poor.” The statement was striking, even when one took into account that Roosevelt was supplanting Smith, a man who had been born poor and had dropped out to work at age fourteen. Smith was rejecting a class fight while a man given the advantages—Roosevelt of Harvard and Groton—chose to take one up.

  The power of Roosevelt’s rhetoric and the medium through which it came trumped Smith. Hoover had had his luck. Now Roosevelt had his: the luck to be a great radio speaker born into the era of radio. Where Hoover had been brusque, Roosevelt inspired. His advisers were astonished at how convincing his broadcasts sounded. Roosevelt was inventing a new kind of public speaking. Shouting and superlatives were not so necessary now that there was a microphone. He showed that one could chat into listeners’ ears and convince them that way. “The great strength of President Roosevelt as a propagandist, for example, lies in his reasonable voice,” a professor of public speaking talking about radio generally would point out, several elections later.

  Not only the medium but the message suited the national mood. Before the country’s very eyes, there was a visual of the Forgotten Man to accompany the audio that Roosevelt had provided—the Bonus Army marcher. The idea that the government was holding back the dollars for some retirement day seemed increasingly absurd to the crowd. And now, veterans began to head for the District of Columbia. At hearings the year before, one of the men to testify had been Joseph T. Angelo, the man who had rescued George Patton from death in 1918, the veteran who had walked down to Washington from Camden, New Jersey. “I came to show you that we need our bonus,” he told the lawmakers. He was not even asking for the full bonus, just part of it. Angelo let the committee see the pocket watch that Patton’s wife had given him. In February, Hoover vetoed a bill; his veto was overridden. Under the new law, the bonus stayed on its old schedule, but veterans might now borrow against it. Still, neither Wright Patman nor the veterans found this compromise satisfactory. In late spring 1932, the marchers started to head for Washington. By summer, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 marchers would be camped out in the capital city.

  Hoover, without calling attention to his action, was supplying this army food, clothing, and tents. He even offered to see the marchers. But as usual, he wanted communication only on his terms—and the Bonus Army veterans were not as passive as southern flood refugees or malnourished Belgians. What’s more, they had an ally in Washington to egg them on: lawmakers like Patton on Capitol Hill. The Bonus Army squatted in Anacostia Flats, unwilling to give ground. He eventually sent troops to corral the protesters out of the city; as a believer in the rule of law, Hoover did not like to see vagrants within the District of Columbia. The veterans threatened the lawmakers, occupying the Capitol steps; members fled through subterranean tunnels.

  The troops were led by a trio associated with another chapter of U.S. history: Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and Patton again. MacArthur, stubborn and independent as always, felt that there was “revolution in the air.” He charged on the men, who in turn set their camps in Anacostia Flats afire. As Dwight Eisenhower would remember later, it was “a pitiful scene, those ragged discouraged people burning their own little things.” Hoover’s PR success of flood rescue was now matched by an equally spectacular public relations failure. It did not matter that FDR too had opposed advancing the bonus money to veterans.

  Here Roosevelt won his first victory over Hoover. “Hoover’s failures,” Tugwell would write, “were more of an asset than Roosevelt’s promises.” As a candidate, he could say he stood for these forgotten men in a way that Hoover had not. The Forgotten Man theme began to carry the campaign. Hoover could not keep up; his mind was still on longer-term programs. In mid-May architects announced completion of a new home for his old department, Commerce. Less than ten years ago, when he had taken the Commerce job, observers had joked about the irrelevance of the bureau. This structure, on Fourteenth Street and Constitution Avenue, was Hoover’s rebuttal, with thirty-five acres of floor space. “Hamilton, gazing at it,” wrote a critic, “would realize that his theories of government had triumphed.”

  As May turned to June, even as the Bonus Army waited restlessly in Anacostia Flats, Hoover misstepped again. Instead of visiting with the soldiers, he decided to walk over to Congress and plead with the lawmakers to raise taxes. Hoover was worried about foreign countries and banks, and the fear that they would cause a run on the dollar unless the budget were balanced. He read in what the papers described as “a low, barely audible voice.” For once, Congress cooperated, and a week later, Hoover signed into law a large tax increase: the Revenue Act of 1932.

