(This is a series of excerpts from The Progressive magazine in the 1930s that are especially relevant today. You can find other delectable items in the current issue of The Progressive, which commemorates the magazine’s 100th anniversary.)

“Individualism” Seen in Destructive Phase
By Theodore Dreiser
January 9, 1932

What I cannot understand is why the American people, which has been drilled from the beginning in the necessity and the advantage of the individual and his point of view, does not now realize how complete is the collapse of that idea as a working social formula. For while, on the one hand, we have arrogated to each of ourselves the right to be a giant individual if we can, we have not seen how impossible it is for more than a very few to achieve this.

It is really not complete individualism for anybody that we need or want or can endure even, but a limited form of individualism which will guarantee to all, in so far as that is possible, the right, if there is such a right, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and also an equitable share in the economic results of any such organization.

As it is now, we have gotten no further than the right of the most cunning and strong individuals among us to aggrandize themselves, leaving the rest of us here in America, as elsewhere, to subsist on what is left after they are through. And if you will examine our American economic arrangement, you will find that they are not through, since by now 50 families control 95 percent of the wealth of the country, and these families, their trusts and holding companies, are now not only not distributing that wealth in any equitable ration, but even if they were so minded, they are not capable of so doing. Taken collectively, they do not constitute any central authority. And except through the function of government which they seek to, and do, direct for their own private aggrandizement, they have no means, let alone any intention of so doing.

More, the government, which is supposed to represent all of the individualistic ambitions of all of our people, is in no position to do that. It, too, in turn, has become one of the instruments of this central group of individuals which now directs all of its functions to its particular and very special advantage.

That leaves the American citizen, 125 million strong, with his faith in individualism and what it will do for him—mainly without his rent, his job, a decent suit of clothes, a pair of shoes, or food. His faith in this free-for-all individualism has now led him to the place where his fellow individualists of greater strength, cunning, and greed are in a position to say for how much, or rather, for how little, he shall work, for how long, and whether, he shall be allowed to make any complaint or even seek redress in case he is unhappy or dissatisfied, ill-treated, deprived, or even actually starved. In fact, his faith in this individualism as a solvent for all of his ills has caused him to slumber while his fellow individualists of greater greed and cunning have been seizing his wealth, his church, his press, his courts, his judges, his legislators, his police, and quite all of his originally agreed upon constitutional privileges so that, today, he walks practically in fear of his own shadow.

Back to the 1930s, Part I