Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882–1945), thirty‐second president of the United States.Born in Hyde Park, New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt enjoyed a privileged upbringing that gave him great self‐confidence and a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He attended Groton School, Harvard College (Class of 1904), and Columbia Law School. Having as a young adult fantasized about following in the footsteps of his distant cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, he gained a closer relationship with his idol in 1905 when he married the president's niece (and his own fifth cousin, once removed), Eleanor Roosevelt. They had five children.

A New York State senator (1911–1913) and assistant secretary of the navy (1913–1920), Roosevelt won the Democratic party's vice presidential nomination in 1920, running unsuccessfully on a ticket headed by James M. Cox. His confidence was temporarily shaken in 1921 when poliomyelitis cost him the use of his legs and thereafter confined him mostly to a wheelchair. But his paralysis enabled him to identify with people who suffered in other ways—and they with him. After he was elected governor of New York in 1928, his presidential aspirations were boosted by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, which discredited President Herbert Hoover and allowed Roosevelt to win the Democratic nomination and sweep to victory in 1932.

As the economy hit bottom, Roosevelt launched an unprecedented legislative program—the New Deal—that addressed the immediate crisis and instituted lasting reform. The New Deal's first “Hundred Days” produced a flurry of Depression‐fighting agencies, including the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, to list only a few. Roosevelt's informal radio talks, billed as “Fireside Chats,” reassured a fearful nation.

The Depression created a constituency for active government and bold new approaches, and Roosevelt, never a systematic thinker, oversaw an eclectic program. The Social Security Act (1935); the National Labor Relations Act (1935), assuring workers' right to join unions; and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), setting maximum working hours and a minimum wage, rank among the New Deal's lasting achievements. The 1936 election produced a Roosevelt landslide. His ill‐advised 1937 effort to reorganize the U.S. Supreme Court produced a significant backlash, however, and Republicans made steady gains in subsequent elections.

Roosevelt drew advisers and top administrators from outsider groups, including Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and recent immigrants. He appointed the first woman Cabinet member ( Frances Perkins as secretary of labor); provided the first federal aid to the arts; redefined the Democratic party as the champion of the poor, the middle class, and organized labor; and moved toward an alliance with African Americans and other minority groups. For the rest of the twentieth century, the Democrats would be identified as the party of activist government, the disadvantaged, and a variously defined “liberalism.” For half a century after his death, Franklin Roosevelt would be the magnet around which politicians arranged themselves, like iron filings attracted to or repelled by the polarizing force of his record and policies.

An altered relationship between the American people and their government was another of Roosevelt's legacies. Before 1933, most Americans had contact with the federal government only through mail delivery or wartime drafts. When Roosevelt died in 1945, the government's increased involvement in the economy and society, in World War II even more than during the Depression, had vastly expanded the variety and frequency of contacts between the people and Washington.

Eleanor Roosevelt loomed large in her husband's presidency, traveling widely, reporting her observations, and championing the underdog. Despite their political partnership, however, the Roosevelts grew apart personally, and each found intimacy outside marriage, FDR with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, with whom he had a long‐term relationship.

The outbreak of war in 1939 presented Roosevelt with a new crisis and a new rationale to remain in office. Breaking with the two‐term tradition established by George Washington, Roosevelt handily won a third term in 1940. World War II dominated the rest of his presidency. Japan's 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, combined with the clear evil of Nazism, united the American people to an extraordinary degree. This unity helped Roosevelt mobilize previously depressed industries to a remarkable level of military production. Working with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt not only forged a wartime alliance, but laid the groundwork for a postwar order, including the United Nations and international economic organizations, designed to lessen the chances of another depression or world war.

Roosevelt's presidency coincided with Adolf Hitler's years as dictator of Germany, and the contrast between them says much about FDR. He was supremely assured; Hitler pathologically insecure. Both were highly effective orators, but with markedly different techniques. While FDR rallied his friends (his radio talks customarily began, “My friends”), Hitler railed against his enemies. Roosevelt stirred compassion; Hitler incited hatred. Roosevelt's first inaugural address assured Americans that all they had to fear was “fear itself”; Hitler exacerbated his followers' irrational fears and prejudices. Roosevelt championed democracy; Hitler personified dictatorship. When the two men opposed each other in war, the world's fate rested on the outcome. Roosevelt's part in democracy's victory over fascism (albeit in alliance with the brutal regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin), combined with his role in bringing the United States through the Depression, secures his place in history. Critics would later fault Roosevelt for yielding too much to Stalin at the 1945 Yalta Conference, but most diplomatic historians contend that he played a weak hand as effectively as he could. As for one of Roosevelt's most momentous wartime decisions—to fund atomic‐bomb research—its full significance emerged only after his death.

At a time when democracy and capitalism were in crisis, Roosevelt revived confidence in both. Although the New Deal did not achieve full recovery (that came only with the war), the combination of Roosevelt's contagious optimism with the New Deal's palliative measures helped Americans surmount the worst economic crisis in their history without abandoning constitutional democracy. Similarly, the New Deal's relatively minor adjustments in the free‐enterprise system helped ensure capitalism's long‐term viability. Victory in the war against fascism, in which Roosevelt played a vital part, further strengthened both democracy and capitalism.

Franklin Roosevelt is generally acknowledged, even by those who disagree with some of his policies, as the most important U.S. president of the twentieth century, and among all presidents second only to Abraham Lincoln. His death in Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12 April 1945, on the eve of victory in World War II, produced a national outpouring of grief. His memory is preserved in his birthplace and burial site at Hyde Park, and in the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., opened in 1998.
See also Atlantic Charter; Bretton Woods Conference; Depressions, Economic; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations; Labor Movements; Manhattan Project; New Deal Era, The; Political Parties.

Bibliography

James MacGregor Burns , Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1956.
William E. Leuchtenburg , Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1964.
James MacGregor Burns . The Soldier of Freedom, 1970.
Kenneth S. Davis , FDR, 4 vols., 1985– .
Frank Freidel , Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny, 1990.
Patrick J. Maney . The Roosevelt Presence, 1992.
Doris Kearns Goodwin , No Ordinary Time, 1995.

Robert S. McElvaine