Franklin D. Roosevelt

President of the United States (1933–1945)

• Born: January 30, 1882
• Birthplace: Hyde Park, New York
• Died: April 12, 1945
• Place of death: Warm Springs, Georgia

Displaying extraordinary personal courage and perhaps the most astute political leadership America has ever witnessed, Roosevelt dominated American government for a longer period than has any other president of the United States.

Early Life

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a member of an American aristocratic family of great wealth. James and Sara Roosevelt, of Dutch and English ancestry, educated their only child with private tutors and European tours. At Groton School in Massachusetts, Roosevelt came under the influence of Rector Endicott Peabody, who prided himself on grooming future politicians and instilling in his charges a lifelong commitment to public service.

By 1900, when Franklin enrolled at Harvard University, he was an impressive young man six feet two inches tall, handsome, with a patrician nose and majestically deep-set eyes. In his junior year, he fell in love with his fifth cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor was the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliott, who died from alcoholism when she was ten. In 1905, Franklin married Eleanor, over the objections of his mother, who tried to postpone the wedding.

Following Harvard, Roosevelt dabbled briefly with the practice of law before turning to the real love of his life: politics. In 1910, he entered the political arena for the first time, running for the New York State senate. Fellow Democrats skeptically observed his entrance into the race for several reasons: his aristocratic bearing, his tendency to look down his nose at people, his unfamiliarity with working-class voters in the Hyde Park–Poughkeepsie area, and the fact that he was a former Republican. The political climate, however, demanded a reformer, and Roosevelt, following in the footsteps of his cousin Theodore, could fill the bill by pointing to the ugly specter of corruption within the opposition party. During the campaign, FDR (as he came to be known) showed he was different from the average “cheap-talking” politician, displaying a pragmatic unorthodoxy that later endeared him to the nation. He even campaigned for office in an automobile, an unusual political act for a time when most people eyed the horseless carriage with suspicion. Victory was his, however, and Roosevelt became only the second Democrat elected from his district to the New York State senate since the Civil War. He was on his way.

It was not an easy path to success. Experiences in the New York senate taught him the limits of progressive, reformistic power. When he challenged Charles F. Murphy’s Tammany Hall political machine of New York City over the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, he met defeat. He gradually learned, however, to moderate his reform tendencies. This later proved to be his first major lesson in the school of politics. Following his reelection in 1912, Roosevelt jumped at the opportunity to join Woodrow Wilson’s administration in the capacity of assistant secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels. In doing so, young FDR may have imagined himself following the example of Theodore Roosevelt, who had achieved the governorship of New York, the vice presidency, and the presidency after serving in the same position. The Navy Department afforded FDR a chance to hone his administrative skills and strengthen his political ties throughout the Democratic Party to the point that, by 1920, delegates to the national convention were willing to exploit his famous name by nominating him for the vice presidency as James M. Cox’s running mate. Cox and Roosevelt suffered defeat in the Republican landslide that swept Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge into office. FDR remained basically unchanged throughout these events, still a somewhat immature young man who maintained very few strong convictions.

All this changed in August, 1921, when Roosevelt contracted polio while vacationing at Campobello Island, his family’s resort off the Maine seacoast. His health was shattered, but a new Roosevelt slowly began to emerge. Paralyzed from the waist down, and wealthy enough to retire at the age of thirty-nine, he fought to regain his vigor. First, he had to overcome the frustration that resulted from the wearing of heavy steel braces that prohibited him from walking unaided. Second, he had to ignore the pleas of his mother (whom he worshiped but who urged him to withdraw from politics) and listen to his wife and his personal secretary, Louis McHenry Howe, who plotted to restore him to some semblance of health. During this period of recovery, Eleanor became his “legs,” going where he could not go, doing what he could not do physically, and generally learning the art of politics.

Life’s Work

In 1924, FDR showed that Roosevelt the fighter had superseded Roosevelt the dedicated aristocrat when he appeared at the Democratic National Convention to give his “Happy Warrior Speech” nominating Alfred E. Smith for president. Smith lost the nomination, but Roosevelt did not lose his political career to polio. Instead, it seemed to give him a strength of character he had rarely shown before. In 1928, while Smith was losing his home state of New York by 100,000 votes to Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt was winning the governorship by 25,000, thus becoming the front-runner for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination. Reelected by an unprecedented 725,000 votes in 1930, Roosevelt, aided by his national campaign manager, James A. Farley, began his first run for the presidency. Capturing the nomination on the third ballot, Roosevelt pledged himself to create, if elected, a “new deal” for the American people.

