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....