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ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York. He was the only child of James and Sara (Delano) Roosevelt. Franklin had a half brother, James Roosevelt, Jr., nicknamed Rosy, whose mother was the first wife of James Roosevelt, Sr. Sara Delano was 26 years old when she married the 52-year-old widower. Of Dutch ancestry, James Roosevelt, Sr., was a wealthy landowner in Hyde Park, a small town along the Hudson River north of New York City. Roosevelt was a Harvard-educated lawyer who served as vice president of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad. He had been a Whig, but after the collapse of the Whig Party due to the slavery issue, he became a Democrat.

James Roosevelt's loyalty to the Democratic Party was weakened by his economic conservatism and his family ties to Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican and his distant cousin from Long Island. In the presidential election of 1896, James Roosevelt was a so-called Gold Democrat who voted for the victorious Republican presidential nominee, William McKinley. Roosevelt was repelled by William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential nominee. He perceived Bryan as a rabble rouser and economic radical who threatened the gold standard. Roosevelt again voted for McKinley in 1900 when the president chose Theodore Roosevelt as his running mate. James Roosevelt died one month after the 1900 presidential election.

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

As a boy tutored at home in Hyde Park and then as a prep school student at the Groton School in Massachusetts, Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated little interest in reading or learning about history and politics. He first expressed an interest in politics while eagerly following the career of Theodore Roosevelt as his cousin rapidly progressed from combat heroism in the Spanish-American War to the presidency. Nonetheless, Franklin Roosevelt's famous surname did not gain popularity and status for him among his classmates and teachers at the Groton School and Harvard University. Widely regarded by his peers and teachers as amiable yet superficial, Roosevelt did not distinguish himself in academics, athletics, student government, or social clubs.

Eleanor Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt's wife, (Anna) Eleanor Roosevelt, was another major influence in the development of his social conscience and political career. She was his distant cousin and the favorite niece of Theodore Roosevelt. She and Franklin were married in 1905. Her uncle, while president, gave away the bride. After completing one year of studies at Columbia University's law school, Franklin Roosevelt worked for a Wall Street law firm. He was often assigned minor clerical duties and soon became bored and frustrated with the practice of law.

During their courtship, Eleanor Roosevelt had volunteered in settlement houses in New York City. She showed her future husband the wretched living conditions of immigrants and their children. More so than Franklin, Eleanor earnestly and zealously identified with the ideals of the Progressive movement and its efforts to abolish child labor, improve public health and education, reduce poverty, and grant suffrage to women.

New York politics. As Roosevelt pondered his political future, it was still not clear if he would enter politics as a progressive Republican or a progressive Democrat. According to biographer Geoffrey C. Ward, Franklin Roosevelt decided to enter politics as a Democrat because Theodore Roosevelt had several sons who were expected to enter politics as Republicans. Also, since Franklin Roosevelt's home county, Dutchess County, was heavily Republican, local Democratic politicians were often desperate to recruit patrician candidates who could finance their own campaigns and attract Republican votes.

Roosevelt was offered such an opportunity in 1910 when John E. Mack, the Democratic district attorney of Poughkeepsie, visited Roosevelt's law office and asked him to run for a seat from Dutchess County in the state senate. Roosevelt eagerly accepted the offer. In his campaign, Roosevelt asserted his political independence, especially by denouncing the machine politics and corruption of Tammany Hall and dissociating it from the progressive wing of New York's Democratic Party. Attracting the votes of Democrats, concentrated in Poughkeepsie, as well as progressive Republicans and mostly Republican friends and neighbors in Hyde Park and other small towns, Roosevelt won the election. He also benefited from the national Democratic sweep of the 1910 midterm elections.

During his one term in the New York state senate, Roosevelt was disliked and dismissed by most Democrats in the state legislature, especially those from New York City. They perceived him as a political lightweight and a publicity-hungry dilettante, and they resented his self-righteous denunciations of Tammany Hall. Like progressives in both parties, Roosevelt supported the adoption of primaries to determine party nominations and the direct election of U.S. senators.

The Wilson administration. Franklin Roosevelt first met Woodrow Wilson in November 1911 after Wilson had served less than a year as governor of New Jersey. Roosevelt was impressed by Wilson's intellect, ethics, inspiring rhetoric, and ability to break up the Democratic machine of Jim Smith and achieve progressive reforms in New Jersey. The young state senator now had a new mentor for his political career and ambition to distinguish himself as a progressive Democrat. Roosevelt subsequently supported Wilson's presidential nomination at the 1912 Democratic national convention. Tammany Hall Democrats backed Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri for president. After Wilson became president, he rewarded Roosevelt's loyalty—which had continued through the general election despite the entry into the race of Theodore Roosevelt as the candidate of the newly created Progressive Party—by appointing him assistant secretary of the navy.

