Leadership Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s line lands like a friendly aside, but it’s also a calibrated political weapon. By speaking in the conditional - “If I went” - he slips past the patrician reality that he didn’t punch a clock, then uses that distance to make a bolder claim: even a president of his class would treat collective bargaining as the rational first move, not a radical indulgence. The intent is less empathy theater than normalization. Union membership becomes workplace common sense, the same way buying insurance is common sense.

The subtext is about power, not sentiment. Factories in the early 20th century weren’t just sites of production; they were laboratories of imbalance: speedups, company towns, blacklists, strikebreaking. Roosevelt is signaling that the individual worker negotiating alone is structurally outgunned. “First thing” is the key phrase - it reframes unions from a last resort after exploitation to a foundational tool for dignity and leverage.

Context matters: this is the New Deal era, when the administration was helping redraw the rules of American capitalism through the Wagner Act, legitimizing unions and making collective bargaining a pillar of recovery. Roosevelt isn’t merely praising labor; he’s defending a new social contract against business backlash that painted unions as un-American. The genius of the line is its simplicity: it makes solidarity sound pragmatic, and it dares opponents to argue that the safest move in a factory should be going it alone.