Silent majority
Posted by Marian on January 21, 2002 at
In Reply to: Found phrase - history division posted by masakim on January 20, 2002
: : We were watching "My
Man Godfrey" last night -- "one of the 1930s' delightful, classic screwball
comedies" with William Powell and Carole Lombard. The phrase "forgotten man,"
for one down-on-his-luck, was used. It was the theme of an FDR radio address:
:
: The Forgotten Man
: : Franklin D. Roosevelt
: : Radio Address, Albany,
N. Y April 7, 1932
: : ".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."
: The future President was not the man who coind the
phrase [forgotten man], nor was Professor Raymond Moley, though he picked it up
and inserted it in that initial speech. A sociologist at Yale University, William
Graham Sumner, first used the phrase in an article written in 1883. Far from intending
it to describe the destitute, Sumner had in mind the sturdy middle-class citizen
who bears society's greatest loads: "Such is the Forgotten Man ... he is not in
any way a hero (like a popular orator); nor a problem (like tramps and outcasts);
nor an object of sentiment (like the poor and weak); nor a burden (like paupers
and loafers) ... therefore, he is forgotten. All the burdens fall on him ..."
: From _Safire's Political Dictionary_ by William Safire
: The forgotten
man works and votes -- generally he prays -- but his chief business in li fe is
to pay.... Who and where is the forgotten man in this case, who will have to pay
for it all?
: --William Graham Sumner, _The Forgotten Man_, 1885
All of this makes me wonder about the origin of another, similar phrase: the silent majority. Was former U.S. President Richard Nixon the first to utter it, or did someone precede him?
- Silent majority Gary Martin
01/21/02
- silent majority Marian 01/21/02
- Silent majority masakim
01/21/02
- silent majority Marian 01/21/02
- Silent majority masakim
01/21/02
- silent majority Marian 01/21/02