Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, at Hyde Park on the Hudson, New York, into one of the oldest and most patrician families in American life. His father, James Roosevelt, was a wealthy landowner and railroad executive; his mother, Sara Delano, was the dominant figure in his upbringing and a lifelong presence in his life. He attended Groton School, Harvard College (where he edited the Crimson), and Columbia Law School. In 1905 he married his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt — a match opposed by his mother — who became one of the most consequential political figures of the twentieth century in her own right. He served in the New York State Senate (1910–1913) and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson (1913–1920), accumulating an exceptional knowledge of American military and naval affairs.

In August 1921, at age 39, Roosevelt was diagnosed with poliomyelitis after falling ill at Campobello Island. The disease left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. He spent years attempting rehabilitation, primarily at the Warm Springs, Georgia resort he eventually purchased and where he would die. He learned to walk short distances with heavy steel leg braces and the support of an aide, and the extent of his disability was carefully managed and largely concealed from the public throughout his presidency — the Washington press corps, in an era of different journalistic norms, cooperated in not photographing him in his wheelchair. The effort required to project physical vigor while managing severe disability shaped his tenacity and his empathy with suffering Americans.

He was elected Governor of New York in 1928 and re-elected in 1930 by a record margin. Running for president in 1932 against the deeply unpopular Herbert Hoover, with unemployment above 23%, Roosevelt won 472 Electoral College votes to Hoover’s 59 — one of the most decisive presidential elections in American history. He would be elected again in 1936, 1940, and 1944, serving twelve years in the White House before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, with the war all but won.

Gallup polling began in 1936, during FDR’s first term, so the full arc of his approval is not captured with the precision of later presidencies. What the available data shows is a president who maintained broad popular support through extraordinary challenges. He entered office during the worst economic crisis in American history and left office in the middle of the largest war in human history — and was re-elected four times by the American people in the process. His 1936 re-election, in which he carried 46 of 48 states and won 523 Electoral College votes, was one of the most decisive popular mandates ever given to an American president.

His support was not uniform: the business community, wealthy Americans, and conservative Democrats remained consistently hostile throughout his presidency, and he was one of the most polarizing figures of his era. The conservative press routinely attacked him as a socialist or crypto-communist. But the coalition he built — labor unions, urban ethnic immigrants, southern whites, African Americans in northern cities, and liberal intellectuals — held together through four elections and defined Democratic Party politics for the next four decades. The FDR coalition is widely considered the most durable political alliance in modern American electoral history.

Roosevelt’s four presidential victories were among the most consequential electoral events in American history. In 1932, he defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover 472–59 in the Electoral College as the country demanded relief from the Depression. In 1936, his re-election margin was staggering: 523–8 in the Electoral College, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont. Alf Landon’s Kansas was the only competitive state — the largest Electoral College margin of any presidential election between 1820 and the present day. In 1940, he ran for an unprecedented third term as Europe fell to Hitler, defeating Republican Wendell Willkie 449–82, with voters choosing continuity over tradition in a time of global crisis. In 1944, with the war ongoing and Allied victory in sight, he defeated New York Governor Thomas Dewey 432–99, though his health was visibly declining by election day.

Franklin Roosevelt is consistently ranked among the three greatest American presidents in historians’ polls, alongside Washington and Lincoln. His claim to that status rests on two pillars: he guided the United States through its worst economic crisis and its worst military crisis within a single twelve-year presidency, and he fundamentally and permanently transformed the relationship between the federal government and American citizens. Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, the NLRA, and the regulatory framework he built still form the backbone of American domestic policy eight decades later.

His critics — and he had many — focus on the Japanese American internment (for which the US government later issued a formal apology and reparations), the court-packing scheme that threatened judicial independence, his failure to act decisively against the Holocaust despite knowledge of the extermination camps, and what some historians see as a willingness to sacrifice political principle for political survival. His illness — both the polio that defined his physical life and the hypertension and arterial disease that killed him at 63 — raises persistent questions about the transparency expected of leaders and the capacity of a severely disabled person to exercise power effectively in the modern age. He died on April 12, 1945. Harry Truman, his vice president for only 82 days, inherited the presidency and the decision about the atomic bomb.