ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN DELANO

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), known as F.D.R., was the thirty-second president of the United States. He was the only president elected to four consecutive terms of office. According to polls of historians and political scientists, F.D.R. is consistently ranked with George Washington (1789–1797) and Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) as one of the United States' three greatest presidents.

Roosevelt's politics in fighting both the Great Depression (1929–1939) and World War II (1939–1945) was always realistic: he stood for humanity and against rigid ideology. Roosevelt seemed to work against the abstract ideologies of fascism, communism, and European imperialism in an effort to find practical ways to help common people.

Some Roosevelt critics in the wealthy business community said he was leading the United States into communism. During the Great Depression he said to his business detractors: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Roosevelt is known as the president who lifted the United States out of its deepest economic despair and revolutionized the country's way of life. While many businessmen opposed him, he understood that social security, unemployment compensation, stock securities regulation, farm price supports, minimum wages, and guarantees of collective bargaining were all ways in which capitalism could save itself, instead of surrendering to other systems and pulling itself apart.

Franklin Roosevelt was born into a prominent and wealthy family in Hyde Park, New York, in 1882. He received a traditional education at the respected Groton School and went on to graduate from Harvard University, then entering the Columbia University law school. Roosevelt became a lawyer without finishing law school, but his dreams seemed always to be about politics. He had great ambitions to become president, and as early as 1905 his fellow law clerks remarked how Roosevelt meant to enter politics and the White House.

In 1910 he was elected to the New York State Senate. From there, his career in public service went from the New York Senate to President Woodrow Wilson's (1913–1924) Assistant Secretary of the Navy, then to the governor of New York in 1928, and ultimately to the presidency of the United States in 1933. He was re-elected to the presidency three times before his death in 1945.

In 1921, at age 39, Roosevelt became seriously ill with polio, and he was almost completely paralyzed. Through exhausting courses of physical exercise, he fiercely struggled to cure himself. He made progress in recovery, but never regained the use of his legs. Prior to his illness, Roosevelt was seen by many as a spoiled rich man dabbling in politics. Little of his later political seriousness was apparent before his bout with polio. When asked how he could be so patient with a political opponent, he said: "If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy."

Roosevelt ran for the presidency on the Democratic Party ticket in 1932, promising to balance the federal budget and provide direct aid to the needy. Though his Republican opponents saw Roosevelt as a dangerous "socialist" during the 1930s, they missed the point that Roosevelt's efforts were to save American capitalism from its worst traits. He also planned to break with "foolish traditions" in order to relieve the misery of one-third of the population, mired in the hard times of the Great Depression (1929–1939). Roosevelt won the election and began his first term of office in 1933.

On March 9, 1933, he convened a special session of Congress, which lasted 100 days. During that period more important legislation was passed than at any other comparable period in U.S. history. Roosevelt called his reform, recovery, and relief efforts the New Deal. To accomplish his social and economic goals he needed to overcome the deep-seated public prejudices against a strong federal government. Roosevelt went on the radio and talked informally to the public about what he wanted to do. This combination of decisive action and personal persuasion was effective. The most popular New Deal measures voted in were aimed at relieving the suffering of the unemployed, who made up about 30 percent of the country's workforce at the time. Roosevelt created federal jobs for the unemployed, assisted farmers ruined by the Depression, and protected citizens against loss of their homes by mortgage foreclosures. He also enacted the Social Security Act, which put in place an old-age pension system, as well as benefits to widows with children and the chronically disabled. A combination of New Deal legislation and World War II (1939–1945) worked to return the United States to prosperity.

By 1938 the Republicans and conservative Democrats had won enough seats in Congress to halt substantial increases in New Deal legislation, which was never without controversy. Regardless of the many perspectives held on Roosevelt and his terms in office, it is impossible to deny the central role he and his New Deal played in the shaping of the modern United States. F.D.R. died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the morning of April 12, 1945. He died knowing World War II was won, and the economy repaired.

ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN DELANO

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