As William E. Leuchtenburg, the consulting editor of the article, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Life Before the Presidency says Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882 in Hyde Park, New York. His father, James Roosevelt, was a land-owner and a businessman of considerable wealth from New York. His mother, Sara Delano, was one of six sisters and was known for her aristocratic manner and her independent streak. Franklin spent most of his youth near Hyde Park, fifty miles north of New York City.
He lived on a large estate and farm tended by hundreds of workers. Franklin was an only child and until he was a teenager, he was home schooled by tutors and he had very limited contact with his peers. When Roosevelt was fourteen years old, his parents sent him to the Groton School which was an exclusive private school that educated the sons of some of the most wealthy and powerful American families. This School aimed to instill in its students both mental and physical toughness and a desire to serve the public.
Franklin’s years at the Gorton school were very difficult due to the fact that he was never among the most popular of Gorton boys because the chool’s hierarchy rewarded boys who were good athletes or displayed a rebellious streak, which were two qualities that Franklin never had. While he attended Morton, he grew quite fond of his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt (Leuchtenburg 1-3). Leuchtenburg continues on about Franklin’s education. After he graduated from Gorton, Roosevelt went to Harvard College in the year of 1900.
A few weeks into his college career, his father had passed away from a heart ailment that he had been suffering with. During college, Franklin decided to do a wide variety of extracurricular activities which helped his social tandings but hurt his grades, which were mostly average. In the year of 1903, he received his undergraduate degree and decided to return for a year of graduate work and more importantly he became the editor of Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson.
Although he remained fond of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt and the current president at that time, Franklin declared himself a member of the Democratic Party. In his second year at Harvard, Roosevelt proposed to Alice Sohier who turned him down, so he then turned his attentions to his distant cousin Alice Eleanor Roosevelt. On March 17, 1905 Eleanor and Franklin married and had six children, on e of which died as an infant (Leuchtenburg 4-5). William E. Leuchtenburg goes on to say that Franklin began law school at Columbia University a few months before his marriage.
Although he attended for two years, he did not display a passion for the law and never graduated. However a fellow Democrats from upstate asked Franklin to run for political office and he quickly agreed. Because of his immense admiration for Theodore Roosevelt spurred him to give politics a try. Franklin ran for the state senate from Dutchess County in pstate New York which was a region dominated by Republicans. Because of his name, his family’s wealth, and his seemingly endless reservoir of energy, allowed him to be a good candidate.
In the state senate, he provided a staunch defender of the farmers in his district and a determined opponent of the Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York City’s Democratic Party. He also believed that the government had to play a role in creating and maintaining a fair and equitable society, and in protecting individuals from concentrations of economic or political power. In the year of 1912, Roosevelt was re-elected to the state senate and then accepted a position as an assistant secretary for Josephus Daniels who was the secretary of the Navy for Woodrow Wilson.
Roosevelt loved what he was doing and eventually became an advocate of U. S. entry into the conflict of the war. Once he was in the war, he supervised much of the Navy’s contribution to the American effort. In the year of 1918, Eleanor discovered the affair that Franklin was involved in and offered him a divorce, but he refused because he knew that he could never succeed in American politics if he would have accepted. In 1920 Roosevelt accepted a position as vice president of Fidelity an dDeposit Company, a financial firm (Leuchtenburg 5-10).
According to William E. Leuchtenburg in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt was diagnosed with poliomyelitis and was partly paralyzed from the abdomen down. Franklin never fully recovered the full use of his legs and mostly spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Throughout the next few years, Roosevelt gained alliances that would prove crucial in the future. During the Great Depression, Roosevelt supported lower taxes or farmers and urged the state to develop public power utilities and he later got re-elected in 1930 (Leuchtenburg 11-23).
According to the editors of Franklin D. Roosevelt Biography in 1930 Roosevelt began his run for the presidency, calling for the government intervention in the economy to provide relief, recovery, and reform. His upbeat, positive charm helped him defeat his Republican opponent Herbert Hoover in November, 1932. There were thirteen million unemployed Americans, and hundreds of banks were closed by the time Roosevelt took office in March of 1933. Franklin Roosevelt faced the greatest crisis in American history since the Civil War. During his first one hundred days, Roosevelt proposed economic reform, calling it the “New Deal”“.
He ordered the temporary closure on all banks to halt the run on deposits. He also formed a “Brain Trust” of economic advisors who designed the alphabet agencies such as the AAA to support farm prices, the CCC to employ young men, and the NRA which regulated wages and prices, other agencies insured bank deposits, regulated the stock market, subsidized mortgages, and provided relief to the unemployed. The conomy showed signs of improvement by 1936. Gross national product was up 34 percent, and unemployment had dropped from 25 percent to 14 percent.
Franklin Roosevelt soon began to face criticism for increased government spending, unbalanced budgets, and for moving the country toward socialism. Several New Deal acts were declared unconstitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court. By 1938, Republican victories in mid-term elections virtually ended Roosevelt’s ability to pass more reform legislation. In 1940, he felt that only he had the experience and skills to lead America in such trying times and in November of 940, he won the presidential election against Republican Wendell Willkie.
During 1941 Roosevelt pushed to have the United States’ factories become an “arsenal of democracy” for the Allies France, Britain, and Russia. A few months after declaring war, Franklin signed Executive Order 9066 ordering all people of Japanese descent to leave the West Coast. As a result of this, 120,000 people, many American citizens, were sent to internment camps located inland. Nearly all Japanese Americans along the West Coast were forced to quit their jobs and sell their property and businesses.
During World War II, Roosevelt was a commander in chief who worked with and sometimes around his military advisors. He helped develop a strategy for defeating Germany in Europe through a series of invasions starting in North Africa and ending with the D-Day invasion of Europe. Roosevelt also prompted the formation of the United Nations. (biography. com editors 13-21). According to William E. Leuchtenburg the consulting editor of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Death of the President says that in 1944 Roosevelt’s doctors revealed a variety of heart ailments, high blood pressure, and bronchitis.
In April of 1945, Franklin returned to Warm Springs, Georgia and on April 12, he collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Roosevelt’s passing stunned the world and hundreds of thousands of people, with tears in their eyes, lined the train route carrying his body from Georgia to Washington, D. C. and then to Hyde Park to pay their respect. Roosevelt was buried in Hyde Park, New York, on April 15, 1945. Roosevelt reshaped the American Presidency, built a bond between himself and the public, and still to this day is the only president to serve four terms in office (Leuchtenburg 1).
