Document 7a
Bruce Craven is responding to one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats.
JULY 25, 1933
Dear Mr. President;
…The forgotten man has been forgotten, if he was ever really remembered. I happen to be an
approved attorney for the Federal Land Bank, and on publication of the information about the
new loan legislation, the little man came to see me vainly hoping that at last he had been
remembered. He is representative of thousands of farmers in North Carolina, owning maybe 50
acres of land and doing all of his own work, and about to lose his farm under a mortgage. But to
get the loan he is obliged to pay $20 in advance for appraisals, and another $10 for a survey, and
he no more has that much cash than he has the moon. I have written to everyone from
Mr. [Treasury Secretary Henry] Morgenthau on down about this, and no one is interested. The
prevailing idea seems to be that if a man is that poor, he should stay poor.
Before any of this loan and public works legislation was enacted, I wrote you that you ought to
put at least one human being in each supervising body, and by that I meant a man who actually
knows there is a “little man” in this nation and that he never has had a fair chance, and that he
deserves one. I hope yet that somehow you may remember this forgotten little man, who has no
one in high places to befriend him.
Respectfully yours,
Bruce Craven
Trinity, North Carolina
Source: Levine and Levine, The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR,
Beacon Press, 2002
According to Bruce Craven, why does “the forgotten man” need help?