Roosevelt: The Balance Between Socialism and Individualism

Date Published: January 20, 2025

This document is the edited combination of two editorials written by Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 for The Outlook: “Where We Cannot Work with Socialists” and “Where We Can Work with Socialists.” It seems timely, even though this perspective is over a century old, to challenge our ideas about extreme socialism in today’s society but to also bring to the forefront the concept of unbridled individualism.

As shown at the end of the article, Teddy Roosevelt's opinions as expressed in these articles cost him dearly in conservative prestige, but the truth of the matter, as our former president saw it, was told.

Peter E. Greulich, May 2022

Background on these Editorials by Theodore Roosevelt

Select to read a review of Owen Wister's, "Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship"

Many times I hear individuals ask, "Was Teddy Roosevelt a Socialist?"

These two articles, written by our ex-President, document where President Roosevelt did and where he would not work with the socialist movement of his day. I think you will find, like I did, that he tried to walk a centrist path between two extremes: absolute socialism and absolute individualism; and as Mark Sullivan wrote of him, for that our former president was constantly hit by bricks thrown from both extremes. This theme also shows up in Owen Wister's book: Roosevelt, The Story of a Friendship.

This document is the edited combination of two editorials written by Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 for The Outlook: “Where We Cannot Work with Socialists” and “Where We Can Work with Socialists.” It seems timely, even though this perspective is over one century old, to challenge our ideas about socialism in today’s society but to also bring to the forefront the concept of individualism.

This author believes that a majority of American history can be viewed as the struggle between what Teddy Roosevelt labels as “absolute socialism” and “absolute individualism.” As Americans we have always prided ourselves on finding the middle ground between two extremes.

Even during the Great Depression, when anarchy, socialism, and fascism were at their peaks and had their advocates on this continent, we found the middle ground and fought for that middle ground … to the defense and betterment of the world. ​

We should never forget that we sent men – boys actually – to die on the beaches of Europe and with all our mistakes, we must keep pushing forward because as Mr. Roosevelt writes in this article, we are in truth our “brother’s keeper, and that our duty is, with judgment and common sense, to try to help our brother.”

We should always be mindful that there is much an individual cannot accomplish by him or herself, or as Teddy Roosevelt wrote: "Ruin faces us … if we permit ourselves to be misled … into refusing to exert the common power of the community where only collective action can do what individualism has left undone or can remedy the wrongs done by an unrestricted and ill-regulated individualism."

1920 Image of Teddy Roosevelt

Lest we forget, such was D-Day—the “uncommon” power of our community. We can accomplish what we set our minds to achieve. That is our heritage.
​
With that said, here's Teddy:

Seeking the Balance between Radical Thoughts​

• Answers Will Not Be Found in Absolute Socialism or Absolute Individualism
• Our Fight Is a Fight Against Privilege
• Good Ideas and Great Individuals Are Found in all Walks of Life
• Open up Economic Opportunities but Focus on Character
• Defeat Privilege to Build a Land of Equal Opportunity

Answers Will Not Be Found in Absolute Socialism or Absolute Individualism​

It is always difficult to discuss a question when it proves impossible to define the terms. … Therefore, there is not much to be gained by a discussion of socialism versus individualism in the abstract. Neither absolute individualism nor absolute socialism would be compatible with civilization. … Not so much as the first step towards real civilization can be taken until there arises some development of the right of private property; that is, until men pass out of the stage of savage socialism in which the violent and the thriftless forcibly constitute themselves co-heirs with the industrious and the intelligent in what the labor of the latter produces.

But it is equally true that every step toward civilization is marked by a check on individualism. The ages that have passed have fettered [restrained] the individualism which found expression in physical violence, and we are now endeavoring to put shackles on that kind of individualism which finds expression in craft and greed. … If the world progresses as we hope and believe it will progress, the standards of conduct which permit individuals to make money out of pestilential tenements or by the manipulation of stocks, or to refuse to share with their employees the dreadful burdens laid upon the latter by the inevitable physical risks in a given business, will seem amazing to our descendants. …

With those self-styled socialists to whom “socialism” is merely a vaguely conceived catchword, and who use it to express their discontent with existing wrongs … there is not much need of discussion. So far as they make any proposals which are not foolish, and which tend towards betterment, we can act with them. But the real, logical, advanced socialists, who teach their faith as both a creed and a party platform, may deceive … decent and well-meaning but short-sighted men; and there is need of plain speaking … to show the trend of their teaching.

