A Few Thoughts on “The Forgotten Men and Women of This Country”
4-25-18
I hate to say this, but I think there might be something to the Trumpian notion of “forgotten men and women of this country.” Wait, wait, just hear me out for a second – I’m not saying that Trump has even begun to make good on his promise to ensure that these forgotten Americans are no longer forgotten, don’t worry your little heads. I won’t even go so far as to suggest that Trump’s people saw the real problem on that night in July of 2016, or that they see that problem now, or even that they would allow themselves to see the real problem were it to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue banging gongs and blowing whistles.[1] But that certain sectors of the United States citizenry have been forgotten by everyone from Washington, D.C., and Wall Street to Silicon Valley and the Ivy League, not to mention the Hollywood and business elite, is uncontestable and, indeed, uncontested by anyone who has ventured for any length of time outside of this nation’s ever-consolidating urban centers of power. Trump managed to tap into a certain subsection of these forgotten men and women – the same subsection earlier captured by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Milhouse Nixon – blue collar and lower-middle class whites feeling economic and cultural pressure from social groups above and below them on the supposedly-invisible and democratized American status hierarchy; however, in so doing, he continued in his predecessors’ footsteps in shunting the plight of other rural communities, from African-Americans living in the rural South to Amerindians living on reservations in Oklahoma, the Dakotas, and elsewhere, into the shadows.
At this point, it is worth taking a detour into the historical record momentarily, so we can understand how the changing voting habits of certain key demographics of supposedly forgotten men and women have driven most of the major political realignments of the 20th century in the United States.[2]
The term “forgotten man” first appeared in the American lexicon from the pen of Yale sociologist and noted social Darwinist William Graham Sumner, who used it as the title for an 1883 address wherein he criticized the slovenly and criminal underclasses of society and suggested that most of the difficulties facing the American lower-middle class, at the time almost exclusively white and which Sumner dubbed “the forgotten men,” originated with the constant parasitic pull from the aforementioned and, in Sumner’s formation, undeserving underclasses; on a policy level, this led, of course, to Sumner’s advocating against redistributive programs such as those which would, nearly a half-century later, be espoused by Franklin Roosevelt and legislated by the so-called “New Deal Coalition.” It was thus a move of rhetorical genius – one among many in the man’s storied political career – that this phrase next entered the national conversation by none other than Roosevelt himself, albeit in a very different context more fitting the liberal cant of the Depression era, in a campaign speech from Albany, New York, on April 7, 1932. For Roosevelt, the “forgotten man” was not exclusionary but inclusive: where Sumner saw a harassed majority feeling deprived of its rights, Roosevelt instead envisioned these same men as “the bottom of our economic pyramid,” as “the infantry of our economic army.” It was around this new vision of “the forgotten man” that Roosevelt and his administration built the New Deal and which we owe for such programs as the minimum wage, the federal right to unionize, and social security.
Roosevelt’s image of America’s “forgotten man” outlived him, stretching beyond the New Deal, through Eisenhower’s progressive taxation and defense of the New Deal as essentially American, past Kennedy’s New Frontier and into Johnson’s Great Society. Indeed, during this period, economic inequality shrank to historical lows and political equality steadily increased; yet, as often follows periods of progressive and inclusive change, the reactionary racial and economic backlash would prove harsh, and it would lead to a political realignment as historically significant as that which Roosevelt had ushered in more than three decades prior. In his 1968 speech accepting the nomination of the Republican Party for the Presidency of the United States, Richard Nixon once again returned to the trope of “the forgotten man,” and like Roosevelt before him, turned the phrase to serve his interests. In Nixon’s phrasing, “the forgotten man” became “the forgotten American” and, all at once, Nixon’s exclusionary policies were lacquered with an inclusionary veneer. That is, in the language itself, Nixon has included far more than simply the forgotten men, specifically the working men, of Roosevelt’s formulation, i.e., the remainder of Americans whose voices remain unheard because they remain unspoken – Nixon’s “forgotten Americans” were, in his words, “the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.” Indeed, Nixon even voiced his inclusionary liberalism thusly:
“They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land. They are black and they are white – they're native born and foreign born – they're young and they're old. They work in America's factories. They run America's businesses. They serve in government. They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free. They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American Dream. They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care. Like Theodore Roosevelt, they know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in. This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America.”
