Roosevelt Franklin Delano

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945), 32nd president of the United States (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, New York, on January 30, 1882, he was the only child of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. 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, 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, 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 (1929-1933), 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 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 United States 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 December 7, 1941, brought the United States 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 Tehran (Teheran) (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, Georgia, 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.”