The 1932 presidential campaign pitted Roosevelt against the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover. With the country three years into the Great Depression, Roosevelt wisely ran a pragmatic campaign fluctuating between alternative ideological positions, allowing Hoover’s record to speak for itself, and leaving the decision to the American electorate. On November 8, 1932, the people spoke giving him a 472–59 electoral victory over Hoover. When Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, the nation was mired in the worst depression in American history. There were approximately thirteen million unemployed people, or 25.2 percent of the workforce. As a mood of apprehension gripped the country, Roosevelt tried to calm the panic-stricken populace when he said,

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

During the crucial one hundred days that followed his inaugural speech, Roosevelt began the New Deal. He quickly satisfied the public’s overwhelming desire for leadership and action by issuing executive orders and introducing legislation that a frightened Congress quickly rubber-stamped. Roosevelt acted in four critical areas: finance, industry, agriculture, and relief (welfare). In combating the Depression, he gave the nation no panacea but offered the means through which it might be able to survive the crisis. He did not end the Depression but many of his programs and the laws he signed got the country through the Depression and remained an effective part of the federal government long after his death. In finance, the Emergency Banking Act (1933) and the Banking Act of 1933, also known as the Glass-Steagall Act, saved the banking structure and helped prevent a future crisis by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Truth-in-Securities Act (1933) and the Securities Exchange Act (1934) brought Wall Street under tighter public regulation. In industry, the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) offered both business and labor opportunities for greater self-government. Later, through the National Labor Relations Act (1935), he concentrated more on allowing labor unions the right to organize. In agriculture, Roosevelt tried to restore farmers’ prosperity through the Agriculture Adjustment Act (1933) by subsidizing certain farm products they could not afford to sell at market prices. In relief, FDR straddled the line between welfare and public works. At first, the New Deal doled out money to unemployed people through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (1933) and sent young men to work camps through the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933).

After the one hundred days had passed, FDR turned away from welfare and made government jobs a primary goal of his administration. Listening to his advisers, Harry Hopkins and Harold L. Ickes, Roosevelt made the federal government the employer of the last resort through the Civil Works Administration (1933), the Public Works Administration (1933), and the Works Progress Administration (1935). In particular, the WPA, which averaged 2,112,000 on its monthly payrolls from 1935 to 1941, was the largest, most visionary, and probably most effective federal relief program ever created. Perhaps the most long-lasting reform achieved by Roosevelt was the Social Security Administration (1935), granting unemployment compensation and old-age pensions.

Roosevelt’s New Deal programs generated billions of new dollars throughout the American economy, increasing incomes and causing tax revenues to “trickle up” to the federal and state governments. The jobs also raised the hopes of millions of voters who came to believe that Roosevelt had saved them from financial disaster. He was the man who put food on their tables, shoes on their feet, and a roof over their heads. In brief, the New Deal was political dynamite, and Roosevelt was the New Deal. The president’s charismatic leadership, his inspirational speeches and informal “fireside chats,” made him an unbeatable campaigner, as his 1936 Republican opponent learned. Roosevelt crushed Kansas Governor Alfred M. Landon by the largest electoral margin in recent American history, 523 to 8.

In less than three years, Roosevelt created an imperial presidency and vastly enlarged the federal bureaucracy, thus prompting criticisms from conservatives and the Supreme Court. When the Court began invalidating some New Deal programs such as the National Industrial Recovery Act (Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 1935) and the Agriculture Adjustment Act (Butler v. United States, 1936), he struck back. In 1937, Roosevelt tried to pack the Court with New Dealers by introducing the Federal Judiciary Reorganization Bill. Although the bill failed to pass Congress, Roosevelt prevailed in this struggle, since the Court’s later decisions proved more favorable to New Deal legislation. Still, the court-packing scheme suggested dictatorial ambitions and damaged Roosevelt’s reputation in some circles. His popularity further declined as the nation slid deeper into the Depression in 1938, and the president, determined to keep his working majority in Congress, attempted to purge conservative Democrats from his party. This tactic also failed. By 1939, the New Deal, for all practical purposes, was dead.

As the New Deal passed into history, new dangers loomed on the horizon. Totalitarian regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy threatened the position of the United States in the world. Roosevelt himself recognized that the leaders of these regimes, Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tōjō, and Benito Mussolini, would necessitate some changes in American foreign policy when he said that “Dr. Win the War” would have to replace “Dr. New Deal.” In this way, he reluctantly began to shift American diplomacy in the direction of confronting these aggressors. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, precipitating a declaration of war by Great Britain and France, Americans debated whether their country should maintain its isolation or aid its British and French allies. While Roosevelt was preaching neutrality, he won an unprecedented third term, a 449–82 electoral victory over his 1940 Republican opponent, Wendell Lewis Willkie.

When the war came to the United States, it struck with a fury. Possibly no aspect of Roosevelt’s foreign policy has evoked more controversy than the role he played in leading the United States into World War II . On December 7, 1941, a little more than a year after he promised that “this country is not going to war,” Japanese planes swept down on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, nearly destroying the United States Pacific Fleet. The declaration of war that followed prompted his critics to complain that he had tricked his nation into war. While the Roosevelt administration made numerous errors in judgment, Roosevelt did not intentionally expose the military installation to attack to drag a reluctant and isolationistic American people into the war.

