Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882–1945) 32nd president of the United States. Born to a wealthy upstate New York family, Roosevelt was raised to a life of privilege. After graduating from Harvard and attending Columbia Law School, he practiced law and ran successfully for the state Senate in 1910. Although he won reelection easily in 1912, he left Albany in 1913 to become assistant secretary of the navy, in which position he advocated preparedness for World War I. He left the navy post in 1920 to make an unsuccessful run for the vice presidency, with James M. Cox at the head of the ticket. A crippling attack of polio in 1921 led him to spend the next several years searching in vain for some treatment that would enable him to regain use of his legs. He returned to public life in 1928 with a successful run for the governorship of New York, where he developed modest programs to help combat the devastation of the Depression and began to call for federal efforts to combat the economic ruin facing the country. In 1932, having won a huge reelection victory in 1930, he took the Democratic nomination for president on the fourth ballot, pledging “a New Deal” for the country. He defeated Herbert Hoover by a comfortable margin and immediately began a remarkable campaign to rebuild the U.S. economy by creating numerous federal agencies that would offer employment opportunities to those out of work while providing economic support to those who could not work. These and other programs enjoyed varying degrees of success, but they began to change the nation's despairing mood. A second round of legislative initiatives, in 1935, dubbed the “Second New Deal,” produced profound and sometimes permanent changes in the government's role in America's social patterns. As World War II threatened the world's security, he also gradually moved the nation from its postwar isolationism to more active support of Great Britain, in particular, winning congressional approval for Lend-Lease in 1940, which allowed him to provide Britain with arms without receiving payment for them; in 1941 he and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, in which they condemned fascism and called for national self-determination. Later that year, he extended Lend-Lease to cover Russia. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, which Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy,” the United States faced a two-front war; Roosevelt decided to concentrate on the war in Europe first. By 1943, the tide of the war seemed to have finally turned. In a series of summit meetings, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Josef Stalin negotiated plans for a long-planned Allied invasion of France's channel coast; the invasion was finally launched on June 6, 1944, D-Day. Roosevelt easily won reelection to a fourth term in 1944; at a final summit, at Yalta, in the Crimea, in January 1945, he appeared frail and ill but vigorously participated in planning for a postwar Europe, although a real accord was reached only on division of Germany. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, in April.