FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

THE 32ND PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(1933-1945)

ROOSEVELT, Franklin Delano (FDR) (1882–1945), 32nd president of the U.S. (1933–45); elected for an unprecedented four terms, he was one of the 20th century’s most skillful political leaders. His New Deal program, a response to the Great Depression, utilized the federal government as an instrument of social and economic change in contrast to its traditionally passive role. Then, in World War II, he led the Allies in their defeat of the Axis powers.   Early Life. Born at Hyde Park, N.Y., on Jan. 30, 1882, he was the only child of James Roosevelt (1828–1900) and Sara Delano Roosevelt (1855–1941). His father, a semiretired railway executive, was a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the U.S. Although they were not wealthy by late 19th-century standards, the Roosevelts of Hyde Park led a comfortable, gracious existence, and young Franklin’s life was sheltered; he was educated by governesses and indulged by his father. A handsome youth, he was an excellent athlete, expert at boating and swimming, and he also collected stamps, birds, and ship models—hobbies that he pursued all his life. His formal education began at the Groton School in Massachusetts, where the headmaster, Endicott Peabody (1857–1944), stressed to his affluent young students their obligation toward those who were less fortunate in society. After graduation from Harvard University in 1904, Roosevelt attended Columbia University Law School without taking a degree and was admitted to the New York State bar in 1907. In 1905, despite his widowed mother’s objections, he married a distant cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, in a gala society wedding at which President Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away.   The Beginning of Roosevelt’s Political Career. Franklin Roosevelt’s political career began with his election to the New York State Senate as a Democrat in 1910. He quickly gained attention as the leader of an upstate coalition that fought the influence of New York City’s Democratic machine. His support of Woodrow Wilson’s candidacy as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1912 resulted in his appointment to the post of assistant secretary of the navy, which he held during World War I. James M. Cox of Ohio, the party’s 1920 nominee for the presidency, chose Roosevelt as his running mate because of his family name, but the Cox-Roosevelt ticket proved to be no match for the Republicans under Warren G. Harding. Roosevelt faced the greatest personal crisis of his life when he was stricken by poliomyelitis at his Canadian summer home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, in 1921. He veiled his deep physical agony with a cheerful demeanor and rejected his mother’s advice that he abandon politics and become a country squire at Hyde Park. Encouraged by Eleanor and his dedicated political mentor, Louis McHenry Howe (1871–1936), he resumed his career by nominating Alfred E. Smith for the presidency at the Democratic convention in 1924 and again in 1928, when Smith won the party’s nomination. The Democratic party of the 1920s was deeply divided between Protestant, rural voters, who favored Prohibition, and urban Roman Catholics, who opposed it. Anxious to win the New York State electoral vote, Smith persuaded Roosevelt to campaign for the governorship, given the latter’s strong upstate appeal. Roosevelt, deeply in debt and disabled by polio, won a narrow victory, while Smith was defeated by Herbert Hoover.   Governor of New York. During two terms as governor of New York (1929–33), Roosevelt established a reputation as a reforming progressive in the Theodore Roosevelt tradition and as a champion of relief for impoverished upstate farmers. His greatest struggle—for control of the Saint Lawrence River waterpower resource by the state rather than private utilities—aimed at providing cheaper electricity for the rural consumer. With the outbreak of the Great Depression, he identified himself with the urban relief cause by appointing Harry Hopkins to head the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. As the depression deepened, he assembled the "Brain Trust," a group of faculty members from Columbia University, to formulate with him a comprehensive program for resolving the economic collapse that had begun in 1929. With the aid of a progressive– southern Democratic coalition in 1932, Roosevelt won the party’s presidential nomination, then easily defeated Hoover in the national election.   Assassination attempt. On February 15, 1933 in Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at Roosevelt. The assassination attempt occurred less than three weeks before Roosevelt was sworn in for his first term in office. Although the President-elect was not hurt, four other people were wounded and Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was killed. Zangara was found guilty of murder and was executed March 20, 1933. The writer John William Tuohy has suggested that Cermak, not Roosevelt, was the intended target, but this is not a consensus of historians. The mayor was a strong foe of Al Capone's Chicago mob.   Roosevelt as President. Roosevelt’s promise of "a new deal for the American people" foreshadowed a revolutionary extension of federal power into the nation’s everyday life.   The effort to restore prosperity. His first three months in office, known as the Hundred Days, were marked by innovative legislation originating in the executive branch. In a period of massive unemployment (25 percent of the work force), a collapsed stock market, thousands of bank closings for lack of liquidity, and agricultural prices that had fallen below the cost of production, Congress, at Roosevelt’s request, passed a series of emergency measures calculated to provide liquidity for banking institutions and relief for the individual and to prevent business bankruptcy. Further, abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 had the effect of devaluing the dollar in international markets. In addition to relief measures, such as creation of the Works Progress Administration under the direction of Harry Hopkins, the New Deal, aimed at long-range economic solutions to problems stemming from World War I. The farm depression, a result of overproduction, had begun in 1921 and sent millions to the cities during the 1920s; Roosevelt regarded it as the root cause of the economic collapse of the late 1920s. He responded with a broad agricultural program framed by the Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933 and 1938. This legislation introduced production controls for certain basic commodities in order to create a balance between supply and demand; it promoted reforestation and conservation; and it provided subsidy payments for curtailed planting. The program of the Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933, included construction of dams to produce hydroelectric power, water management, improvement of farming techniques and river navigation, and construction of hospitals and schools. New industries attracted by low-cost electricity and labor diversified the southern economy and benefited an impoverished area.   The New Deal coalition. Although Roosevelt’s ties to the city and organized labor were never strong, many New Deal measures alienated the business community; at the same time, they attracted blacks and other urban minorities and the labor movement into the Democratic party, thus forming the New Deal coalition. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) began as an industrial stabilization scheme designed to eliminate cutthroat practices and maintain prices. Section 7a of the law, which promoted labor unionization, alienated conservative businesspeople, however. Strict securities-issuance and stock exchange regulation, enforced by the new Securities and Exchange Commission, intensified business opposition. Benefits provided by the Social Security Act, by unemployment insurance legislation, and by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 attracted workers’ support. In 1935 and 1936 the traditional-minded U.S. Supreme Court struck at key New Deal measures by declaring provisions of both the NIRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional.   Second term. After winning a resounding victory over Alfred M. Landon in the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt tried to neutralize the Court by proposing the appointment of new justices, but Congress rejected this "court-packing" plan in 1937. In the ensuing years a congressional coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats, fearful of growing federal spending in the 1937–38 depression and anxious to curtail expansion of federal power into areas traditionally reserved to the states, checked the New Deal’s momentum. The imminence of war in Europe, followed by U.S. involvement, drew attention away from the president’s domestic defeats and made possible his victories over Republican candidates Wendell L. Willkie in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey in 1944.   Prewar foreign policy. Roosevelt was a pragmatist in his diplomatic views in the interwar period. Although he had been a supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he abandoned Wilson’s internationalist ideas when the country turned to isolationism in the 1920s. Then, in the late 1930s, spurred by Adolf Hitler’s aggression in Europe and Japanese expansionism in the Pacific, Roosevelt moved the U.S. back toward engagement in world affairs. He was restrained, however, by the persistence of strong isolationist sentiment among the voters and by congressional passage of a series of neutrality laws intended to prevent American involvement in a second world war. Roosevelt won the contest when, alarmed by Germany’s defeat of France in 1940, Congress passed his Lend-Lease legislation to help Great Britain’s continued resistance to the Germans. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, brought the U.S. into the war on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union.   World War II. Roosevelt framed his diplomatic objectives as wartime leader in a series of wartime conferences. In collaboration with Winston Churchill he explained Anglo-American war aims in August 1941 in the form of the Atlantic Charter. It denied territorial ambitions, favored self-government and liberal international trade arrangements, and pledged freedom from want and permanent security against aggression. At Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on Germany’s unconditional surrender as a means of preventing the enemy’s future military resurgence. The Québec Conference (August 1943) planned the Normandy invasion. At Moscow (October 1943) the Allied foreign ministers approved in principle a postwar organization for world security. Military strategy and the problem of postwar Germany came under discussion at Cairo (November–December 1943) and Québec (September 1944). Finally, at Yalta in the USSR (February 1945), Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin broached their plans for a postwar world. In the process, Roosevelt pressed for admission of China to the Allied councils as a major power, liberalization of international trade as a means of preventing future wars, and creation of a United Nations organization as a mechanism for preserving peace. He did not, however, see the end of the war. Roosevelt’s vision of a peaceful and stable postwar world foundered on national ambition. Although he bypassed Churchill and a weakened Great Britain to deal with Stalin at Yalta, it became apparent on the eve of his death that Soviet ambitions included the occupation of eastern and central Europe. His faith in the ability of the UN to keep the peace through the collaboration of the former wartime Allies proved unworkable in the era of the cold war. The New Deal coalition lasted for many years after Roosevelt’s death. In addition, his long tenure in office during the crisis years of the Great Depression and World War II laid the groundwork for what later became known as the "imperial presidency." The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum (1940), the nation’s first presidential library, is located in Hyde Park.   Death and funeral. On March 29, 1945, Roosevelt went to the Little White House at Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest before his anticipated appearance at the founding conference of the United Nations. On the afternoon of April 12, Roosevelt said, "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head." He then slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom. The president's attending cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, diagnosed a massive cerebral hemorrhage (stroke). At 3:35 pm that day, Roosevelt died. As Allen Drury later said, “so ended an era, and so began another.” After Roosevelt's death, an editorial by The New York Times declared, "Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House". At the time he collapsed, Roosevelt had been sitting for a portrait painting by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, known as the famous Unfinished Portrait of FDR. In his later years at the White House, when Roosevelt was increasingly overworked, his daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger had moved in to provide her father companionship and support. Anna had also arranged for her father to meet with his former mistress, the now widowed Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Shoumatoff, who maintained close friendships with both Roosevelt and Mercer, rushed Mercer away to avoid negative publicity and implications of infidelity. When Eleanor heard about her husband's death, she was also faced with the news that Anna had been arranging these meetings with Mercer and that Mercer had been with Franklin when he died. On the morning of April 13, Roosevelt's body was placed in a flag-draped coffin and loaded onto the presidential train. After a White House funeral on April 14, Roosevelt was transported back to Hyde Park by train, guarded by four servicemen, one each from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. As was his wish, Roosevelt was buried in the Rose Garden of the Springwood estate, the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park on April 15. Eleanor, who died in November 1962, was buried next to him. Roosevelt's death was met with shock and grief across the U.S. and around the world. His declining health had not been known to the general public. Roosevelt had been president for more than 12 years, longer than any other person, and had led the country through some of its greatest crises to the impending defeat of Nazi Germany and within sight of the defeat of Japan as well. Less than a month after his death, on May 8, the war in Europe ended. President Harry S. Truman, who turned 61 that day, dedicated Victory in Europe Day and its celebrations to Roosevelt's memory, and kept the flags across the U.S. at half-staff for the remainder of the 30-day mourning period, saying that his only wish was "that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day."