William Grant Sumner, a professor at Yale long before the Great Depression wrote an essay titled “The Forgotten Man”.
“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffereing, A talks it over with B, and A and B propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…..what A,B and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B for helping X. What was wrong was the law and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.”
Amity Shlaes has used the forgotten man as the title of her best selling history of the depression. It’s a timely read given that our leaders in Washington have all but declared the current economic problems as the return of the Great Depression. One might hope that we have learned something since the last one but the jury is still out.
What impresses me is the superficiality of the history I was taught in high school – and this was back when education was the prime objective of the schools. Hoover was always presented as victim when he was actually a prime driver of the economic failure. Haven’t got to FDR yet. So far its a wonderfull, rich pudding with lots of details about key players of the time. 
