Nor is it right that we overlook the failures of their philosophies.

From The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes.  Page 12.

Roosevelt’s work on behalf of his version of the forgotten man generated a new tradition. To justify giving to one forgotten man, the administration found, it had to make a scapegoat of another. Businessmen and businesses were the targets. Roosevelt’s old mentor, the Democrat Al Smith, was furious. Even Keynes was concerned. In 1938 he wrote to Roosevelt advising him to nationalize utilities or leave them alone—but in any case cease his periodic and politicized attacks on them. Keynes saw no point “in chasing utilities around the lot every other week.” Roosevelt and his staff were becoming habitual bullies, pitting Americans against one another. The polarization made the Depression feel worse. Franklin Roosevelt’s forgotten man, the constituent X, perpetually tangled with Sumner’s original forgotten man, C.

This book is the story of A, the progressive of the 1920s and ’30s whose good intentions inspired the country. But it is even more the story of C, the American who was not thought of. He was the Depression-era man who was not part of any political constituency and therefore lived the negatives of the period. He was the man who paid for the big projects, who got make-work instead of real work. He was the man who waited for economic growth that did not come. As an editorialist in Indiana wrote in 1936, “Who is the ‘forgotten man’ in Muncie? I know him as intimately as I know my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief and has been attempting the same thing since the depression that cracked down on him.”

Among the people whom the New Deal forgot and hurt were great and small names. The great casualties included the Alan Green-span figure of the era, Andrew Mellon, treasury secretary for the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations—a figure so towering it was said that “three presidents served under him.” Another was Samuel Insull, a utilities magnate and innovator to whom the New Dealers assigned the blame for the crash. Yet another was James Warburg, a Roosevelt adviser who became so angry with the president that he penned book after book to express his rage. George Sutherland and James McReynolds, two of the four justices on the Supreme Court who fought back against Roosevelt, were also important. It was Willkie who spoke out most explicitly for the forgotten man on the national stage.

Others were of humbler background: those farmers who found themselves forced to kill off their piglets in a time of hunger because FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordained they must; a family of kosher butchers named Schechter who believed in Roosevelt but fought the New Deal all the way to the Supreme Court; a black cult leader named Father Divine; Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who taught Americans that the solution to their troubles lay not with a federal program but within a new sort of entity—the self-help community.

Of course the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations may have had no choice but to pursue the policies that they did. They may indeed have spared the country something worse—an American version of Stalin’s communism, or Mussolini’s fascism. That is the position that author Sinclair Lewis was taking when, in 1935, he published It Can’t Happen Here, a fantasy version of the United States under fascist leaders remarkably similar to Roosevelt’s opponents. The argument that democracy would have failed in the United States without the New Deal stood for seven decades, and has been made anew, by scholars of considerable quality, quite recently. But it is not right that we permit that argument—even if it is correct—to obscure some of the consequences of the two presidents’ policies. Nor is it right that we overlook the failures of their philosophies. Glorifying the New Deal gets in the way of getting to know all the Cs, the bystanders, the third parties. They spoke frequently of the forgotten man at the time—the phrase “forgotten man” recurred throughout the decade—but eventually became forgotten men themselves. Going back to the Depression is worthwhile, if only to retrieve their lost story.