Influences on Franklin D. Roosevelt

Page Smith

[From the Book:
Redeeming The Time: A People's History of the 1920s and the New Deal
Published by McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1987

Woodrow Wilson was the third important influence on FDR among modern politicians. By Eleanor Roosevelt's testimony, Wilson had "a profound effect" on her husband's "thinking and political philosophy. Franklin admired him greatly, I know," she added, "and believed deeply in his ideas and ideals." By the same token he was well aware that the basis of Wilson's power lay in the eloquence of the writings and, above all, of his speeches. He had learned from Wilson the importance of oratory, of communication, as we would say today, in leading a democratic nation. "There is no question in my mind," Eleanor Roosevelt added, "but that all three of these great men [Theodore Roosevelt, Brandeis, and Wilson] had an effect on Franklin that was evident in his actions both as governor and as president."

As early as 1912, in a talk in Troy, New York, Roosevelt declared himself in favor of a central role on the part of the government in regulating the economy to provide for the common interests of all rather than the special interests of a few. "We are beginning to see that it is necessary for our health and happiness of the whole people of the state that individuals and lumber companies should not go into the wooded areas like the Adirondacks and the Catskills and lumber them off root and branch for the benefit of their own pocket. . . . After all, if I own a farm of a hundred acres and let it lie waste and overgrown, I am just as much a destroyer of the liberty of the community--and by liberty we mean happiness and prosperity--as the strong man who stands idle on the corner, refusing to work, a destroyer of his neighbor's happiness, prosperity and liberty." The speech was an odd jumble of Henry George notions and Edward Bellamy "nationalism." To compare the farm left fallow with "the strong young man who stands idle at the corner" was an odd analogy; certainly it was eccentric to suggest that both were robbing their neighbors of "happiness, prosperity, and liberty."


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Franklin Delano Roosevelt Address to The Civic Forum, Troy, NY, 3/31/1912

For the last three or four years people have been going about talking about unrest. It does not matter very much where one is, whether in the Orient or in Europe or in this County, everywhere there is the same feeling in men's minds and they call it the spirit of Unrest.

If you ask a man to define it, to tell what he means by the spirit of Unrest, one can get no two answers alike. Some persons will ascribe it to the discontent with the tariff, others to the system of government, others to the oppression of capital, others to the awakening and education of the laboring classes and so forth and so on.

It is easy enough to get people to lay the blame on one particular condition or one particular act but the trouble is that it is impossible to make any set of men agree upon just what that condition and just what that act is. In other words people seem to be groping, not only for the remedy, but for the cause that underlies a condition.

Some people say that it is a dangerous matter to talk about, that the less said about it the better, but after all one has to turn to history to prove conclusively that where a condition exists and a free discussion on such a condition is not had, there will be almost inevitably an explosion of some kind, which could have been avoided by a full and frank discussion.

In economic conditions of this kind the same rule applies as in smaller transactions between groups composed of a few individuals. If half a dozen men cannot agree by mail or through agents over a business proposition or some other comparatively simple transaction those same men are, in nine cases out of ten, able to settle their differences by sitting around a table and talking the matter out.

For this reason I have always held that public discussions of large economic questions are not only the simplest and most efficacious way of handling the situation but is is at the same time an effective check or safety valve, which may present an ultimate explosion.

Following out the same analogy organizations, such as this civic forum, are safety valves which prevent explosions and will lead to the discovery and working out of the solutions.

If we follow out simple reasoning we find that a condition exists today. That to my mind is a clearly established fact. It is, if you choose to call it, for lack of a better term, a condition of Unrest. And such condition requires a remedy. To my mind there has been, not only in this country but abroad, too much seeking after the remedy without sufficient attention to the cause underlying the condition.

Take as an analogy the science of medicine. Before science began to be developed as it is today, doctors existed even as they do now. There were doctors in early European history, there were medicine men, magicians and sooth sayers in the East, all practicing the art of remedying a certain condition of the human body. They were offering remedies and did not know the cause of the disease. It has only been in comparative recent times and among the so-called civilized nations of the west that an attempt has been made to study the original cause before prescribing the remedy. The result is that today the science of medicine has accomplished vast results, where for centuries previously nothing had been accomplished and the fundamental reason for the success of the remedy must be traced to the search for the cause. In just the same way I hold that there has been, in the last few years, too much groping for the remedy for a condition of unrest and too little attention to the underlying cause.

If any man were to ask me today what remedial legislation I would seek, I would be unable to answer the question directly. What we want today is, not so much, laws aimed at this, that or the other business or class or system of government off hand in the hope that some target will be hit somewhere. I would answer rather that the underlying cause must first be studied with the utmost care by the best qualified persons and that a comprehensive remedy be proposed which would go to the root of the disease and not seek merely to apply external remedies.

For the same reason I feel a certain amount of hesitation in even giving my views in regard to the underlying causes but here again must be applied the doctrine that a full discussion is the safest and best means of attaining the end.

