The colossal figures who shaped the politics of industrial America emerge in full scale in this engrossing comparative biography. In both the depth and sophistication of intellect that they brought to politics and in the titanic conflict they waged with each other, Roosevelt and Wilson were, like Hamilton and Jefferson before them, the political architects for an entire century.

All previous efforts to treat the philosophies and programs of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom have been partial and episodic. Now John Milton Cooper reconstructs in parallel lines the entire range of their ideologies and their struggles—their social identification in terms of class, education, and regional roots; the origins and evolution of their political thought; their party leadership roles; and their psychological characters.

After tracking the shared identities of young manhood, Cooper explains the conflict of their mature years that developed from opposing philosophies of government. Not until 1912, when Wilson ran for president, did they come together partially and briefly on common practical grounds of reform of the political process and efforts to curb big business in the public interest. Later, foreign policy in particular pitted them in a deeper conflict that consumed the rest of their lives.

Winner of the George Washington Prize

A fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose singular passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery.

George Washington spent more of his working life farming than he did at war or in political office. For over forty years, he devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture, which he saw as the means by which the American people would attain the “respectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.”

Washington at the Plow depicts the “first farmer of America” as a leading practitioner of the New Husbandry, a transatlantic movement that spearheaded advancements in crop rotation. A tireless experimentalist, Washington pulled up his tobacco and switched to wheat production, leading the way for the rest of the country. He filled his library with the latest agricultural treatises and pioneered land-management techniques that he hoped would guide small farmers, strengthen agrarian society, and ensure the prosperity of the nation.

Slavery was a key part of Washington’s pursuits. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. To this end, he devised an original and exacting system of slave supervision. But Washington eventually found that forced labor could not achieve the productivity he desired. His inability to reconcile ideals of scientific farming and rural order with race-based slavery led him to reconsider the traditional foundations of the Virginia plantation. As Bruce Ragsdale shows, it was the inefficacy of chattel slavery, as much as moral revulsion at the practice, that informed Washington’s famous decision to free his slaves after his death.