Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, at his family's estate in Hyde Park, New York, the only child of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt ^[1]. The family belonged to the Hudson Valley gentry, and Franklin grew up amid private tutors, European travel, sailing on the Hudson, and the quiet confidence of inherited wealth. His mother, Sara, was a dominating presence in his life from childhood until her death in 1941 ^[2].

At fourteen he entered Groton School in Massachusetts, where headmaster Endicott Peabody preached public service as a duty of the privileged. Roosevelt absorbed the lesson. He went on to Harvard College, where he edited the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, and graduated in 1903 ^[1]. During his Harvard years his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt became president, and the younger Roosevelt began to see politics as a possible career rather than a spectator sport.

He studied law at Columbia University, passed the New York bar in 1907, and left without taking a degree. He practiced with a Wall Street firm but found the work dull ^[2]. In 1905 he had married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore's niece and his own fifth cousin once removed. The president himself gave the bride away at the wedding in New York City ^[3].

Roosevelt entered politics in 1910, winning a New York State Senate seat from a Republican-leaning Hudson Valley district as a Democrat, a mild surprise that he owed partly to his famous surname and partly to energetic campaigning by automobile ^[1]. In Albany he made a name fighting the Tammany Hall machine. His reward came in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy, the same post Theodore Roosevelt had once held. He kept it through the First World War, pushing for naval expansion and learning how a wartime bureaucracy actually worked ^[2].

The Democratic Party nominated him for vice president in 1920 on a ticket with James M. Cox. They lost badly to Warren Harding, but the national campaign made the 38-year-old Roosevelt a familiar figure in the party ^[1].

Then came the crisis that reshaped his life. In August 1921, while vacationing at Campobello Island, Roosevelt fell ill with what was diagnosed as poliomyelitis. The disease left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down ^[4]. Many assumed his career was finished. Instead he spent seven years in a determined rehabilitation effort, much of it at Warm Springs, Georgia, whose mineral waters he credited with easing his condition. He bought the resort in 1926 and turned it into a treatment center for polio patients ^[4]. Eleanor and his adviser Louis Howe kept his political network alive, and in 1928, at the urging of Governor Al Smith, he ran for governor of New York and narrowly won. Re-elected by a landslide in 1930 as the Depression deepened, he built a state relief program that became a rehearsal for what followed ^[2].

Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932 in a rout of the incumbent Herbert Hoover, carrying 42 of 48 states while roughly a quarter of the American workforce stood unemployed ^[5]. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, he told the country that the only thing it had to fear was fear itself, then moved with startling speed. The first hundred days of his administration produced a burst of legislation with few parallels in American history: an emergency banking act that stabilized a collapsing financial system, the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation among them ^[5].

He called the program the New Deal, and it changed the relationship between Americans and their national government. The Securities and Exchange Commission brought federal oversight to Wall Street. The Works Progress Administration, created in 1935, eventually employed millions of people building roads, schools, airports, and public art. The Social Security Act of 1935 established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, the foundation of the modern American welfare state ^[1]. The National Labor Relations Act of the same year guaranteed workers the right to organize unions.

Roosevelt communicated all of this directly to the public through radio broadcasts he called fireside chats, a conversational form that made a distant government feel personal ^[6]. Voters responded: in 1936 he won re-election with more than 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except Maine and Vermont ^[5]. His second term proved rockier. His 1937 plan to enlarge the Supreme Court, which had struck down several New Deal measures, failed in Congress and cost him political capital, and a sharp recession in 1937 and 1938 revived doubts about the recovery. Among the central Franklin D. Roosevelt facts, though, this endures: the Depression did not end on his watch until war production finished the job, but the institutions he built outlasted him by generations.

As Europe slid toward war in the late 1930s, Roosevelt worked against a strong isolationist current in Congress and the public. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939 he won revisions to the Neutrality Acts allowing arms sales to Britain and France, and in 1940 he traded fifty aging destroyers to Britain for base rights in the Atlantic ^[2]. That same year he broke the two-term tradition dating to George Washington and won an unprecedented third term, defeating Wendell Willkie ^[1].

