FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT -- RADIO ADDRESS ON - THE NATIONAL ECONOMIC EMERGENCY - April 7, 1932 - - THE FORGOTTEN MAN - Although I understand that I am talking under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, I do not want to limit myself to politics. I do not want to feel that I am addressing an audience of Democrats or that I speak merely as a Democrat myself. The present condition of our national affairs is too serious to be viewed through partisan eyes for partisan purposes. Fifteen years ago my public duty called me to an active part in a great national emergency, the World War. Success then was due to a leadership whose vision carried beyond the timorous and futile gesture of sending a tiny army of 15,000 trained soldiers and regular navy to the aid of our allies. The generalship of that movement conceived of a whole nation mobilized for war: economic, industrial, social, and military resources gathered into a vast unit capable of and actually in the process of throwing into the scales 10 million men equipped with physical needs and sustained by the realization that behind them were the united efforts of 110 million human beings. It was a great plan because it was built from bottom to top and not from top to bottom. In my calm judgement, the nation faces today a more grave emergency than in 1917. It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry--he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 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....