Politics & Power Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s line is a velvet-gloved warning: stop pretending your fortunes are private. Delivered in the shadow of economic catastrophe and democratic fragility, it compresses the New Deal’s moral argument into a single, almost fatalistic equation. “We all go up - or else we all go down” isn’t feel-good togetherness; it’s a stark claim about interdependence in an industrial society where banks, jobs, and public trust rise and fall as a system.

The intent is political discipline. FDR is telling business leaders, lawmakers, and anxious voters that the old bargain - rugged individualism plus minimal government - has already failed the stress test. If you want “economic and political progress,” you don’t get to cherry-pick: prosperity without stability breeds extremism, and stability without shared prosperity rots into resentment. The subtext is a preemptive strike against the era’s familiar charge that reform is “class warfare.” Roosevelt reframes redistribution and regulation as national self-preservation, not ideological charity.

Rhetorically, the line works because it’s both inclusive and coercive. “We all” sounds democratic, but it also erases the escape hatch for elites who think they can insulate themselves behind capital, geography, or private security. The dash functions like a hard pivot from aspiration to consequence. It’s a president using the authority of crisis to redraw the boundary of responsibility: in a mass economy, private gain that undermines public capacity isn’t freedom. It’s a countdown.