Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945

32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, known as FDR, was elected president four times and led the United States through the two greatest crises of the twentieth century: the Great Depression and World War II. Born on January 30, 1882, into a wealthy family in Hyde Park, New York, he attended Groton and Harvard, married his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905, and modeled his early career on his relative Theodore Roosevelt. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson and ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1920. Then, in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt was struck by a paralyzing illness, long identified as polio, that cost him the use of his legs. He never walked again unaided, relying on heavy leg braces, a wheelchair, and the steadying arm of an aide, and he went to great lengths to keep the full extent of his disability out of public view. Many historians see the struggle as the making of him, deepening his empathy for people who suffered. Roosevelt returned to politics as governor of New York in 1929, just as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression set in. In 1932, with millions out of work, he won the presidency in a landslide, promising Americans a New Deal. His first hundred days were a whirlwind: he declared a bank holiday to stop the financial panic, then pushed through a torrent of laws giving the federal government a vast new role in the economy. Programs put people to work, regulated banks and the stock market, and aided farmers. In 1935 came landmark reforms: the Social Security Act, which created old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, and the Wagner Act, which protected workers' right to form unions. Roosevelt also transformed how a president spoke to the nation. In radio addresses known as fireside chats, he explained his policies in plain, reassuring language, as if speaking to each family in its living room. The New Deal drew fierce criticism from both left and right, and when the Supreme Court struck down several New Deal laws, Roosevelt overreached: in 1937 he proposed a bill to add up to six new justices to the Court, a plan critics condemned as court-packing. Congress rejected it, damaging his standing even within his own party, though the Court soon began upholding his programs anyway. Roosevelt broke the tradition, set by George Washington, that presidents serve only two terms, winning election four times: in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. As war engulfed Europe and Asia, he steered a reluctant, isolationist nation toward supporting the democracies fighting Nazi Germany, most importantly through the Lend-Lease program that supplied Britain and the Soviet Union. Everything changed on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The next day the United States entered the war, and Roosevelt worked with Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to forge the Allied strategy that led to victory in Europe on D-Day and beyond. Roosevelt's wartime record also includes decisions history judges harshly. In 1939 he received a letter from Albert Einstein warning that Germany might build an atomic bomb, and he authorized the secret research that grew into the Manhattan Project, though he died before any bomb was ready and never ordered one used; that decision fell to his successor. And in February 1942, responding to fear and prejudice after Pearl Harbor, he signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal and incarceration of about 122,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, in remote camps. No charges were filed, and decades later the United States formally apologized and paid reparations for this violation of civil liberties. Worn down by the strain of the war, Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, at Warm Springs, Georgia, less than a month before Germany surrendered and four months before the war with Japan ended. Vice President Harry Truman, told almost nothing about the atomic bomb, suddenly became president. Roosevelt's New Deal and wartime leadership permanently changed the nation, and the presidency, and they still shape debates about government today. You can follow the wider conflict he helped win in the World War II journey.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Further reading