Elected to an unprecedented four terms in the Oval Office, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) led the United States through the Great Depression, World War II, and massive social and economic changes.
A distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), Franklin Roosevelt was born in the wealthy enclave of Hyde Park, New York. He attended Harvard, worked on Wall Street, and married another member of the Roosevelt clan, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), in 1905.
Although his cousin was a Republican, Franklin Roosevelt entered politics as a Democrat and ran for vice president on the party’s ticket in 1920. He failed in his first national race, but was elected governor of New York in 1928, a time when the governorship of the nation’s biggest state was considered a springboard to the presidency.
In 1932, after the stock market collapse plunged the US economy into a cataclysmic economic depression, Roosevelt easily defeated the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), who was widely blamed for the crisis.
In office, Roosevelt offered a set of economic programs, collectively called the New Deal, to combat the crisis. He spent billions on public works—roads, bridges, dams—to put people back to work and created social welfare programs to protect workers and the elderly. The programs massively expanded the federal government’s role in managing the economy. During World War II, Roosevelt shifted the US economy to a war footing and, along with British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965), laid the groundwork for the postwar world.
Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in April 1945, just after being elected to a record fourth term. He was sixty-two.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- In the last five years of his presidency, Roosevelt owned a Scottish terrier named Fala (the name came from one of Roosevelt’s ancestors). A statue of the dog is included in the Roosevelt memorial that opened in Washington, DC, in 1997.
- Roosevelt had three different vice presidents: John Nance Garner (1868–1967), who broke with Roosevelt and challenged him for the 1940 nomination; Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965), whom Roosevelt dropped from the ticket over foreign policy differences in 1944; and Harry S. Truman (1884–1972), his eventual successor.
- Roosevelt appointed the first woman cabinet member, secretary of labor Frances Perkins (1882–1965).