  In the tax increase Hoover had Mellon’s support, at least in name. Mellon had already been on his way out when he had devoted a few words to the support of the new bill: “We are convinced that in the long run lower rates are more productive than higher ones. But these are not normal times.” To Paul, Mellon acknowledged the contradiction of his action: the government was going to “impose additional taxes upon industry and commerce that are in no condition to bear additional burdens….” It was Mellon’s worst moment. By going along with Hoover, Mellon was betraying many of his own principles. The tax that most Americans were having the most trouble with at the time was not the income tax, it was the property tax. The deflation made mortgage obligations unbearable, but it also made it hard to come up with the cash for property tax bills. Delinquency in both instances led to the same bitter conclusion: foreclosure.

  The Revenue Act did not increase everyone’s taxes. At that time the income tax was young, and the average citizen did not pay it: it was said the tax was a “class tax” and not a “mass tax.” Still, tax increases generally were like interest-rate increases: bad news at a time when, just as Mellon said, neither citizens nor the economy could handle it. Starting a business and hiring both became harder. The deflation made the whole tax story even worse: at a time when every dollar counted more, the law took dollars away by raising rates. Added to all this was the fact that Hoover’s was not just any tax increase, but a giant one: an increase in the top rate from the mid-20 range to 63 percent. Such increases were the sort the country had heretofore thought possible only in wartime. The maximum top rate when the income tax was first introduced, less than two decades back, had been 7 percent, and that was only on incomes over half a million dollars. The House had already gone Democratic in the midterms, but Republicans still held the Senate and the White House. Yet this tax act was such an antiwealth gesture, it seemed a sort of symbol of Republican capitulation to a coming Democratic moment.

  That moment had its true beginning later that June, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Roosevelt offered yet more ideas—again, contradictory, and more political and moral than economic. On the one hand, he stuck to old and conservative policies. He talked like Hoover about how “government, of all kinds, big and little, be made solvent.” He complained about high taxes: government “costs too much.” On the other hand, he made expansive statements whose import was hard to gauge. The country, he believed, had grown too fast: beyond “our natural and normal growth.” The problem was that there had been “an era of selfishness.” There existed “throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy” of the last years. These people “look to us for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” This language sounded new—it was that of the pilgrims and the progressives. Roosevelt also assigned blame to Hoover and Coolidge for the inflation that they both wrongly believed was doing the damage. And now Roosevelt made fun of the Republicans for assigning the blame for the Depression to international causes, even though he himself had acknowledged this might be part of the story through his earlier attack on tariffs.

  At the same convention speech, the future president signaled something else: that he would ignore Al
Smith in regard to the scapegoats. The Depression, FDR said, was the result of “lack of honor of men in high places” and “crooks.” More generally, he assigned blame to a moral fault: national greed. “Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades.” But it was Roosevelt’s finale that struck everyone most. “I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.” Roosevelt stealing the mantle of reform for the Democrats from the Republicans. All the reformers and Brain Trusters were impressed, including Willkie, who was probably in the audience; he had come to the convention as a floor manager for Newton Baker. This routine of targeting class enemies in the name of reform would become Roosevelt’s hallmark. While on his way to accept the nomination, Roosevelt had a long conversation with Frankfurter, which Frankfurter wrote down afterward. Frankfurter told Roosevelt, “As soon as I get your free mind, I have some things of importance to tell you.” Roosevelt responded that Frankfurter ought to get hold of a document on economics produced for him by Tugwell, Berle, and Moley.

  After the convention, the intellectuals redoubled their efforts, sensing that they now had their first real chance since Wilson of taking the White House. Roosevelt was curious about Russia—perhaps it was time for recognition. He hosted Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent, at the governor’s executive mansion in Albany in July. Duranty had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, and the meeting was one between expert and politician. “I turned the tables,” Roosevelt told a reporter. “I asked all the questions this time. It was fascinating.” Roosevelt’s primary interest was trade and political leverage; having the Soviet Union as an ally would help the United States. But he was also interested in the Soviet spirit of experiment. “Consults Walter Duranty in Regard to Suggestions That Our Attitude Should Change,” read the subheadline on the news report. Roosevelt also hosted the Yale economist Irving Fisher, also in Albany: “Now is the time to educate him,” Fisher wrote to his wife.