Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 - April 12, 1945) was the thirty-second President of the United States (1933 - 1945), the only president elected to four terms, and the central American figure of the twentieth century's darkest years. He took office at the bottom of the Great Depression, with a quarter of the workforce unemployed and the banking system in collapse, and died twelve years later with victory in the Second World War weeks away.
Early life and the ordeal of polio
Born to a wealthy Hudson Valley family and a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR followed his cousin's path: Harvard, the New York legislature, assistant secretary of the navy, and the 1920 Democratic nomination for vice president on a losing ticket. In 1921, at age 39, he was stricken with polio and never again walked unaided. His return, as governor of New York in 1929, was one of the great comebacks in American politics. He married his fifth cousin Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905; she became the most consequential first lady in the nation's history.
The New Deal
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," Roosevelt declared at his first inaugural. In his first hundred days, a phrase every president since has been measured by, he declared a bank holiday, took the country off the gold standard, and drove fifteen major bills through Congress. The New Deal's alphabet agencies put millions to work: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Its permanent legacy includes the Securities and Exchange Commission, federal deposit insurance, the National Labor Relations Act, and above all the Social Security Act of 1935.
He explained it all directly to the people by radio in his "fireside chats," inventing the modern presidential relationship with mass media. After a landslide reelection in 1936, he overreached with a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court, which Congress rejected, though the Court soon stopped striking down New Deal laws.
The Second World War
As Europe fell to Hitler, Roosevelt pushed aid to Britain against fierce isolationist opposition: destroyers for bases in 1940, Lend-Lease in 1941. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," the United States entered the war on both oceans. Read the Pearl Harbor address in full.
Roosevelt directed a war economy that built ships, planes, and tanks at rates no one thought possible, chose the leaders who won the war, including George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, and shaped the peace at summits in Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta. The war years also carry his gravest stain: Executive Order 9066, which sent some 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps.
Death at Warm Springs
Reelected to a fourth term in 1944, visibly failing, Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, less than a month before Germany's surrender. The 22nd Amendment, limiting presidents to two terms, was proposed two years later. The United Nations, whose name he coined, held its founding conference thirteen days after his death.
Highlights of the Roosevelt presidency
- The Hundred Days (1933) and the New Deal.
- Social Security (1935), the foundation of the American safety net.
- Pearl Harbor and the war leadership, 1941 - 1945.
- Four elections won: 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944.
- The fireside chats, the invention of the media presidency.
Read his words on this site: the Pearl Harbor address (1941) and his State of the Union messages, including the 1941 "Four Freedoms" speech.