And yet, at the core of Nixon’s argument in this acceptance speech is not only that his “forgotten Americans” will come together to take him to the Oval Office because their “cause is right” but also that their cause is not the cause of the Vietnam War protesters, civil rights activists, feminists, or other countercultural movements. When Nixon speaks about “the crime that plagues the land,” it is in the same speech wherein he has already noted, “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.” This is a Nixon who has no sympathy for those Americans who feel so forgotten as to rise up and burn down their own neighborhoods in order, among other, more complicated reasons best left for other times, to draw the attention of Nixon’s “silent majority” to their oppressive conditions.
This suggests several things, among them that people of color, especially poor people of color, have been forgotten even from our shared national story about who has been forgotten, and that the rather more rhetorical than factual metric by which we categorize certain citizens as “forgotten” in economic, cultural, or political terms is deeply flawed. The task, then, will be not only to revise that national story so as to include at least a small part of those people forgotten even among the forgotten but also to establish the beginnings, at least, of a system capable of understanding the world as it exists and not simply as we are told it must exist by the powerful and the wealthy and the privileged who seek to maintain their power, wealth, and privilege at absolutely any cost to anyone other than themselves. After all, it is only with an accurate understanding of where we were yesterday and where we are today that we can take any actionable steps toward creating a better tomorrow.
Flash forward, then, to 2016, when Trump reintroduced this phrase into the American conversation as “the forgotten men and women of this country,” this time forgoing even Nixon’s limp bids for racial and socioeconomic harmony and returning “the forgotten man” back to Sumner’s original, exclusionary definition. Here again, the focus of the campaign and the media coverage surrounding it was without exception concerned with states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, perhaps Minnesota, Wisconsin – Northern Rust Belt states filled with plenty of “forgotten men and women” who also happened to be white. Even when stories with a strong racial charge made headlines, they were centered around these Rust Belt states: Flint, Michigan made national news, but Ferriday, Louisiana continued to go unreported even as conditions there rivaled some in the so-called developing world, lacking healthcare, sanitation, public education, and resources public or private.[3]
Let’s focus for a moment on Ferriday, actually. Another friend of mine works there – for another month or so, at any rate. See, he is a teacher working with Teach For America as a member of the 2017 Louisiana Delta Corps, which theoretically ensures his position through the end of the 2018-2019 school year; however, the Louisiana Delta Corps is dissolving at the end of this year for a whole slew of reasons. As I understand it, the Corps was started after Louisiana’s governor called a state of emergency after Hurricane Katrina, and Teach For America had the proper credentials to meet the government’s requirements for teachers in this newly established emergency zone. As such, TFA asked the members of the Greater New Orleans Corps if anyone would be willing to serve out the second year of their two-year commitment in the much poorer, more rural part of the state adjacent to the Mississippi River, and the few who accepted became the first members of the Louisiana Delta Corps. However, after the Great Recession hit in 2007/08, privately funded organizations like TFA took a proportionately large hit, which is to say, they were not doing well. As the economy improved under the presidency of Barack Obama, private donations once again began to roll back in – but this time, these donations were being kept close to the donor’s home community, which almost invariably meant that the money was being consolidated into America’s cities. This meant only one thing for Teach For America’s Louisiana Delta Corps: because it served one of America’s poorest rural communities and most assuredly not a city like Houston or New Orleans, by the end of the 2017-2018 school year, the program became financially unsustainable.
Of course, this pattern would extend beyond Ferriday, Louisiana to most of the states where Trump’s base is strongest, including both the rural South and the decaying urban Rust Belt in the North, not to mention the sparsely populated states to the West. And indeed, it was “the forgotten men and women” in these states who brought Trump an Electoral College victory. It is too early to say whether or not Trump’s election in 2016 has brought about a true political realignment; either way, it is notable that, by and large, the African-American vote remained firmly with Hillary Clinton. Considering that we are exploring those who are forgotten even among the forgotten, it is worth once again considering the history of the African-American voting demographic and the reasons it has for voting as it does. Perhaps fortunately from your perspective, this dip into the waters of time should be briefer than our last.
