The Farmer And The Business Man

Performed by Theodore Roosevelt
Recorded September 22, 1912

The welfare of our people is vitally and intimately concerned with the welfare of the farmer. The Country Life Commission should be revived with greatly increased power. It’s abandonment was a severe blow to the interest of our nation, for the welfare of the farmer is a basic need of this nation. It is the men from the farms who in the past have taken the lead in every great movement within our country, whether in time of war or in time of peace. It is well to have our cities prosper, but it is not well if they prosper at the expense of the country. In this movement, the lead must be taken by the farmers themselves. But our people as a whole, through their governmental agency should back them up. Everything possible should be done for the better economic condition of the farmer and also to increase the social value of the life of the farmer’s wife and their children, no less than of the farmer himself. The burdens of labor and loneliness bear heavily on the women in the country. Their welfare should be the especial concern of all of us. Everything possible should be done to make life in the country profitable so as to be attractive from an economic standpoint, and there should be just the same chance to live as full, as well-rounded, and as useful lives in the country as in the city. The government must cooperate with the farmer to make the farm more productive. There must be no skinning of the soil. The farm should be left to the farmer’s son, in better and not worse condition because of its cultivation. Moreover, every invention and improvement, every discovery and economy, should be at the service of the farmer in the work of production and in addition, he should be helped to cooperate in business fashion with his fellows so that the money paid to the consumer for the product of the soil, shall to as large a degree as possible, go into the pockets of the man who raised that product from the soil. So long as the farmer leaves cooperative activities with their profit sharing to the city man of business, so long will the foundations of wealth be undermined and the comforts of enlightenment be impossible in the country community.

The present condition of living cannot be accepted as satisfactory. There are too many who do not prosper enough, and of the few who prosper greatly, there are certainly some whose prosperity does not mean welfare for the country. Rational progressives, no matter how radical, are well aware that nothing the government can do will make some men prosper, and we heartily approve the prosperity, no matter how great of any man, if it comes because of his rendering service to the community. But we wish, so to shape condition, that a greater number of the small men in business, the decent, respectable, industrious and energetic men, who conduct small businesses, who are retail traders, who run small stores and shops, shall be able to succeed and so that the big man who is dishonest, shall not be allowed to succeed at all. Our aim is to control business, not to strangle it. And above all, not to continue the policy of make-believe strangle toward big concerns that do evil and constant menace towards both big and little concerns that do well. Our aim is to promote prosperity and then to see that prosperity is passed around. But there is a proper division of prosperity. We wish to control big business among other reasons so that we may secure good wages for the wageworker as well as reasonable prices for the consumer. We will not submit to the prosperity that is obtained by lowering the wages of working men and charging an excessive price to the consumer. Nor to that other kind of prosperity that is obtained by swindling investors or by getting unfair advantage over smaller business rivals.