But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility, there is a collective responsibility.

Books such as Herbert Croly's "Promise of American Life" and Walter E.Weyl's "New Democracy" would generally at that time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy.
The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way.

It was not so democratic in another.

I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself.

But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few.