Forgotten man

For other uses, see The Forgotten Man (disambiguation).
Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), Forgotten Man, 1934, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 1/8 inches. Brigham Young University Museum of Art, gift of Herald R. Clark, 1937.

The forgotten man is a political concept in the United States centered around those whose interests have been neglected. The first main invocation of this concept came from William Graham Sumner in an 1883 lecture in Brooklyn[1] entitled The Forgotten Man (published posthumously in 1918)[2] who articulated such a man to be one who has been compelled to pay for reformist programs. In 1932, President Franklin Roosevelt appropriated the phrase in a speech, using it to refer to those at the bottom of the economic scale whom Roosevelt believed the state needed to help.[3]

  1. ^ "The Lecture by Professor William G. Sumner, Of Yale. On 'The Forgotten Man,' Will be given ... January 30, [1883]", Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 29, 1883, p. 1
  2. ^ William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays. Edited by Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), pp. 465-495.
  3. ^ Gillespie, Nick. Remembering 'The Forgotten Man'", Reason.com, January 2008, accessed October 9, 2018