Franklin D. Roosevelt

• 1. Introduction

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  Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency four times, the only person in American history to serve more than two terms. He took office on the 4th of March 1933, when a quarter of the workforce had no job and 32 of the 48 states had shut their banks. He left it only at his death on the 12th of April 1945, while a world war he had steered for years was still unfinished. Before any of that, a wealthy New York family raised a boy who would learn to govern from a wheelchair he refused to let the public see. What turned a privileged son of Hyde Park into the man who reshaped American politics into something historians now call the Fifth Party System? How did a politician paralyzed from the waist down convince a frightened nation to trust him through depression and war? And why, decades later, do historians still rank him among the three greatest presidents while criticizing some of his gravest choices? The answers begin at a large estate south of Hyde Park's historic center, and they run all the way to a beach in occupied France.

• 2. A Delano, Not A Roosevelt

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  Springwood was the family estate where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on the 30th of January 1882, the son of businessman James Roosevelt I and his second wife, Sara Ann Delano. His parents were sixth cousins, drawn from the wealthy Roosevelt and Delano families. James was a prominent Bourbon Democrat who once brought Franklin to meet President Grover Cleveland, who told the boy a strange wish, that he might never become President of the United States.

  Sara Delano Roosevelt dominated her son's early years and never let anyone forget whose blood she thought ran strongest. "My son Franklin is a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all," she once declared. James was 54 when Franklin was born and struck some as a remote father, though biographer James MacGregor Burns notes he engaged with his son more than was typical for the era. Franklin also had a half-brother, James Roosevelt "Rosy" Roosevelt, from his father's earlier marriage.

  Frequent trips to Europe shaped the boy as much as Springwood did. He first crossed the ocean at age two, then traveled regularly from age seven to fifteen, becoming conversant in German and French. He learned to ride, shoot, sail, and play polo, tennis, and golf. Tutors homeschooled him until age fourteen, apart from a stint in a German public school at age nine.

  At Groton School, an Episcopal boarding school in Massachusetts, Roosevelt was not among the popular boys, who were better athletes with rebellious streaks. The headmaster, Endicott Peabody, preached that Christians had a duty to help the less fortunate and pushed his students toward public service. Peabody stayed close throughout Roosevelt's life, officiating at his wedding and later visiting him as president, a thread of influence that outlasted the schoolroom.

• 3. Crimson And Courtship

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  The Harvard Crimson made Roosevelt its editor-in-chief, a role that demanded ambition, energy, and the ability to manage others, even though he was an unremarkable student and athlete. He belonged to the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and the Fly Club and worked as a cheerleader. He later confessed, "I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong."

  His father's death in 1900 distressed Franklin greatly. The next year his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt became president, and Theodore's vigorous, reforming style turned him into Franklin's role model. Franklin finished Harvard in three years with an A.B. in history in 1903, then stayed a year for graduate courses. Columbia Law School took him in 1904, but he dropped out in 1907 after passing the New York bar examination, telling friends he meant to enter politics.

  Boston heiress Alice Sohier turned down Roosevelt's proposal during his second year of college. He then courted his fifth cousin once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of Theodore Roosevelt, and proposed to her in 1903. Despite resistance from his mother, Franklin and Eleanor married on the 17th of March 1905, with President Theodore Roosevelt giving away the bride because her father, Elliott, was dead.

  Six children followed. Anna, James, and Elliott arrived in 1906, 1907, and 1910. A second son named Franklin died in infancy in 1909, another son named Franklin was born in 1914, and the youngest, John, was born in 1916. Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's social secretary hired in 1914, became Franklin's lover, and Eleanor discovered the affair in 1918. He promised never to see Mercer again but broke that promise, seeing her again by 1941. Eleanor never forgave him; their marriage became a political partnership, and she built a separate home at Val-Kill to pursue her own causes.