Shortly after the “day of infamy,” Roosevelt met with British prime minister Winston Churchill in the first of several Washington conferences forming a “grand alliance” between the two world leaders and their nations. At the first meeting, Roosevelt agreed to the idea that the Allies should place top priority on defeating Germany and Italy, while fighting a holding action against Japan in the Pacific theater. In fact, throughout the war, Roosevelt actively planned and executed top military and diplomatic decisions that affected its outcome and the postwar world. Together with Churchill and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, he agreed to the formulation of the United Nations. At the Yalta Conference (February, 1945), Roosevelt made another of his extremely controversial decisions that would affect public opinion long after he was gone. In return for Stalin’s promise to enter the war against Japan and to allow free elections in the Soviet bloc nations, Roosevelt acquiesced to Russia’s hegemony in eastern Poland and other territories occupied by Soviet troops. Because these decisions were kept secret by the chief signatories, Roosevelt never felt the full fury of his critics before his death on April 12, 1945.

Significance

In electing Roosevelt to an unprecedented four terms of office, the American people lent credence to the belief that Roosevelt was the greatest leader ever to hold the presidency. This view was further substantiated by the 1982 survey conducted by Professor Robert K. Murray of Pennsylvania State University among a thousand historians with doctoral degrees; only Abraham Lincoln ranked ahead of Roosevelt as the best president in American history. Those who admire FDR have praised his leadership, confidence, and flexibility in the face of economic crisis and war. The Social Security Act has changed since its initial implementation, but continues to provide financial support to disabled and elderly Americans. Nevertheless, some historians have criticized Roosevelt's ambitions as dictatorial for circumventing the Constitution and in his effort to seat New Deal–friendly justices on the Supreme Court. Conservatives have decried Roosevelt for allowing the national debt to grow during his presidency, while others point to the recession that occurred when FDR reined in deficit spending and implemented economic austerity measures. Since Roosevelt's presidency both liberal and conservative presidents have resorted to deficit spending, and political debate over its use and misuse continues into the twenty-first century.

Roosevelt created the imperial presidency, in the process setting a precedent for leadership by which all his successors have been evaluated. He took the executive branch, which had lost much of its power and glory, and expanded it beyond the limits achieved by any twentieth century American chief executive. Circumstances such as depression and war, and the force of his indomitable personal character, allowed him to restructure the office into its present form. Proponents have praised the FDR’s restructuring of the executive office for expanding both its responsibilities and capabilities, while critics say such changes encroach on the normal powers and functions of Congress and the Supreme Court. In 1939 he issued Executive Order 8248, creating the Executive Office of the President and shifting the powerful Bureau of the Budget from the Treasury Department to the White House.

Although Roosevelt’s primary claim to greatness lay in domestic achievements, he made major contributions in foreign policy as well. He was the president who led America to victory over the Axis powers and then achieved the first détente with the new superpower: the Soviet Union. It was in the arena of American politics and government, however, that Roosevelt made his greatest imprint. Even his critics must concede that his impact on the nation was extraordinary.

Bibliography

Beschloss, Michael. The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945. New York: Simon, 2002. Print.

Brands, H. W. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 5th printing. New York: Anchor, 2013. Print.

Burt, Sally. "The Ambassador, the General, and the President: FDR's Mismanagement of Interdepartmental Relations in Wartime China." Jour. of Amer.-East Asian Relations 19.3/4 (2012): 288–310. Print.

Daniels, Roger. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2015–2016. Print.

Davis, Kenneth Sydney. FDR, Into the Storm, 1937–1940: A History. New York: Random, 1993. Print.

"Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidency." Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, www.fdrlibrary.org/fdr-presidency. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

Freidel, Frank. Launching the New Deal. Boston: Little, 1973. Print.

Kennedy, Lesley. "How FDR Became the First—and Only—President to Serve Four Terms." History, 22 Oct. 2019, www.history.com/news/fdr-four-term-president-22-amendment. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

McElvaine, Robert S. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Washington, D.C.: CQ P, 2002. Print.

Neal, Steve. Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR and How America Was Changed Forever. New York: Morrow, 2004. Print.

Pious, Richard M. "The Historical Presidency: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Destroyer Deal: Normalizing Prerogative Power." Presidential Studies Quarterly 42.1 (2012): 190–204. Print.

Rofe, J. Simon, and John M. Thompson. "Internationalists in Isolationist Times—Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and a Rooseveltian Maxim." Jour. of Transatlantic Studies (Routledge) 9.1 (2011): 46–62. Print.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1957–1960. Print.

Shaw, Stephen K., Franklin Williams, and William D. Pederson. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Transformation of the Supreme Court. London: Routledge, 2015. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 8 Sept. 2015.