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Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the thirty-second and longest-serving president of the United States, leading the nation from the depths of the Great Depression in 1933 until the final months of World War II. An inspiring personality, innovative policy maker, and exceptionally skillful politician, he brought the country through two of its most formidable challenges and left a legacy of hope and progress. Roosevelt was born in 1882 into a family of Dutch and French ancestry at the ancestral home in Hyde Park, New York, with every privilege that the Gilded Age could offer. While he was attending Harvard College, his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt became president, through his policies reinforcing the notion of service in the pursuit of a better society. In 1902 Franklin Roosevelt encountered Theodore's niece Eleanor during a visit to the White House; the two married three years later while Franklin was attending Columbia Law School. Roosevelt left Columbia in 1907 to take the bar exam and entered private practice at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn the following year. He and Eleanor remained married until his death forty years later, but over time they came to live somewhat separate personal lives.

The call to public service came quickly to the well-connected and convivial Roosevelt, who was elected as a reform Democrat to the New York State Senate in 1910. He proved popular in Albany and among his fellow party members. He was reelected in 1912 but resigned shortly thereafter to serve as assistant secretary of the navy in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. With the opening of World War I in 1914, Roosevelt overhauled the navy into a force capable of protecting the transatlantic shipping lanes and bringing 2 million Americans and countless tons of supplies to Europe. As the war ended in late 1918, Roosevelt oversaw the massive efforts to bring American troops home and then to demobilize the navy. He resigned in July 1920 in order to pursue an unsuccessful bid for the vice presidency.

In August 1921, while vacationing in New Brunswick, Canada, Roosevelt contracted an illness that resulted in lifelong paralysis from the waist down. In his struggle to overcome the paralysis, he developed determination and a sense of humanity that aptly shaped his character for the coming challenges. Elected New York's governor in the fall of 1928, Roosevelt returned to Albany to be a well-regarded reformer; he was easily reelected in 1930. Roosevelt's popularity and achievements running the nation's most populous state were compared favorably to President Herbert Hoover's early record in Washington, D.C. In 1932, running against Hoover, Roosevelt was elected president by a wide margin. His inspiring inaugural address offered the nation an ambitious reform agenda referred to as the New Deal, and he would tackle the economic crisis by creating an "alphabet soup" of programs. During his first term, unemployment dropped, and the gross national product inched toward recovery. The nation rewarded Roosevelt with reelection in 1936 and even larger majorities in both houses of Congress. Emboldened by success, Roosevelt grew more ambitious in his second term. However, the conservative Supreme Court thwarted him, most notably by finding unconstitutional the National Industrial Recovery Act, in which Congress had delegated to the president extraordinary economic powers. Piqued and perhaps overconfident, Roosevelt proposed adding new justices to the Court in a scheme to overwhelm the conservatives. In attempting to dictate terms to another sovereign branch of government, Roosevelt went too far; Democrats threatened open rebellion, and he backed down. But the Supreme Court took heed and subsequently found that other New Deal acts did indeed pass constitutional muster.

By 1937 Germany had remilitarized, Italy had conquered Ethiopia, and Japan was engaged in the conquest of China. Recognizing the growing threat and Americans' unwillingness to fight, Roosevelt called for a quarantine of aggressor nations. Over the next four years, Roosevelt publically supported the embargo policy even while he secretly supported China and the democracies concerned and prepared the nation's armed forces for war. By January 1941, Roosevelt was walking a fine line between the isolationist views held by many Americans and the need to prevent a cataclysm. His annual message to Congress of that month announced bolstered material support through the new Lend-Lease program, while establishing "four essential human freedoms" as a common vision for America and the rest of the free world.

Eleven months later, a massive Japanese air assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, brought the United States into the conflict; declaring war on Japan, Roosevelt informed the nation the following day that December 7, 1941, would be "a date which will live in infamy." Days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Suddenly, Roosevelt became a wartime leader facing lethal enemies in both Europe and the Pacific. The first years of war were horrible, as U.S. forces retreated in the Pacific while mobilizing for ultimate offensives. The diplomatic, political, military, strategic, intelligence, and logistical challenges were all extraordinary. Roosevelt built an alliance with Britain, the Soviet Union, and other remaining Allied powers and oversaw the greatest mobilization of materiel and personnel in history. The entire U.S. economy was placed on a wartime footing, as every American was called upon to make sacrifices for the war effort. Indeed, the lingering depression ended almost instantly as every able-bodied hand went to work on farms, in factories and shipyards, or in the armed services.

By the summer of 1944 the war's tide had clearly turned. The Allies had taken Rome. In the wake of the D-day invasion of Normandy in June, Allied troops were crawling across northern France, while the Soviet Union's Red Army was pushing the Germans back into Poland. But victory was not a foregone conclusion, such that Roosevelt could not allow himself to retire despite his rapidly failing health; he wanted to ensure the success of the "second Bill of Rights" that he had promoted in his annual message to Congress of January. Under pressure from Democratic Party leaders, Roosevelt selected Harry S. Truman, a centrist senator from Missouri, as his new vice presidential running mate. That November the new team handily defeated the Republican ticket headed by governors Thomas Dewey and John Bricker. On April 12, 1945, while visiting his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. Truman served only eighty-two days as vice president, and little was done to prepare him for the challenges that would follow.

References:

1. Divine, Robert A. Roosevelt and World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.

2. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

3. Larrabee, Eric. Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

4. Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

5. Maney, Patrick J. The Roosevelt Presence: The Life and Legacy of FDR. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

6. Sunstein, Cass R. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

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