If we go back through history, or rather through the history of the past thousand years we are struck by the fact that as a general proposition the Aryan races have been struggling to obtain individual freedom. For nearly one thousand years and in almost every European and American country this has been the great and fundamental question in the economic life of the people. The Reformation for instance and the Renaissance in Europe are too commonly regarded as religious or educational struggles and have not in most history books been sufficiently explained as efforts on the part of the various peoples affected to obtain individual liberty. In the same way the American Revolution while on the surface a struggle to obtain a separate form of government, was, even more in basic principle a struggle for individual liberty. So too the French revolution and at a later date the general European uprisings of 1848. Almost every struggle of representative government has been in reality an attempt to secure individual freedom and almost everywhere that one turns today, can be found a form of government, which to a great degree guarantees this personal liberty. It is a sweeping statement to make but taking the nations as a whole today, in Europe and America, the liberty of the individual has been accomplished.

Let us for the sake of argument assume for a while that this is so, that the efforts of centuries, directed to the attainment of the freedom of the individual, have, as a whole been successful and that this freedom exists today. If we assume this we must assume at the same time that individual liberty or rather the lack of it is not today one of the fundamental causes of the existing conditions, which call for a remedy. At least we have progressed far enough to eliminate one often quoted cause as no cause at all. Let us see if we cannot eliminate others.

We hear people talking today about the struggle between labor and capital and I dare say that many of you will disagree with me when I make the assertion that in itself the struggle between labor and capital is not and cannot be the underlying cause of conditions of unrest. In the first place there is no such thing as a struggle between labor and capital, not only is there no struggle but there is and has always been the heartiest cooperation for neither capital can exist without the cooperation of labor nor labor without the cooperation of capital. Therefore I say there is no struggle between the two, not even a dividing line.

Going back for a moment to the question of the liberty of the individual. On my assumption that this liberty has been accomplished I come to the next step in the search for the cause and I find the cause in the growth of what in speaking as a modern, a new way of looking at things, a new economic theory. It is new because there has never been any immediate need for such a theory in the past. When men are serfs or are rule by tyrants they need first of all, individual freedom. They do not need to go beyond that but when this freedom has been acquired they have not yet got to Utopia.

Conditions of civilization that come with individual freedom are inevitably bound to bring up many questions that mere individual liberty cannot solve. That is to my mind exactly what has happened in the past century. We have acquired new sets of conditions of life, that require new theories for their solution and when one seeks for a theory it is as in nature and human intercourse to seek for the simplest theory.

To put it in the simplest and fewest words I have always called this new theory the struggle for the liberty of the Community rather than liberty of the individual. When all is said and done every new doctrine which had been advanced for the last 25 years comes under this definition. Every new start that the people have hitched their wagon to for the past quarter century whether it be anti-rebating or anti-trusts or new fashioned education or conservation of our natural resources or state regulation of common carriers or milder forms of socialism or commission government or any of the thousand and one other things that we have run after of late without any exception come under the same heading. They are all steps in the evolution of the new theory of the liberty of the Community.

And if we use the word liberty in conjunction with the word community we necessarily give to that word liberty a higher and a nobler meaning than where the same word was applied to the individual.

The Socialist has at times called the same thing "community interest" and some high sounding orators have called it the "brotherhood of man." Neither of these expressions are possible to use anywhere outside of heaven for, community of interest at once suggests to the mind a kind of happy condition where everybody wants the same thing and everybody gets it, where all are on an absolute parity, not only in regard to worldly wealth but also in regard to ability, education and morals and "Brotherhood of Man" is a purely Utopian phrase that means very little as long as every person in the world does not think as every other person does.

If you will follow what I am striving to explain you will gather that I believe the liberty of the Community to be a comparatively recent doctrine; but as I have stated before, the liberty of the individual has to all intents and purposes today been obtained, and the normal progress of civilization during the time in which this liberty of the individual was being obtained has brought us to the point where the new conditions must be met by new theories. In other words the right of anyone of use to work or not as he sees fit, to live to a great extent where and how he sees fit is not sufficient. We have found that if every man does as he sees fit with a due regard to law and order, other new factors have entered into his life and proved that he is not entirely happy or ready to march on with civilization in a way satisfactory to the great majority of us.

To put it another way competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further. Cooperation must begin where competition leaves off and cooperation is as good a word for the new theory as any other. The founders of the republic were groping for the idea when they tried to form a government aimed to secure the greatest good for the greatest number and it is precisely that idea which is being developed today along every possible walk of life.

Let us take some examples of this, in what we call today, Conservation. We are taking merely a theory which began to be developed in other countries many years ago. It was recognized in Germany for instance one hundred years ago that the trees on the land were necessary for the preservation of the water power and, indeed, for the health of the people. As a result practically all of Germany is today working out a theory of the liberty of the Community rather than of the liberty of the individual.

