Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (b. Hyde Park, N.Y., 30 Jan. 1882; d. Warm Springs, Ga., 12 Apr. 1945), president of the United States, 1933–1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency was the longest and one of the most acclaimed in United States history. During his twelve years in office the New Deal helped to transform the structure of American government by expanding the scope and reach of federal power, by modernizing the federal bureaucracy, and by bringing into government many bright reformers who were committed to making government work to solve the social, political, and economic problems that confronted the country.

Roosevelt attended Columbia Law School for three years after his graduation from Harvard. Following admission to the New York bar, he briefly practiced in a Wall Street firm (1907–1910). He again was a member of a firm during the 1920s, but he served mainly as a name to attract clients, not as a practitioner. Roosevelt relished politics; he was a superb politician with a genius for public communication and building coalitions. He was a patrician who could trace his roots in the United States to the seventeenth century ( Theodore Roosevelt was his fifth cousin), yet he was perhaps the most loved national politician of this century, easily winning four presidential elections—one, of record‐setting landslide proportions. At the age of twenty‐eight he was elected as a Democrat to the New York senate. He served in President Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as assistant secretary of the navy and lost as the Democratic vice presidential candidate in James Cox's defeat by Warren G. Harding in 1920. FDR twice won election as governor of New York, and in 1932 he secured the Democratic nomination for president. In his convincing electoral triumph over President Herbert Hoover, he forged a coalition of Progressives, northern urban liberals, conservative southern Democrats, labor unions, farmers, middle‐ and lower‐class white ethnic groups, and African‐Americans that survived almost intact for fifty years.

Roosevelt held to no fixed political vision. Rather, he had a commitment to using the federal government to accomplish tasks that he and his advisers believed were necessary to move America forward—first out of the Great Depression, and then toward victory over Axis powers in World War II. During the first hundred days (the “first New Deal”), he launched federal efforts to reform banking laws and relieve the plight of farmers and later to regulate securities. The centerpiece of his economic recovery measure was the National Recovery Administration, which was a cooperative effort between business, labor, and government. After the Supreme Court struck down the NRA, and after his overwhelming electoral victory in 1936 (which also created enormous Democratic margins in Congress), FDR switched from cooperation to confrontation with business and the wealthy. His “second New Deal” included the passage of the Wagner Act (guaranteeing unions the right to organize and bargain collectively), a large increase in the tax rate of the most wealthy, the Social Security Act, further banking reform, and the most massive public works program undertaken in American history. As he lost support for his more radical reform efforts, and as World War II began, he switched back to the more cooperative politics of the first New Deal.

Unlike another lawyer‐president, William Howard Taft, FDR had little reverence for the traditions of the Supreme Court as an institution, nor did he worship constitutional precedents. He perceived the Constitution as a document that must change to accommodate modern economic and social conditions of the country. These views led Roosevelt to the most strident and direct clash between the executive branch and the judiciary in the twentieth century: the court‐packing struggle of 1937.

Fearing that the Supreme Court—dominated in 1936–1937 by its conservative bloc joined by Justice Owen Roberts and often by Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes—would stymie New Deal efforts to cope with the Depression, FDR proposed a bill that would permit him to name additional justices to the Court and judges to the lower federal courts equal in number to jurists with ten years' service who had attained the age of seventy and refused to retire. The proposal encountered immediate and powerful opposition. Meanwhile, the Court handed down its decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which by a 5‐to‐4 margin upheld a state minimum‐wage law for women and minors, thus signaling a reversal of its hostility to federal and state legislation that regulated the economy. When Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his retirement, it became apparent that the president would soon be able to nominate enough justices to assure the permanence of this turn‐around. When the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the bill out negatively, FDR lost the legislative battle but won the war for the soul of the Supreme Court.

Roosevelt named nine justices to the court, second only to the number of justices appointed by George Washington. The only seat on the Court not filled by FDR at the time of his death was that of Owen Roberts. He nominated the populist senator Hugo Black to replace Willis Van Devanter. Solicitor General Stanley Reed, who had argued many important agency cases, filled the vacancy caused by George Sutherland's resignation. Felix Frankfurter, Harvard Law School professor and a crucial member of FDR's brain trust, was named to Benjamin N. Cardozo's seat. Former Yale Law School professor and chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, William O. Douglas, succeeded Louis D. Brandeis. Attorney General Frank Murphy replaced Pierce Butler, and his replacement as attorney general, Robert H. Jackson, filled Harlan F. Stone's seat when Stone replaced Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. FDR named Senator James Byrnes to James McReynolds' seat. Byrnes resigned after only one year to take a place in the president's war cabinet and was replaced by Wiley Rutledge, a federal appellate judge who had supported court packing while dean of the University of Iowa law school. Eight of the nine men named had directly served in the New Deal, and Rutledge in writings before and on the bench had shown himself to be supportive of New Deal measures. All were selected in large part because they agreed with the issues that mattered most to FDR; that is, they were certain to take an expansive view of the power of Congress to regulate the economic life of the nation under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. After 1938 no New Deal legislation was declared unconstitutional, and the doctrine of substantive due process rapidly withered in areas of economic regulation. FDR had no integrated constitutional philosophy that his appointees fit. They were diverse, and as the issues before the Court shifted from the scope of federal regulatory power to issues of social justice and the protection of civil rights and civil liberties in an expanded governmental state, they differed, often quite sharply, about the nature of government and judicial power.

Franklin Roosevelt had the most profound influence on the Supreme Court of any president in the twentieth century, partly because of the longevity of the justices he appointed; Douglas served thirty‐six years, Black thirty‐three years, Frankfurter twenty‐three years, and Reed nineteen years. Five of the justices deciding the most famous twentieth‐century case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), were Roosevelt appointees. Additionally, other justices appointed later were in some measure New Dealers. Justice Abe Fortas had served in the Roosevelt administration, and others such as Justices Arthur Goldberg, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall were profoundly influenced by the New Deal. Perhaps Roosevelt's most enduring legacy is that the issues with which the Supreme Court dealt during the last half of the twentieth century were framed and shaped by the transformation of federal power and the federal government that FDR had created.

See also Court‐Packing Plan; History of the Court: The Depression and the Rise of Legal Liberalism; New Deal.

Bibliography

William E. Leuchtenburg , Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940 (1963).
Paul L. Murphy , The Constitution in Crisis Times, 1918–1969 (1972).

Rayman L. Solomon