To Roosevelt's dismay, Wilson continued to provide patronage to Democratic machines, including Tammany Hall. Until the American entry into World War I, Roosevelt had little control over the distribution of his department's patronage and contracts in New York. But he gained greater political influence in New York during the American war effort as he oversaw defense contracts and navy shipyards and bases there. Meanwhile, Louis Howe, a former newspaper reporter and close aide to Roosevelt, arranged for Roosevelt's control over post office patronage in upstate New York.

Roosevelt also used his position as assistant secretary of the navy to conduct a widely publicized inspection tour of war-torn Europe. He sought a political reconciliation with Tammany Hall, but he politely declined its offer to nominate him for governor in 1918. Roosevelt wanted to remain in the Wilson administration and took a greater interest in foreign policy, especially in Wilson's effort to gain a leading role for the United States in the League of Nations after the war ended.

ROOSEVELT AND THE 1920s

With his service in the New York state legislature and as assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt's career had closely paralleled that of Theodore Roosevelt. Likewise, just as his Republican cousin accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1900, Franklin Roosevelt readily accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1920. He had no illusions that James Cox, the Democratic presidential nominee, could win the election. Inflation, growing public disillusionment about American participation in World War I, and the unpopularity of the ailing Wilson and the League of Nations indicated a Republican landslide in the 1920 elections. Instead, Roosevelt valued his vice presidential candidacy as an opportunity to meet Democratic politicians throughout the nation. He also earned their respect for his willingness to serve as the running mate in a doomed presidential campaign and to defend Wilson's unpopular position on the League of Nations.

Until he was elected governor of New York in 1928, Roosevelt remained a private citizen. Despite being stricken with infantile paralysis, commonly known as polio, in 1921, Roosevelt energetically tried to make the Democratic Party, both nationally and in New York, a more thoroughly progressive or liberal party that would provide voters with a clear, attractive alternative to the Republican Party in public policy and ideology. He persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt to join the women's division of the Democratic state committee and improve the participation of women in the New York Democratic Party, especially in upstate areas. Roosevelt also tried to reduce the divisive impact of the prohibition issue within the New York and national Democratic parties. After Calvin Coolidge's landslide election in 1924, Roosevelt noticed that Robert La Follette, the National Progressive Party's nominee for president, performed unusually well for a minor party candidate during the apparently prosperous, Republican-dominated era. La Follette's economic platform was similar to that of Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 "Bull Moose" platform. It was especially appealing to economically distressed farmers, miners, and factory workers. Nationally, La Follette received 16 percent of the popular votes compared to the 29 percent received by John Davis, the obscure, conservative Democratic nominee for president. In some states and congressional districts, La Follette ran ahead of Davis.

Roosevelt attributed La Follette's relatively impressive performance and Davis's comparatively poor showing to the ideological and programmatic fact that La Follette offered economically distressed voters an attractive alternative to the Republican Party's pro-big business, anti-labor, high tariff policies, while the Democratic Party did not. He was now convinced that the Democratic Party must become a distinctly liberal party in order to emerge as the new majority in the two-party system and win future presidential elections and majorities in Congress. Meanwhile, Roosevelt wanted his party to avoid the divisive social issues, such as racial segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, Catholicism, and prohibition that plagued it at the 1924 and 1928 Democratic national conventions.

After New York governor Al Smith became the 1928 Democratic nominee for president, he asked Roosevelt to run for governor. Roosevelt reluctantly accepted Smith's offer, and was narrowly elected governor in an upset victory, while Smith lost the presidential election by a wide margin and failed to carry his home state. Even before the Great Depression began in late 1929, Roosevelt ambitiously pursued policies intended to serve as a harbinger of what he might do in the future if elected president. In order to make the New York Democratic Party and his governorship more attractive to mostly Republican, rural, upstate voters, he advocated state-sponsored, low-cost hydroelectric power for rural areas, farm-to-market paved roads and highways, property tax relief for farmers, and unemployment insurance. He communicated directly to New Yorkers through radio broadcasts as a way to circumvent the mostly Republican-owned newspapers.

