Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

The movement that had such a great effect on the young Franklin D. Roosevelt was heavily influenced by the Prussian-German model. In 1912, he cited German reformers as models for a new balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility: “They passed 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.”45 Moreover, all of the leading Progressive figures, including Woodrow Wilson, studied either in Germany or at American universities founded along German lines. In the process, they came to appreciate the Hegelian theory of a strong state and Prussian militarism as the most efficient way of organizing modern societies that could no longer be ruled by anarchic liberal principles.