🌊Franklin D. Roosevelt

32nd President · 1933–1945

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency four times — an unprecedented run that led to the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting all future presidents to two. He took office during the depths of the Great Depression and served until his death in the closing months of World War II, shaping the American state and the modern world order more than any other 20th-century president.

Hudson Valley Aristocrat

Roosevelt was born into a prominent Hudson Valley family at the estate of Hyde Park, New York. His fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt was president during his college years at Harvard, and in 1905 Franklin married Theodore's niece, Eleanor Roosevelt. After Columbia Law School, he entered New York politics, became Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, and ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket in 1920. The ticket lost badly.

Polio and Recovery

In August 1921, at age 39, Roosevelt was stricken with a paralytic illness — historically labeled polio, though recent analysis suggests Guillain-Barré syndrome. He lost the use of his legs permanently. For the rest of his life he used leg braces, a wheelchair, or supported himself by the arm of a son or aide. With the full cooperation of the press, this was almost entirely concealed from the American public — during his twelve years as president, Americans rarely saw photographs showing him unable to walk.

New York Governor and the Crash

Roosevelt returned to politics as Governor of New York in 1929, the year the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. Three years later, with national unemployment near 25 percent and the banking system in collapse, he defeated Herbert Hoover for the presidency by pledging "a new deal for the American people."

The New Deal

In his first hundred days, Roosevelt and a compliant Democratic Congress passed a blizzard of legislation that reshaped American life: emergency banking reform, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Public Works Administration. A second wave in 1935 added the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act (which protected union organizing), and the Works Progress Administration. The Supreme Court struck down several of these programs, prompting Roosevelt's ill-fated 1937 plan to "pack" the Court — a proposal that failed but arguably cowed the Court into approving his subsequent reforms.

World War II

Roosevelt steered the country cautiously toward supporting Britain and the Allies in the late 1930s, despite strong isolationist sentiment. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 settled the matter overnight. Roosevelt requested a declaration of war from Congress the next day, calling December 7 "a date which will live in infamy." He served as commander-in-chief through nearly four years of total war, meeting with Churchill and Stalin at the conferences of Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta that shaped the postwar world. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945 at his Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia — less than a month before Germany's surrender.

Roosevelt Trivia

• The Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, was a direct response to Roosevelt's four elections. No one else will ever win more than two.
• His "fireside chats" — evening radio addresses delivered in a conversational tone — gave Americans direct access to the president for the first time.
• He signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, authorizing the internment of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans — one of the darkest acts of his presidency.
• Roosevelt's presidential library, established in Hyde Park in 1941, was the first presidential library of its kind and set the model for every one that followed.
• He was the first president to appear on television, at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

🎩 Related Presidents

Continue exploring the chronology:

→ See all presidents in order