In March 1941 he pushed the Lend-Lease Act through Congress, committing the United States to supply Britain, and later the Soviet Union and China, with vast quantities of war material. He described the American role as the arsenal of democracy ^[6]. In January 1941 he framed the stakes of the conflict in his Four Freedoms address: freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear ^[6].

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which Roosevelt called a date which will live in infamy, brought the United States fully into the war ^[1]. As commander in chief he set the broad strategy of defeating Germany first, backed the enormous industrial mobilization that armed the Allies, and authorized the secret Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. He met repeatedly with Winston Churchill, and with both Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in February 1945, conferences that plotted the invasion of Europe and sketched the postwar order, including the United Nations ^[7]. One decision from these years remains a deep stain on his record: Executive Order 9066, signed in February 1942, which led to the forced removal and incarceration of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, from the West Coast ^[5].

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had six children between 1906 and 1916, five of whom survived infancy: Anna, James, Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John ^[3]. The marriage endured a severe rupture in 1918, when Eleanor discovered her husband's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Divorce was considered and rejected, and the couple settled into a working partnership that grew more political than romantic. Eleanor became a public figure in her own right, and as first lady she traveled, wrote, and lobbied on civil rights, labor, and refugee questions, often pressing her husband further than he wished to go ^[3].

Roosevelt's paralysis shaped his daily existence in ways the public rarely saw. He used a wheelchair privately, wore heavy steel leg braces, and taught himself to appear to walk short distances by swiveling his hips while gripping a cane and a companion's arm. The press largely cooperated in avoiding photographs that showed his disability ^[4]. In 1938 he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, popularly known as the March of Dimes, which later funded the research behind the Salk polio vaccine ^[4].

Away from politics he collected stamps, loved the sea and naval history, and returned constantly to Hyde Park and to Warm Springs. Lucy Mercer, by then Lucy Rutherfurd, re-entered his life quietly during the war years and was with him on the day he died, a fact kept from Eleanor until afterward ^[3].

By 1944 Roosevelt was visibly failing. Physicians diagnosed severe hypertension and heart disease, though the details were withheld from the public ^[2]. He nevertheless ran for a fourth term, replacing Vice President Henry Wallace on the ticket with Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, and defeated Thomas E. Dewey in November 1944 ^[1].

In February 1945 he made the exhausting journey to Yalta in the Crimea for his final meeting with Churchill and Stalin. Observers were shocked by his gaunt appearance. On March 1 he reported to Congress on the conference while seated, referring openly, for once, to the ten pounds of steel around the bottom of his legs ^[7].

On April 12, 1945, while sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt complained of a terrific headache and collapsed. He died that afternoon of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 63, less than a month before Germany's surrender ^[1]. His body was carried north by funeral train past crowds lining the tracks, and he was buried in the rose garden of his Hyde Park estate.

Roosevelt's twelve years in office remade the American presidency. The federal government he left behind regulated banking and securities markets, insured bank deposits, guaranteed union rights, and paid pensions to the elderly, functions that had barely existed when he took the oath in 1933 ^[5]. The Democratic coalition he assembled, joining urban workers, farmers, Black voters in northern cities, and white southerners, dominated national politics for a generation. The two-term limit written into the Constitution by the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951 was a direct response to his four elections ^[1].

Historians and political scientists who rank the presidents consistently place him alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln at the top ^[2]. His record also draws serious criticism: the internment of Japanese Americans, the limited response to the plight of European Jews before and during the Holocaust, and New Deal programs that often bent to segregationist pressure in the South. Any honest account of Franklin D. Roosevelt achievements has to weigh both ledgers.

His presence in American memory remains physical as well as political. His Hyde Park home and presidential library, the first such library in the national system, are run by the National Archives and the National Park Service ^[8]. A memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington, dedicated in 1997, presents his presidency in four outdoor rooms, one for each term. Students who look up a Franklin D. Roosevelt biography today find a man who could not stand without help and who nonetheless carried a frightened country through its worst depression and its largest war.