Woodrow Wilson, who had reason to know, said that the reform impulse comes once every twenty years and is lucky to last a single term, which was why he refused the advice of his young assistant secretary of the Navy to delay part of his program until a second term. Twenty years later, the assistant secretary took Wilson's words to heart and put the New Deal on a fast track. Roosevelt's moment of opportunity lasted slightly longer than Wilson's, then it, too, was gone. In the modern era, he said, life had become tremendously complex, and the size of corporations threatened individual freedom in a new way. He reminded his audience that Jefferson had warned against excessive government interference in the activities of citizens, a warning that had been gospel to the Democratic Party ever since.
Freedom today is something more than being let alone.
With this insight a progressive could remain a Jeffersonian. Wilson had seen a dilemma, acknowledged it, and deftly resolved it. He had also scored points on the stump. By couching the problem of trusts as a matter of restoring freedom to the individual, Wilson was positioning himself against Theodore Roosevelt, whose brand of progressivism accepted the fact of increasing bigness in American life, proposing to use government to regulate or take over monopoly but not break it up. Either it must discriminate in their favor or it must discriminate against them.