• 4. Insurgent And Officer

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  The New York State Senate seat Roosevelt won in 1910 sat in a strongly Republican district spanning Dutchess, Columbia, and Putnam Counties. Acting as his own campaign manager, he toured the district by automobile at a time when few could afford a car, and a Democratic landslide carried him to a surprising victory. Taking his seat on the 1st of January 1911, he led the "Insurgents" against the Tammany Hall machine. News articles and cartoons described "the second coming of a Roosevelt" sending "cold shivers down the spine of Tammany."

  Woodrow Wilson got Roosevelt's backing for the 1912 Democratic nomination, a choice complicated when Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republicans for a third-party run. Franklin's support for Wilson over his cousin alienated some of the family, though not Theodore himself. Despite a bout of typhoid fever, and with help from journalist Louis McHenry Howe, he won re-election in 1912 and chaired the Agriculture Committee.

  Assistant Secretary of the Navy was the post Roosevelt took in March 1913, the second-ranking job in a department whose Secretary, Josephus Daniels, paid it little attention. Roosevelt loved the Navy, set up a merit-based promotion system, and earned union leaders' respect for his fairness. His record on race was darker: in 1916 he carried out an order to build, at considerable expense, separate toilets for "the use of white women, white men and colored," rescinded a month later after the NAACP objected.

  When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Roosevelt asked to serve as a naval officer, but Wilson insisted he stay at his desk. He coordinated naval deployment from Washington as the Navy expanded fourfold. In 1918 he toured Europe, where his kinship to Theodore won long private audiences with King George V and prime ministers David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. After the Armistice, he overruled older officers like Admiral William S. Benson, who said he could not "conceive of any use the fleet will ever have for aviation," and ordered the Navy's Aviation Division preserved.

• 5. Iron Braces

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  Campobello Island in August 1921 was where the illness struck. Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio, which left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. A 2003 study strongly favored a diagnosis of Guillain-Barre syndrome, but historians have kept to the original label. His mother urged retirement; Roosevelt, Eleanor, and Louis Howe were determined he continue.

  He taught himself, laboriously, to walk short distances on iron braces fastened to his hips and legs. In public he appeared standing upright, supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons, and was careful never to be seen in his wheelchair. Great care kept any image of his disability out of the press.

  Warm Springs, Georgia, became his project. Intrigued by hydrotherapy, he founded a rehabilitation center there in 1926, spending most of his inheritance to buy the Merriweather Inn and assembling a staff of physical therapists. He spent much of his time after 1925 in the South, at first on his houseboat, the Larooco. In 1938 he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, work that led toward the development of polio vaccines.

  He never left politics for long. He delivered Al Smith's nominating speeches at the 1924 and 1928 Democratic conventions, the first marking his public return after the illness. In 1923, after Edward Bok offered a $100,000 American Peace Award, Roosevelt drafted a plan for a "Society of Nations" to replace the League. He never submitted it, because Eleanor was a judge, but he folded some of those 1924 ideas into the design of the United Nations two decades later.

• 6. From Albany To The Nation

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  Al Smith asked Roosevelt to run for governor of New York in 1928, and though Smith lost the presidency in a landslide, Roosevelt won the governorship by a one-percent margin. He proposed hydroelectric power plants, addressed the farm crisis, and continued the "fireside chats" by radio he would later carry into the White House. When the Wall Street Crash hit that October, he became the first governor to publicly endorse unemployment insurance.

  The Seabury Commission, created during his governorship, exposed an extortion ring, drove many officials from office, and made the decline of Tammany Hall inevitable. He won a second term, created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration under Jesse I. Straus and then Harry Hopkins, and passed old-age insurance for New Yorkers in 1930.

  The 1932 presidential campaign ran on a team led by Howe and Farley and a "brain trust" of mostly Columbia and Harvard professors. The commentator Walter Lippmann dismissed him as "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president." Roosevelt clinched the nomination on the fourth ballot after promising the vice presidency to John Nance Garner, then flew to Chicago to accept in person, the first major-party nominee to do so. In his speech he pledged "a new deal for the American people" and called it "a call to arms."

