The Forgotten Forgotten Man

On a November evening in Brooklyn, 13-year-old William Troeller, one of six children in the Troeller family, hanged himself from his bedroom transom. Just weeks earlier, the stock market had suffered Black Tuesday, and things had gotten desperate. William’s father had been crippled by a work-related hernia and had lost his job. The gas for their apartment had been turned off since April. Poor William, described by his brother Harold as a sensitive boy, “always felt embarrassed” about asking for his portion at mealtime. The local police station helped arrange the funeral, and the Times went with the headline, “He Was Reluctant about Asking for Food.”¹

Just another suicide in the wake of Black Tuesday. But, wait, this was not that Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Rather, it was Tuesday, October 19, 1937—eight years after the famous Wall Street crash and five years into Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. So far, his policies had failed to rescue the nation from the Great Depression. Indeed, that deliverance would not begin to materialize for another four years, with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; it was World War II and not the New Deal that fired the engines of recovery.

Why did it take so long? According to Amity Shlaes, a scholar with the Council of Foreign Relations, “[T]he deepest problem was [government] intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace.”² First, President Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff crippled world trade. Then, President Roosevelt cooked up an alphabet soup of powerful and intrusive government agencies (e.g., CCC, PWA, NRA, WPA, AAA, TVA, REA, SSA, FDIC).³ Some good things happened, but Roosevelt’s commitment to “bold, persistent experimentation” had a chilling effect on business. By not trusting, indeed, by positively distrusting the market’s ability to right itself and generate economic well-being, he kept the nation mired in depression for a decade.

On Roosevelt’s watch, the public sector gained ascendancy over the private sector, but the State did not win every battle.⁴ When his administration established the National Recovery Administration in 1933, they did not take the Schechter brothers of Brooklyn into account. For when the government pushed absurd regulations on their kosher poultry shop, the Schechter’s pushed back. Convicted of non-compliance, they appealed to the Supreme Court—and won!⁵

After the trial, Justice Brandeis collared two of the government’s lawyers and told them, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything. It’s come to an end.” He added, “As for your young men, you call them together and tell them to get out of Washington—tell them to go home, back to the states. That is where they must do their work.”⁶

In 1883, Harvard’s William Graham Sumner penned an essay called “The Forgotten Man.” In it, he stood up for the fellow who must pay for what others decide must be done: “Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors.” Sumner continued, “He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays—yes, above all, he pays.”⁷

Roosevelt appropriated Sumner’s expression but turned it on its head. Now, the Forgotten Man was the fellow “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”⁸ It was he, and not the tax-paying wage earner, whom the government would champion and whose friendship and support it would cultivate. Forgotten were the original Forgotten Men, the Schechter brothers of this world who, in their humble way, kept things going and growing—and funded. And so the Depression dragged on and on—to the dismay of millions, including the Schechters’ Brooklyn neighbors, the Troellers, whose sensitive son William succumbed to despair in those perennially and needlessly dark days.

If only Franklin Roosevelt and his administration had appreciated the strength and bounty of the marketplace with its hard work, creativity, and responsibility.

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