Politics & Power Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt is selling interdependence to a country raised on self-reliance, and he does it by flattering both instincts at once. The opening concession - "In our personal ambitions we are individualists" - is political jujitsu. He grants Americans their favorite self-image before pivoting to the harder claim: that markets, jobs, and democracy don’t respect the boundaries of private hustle. You can climb as high as you want, but you’re climbing on a ladder everyone is holding.

The line works because it frames solidarity not as sentimental charity but as national self-preservation. "Economic and political progress" is a paired phrase with a warning embedded in it: when people lose material security, institutions wobble; when institutions wobble, individual dreams become irrelevant. Roosevelt is insisting that the public sphere is not optional infrastructure. It is the condition that makes individual ambition meaningful.

The subtext is New Deal logic in a single breath: regulate, insure, build, and share risk because risk is already shared. "We all go up or else all go down" turns policy into physics, a collective elevator with no private exits. It’s also a gentle rebuke to elites who imagined they could wall themselves off from breadlines, bank runs, labor unrest, or the rising appeal of extremism.

Contextually, this is Depression-era rhetoric aimed at legitimizing an expanded federal role without declaring war on the American mythos. Roosevelt doesn’t try to replace individualism; he reframes it as something that survives only inside a functioning, mutually supported republic.