  In February 1933, before he took office, a woman seized the arm of Giuseppe Zangara as he fired five shots toward Roosevelt's open car in Florida. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, sitting alongside, was struck and killed. Weeks later Roosevelt was inaugurated at the nadir of the Depression, with farm prices fallen 60 percent, industrial production cut by more than half since 1929, and two million people homeless.

• 7. Relief, Recovery, Reform

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  A four-day national bank holiday was Roosevelt's move on his second day in office, halting the runs of depositors. Congress, summoned to a special session, passed the Emergency Banking Act almost sight unseen. When the banks reopened on the 15th of March, stock prices rose 15 percent and over $1 billion flowed back into bank vaults. On the 22nd of March he signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, ending Prohibition.

  The "Hundred Days Congress" produced an unprecedented flood of legislation. The Civilian Conservation Corps, Roosevelt's favorite agency, hired 250,000 unemployed men for rural projects and eventually enrolled 3.4 million young men, who built 13,000 miles of trails and planted two billion trees. The Public Works Administration under Harold Ickes built dams, bridges, and schools, while the Tennessee Valley Authority became the largest government-owned industrial enterprise in American history. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration paid farmers to leave land idle, drawing criticism when crops were plowed under and livestock killed.

  Not everything survived. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 tried to end cutthroat competition through industry rules, but the Supreme Court struck it down in May 1935. The Glass-Steagall Act created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Securities and Exchange Commission arrived in 1934 to regulate the trading of securities.

  The Second New Deal pushed further. The Social Security Act took federal responsibility for the aged, the unemployed, dependent children, and the disabled, funded by payroll taxes. Roosevelt insisted on that funding for a reason: "With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program." The Works Progress Administration under Hopkins employed over three million people in its first year, and the National Labor Relations Act guaranteed collective bargaining. In 1936 he won a record 60.8 percent of the popular vote, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont, with Black voters in northern cities backing the Democratic ticket for the first time since the Civil War.

• 8. Arsenal And Infamy

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  The Supreme Court consumed Roosevelt's second term after it overturned many of his programs. His Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 would have let him appoint an extra justice for each one over age 70, and in 1937 there were six. The plan met fierce opposition within his own party, and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes broke precedent to argue publicly against it. The case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish then turned the court toward upholding economic regulations, in what historians call "the switch in time that saved nine." By 1941 Roosevelt had appointed seven of the nine justices.

  The Good Neighbor Policy was his signature first-term move abroad. He withdrew forces from Haiti, ended the protectorate status of Cuba and Panama, and in December 1933 signed the Montevideo Convention renouncing unilateral intervention in Latin America. Isolationism boxed him in through the mid-1930s, as the Neutrality Acts aimed to stop the "merchants of death" from selling arms abroad.

  When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt opened a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, the first of 1,700 letters and telegrams between them. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 created the first peacetime draft, and the army grew from 189,000 men at the end of 1939 to 1.4 million by mid-1941. In September 1940 he traded 50 destroyers to Britain for Caribbean base rights. Convinced only he could see the nation through the Nazi threat, he broke George Washington's two-term tradition, won the 1940 election with 55 percent of the popular vote, and named four fundamental freedoms in his January 1941 speech: speech, worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

  Japan tightened the spiral. After Roosevelt cut off oil sales in July 1941, depriving Japan of more than 95 percent of its supply, the Japanese resolved to attack. On the 7th of December 1941 they struck Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 American servicemen and civilians. Roosevelt called for war in his "Infamy Speech," naming the date "which will live in infamy," and Congress declared war nearly unanimously. He coined the term "Four Policemen" for the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, met Stalin for the first time at Tehran in November 1943, and made the United Nations his highest postwar priority. At Yalta in February 1945 he pressed Stalin to enter the war against Japan, then chose General Dwight Eisenhower to command the invasion that would carry the Allied effort onto the beaches of occupied Europe.