The crippling legacy of the 1936 election.

• Author: Shlaes, Amity
• Position: USA Yesterday - Essay

WHAT MADE THE field of presidential candidates so timid during the primaries? It was clear listening to figures from both parties that they still believe Social Security is untouchable; this despite the fact that bringing Social Security into solvency is a relatively easy task. When it comes to the more serious fiscal burdens upon our grandchildren, the candidates likewise lacked boldness; this despite the fact that those burdens only become heavier as we delay. We speak of 2008 as a key election year, but it also is the year when the tide of Social Security cash begins to recede with the retirement of baby boomers.

Where did this problem originate? Traditionally, historians have focused on the slow rise of American progressivism over the past century and a haft. Actually, this destructive hesitation comes out of a single political campaign, the presidential run of 1936 that pitted Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt against Republican nominee Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas. It marked the virtual end of old-fashioned American federalism and the rise of a new kind of politics. It was 1936, more than any other year, that created modem interest groups and taught us that Washington should subsidize them.

Pinning blame on a single campaign (and its run up) may seem facile. Still, the story is well worth telling. In 1932, total Federal spending was five percent of gross domestic product. By contrast, spending by states and local governments represented 10% of GDE Even well into the Depression, it was to state and local governments that many looked for a means to recovery. There was no big tax redistribution. The word "liberalism" still signified a belief in individual liberty rather than paternalistic government, nor did American workers view themselves so much as a class in those years. They saw themselves as moving up and down the economic ladder. Even our greatest union, the American Federation of Labor, was more of a craft and trade union than a class union. Soon, all this was to change.

In his 1932 campaign, Roosevelt had talked about helping someone he called "the forgotten man." He was thinking of the poorest man or, as he put it--invoking the time of the pharaohs--"the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." His speechwriter, Ray Moley, had inserted the phrase into a radio address on "The Lucky Strike Hour." Moley wrote to his sister Nell that he did not know where the phrase came from but, in fact, it did have a provenance. It came from an essay (and later a book) written decades before, called The Forgotten Man. The author was a famous Yale University professor named William Graham Sumner; he defined "the forgotten man" differently. Sumner employed algebra to explain what he meant: A and B want to help X, he wrote. This is the charitable impulse. The problem arises when A and B band together and pass a law that coerces C into co-funding their project for X. Sumner identified C as the forgotten man. He is the man who works, prays, pays his own bills, and is "never thought of."

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This, though, did not matter to Roosevelt, who...