Between 1868 and 1928, the African-American community voted in aggregate for the Republican candidate whether for president, senator, or congressman, and it isn’t hard to see why: Republicans were the Party of Lincoln; they had among their ranks abolitionists, Union heroes, egalitarians, anti-imperialists, unionists, and, most importantly, they had elected other African-Americans to positions of power under their banner; and, anyway, their competition included the same Southern aristocracy who had raped and enslaved their ancestors for generations. And then something profoundly strange happened: in 1932, despite the Democratic Party still consisting of Confederate sympathizers and Klansmen on the one hand and fat cat party machine bosses on the other, African-Americans began voting for them in droves. Certainly, part of this was Roosevelt’s insistence that his programs would be for everyone, and yet when this proved to be untrue – it took more than 20 years for Social Security benefits to extend to African-Americans – the community still continued to vote for Roosevelt and, later, his fellow Democrats. So, what caused the community’s shift away from the Party of Lincoln and into the party of slaveowners Jefferson and Jackson? Simply this: one too many broken promises.
In the mid-1920s, leaders of the African-American community were discussing a movement away from the G.O.P. – I’m sure seeing ballots with things like “Kandidate Kalvin Koolidge” written on them didn’t help matters – and yet loyalty and tradition, not to mention the relief Herbert Hoover coordinated in the aftermath of the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927 (about which Charlie Patton and Memphis Minnie wrote excellent Delta blues songs) and the promises he made in the wake of said relief kept the African-American vote with the Republicans in 1928.[4] Among the promises Hoover made as a systems planner of exceptional skill was to reinvest in Southern infrastructure so as to promote economic and intellectual growth; Hoover also promised to revisit the question of civil rights and an end to Jim Crow segregation if only the community leaders would throw their weight behind his candidacy. When the Great Depression struck at the tail end of 1929, Hoover’s attentions were diverted from this task, although his canny political instincts would have likely dissuaded him from tackling it regardless, if only to avoid the scent of Reconstruction, then only just a half century ended. Had his attention been more keenly focused on the African-American constituency, which he assumed along with every Republican politician and political strategist would always vote for the party of the Great Emancipator, Hoover may have seen the folly in breaking his word and continuing to ignore the plight of the African-American community and, effectively, relegating them to forgotten status even among the forgotten in American life. Hoover’s vision was not, however, so grand as this, and so the African-American vote slipped, seemingly forever, out of the G.O.P.’s grasping clutches and into the waiting embrace of the Democratic Party, and the realignment of the 1960s only further cemented this shift.
The danger now facing the Democratic Party in 2018 is, once again, something Trump correctly identifies, even if he’s once again horribly wrong in his specifics, when he asks of African-American voters, “What the hell do you have to lose [in voting for me, a Republican]?” If the Democratic establishment continues to break its promises to the African-American community like the G.O.P. did throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, they will lose the African-American vote in the early 21st. If both sides of the political aisle continue to frame “the forgotten Americans” in such a way as to exclude the poorest and the most vulnerable amongst us, those segments of our society will rise up and demand a voice in the conversation, and they will continue to do this until they are, at last, heard on their own terms. It is our obligation not only as politically minded individuals but as moral beings and as social animals who depend on our very selfhoods in part on our interaction with the people around us to provide platforms for these voices to be heard and to amplify them with our own. If we don’t we run a far greater risk than that of simply losing their vote in upcoming elections; we run the risk of losing their very lives, and not one of us can afford that.
[1] And anyway, the only whistles with which these folks are familiar is the kind they use for dogs. But I digress.
[2] If one good thing came out of Trump’s nomination and his acceptance speech, it is that many people with more time and resources to devote to the historical research were actually awarded the opportunity to devote said time and resources to just this very topic, and so I’m fortunate enough to rely here, for the most part, on writing by Beverly Gage in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/who-is-the-forgotten-man) and by Jefferson Cowie at Time Magazine (http://time.com/4567949/forgotten-man-donald-trump/).
[3] C.f., e.g., this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kZ47paxVp0
[4] For this material, I am indebted to Susan Scott Parrish’s excellent book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History.