One hundred and fifty years ago in Germany the individual was not restricted from denuding his lands of the growing trees. Today he must cut only in a manner scientifically worked out, which is calculated to serve the ends of the community and not his ends.

They pass beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it was necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people.

So in New York State we are beginning to do the same thing. As a whole we are beginning to realize that it is necessary to the health and happiness of the whole people of the State that individuals and lumber companies should not go into our wooded areas like the Adirondacks and the Catskills and cut them off root and branch for the benefit of their own pocket.

There are many persons left today that can see no reason why if a man owns lands he should not be permitted to do as he likes with it. The most striking example of what happens in such a case, that I know of, was a picture shown me by Mr. Gifford Pinchot last week. It was a photograph of a walled city in northern China. Four or five hundred years ago this city had been the center of a populous and prosperous district. A district whose mountains and ridges were covered with magnificent trees. Its streams following without interruption and its crops in the valleys prospering. It was known as one of the most prosperous provinces in China, both as a lumber exporting center and as an agricultural community.

Today the picture shows the walled town, almost as it stood five hundred years ago. There is not a human being within the walls. There are but few human beings in the whole region. Rows upon rows of bare ridges and mountains stretching back from the city without a vestige of tree life, without a vestige of flowing streams and with the bare rocks reflecting the glare of the sun. Below in the plains the little soil which remains is parched and unable to yield more than a tiny fraction of its former crops. This is the best example I know of the liberty of the individual without anything further.

Every man five hundred years ago did as he pleased with his own property. He cut the trees without affording a chance for reproduction and he thereby parched the ground, dried up the streams and ruined the valley and the sad part of it is that there are today men of the State who for the sake of lining their pockets during their own lifetime are willing to cause the same thing that happened in China. With them the motto is "After us the deluge."

They care not what happens after they are gone and I will go even further and say that they care not what happens even to their neighbors, to the community as a whole, during their own lifetime. The opponents of Conservation who, after all, are merely opponents of the liberty of the community, will argue that even though they do exhaust all the natural resources, the inventiveness of man and the progress of civilization will supply a substitute when the crisis comes. When the crisis came on that prosperous province of China the progress of civilization and the inventiveness of man did not find a substitute. Why will we assume that we can do it when the Chinese failed?

It is the same way with all of our other natural resources in addition to forests. Why, let me ask, are so many of the farms in the State of New York abandoned? The answer is easy. Their owners fifty or one hundred years ago took from the soil without returning any equivalent to the soil. In other words they got something for nothing. Their land was rich and the work was easy. They prospered for a while until the deluge came and when it came they discovered that their lands would not produce. They had taken the richness away and did not pay for it with fertilizers and other methods of soil regeneration.

Today the people in the cities and the people on the farms are suffering because these early farmers gave no thought to the liberty of the Community. To have suggested to a New York State farmer one hundred years ago that the government would compel him to put so much lime or so much fertilizer on every acre he cultivated would have been an impossibility. He would have stared and muttered something about taking care of his own land in his own way.

Yet there are many thinking people in the State today who believe that the time is not far distant when the government of the State will rightly and of necessity compel every cultivator of land to pay back to that land some quid pro quo.

I have taken the conservation of our natural resources as the first lesson that points to the necessity for seeking community freedom, because I believe it to be the most important of all our lessons. Five hundred years ago the peasant of Europe, our ancestors, were not giving much thought to us who are here today. But I think a good many people in the audience have often considered what kind of a country we today are fashioning to hand down to our descendants.

As it is with conservation of natural resources, so also is it bound to become with the production of food supply. The two go hand in hand so much so that if we can prophesy today that the State (or, in other words the people as a whole) will shortly tell a man how many trees he must cut. Then why can we not, without being called radical, predict that the State will compel every farmer to till his land or raise his beef, or horses? After all if I own a farm or a hundred acres and let it lie waste and overgrown, I am just as much of a destroyer of the liberty of the Community, and by liberty, we mean happiness and prosperity, as the strong man who stands idle on the corner, refusing to work, a destroyer of his neighbor because he is a negative.

I used to row in college in an eight-oared crew and there I got an expression that best describes my meaning, "Pulling your Weight." Some men would sit in that shell and if they were shirkers we said "they don't pull their own weight." For remember, that a man just pull not only his own weight, but in addition one-eighth part of the total weight of the coxswain, or helmsman and the boat itself. It is the same example of Cooperation again.

There is, to my mind, no valid reason why the food supply of the nation should not be put on the most economical and at the same time the most productive basis by carrying out cooperation. If we call the method Regulation, people hold up their hands in horror and say "Oh, America," or "Dangerous." But if we call the same identical process Cooperation these same old fogies will cry out, "Well done."

It may sound absurd in these days to call the rebating formerly done by railroads, and the great trusts so-called, and the control of common carriers by the State minor issues, but after all rebating was discrimination and the doctrine of cooperation overcame it. So too Trusts were and are run on the theory of monopoly, but cooperation makes monopoly out of date.