PRESIDENTIAL AMBITION

Because the state legislature was controlled by Republicans, most of Roosevelt's legislation was either defeated or heavily compromised and diluted. Nevertheless, as Roosevelt prepared for his gubernatorial re-election campaign, he had succeeded in projecting the image of an effective, dynamic, innovative leader who addressed the immediate economic concerns of Depression-plagued New Yorkers, both urban and rural, agricultural and industrial, Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Democrat. Before the Great Depression began, Roosevelt had planned on running for president in 1936. But as the Great Depression worsened and President Herbert Hoover seemed unlikely to be reelected, Roosevelt decided to run in 1932. With the help of political aides Louis Howe, Edward Flynn, and James Farley, Roosevelt wanted to be reelected in 1930 by such an overwhelming margin, especially in staunchly Republican rural areas, that his victory would impress and persuade major Democratic politicians, especially those from the South and West, to commit their delegates to him before the 1932 Democratic national convention began its proceedings in Chicago.

Roosevelt was re-elected governor in 1930 with 62 percent of the popular votes. More significantly, the governor carried forty-one of the fifty-seven counties outside of New York City and received a plurality of more than 167,000 votes in mostly Republican upstate counties. Using these electoral statistics and Roosevelt's popular policy agenda, Farley and Flynn traveled throughout the United States promoting Roosevelt's presidential candidacy to powerful Democrats, such as Tom Pendergast, the machine boss of Kansas City, and Huey Long, a Louisiana senator and the virtual dictator of that state. Farley and Flynn generally avoided urban Catholic Democratic machine politicians from the Northeast and Midwest. They assumed that most Catholic Democrats would unite behind Al Smith, who was Roman Catholic, for the presidential nomination and understood that Roosevelt had alienated Catholic machine politicians since the governor had initiated a highly publicized investigation of Tammany Hall, the courts, and the police department of New York City.

After he had become afflicted with polio, Roosevelt regularly traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, to soothe and refresh himself in its mineral waters. As he became more personally and politically familiar with the South during the 1920s and early 1930s, Roosevelt began to study and propose policy solutions to economic problems that were either peculiar to or especially severe in the South. He recognized the need for greater federal intervention in such policy areas as cotton growing, rural electrification, soil conservation, highway construction, and irrigation and flood control projects in order for the South to modernize and develop its economy. Unlike Smith, Roosevelt agreed with southern Democrats on the need to reduce tariffs significantly and revise the federal tax code in order to stimulate this chronically depressed region.

With overwhelming support from southern delegates and fairly solid backing from western delegates, Roosevelt won the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination on the fourth ballot. The Democratic national platform and Roosevelt's campaign speeches were ideologically and programmatically confusing and contradictory. The Democrats criticized Hoover and the Republican Party for excessive federal spending and regulations and a bloated federal bureaucracy that threatened states' rights and private enterprise. But they also promised more vigorous federal intervention to end the Great Depression, permanently reform the economy, reduce tariffs, balance the federal budget, and benefit farmers, laborers, business, and consumers. The Democrats also tried to appease both defenders and opponents of prohibition by promising to repeal national prohibition while giving states broad discretion to ban or regulate alcohol.

Roosevelt's only clear, consistent campaign proposal for economic recovery and reform was expressed in his Commonwealth Club address in San Francisco. In this speech, Roosevelt emphasized the need for government, business, labor, and agriculture to engage in economic cooperation and planning. He especially underscored the need for business to assume social responsibility for developing a more just, humane economic system.

Despite being paralyzed below his waist, Roosevelt energetically campaigned throughout the nation while Hoover rarely left the White House. Although there were more Republican than Democratic voters in 1932, Roosevelt won 57 percent of the popular votes and carried all but six states in the electoral college. His party also won large majorities in both houses of Congress. In his 1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt claimed that the underlying cause of the Great Depression was an unjust, irrational, ineffectively regulated economic system with a maldistribution of wealth. He also used biblical allusions to denounce the greed, callousness, and irresponsibility of big business. In the conclusion of this speech, the new president asked Congress to grant him "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Roosevelt frankly admitted that he had no clear, consistent economic philosophy or program to end the Great Depression because the nation had never previously experienced such a severe, complex, prolonged economic crisis. He sought to inspire the public's confidence about economic recovery, however, by asserting that he would boldly experiment with a variety of ideas and policies, and discard those that failed. Such tentative incrementalism was inevitable, though, since Roosevelt's top economic advisers and administration officials disagreed on how to analyze and eventually end the Great Depression. Raymond Moley, a leading member of Roosevelt's so-called Brains Trust, advocated a planned economy through cooperation between government and business. Negotiated yet government-enforced codes for prices, wages, working conditions, and agricultural and industrial production would stabilize and then improve the economy. They would also achieve social and economic reforms, such as minimum wages, maximum hours, the abolition of child labor, and legal rights for labor unions. Other administration officials, such as economist Robert Nathan, wanted to emphasize deficit spending on public works jobs and relief for the unemployed in order to increase mass consumption. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau respectively wanted to concentrate on international trade agreements and monetary policy to stimulate the economy.

When Roosevelt and his speech writers first used the term New Deal, a reference from Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, during the 1932 campaign, they hoped to evoke favorable comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal and Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom progressivism. During Roosevelt's "First Hundred Days" as president, though, the most innovative of the administration's legislation that Congress passed mostly reflected the economic planning and cooperation of the Brains Trust. Distinct from the more conventional relief and public works programs, such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA), that Congress quickly passed, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) were the programmatic and intellectual foundation of the first New Deal's emphasis on federally enforced controls on prices, wages, trading practices, and production. In 1935 and 1936, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court struck down the NRA and AAA, the essence of the first New Deal.

Partially because of these Supreme Court decisions, the second New Deal emerged by the middle of 1935. The adoption of the National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act), the Social Security Act, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 signified the beginning of the second New Deal. The second New Deal emphasized more "pump priming" to reduce poverty and unemployment and increase mass consumption through programs like the WPA, while adding new social welfare benefits, such as retirement pensions and unemployment insurance. It also pursued a more antagonistic approach to big business, major banks, and stock brokers through a more vigorous use of antitrust powers and a broader distribution of income and the tax burden through the Wealth Tax Act of 1935, although the latter accomplished little.

Roosevelt's pursuit of the second New Deal was also politically motivated by his desire to disperse and co-opt various economic protest movements and critics from the left and assure his own re-election in 1936 and the transformation of the Democratic Party as the new, enduring majority party in American politics and government. Politically, the Wealth Tax and the Social Security Act's pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to dependent children were intended to reduce the political appeal of Huey Long and Francis Townsend, respectively. Townsend advocated federal retirement pensions for all elderly Americans, while Long's "Share Our Wealth" movement sought to heavily tax the wealthy and big business in order to redistribute income equitably and end poverty.

Likewise, Roosevelt eventually yet reluctantly signed the Wagner Act of 1935 in preparation for the 1936 election. John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers (UMW) labor union, was a Republican who endorsed Hoover in 1932, but the Wagner Act and other New Deal measures led him to endorse Roosevelt for re-election. The UMW and other unions of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO) were major sources of campaign funds, services, and votes for Roosevelt's campaign.

The 1936 presidential election. Despite a Literary Digest poll that projected Republican presidential nominee Alfred Landon's victory in the 1936 election, Roosevelt's re-election was assured by the summer of 1936. In addition to the electoral college votes of all southern and border states, Roosevelt could rely on the industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest, where the Democratic Party's voter appeal had rapidly grown since 1932. In the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt received 61 percent of the popular votes and carried all but two states in the electoral college. Roosevelt's coattail effects increased the Democratic majorities in Congress to overwhelming ratios against the Republicans.

For the first time since 1856, most voters were now registered as Democrats. A realignment in the two-party system had occurred so that the Democratic Party dominated the voting behavior, presidential elections, control of Congress, and policy-making for the next generation. The Roosevelt-led Democratic Party's voter appeal proved to be especially strong in major cities throughout the nation. Catholics, Jews, blacks, labor union members, foreign-born Americans, and young adults provided Roosevelt with the highest percentages of votes. Southern whites, regardless of economic differences among them, were as monolithically loyal to Roosevelt in 1936 as they had been in 1932. Roosevelt, though, proved to be a less attractive candidate among non-southern, rural, white Protestants. Their voting behavior became even more Republican in the 1940 and 1944 elections.

Court-packing controversy. Roosevelt was confident that the 1936 election results gave him a mandate to continue and even extend the second New Deal into such policy areas as public housing, slum clearance, and executive reorganization. He also wanted Congress to pass labor and agricultural legislation similar to the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which the Supreme Court had rejected. Consequently, Roosevelt submitted a court reorganization bill in early 1937. Its content included a provision that empowered the president and Senate to appoint additional justices to the Supreme Court, exceeding the traditional number of nine. Opponents of this bill soon denounced it as a "court-packing" plan that threatened the separation of powers and the political independence of the Supreme Court, and proved that Roosevelt was dangerously power hungry.

A bipartisan conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress, especially in the Senate, soon formed to oppose this bill. In addition, the Supreme Court seemed to voluntarily develop a pro-New Deal majority in 1937 when it upheld the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act. With little congressional or public support for his original legislation, Roosevelt reluctantly signed a weakened, heavily compromised court bill.

Despite this major legislative defeat and the invigoration of anti-New Deal forces in Congress, Roosevelt succeeded in securing passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and a second Agricultural Adjustment Act. After 1938, however, no new major New Deal legislation was passed. The New Deal and Roosevelt's presidency did not end the Great Depression and return the American economy to the prosperity of the 1920s. They succeeded, though, in reducing unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, and in reforming the economy in order to ensure a broader distribution of income, legal rights for labor unions, a more stable business cycle through federal regulations and subsidies, and a social safety net for the poor, unemployed, and elderly.

With Republicans and conservative Democrats frequently reminding the president and the public of his 1932 campaign promise to balance the federal budget, Roosevelt decided to begin reducing federal spending in 1937. His budget cuts, however, partially contributed to the recession of 1937 to 1938, which was characterized by higher unemployment, lower farm prices, and weaker stock market performance. Republicans labeled it the "Roosevelt recession" and cited it as proof of the failure of the New Deal as they prepared for the 1938 midterm elections. The Republicans gained eighty-two House seats and eight Senate seats in 1938. These Republican victories strengthened and emboldened the anti-New Deal, bipartisan, conservative coalition in congress, especially in the House committee system.

WORLD WAR II

In 1939, Roosevelt's attention turned from domestic to foreign policy. He signed all four major pieces of neutrality legislation that Congress sent him from 1935 to 1939. He relied on amendments to these laws and executive orders to provide the president with the discretion to determine such matters as whether a foreign nation was a belligerent and the imposition of trade sanctions on belligerents. Before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt recognized the degree to which Congress and public opinion were isolationist. Consequently, his public rhetoric cautiously combined denunciations of German, Japanese, and Italian aggression with assurances that the United States would maintain its neutrality after World War II began in Europe in 1939. Meanwhile, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to increase defense spending and pass the Selective Service Act of 1940, which began military conscription.

The growing prospect of American entry into World War II dominated the 1940 presidential election. This issue soon overshadowed Roosevelt's tradition-breaking decision to accept nomination for a third term. Determined to defeat Roosevelt, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, a Wall Street lawyer and former Democrat, for president. Privately supportive of Roosevelt's military aid to Great Britain, Willkie vacillated in his campaign rhetoric between cautious internationalism and staunch isolationism.

Roosevelt defeated Willkie with 55 percent of the popular votes and carried thirty-eight states in the electoral college. Compared to the 1936 election, Roosevelt's electoral base had narrowed. Non-southern white Protestants, especially in the Midwest, accelerated their return to the Republican Party. Among the non-southern states that he carried, Roosevelt depended more on lower income voters in major cities for his popular vote margins.

Roosevelt preferred to avoid antagonizing southern Democrats on racial issues, but he began to take a modest, cautious step toward identifying his presidency, New Deal liberalism, and the Democratic Party with civil rights for blacks. During his first two terms as president, Roosevelt had limited his policy response to African Americans to minor patronage appointments, public works jobs, and relief. In 1941, however, he issued an executive order creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which investigated and prohibited job discrimination by defense contractors. Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph pressured Roosevelt into doing this by planning a march on Washington. Nonetheless, Roosevelt continued racial segregation in the military.

The 1944 presidential election. As the 1944 presidential election approached, Roosevelt's candidacy for a fourth term was less controversial than his 1940 candidacy. Roosevelt did little campaigning, and he defeated his Republican opponent, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, with 53 percent of the popular votes and carried thirty-six states. Although Roosevelt carried all of the southern and border states, Dewey, as a moderately liberal northeastern Republican, performed relatively well in such border and southern states as Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and North Carolina. More so than in the three previous presidential elections, Roosevelt relied on lower-income voters in the largest non-southern cities for his popular vote margins. The proportion of Roosevelt's plurality that was derived from the nation's twelve largest cities increased from 25 percent in 1932 to 65 percent in 1944.

