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bible. Though Berle was committed to the corporate system, he warned of concentrating the market in a few hundred firms and examined how senior managers of Wall Street firms had seized control from the shareholders. According to Berle, the Depression was evidence that giant, unregulated corporate monopolies inevitably failed both the stockholders and the public. Berle and Raymond Moley, a Cleveland-born Columbia University political science professor, brainstormed with Roosevelt to devise a solution.
    Roosevelt called for a new “economic constitutional order” in which government would intervene to break up the concentration of corporate wealth and power. Recalling the phrase “the forgotten man” from an essay written by a Yale philosopher in the 1880s, Moley inserted the expression into one of the candidate’s most famous campaign speeches: If elected, Roosevelt would rely on methods “that build from the bottom up and not the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
    Republicans and old-guard Democrats alike saw this concept—that government in a civilized society had an obligation to abolish poverty, reduce unemployment, and redistribute wealth—as dangerously radical. Roosevelt was now marked as a bald-faced progressive, and his advocacy of government-financed unemployment insurance and an old-age pension alarmed many members of his patrician class.
    Meanwhile, Hoover’s stuffy nature and inflexible devotion to laissez-faire economics gave way to a sudden passion for winning reelection. Stunned by what he gradually realized was a “hatred” of him in the country, the president “put on his high-button shoes and celluloid collar and went to the people” to incite fear of Roosevelt, as William Manchester described it. But what Hoover found on the campaign trail was a disdain and discontent so deep that he “was lucky to come back alive.” He was hissed in Indianapolis, jeered in Cleveland, and booed in Detroit, where nearly a quarter-million people were unemployed. Hoover’s jibes at Roosevelt’s infirmity and implications that his rival was physically unfit for the office only solidified support for Roosevelt. That Hoover had kept Roosevelt standing for half an hour at a White House reception for the nation’s governors underscored the president’s insensitivity. “We’ve got to crack him every time he opens his mouth,” said Hoover, who directed his aides to ramp up a smear campaign against his opponent with attacks focused on Roosevelt’s infirmity, physical weakness, and crazy ideas. Gambling odds were running seven to one against Hoover, who “deliberately chose the low road,” according to William Manchester, and confided to a cabinet member that the only way to win was to incite “a fear of what Roosevelt will do.”
    The Hoover administration was facing certain defeat at the hands of an invigorated Democratic Party and an agitated public. Then, in late July 1932, its calamitous handling of the forty-five thousand Bonus Army soldiers who marched on Washington was the final blow. A month earlier, on June 15, 1932, the U.S. House of Representatives had passed yet another bill authorizing immediate payment of the veterans’ bonuses, a $2.4 billion appropriation that had been ushered out of committee and to a floor vote by Speaker of the House John Garner. The vote of 211 to 176, with 40 abstaining, had come after a heated debate in which Democrats had overwhelmingly supported the bill and Hoover loyalists had opposed it. One Democratic congressman, Edward Eslick of Tennessee, had been so passionate in his support of the legislation that he had dropped dead of a heart attack in the midst of his speech: “Uncle Sam, the richest government in the world, gave sixty dollars and an IOU ‘that I will pay you twenty-seven years after the