In more than one American industry, the saving of a life has become gospel

The … absurdity of the doctrines of socialism as propounded by these advanced advocates are quite as great as those of the advocates … of an unlimited individualism. … One difficulty in arguing with professed socialists of the extreme … is that those of them who are sincere almost invariably suffer from great looseness of thought; for if they did not keep their faith nebulous, it would at once become abhorrent in the eyes of any upright and sensible man. …

These same [extremist] socialist leaders, with a curious effrontery, at times deny that the exponents of “scientific socialism” assume a position as regards industry which in condensed form may be stated as, that each man is to do what work he can, or, in other words, chooses, and in return is to take out from the common fund whatever he needs; or, what amounts to the same thing, that each man shall have equal remuneration with every other man, no matter what work is done. …

Mrs. Besant, for instance, putting it pithily, says that we must come to the “equal remuneration of all workers;” and one of her colleagues, that “the whole of our creed is that industry shall be carried on, not for the profit of those engaged in it, whether masters or men, but for the benefit of the community.” … It is unnecessary to point out that the pleasing idea of these writers could be realized only if the State undertook the duty of taskmaster, for otherwise it is not conceivable that anybody whose work would be worth anything would work at all under such conditions. … Of course, in practice such a system could not work at all; and incidentally the mere attempt to realize it would necessarily be accompanied by a corruption so gross that the blackest spot of corruption in any existing form of city government would seem bright by comparison. …
​
I wish it to be remembered that I speak from the standpoint of, and on behalf of, the wage worker and the tiller of the soil. These are the two men whose welfare I have ever before me, and for their sakes I would do anything, except anything that is wrong; and it is because I believe that teaching them doctrine like that which I have stigmatized represents the most cruel wrong in the long run, both to wage-worker and to earth-tiller, that I … denounce such conduct.

Ever before me is the wage worker and the tiller of the soil

We need have but scant patience with those who assert that modern conditions are all that they should be, or that they cannot be improved. …

​There are dreadful woes in modern life, dreadful suffering among some of those who toil, brutal wrongdoing among some of those who make colossal fortunes by exploiting the toilers. It is the duty of every honest and upright man, of every man who holds within his breast the capacity for righteous indignation, to recognize these wrongs, and to strive with all his might to bring about a better condition of things. But he will never bring about this better condition by misstating facts and advocating remedies which are not merely false, but fatal.

Take, for instance, the doctrine of the extreme socialists, that all wealth is produced by manual workers, that the entire product of labor should be handed over every day to the laborer, that wealth is criminal in itself. Of course, wealth is no more criminal than labor.

Human society could not exist without both; and if all wealth were abolished this week, the majority of laborers would starve next week.

Individuals of Greatness Produce Great Works and Should be Rewarded Equitably​

Here in the city where The Outlook is edited … is a huge dry goods store. The business was originally started, and the block of which I am speaking was built for the purpose, by an able New York merchant [A. T. Stewart]. It prospered. He and those who invested under him made a good deal of money. Their employees did well.

Then he died, and certain other people took possession of it and tried to run the business. ​The manual labor was the same, the good-will was the same, the physical conditions were the same; but the guiding intelligence at the top had changed. The business was run at a loss.

​It would surely have had to shut down, and all the employees, clerks, laborers, everybody would have been turned adrift, to infinite suffering, if it had not again changed hands and another businessman of capacity taken charge.

Wanamaker's of New York - formerly A. T. Stewart
​(select image to read about John Wanamaker)

The business was the same as before, the physical conditions were the same, the goodwill the same, the manual labor the same, but the guiding intelligence had changed [John Wanamaker took charge. Read about John Wanamaker, the Merchant Prince here], and now everything once more prospered, and prospered as had never been the case before.

​With such an instance before our very eyes, with such proof of what every business proves, namely, the vast importance of the part played by the guiding intelligence in business, in war, in invention, in art, in science, in every imaginable pursuit, it is really difficult to show patience when asked to discuss such a proposition as that all wealth is produced solely by the work of manual workers, and that the entire product should be handed over to them. Of course, if any such theory were really acted upon, there would soon be no product to be handed over to the manual laborers, and they would die of starvation.

A great industry could no more be managed by a mass-meeting of manual laborers than a battle could be won in such fashion, than a painters’ union could paint a Rembrandt, or a typographical union write one of Shakespeare’s plays.

The fact is that this kind of socialism represents an effort to enthrone privilege in its crudest form.

Our Fight Is a Fight Against Privilege​

Standard Oil Company used rebates to gain dominance in its industry and riots ensued

Much of what we are fighting against in modern civilization is privilege.

