Franklin D(elano) Roosevelt Biography (1882–1945) (nickname FDR)

[spidge]

Franklin D(elano) Roosevelt Biography (1882–1945) (nickname FDR)


US and 32nd president (1933–45), born in Hyde Park, New York, USA. Born into the patrician family (of Dutch descent) that produced his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt, he was educated in Europe and at Harvard and Columbia Law School. Admitted to the bar (1907), he served as a progressive state senator (1911–13) and assistant secretary (1913–20) before running unsuccessfully as vice-president on the 1920 ticket. After a crippling attack of polio in 1921 (he would never again walk without assistance), he resumed his political career, becoming governor of New York (1929–33) and seeming to take on a new sense of purpose. With the country in a deep depression, he easily defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932.

As president, he moved decisively and set the pattern for the modern liberal Democratic Party with a social and economic programme called the ‘New Deal’. An array of agencies and departments, many hastily created in his first months in office, were designed to stimulate the economy, put people to work, and simply to create hope, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, Civilian Conservation Corps, Securities and Exchange Commission, Work Projects Administration, and the Social Security Administration, among others. Some of these organizations were short-lived, while others became fixtures of the American way of life. While the nation's economy did not fully revive until wartime, his actions earned Roosevelt the gratitude of working people that outweighed the hatred of conservatives. In fact, he himself was not all that interested in either the details of his programmes nor in any ideological theories, but was motivated largely by a desire to keep the US a functioning and fair society, and to this end he surrounded himself with first-rate people.

A person of ordinary intellect and tastes, his mixture of casual optimism and natural sympathies managed to appeal to everyone from artsy intellectuals to disenfranchised minorities. Re-elected by a landslide in 1936, he won unprecedented third and fourth terms (1940, 1944). Having maintained neutrality in the face of European hostilities in the late 1930s, his administration began supplying arms to the Allies by 1940 and then led the nation into World War 2 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Dec 1941). Having seen the nation through the War, and helped plan, with other Allied leaders, the post-war world and the United Nations, Roosevelt died less than four weeks before the German surrender. The object of constant attacks during his presidency - he was regarded as everything from ‘a traitor to his class’ to a would-be dictator - he would suffer somewhat from posthumous revelations about an extramarital relationship and by charges that he conceded too much in negotiations with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill; but most historians and informed people continue to regard FDR as one of the three or four greatest American presidents.