Leadership Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Competition is treated here like a tool, not a creed: effective in measured doses, corrosive when worshipped. Roosevelt’s phrasing is deliberately clinical - "shown to be useful" sounds like a lab report, not a sermon - and that’s the point. He’s stripping competition of its moral glamour, reducing it to something you deploy until it stops working. Then comes the pivot: cooperation isn’t the soft alternative, it’s the next stage of serious governance, the moment where private striving hits public limits.

The subtext is a rebuke to the pre-Depression faith that markets, left alone, will naturally sort society into prosperity. Roosevelt doesn’t deny ambition or enterprise; he implies they’ve already run their course and delivered a catastrophe. "Begins where competition leaves off" frames cooperation as additive rather than oppositional: a handoff, not a surrender. That’s politically shrewd in a country suspicious of anything that smells like collectivism. He’s not asking Americans to stop wanting; he’s asking them to coordinate.

In context, this is New Deal rhetoric doing double duty. It justifies expanded federal action - regulation, labor protections, social insurance - while recasting those policies as pragmatic, not ideological. Cooperation becomes the patriotic technology of recovery: government, business, and workers aligned against a shared threat. The line also anticipates the wartime social compact to come, where the language of collective effort would be necessary to mobilize an economy and a population at scale.

Roosevelt’s real intent is to redraw the boundary of "common sense": competition for growth, cooperation for survival.