We fight against privilege when it takes the form of a franchise to a street railway company to enjoy the use of the streets of a great city without paying an adequate return; when it takes the form of a great business combination which grows rich by rebates which are denied to other shippers; when it takes the form of a stock-gambling operation which results in the watering of railway securities so that certain inside men get an enormous profit out of a swindle on the public.

All these represent various forms of illegal, or, if not illegal, then anti-social privilege.

​But there can be no greater abuse, no greater example of corrupt and destructive privilege, than that advocated by those who say that each man should put into a common store what he can and take out what he needs. This is merely another way of saying that the thriftless and the vicious, who could or would put in but little, should be entitled to take out the earnings of the intelligent, the foresighted, and the industrious. Such a proposition is morally base.

To choose to live by theft or by charity means in each case degradation, a rapid lowering of self-respect and self-reliance. The worst wrongs that capitalism can commit upon labor would sink into insignificance when compared with the hideous wrong done by those who would degrade labor by sapping the foundations of self-respect and self-reliance. …

Service is the Standard of Worth to Determine Rewards​

Theodore Roosevelt

In short, it is simply common sense to recognize that there is the widest inequality of service, and that therefore there must be an equally wide inequality of reward, if our society is to rest upon the basis of justice and wisdom. Service is the true test by which a man’s worth should be judged. We are against privilege in any form: privilege to the capitalist who exploits the poor man, and privilege to the shiftless or vicious poor man who would rob his thrifty brother of what he has earned.

Certain exceedingly valuable forms of service are rendered wholly without capital. On the other hand, there are exceedingly valuable forms of service which can he rendered only by means of great accumulations of capital, and not to recognize this fact would be to deprive our whole people of one of the great agencies for their betterment.

​The test of a man’s worth to the community is the service he renders to it, and we cannot afford to make this test by material considerations alone.

One of the main vices of the socialism, … is that it is blind to everything except the merely material side of life. It is not only indifferent, … but essentially based on the immediate annihilation of personal ownership of capital.

Society Must Rein in Absolutism​​

It is true that the doctrines of … socialism, if consistently followed, mean the ultimate annihilation of civilization. Yet the converse is also true. Ruin faces us … if we permit ourselves to be misled … into refusing to exert the common power of the community where only collective action can do what individualism has left undone or can remedy the wrongs done by an unrestricted and ill-regulated individualism.

​There is any amount of evil in our social and industrial conditions of today, and unless we recognize this fact and try resolutely to do what we can to remedy the evil, we run great risk of seeing men in their misery turn to the false teachers whose doctrines would indeed lead them to greater misery, but who do at least recognize the fact that they are now miserable.

At the present time there are scores of laws in the interest of labor—laws putting a stop to child labor, decreasing the hours of labor where they are excessive, putting a stop to unsanitary crowding and living, securing employers’ liability, doing away with unhealthy conditions in various trades, and the like—which should be passed by the national and the various state legislatures; and those who wish to do effective work against socialism would do well to turn their energies into securing the enactment of these laws.

To be effective against socialism, legislatures should enact child labor laws

Good Ideas and Great Individuals Are Found in all Walks of Life​​​

Moreover, we should always remember that socialism is both a wide and a loose term, and that the self-styled socialists are of many and utterly different types.

​If we should study only the professed apostles of radical socialism, of what these men themselves like to call scientific socialism, or if we should study only what active leaders of socialism in this country have usually done, or read only the papers in which they have usually expressed themselves, we would gain an utterly wrong impression of very many men who call themselves socialists.

There are many peculiarly high-minded men and women who like to speak of themselves as socialists, whose attitude, conscious or unconscious, is really merely an indignant recognition of the evil of present conditions and an ardent wish to remedy it, and whose socialism is really only an advanced form of liberalism.

​Many of these men and women in actual fact take a large part in the advancement of moral ideas, and in practice wholly repudiate the purely materialistic, and therefore sordid, doctrines of those socialists. …

The socialists of this moral type may in practice be very good citizens indeed, with whom we can at many points cooperate. They are often joined temporarily with … opportunist socialists—those who may advocate an impossible and highly undesirable utopia as a matter of abstract faith, but who in practice try to secure the adoption only of some given principle which will do away with some phase of existing wrong. With these two groups of socialists it is often possible for all far-sighted men to join heartily in the effort to secure a given reform or do away with a given abuse.

Probably, in practice, wherever and whenever socialists of these two types are able to form themselves into a party, they will disappoint both their own expectations and the fears of others by acting very much like other parties, like other aggregations of men; and it will be safe to adopt whatever they advance that is wise, and to reject whatever they advance that is foolish, just as we have to do as regards countless other groups who on one issue or set of issues come together to strive for a change in the political or social conditions of the world we live in.

