Don't Forget Our 'Forgotten' Americans, Mr. President
As President Donald Trump delivered his address to Congress on Tuesday, I listened in vain for a familiar presidential theme: the "forgotten man and woman." I didn't hear it. I hope he didn't forget to remember the "forgotten."
Franklin D. Roosevelt is most famous for invoking "The Forgotten Man" in a 1932 campaign radio address with that title. To FDR, the forgotten man was "at the bottom of the economic pyramid."
That was quite the opposite aim of social Darwinist William Graham Sumner, who in 1883 described the "forgotten man" as the hard worker who yearned to be freed from the nagging needs of the undeserving poor.
Bill Clinton put his own twist on the phrase in 1991 when he announced his presidential candidacy as "a campaign for the future, for the forgotten hard-working middle class families of America."
Small wonder that President Trump revived the theme in his election night victory speech and his inauguration address. "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer," Trump said in November. "Everyone is listening to you now."
Yes, everyone was. I was not happy about Trump's election. But after years of writing about how poverty, job loss and income inequality had entrapped more white people than people of color, I could not help but feel pleased to see poor and working class whites turn out at a higher rate than any other group to vote for change.
That's how democracy is supposed to work. I was only surprised that the working class hero of this decade turned out to be Donald Trump.
Will he remember them now? He didn't mention "forgotten men and women" in his speech to Congress last Tuesday. But I don't think his voter base minded much.
"It's still early of course, but every Trump voter I know loved the speech," author J.D. Vance told me in an e-mail.
Vance is the author of the best-selling " Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," his story of growing up amid the socio-economic troubles of rural Kentucky and the economically troubled steel town of Middletown, Ohio -- where I, too, grew up about three decades earlier.
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