(1882-1945), thirty-second president of the United States (1933-45). Roosevelt was the only president to be elected to more than two terms. Born in Hyde Park, New York, the only child of an old patrician family, Roosevelt was educated at Harvard and entered politics early. He served as assistant secretary of the navy in World War I and in 1920 ran unsuccessfully for vice president with Democratic presidential candidate James Cox. In 1921 he was partially paralyzed from an attack of poliomyelitis. Encouraged to reenter politics by his wife, Eleanor, Roosevelt won the governorship of New York by a narrow margin in 1928 and became the Democratic candidate for president in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. Forging a new Democratic coalition among urban voters, immigrants, young first-time voters, blacks, women, the working class, and the southern states, FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in a landslide.
Roosevelt promised the American people in his inaugural address a
New Deal. His buoyant personality helped restore the country's morale, and he and the many fresh faces he brought to Washington tackled problems of the economy with groundbreaking programs of public works, relief, and reform. Programs and agencies set up under the New Deal included the
Securities and Exchange Commission, to oversee the stock market; the
Tennessee Valley Authority, to bring electricity and conservation programs to rural areas in the South; the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to insure people's bank deposits; the
Social Security System, to provide old-age pensions and unemployment insurance; and the
Fair Labor Standards Act, to set a national minimum wage and limit hours of work. Other, more temporary programs — like the Works Progress Administration and the
Civilian Conservation Corps — relieved unemployment on a short-term basis. Roosevelt's administration did not end the depression (it took World War II to do that), but it did greatly expand the role and power of the federal government and of the presidency itself. He won reelection in a landslide in 1936 and an unprecedented third term in 1940.
Always both a balance-of-power realist and an idealist in foreign policy, Roosevelt grew increasingly alarmed by the rise of fascism and Nazism abroad in the 1930s and tried to steer the nation away from
isolationism. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the United States entered
World War II, he became a highly effective commander in chief, leading the country in the immense mobilization of manpower and resources required to fight the war. His articulation of Allied war aims in the
Atlantic Charter and the
Four Freedoms speech and his proposal for a
United Nations after the war reflected his belief in democracy and America's role of leadership in the postwar world.
Roosevelt was reelected for a fourth term in 1944, but the next year, he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12 in Warm Springs, Georgia. Many historians rank him among America's strongest presidents.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The Four Freedoms
An excerpt from Roosevelt's inaugural address of January 6, 1941; the Second World War had begun in Europe and the Pacific, but the United States did not enter it until December, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough manner that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world....
Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is in our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
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