The important thing is generally the next step. We ought not to take it unless we are sure that it is advisable; but we should not hesitate to take it when once we are sure; and we can safely join with others who also wish to take it, without bothering our heads over much as to any somewhat fantastic theories they may have. …

Socialism isn’t Socialism isn’t Socialism​​​​

There are communities in which our system of state education is still resisted and condemned as socialism; and we have seen within the past two years in this country men who were themselves directors in national banks, which were supervised by the government, object to such supervision of railways by the government on the ground that it was socialistic.

​An employers’ liability law is no more socialistic than a fire department; the regulation of railway rates is by no means as socialistic as the digging and enlarging of the Erie Canal at the expense of the state. A proper compensation law would merely distribute over the entire industry the shock of accident or disease, instead of limiting it to the unfortunate individual on whom, through no fault of his, it happened to fall.

Some communities condemn state
​education as socialism

As communities become more thickly settled and their lives more complex, it grows ever more and more necessary for some of the work formerly performed by individuals, each for himself, to be performed by the community for the community as a whole. Isolated farms need no complicated system of sewage; but this does not mean that public control of sewage in a great city should be resisted on the ground that it tends toward socialism.
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Let each proposition be treated on its own merits, soberly and cautiously, but without any of that rigidity of mind which fears all reform. If, for instance, the question arises as to the establishment of day nurseries for the children of mothers who work in factories, the obvious thing to do is to approach it with an open mind, listen to the arguments for and against, and, if necessary, try the experiment in actual practice. If it is alleged that small groups of farmers have prospered by doing much of their work in common, and by a kind of mutual insurance and supervision, why of course we should look into the matter with an open mind, and try to find out, not what we want the facts to be, but what the facts really are.

​Use judgement and common sense

We cannot afford to subscribe to the doctrine, equally hard and foolish, that the welfare of the children in the tenement-house district is no concern of the community as a whole.

​If the child of the thronged city cannot live in decent surroundings, have teaching, have room to play, have good water and clean air, then not only will he suffer, but in the next generation the whole community will to a greater or less degree share his suffering.

Open up Economic Opportunities but Focus on Character​​​​​

In striving to better our industrial life we must ever keep in mind that, while we cannot afford to neglect its material side, we can even less afford to disregard its moral and intellectual side. Each of us is bound to remember that he is in very truth his brother’s keeper, and that his duty is, with judgment and common sense, to try to help the brother. …

Socialism strives to remedy what is evil alike in domestic and in economic life, and its tendency is to insist that the economic remedy is all-sufficient in every case. We should all join in the effort to do away with the evil; but we should refuse to have anything to do with remedies which are either absurd or mischievous, for such, of course, would merely aggravate the present suffering.

The first thing to recognize is that, while economic reform is often vital, it is never all-sufficient. The moral reform, the change of character in which law can sometimes play a large, but never the largest, part is the most necessary of all. …

Defeat Privilege to Build a Land of Equal Opportunity​​

We should do everything that can be done, by law or otherwise, to keep the avenues of occupation, of employment, of work, of interest, so open that there shall be, so far as it is humanly possible to achieve it, a measurable equality of opportunity; an equality of opportunity for each man to show the stuff, that is in him.

When it comes to reward, let each man, within the limits set by a sound and far-sighted morality, get what, by his energy, intelligence, thrift, courage, he is able to get, with the opportunity open.

We must set our faces against privilege; just as much against the kind of privilege which would let the shiftless and lazy laborer take what his brother has earned as against the privilege which allows the huge capitalist to take toll to which he is not entitled.

​We stand for equality of opportunity, but not for equality of reward unless there is also equality of service. If the service is equal, let the reward be equal; but let the reward depend on the service; and, mankind being composed as it is, there will be inequality of service for a long time to come, no matter how great the equality of opportunity may be; and just so long as there is inequality of service it is eminently desirable that there should be inequality of reward.

We recognize, and are bound to war against, the evils of today.

​The remedies are partly economic and partly spiritual, partly to be obtained by laws, and in greater part to be obtained by individual and associated effort; for character is the vital matter, and character cannot be created by law.
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These remedies include a religious and moral teaching which shall increase the spirit of human brotherhood; an educational system which shall train men for every form of useful service—and which shall train us to prize common sense no less than morality; such a division of the profits of industry as shall tend to encourage intelligent and thrifty tool-users to become tool-owners; and a government so strong, just, wise, and democratic that, neither lagging too far behind nor pushing heedlessly in advance, it may do its full share in promoting these ends.

Roosevelt suffered the consequences
of standing for what he believed

Theodore Roosevelt, The Outlook Magazine, 1909

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