National Security: Forgotten man

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: