Sweden: The Middle Way - The Reaction

The Reaction

The most prominent reaction to the book came from President Franklin Roosevelt, who in June 1936 had dispatched a commission to Europe to study the prevalent use of cooperatives there. In a press conference, Roosevelt told reporters:

I became a good deal interested in the cooperative development in countries abroad, especially Sweden. A very interesting book came out a couple of months ago — The Middle Way. I was tremendously interested in what they had done in Scandinavia along those lines. In Sweden, for example, you have a royal family and a Socialist Government and a capitalist system, all working happily side by side. Of course, to be sure, it is a smaller country than ours; but they have conducted some very interesting and, so far, very successful experiments. They have these cooperative movements existing happily and successfully alongside of private industry and distributions of various kinds, both of them making money. I thought it was at least worthy of study from our point of view.

Already a best-seller before Roosevelt got interested in the book, the president's comments fortified its stature as one of the best-known American non-fiction books of the second half of the 1930s.