With Roosevelt aging, ailing, and frail, many political insiders did not expect him to complete a fourth term. Democratic machine bosses, Democratic National Committee chairman Robert E. Hannegan, and several southern Democrats persuaded Roosevelt to replace Vice President Henry A. Wallace with Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri as his running mate in 1944. Wallace was unpopular among these Democrats for his political ineptitude, outspoken liberalism on civil rights, and status as a former Republican. Truman was a loyal New Deal liberal on domestic issues, making him acceptable to labor unions, blacks, and big city mayors. He was also respected by southern Democrats and Republicans in the Senate for his competence, integrity, and bipartisan approach as the chairman of a Senate committee that investigated defense spending. Since the 1942 midterm elections resulted in a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate, Roosevelt realized that he needed a vice president like Truman to facilitate the Senate's passage of treaties and other postwar legislation.

ROOSEVELT'S PERSONALITY AND LEGACY

Throughout his life, Roosevelt exuded a charming, effervescent, engaging personality. His critics and political opponents often dismissed these traits as evidence of superficiality or duplicity. People who met Roosevelt individually or collectively often found him to be amiable and gregarious. His family and closest political associates, however, perceived him to be an intensely private, self-contained man who avoiding confiding in them. His wife and children often regarded him as remote and emotionally uninvolved in their lives.

Roosevelt, though, enjoyed flirtatious, bantering relationships with attractive, witty, self-assured women. Eleanor Roosevelt discovered evidence of her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer, her social secretary, during his tenure as assistant secretary of the navy. Although he promised to end this relationship, Roosevelt was with Lucy when he died. Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, Roosevelt's personal secretary, was widely rumored to be his mistress during his presidency. Thus, even before his presidency, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's relationship resembled a political partnership rather than a conventional marriage.

Despite Franklin Roosevelt's shortcomings as a husband and parent, he was immensely effective in projecting his most positive, attractive personality traits in his radio broadcasts. For millions of Americans, Roosevelt exuded an infectious self-confidence and reassuring leadership during the grimmest days and events of the Great Depression and World War II. His affliction with polio enabled him to more genuinely express sensitivity and empathy to suffering Americans during these crises. In short, Roosevelt's skills as a communicator through radio and newsreels, combined with the connection that his own affliction gave him with less fortunate people, induced many Americans to develop a personal bond with Roosevelt, unlike any previous president.

Roosevelt died after serving less than three months of his fourth term on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia. During and after the 1944 presidential campaign, Roosevelt rarely conferred with Truman, so his vice president felt over-whelmed and unprepared in assuming the presidency. As Truman's presidency ensued, it became evident that the modern presidency that Roosevelt had established was not a temporary phenomenon that was a product of Roosevelt's unique combination of political skills and values or the successive crises of the Great Depression and World War II. Even with the end of World War II and the beginning of rapid economic growth, many Americans expected the president to behave in a Rooseveltian style as an articulate media figure who could influence public opinion and motivate Congress to pass legislation that improved their quality of life in such diverse policy areas as health care, education, inflation control, employment, economic development, and the public infrastructure. Roosevelt's wartime example as commander-in-chief and chief diplomat provided both a role model and high expectations for future presidents to be respected, powerful world leaders adept at forming American-led international coalitions through United Nations' decisions, treaties, and collective security organizations for the purposes of deterring or repelling anti-democratic aggression and spreading the American values of human rights, democratic government, and capitalism.

Much of the unattained policy agenda of New Deal liberalism and Roosevelt's presidency, such as health care for the poor and elderly, urban renewal, federal aid at all levels of education, civil rights protection for blacks and other minorities, and environmental and consumer protection, became the major domestic policy goals of Roosevelt's Democratic, and to some extent, his Republican, successors in the presidency, as well as most Democrats and some Republicans in Congress. Likewise, opponents and critics of Roosevelt's policies and his conduct as president devoted much time and effort after his death to stop the further advance of New Deal-based liberalism in domestic policy and to counter what they regarded as the "imperial presidency" that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY; NEW DEAL; NEW DEAL, SECOND; NEW DEAL, THIRD; ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 1956.

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. 1963.

Maney, Patrick J. The Roosevelt Presence: A Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 1992.

McElvaine, Robert S. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 2002.

Savage, Sean J. Roosevelt: The Party Leader. 1991.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 3: The Politics of Upheaval. 1960.

Ward, Geoffrey C. A First-Class Temperament. 1989.

SEAN J. SAVAGE