Defining the "forgotten man" is key to Trump's presidency

In fact, two opposing Forgotten Men figure in American history. Which one Trump actually backs will determine what kind of presidency his ends up being.

The more familiar Forgotten Man was the brainchild of another populist campaigner, Franklin Roosevelt. During the 1932 presidential campaign, a point when two in 10 workers were unemployed, Roosevelt expressed concern for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The New York governor meant the poor man, whose poverty he blamed on a failure of Wall Street…

Roosevelt’s is the first Forgotten Man who comes to mind now. But in those days, another version was just as familiar. That was the one captured by a legendary Yale professor named William Graham Sumner. His Forgotten Man was an anonymous figure, suffering the collateral damage of a project advanced to help the group identified as vulnerable. In Sumner’s definition, he was “the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of.”

A classical liberal in the U.K. tradition, Sumner therefore rejected any law for special groups: earmarks, targeted social programs, official interest-group organizations, narrow tax breaks. The professor especially abhorred protectionism, then also a plank in the Republican platform, because protectionism benefited a narrow group: New England industrialists. Sumner called protectionism “the ism which teaches that waste makes wealth.”