FDR - Jean Edward Smith [55]
The course of modern history, he suggested, had been a struggle for individual liberty. “Today, in Europe and America, the liberty of the individual has been accomplished.” What was now required was a process by which that liberty could be harnessed for the betterment of the community. “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further. Co-operation, which is the thing that we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.” FDR avoided the term “community interest” as too socialistic. He eschewed “brotherhood of man” as too sentimental. Instead, he defined cooperation as “the struggle for the liberty of the community rather than the liberty of the individual” and said it was “what the founders of the republic were groping for.”
The answer was regulation. But don’t call it regulation, said Roosevelt. “If we call the method regulation, people will hold up their hands in horror and say ‘unAmerican’ or ‘dangerous.’ But if we call the same process co-operation these same old fogeys will cry out ‘well done.’ ”19
FDR’s embrace of a regulative role for government led him to Trenton and Woodrow Wilson, the fast-rising leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. In 1910, the year Franklin was elected to the Senate in Albany, Wilson was rescued by New Jersey Democrats from a difficult situation at Princeton and elected governor.* Wilson proved more adept at state politics than academic infighting (“The reason academic politics are so vicious is because the stakes are so small” is often attributed to Wilson) and in his first four months as governor cajoled the legislature into enacting a spectacular series of reform measures including a direct primary law, a corrupt-practices act, a bill establishing a strong public utilities commission with rate-setting authority, and an employer’s liability law. The speed with which Wilson pushed the measures through the statehouse provided a lesson in leadership that made him the odds-on favorite among progressive Democrats for the party’s 1912 presidential nomination.
Roosevelt was but one of many Democrats who journeyed to Trenton to meet Wilson. The get-together served a common purpose: Wilson was interested in the delegate vote count in New York; FDR was eager to join the Wilson campaign at its inception. They met in Wilson’s office in the autumn of 1911. How many votes could he count upon from New York? the governor asked. The prospects looked bleak, FDR replied. New York had ninety votes at the convention and perhaps a third might support Wilson. But like the Democratic legislative caucus in Albany, the state operated under the unit rule. Charles Murphy would control the delegation, and Murphy’s candidate, who was likely to be anyone other than Wilson, would get all of New York’s ninety votes.20
Late that afternoon FDR and Wilson resumed their conversation on the train back to Princeton, where Wilson lived. As they sat opposite each other in a Pennsylvania Railroad day coach, the short ride to Princeton Junction gave the man who would become the twenty-eighth president of the United States and the man who would follow twelve years later as the thirty-second an opportunity to appraise each other. At fifty-five years of age, Wilson was the beneficiary of a sudden wave of popularity. But he remained cold, stern, and professorial—a dour Presbyterian academic born to southern privilege who believed God was guiding his every step. Crisply articulate, inflexible, and dedicated to principle, his firm belief in right and wrong evoked in Franklin memories both of his father, James, and, more poignantly, the Reverend Endicott Peabody. Peabody lacked Wilson