Jeffersonian Governing Strategy

A history major at Harvard, Franklin Roosevelt was widely read in his field but wrote just one book review in his lifetime from which the epigraph at the top of this chapter is taken. Published in the New York Evening World in the mid-1920s, it was an enthusiastic appraisal of a book by Claude Bowers. “As I read Mr. Claude Bowers’ thrilling Jefferson and Hamilton,” Roosevelt (1925) began, “I felt like saying ‘At last.’” What seemed to delight him more than anything was that the book echoed his own ideas. He (1925) reminded readers of this, citing a letter he had written to Democratic leaders which applied the differences “between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideals for an American method of government…to present-day policies.” The letter had not been well received, particularly by the press, which “launched sneers at the mere suggestion that Jeffersonianism could, in any remote way, bear upon the America of 1925.”