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ROOSEVELT, Franklin Delano
(1882–1945), 32d 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.
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.
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.
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.
Roosevelt’s promise of “a new deal for the
American people” foreshadowed a revolutionary extension
of federal power into the nation’s everyday life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Ga., on April
12, 1945.
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.