Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

(1882–1945) thirty-second U.S. president; born in Hyde Park, N.Y. Born into the patrician family (of Dutch descent) that produced his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, as well as his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, he was educated in Europe and at Harvard and Columbia Law School. Admitted to the New York bar in 1907, he served as a progressive state senator (1911–13) and assistant navy secretary (1913–20) before running unsuccessfully as vice-president on the 1920 Democratic 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 program 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—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; 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 programs nor in any ideological theories; he was motivated largely by a desire to keep the U.S.A. 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. Reelected by a landslide in 1936, he won unprecedented third and fourth terms in 1940 and 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 II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941). Having seen the nation through the war, and helped plan, with other allied leaders, the postwar 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.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

(1882–1945) 32nd president of U.S.; stricken with polio and confined to wheelchair. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 2355]

See: Lameness

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Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

(1882–1945) 32nd U.S. President; elected to four terms. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 726]

See: Longevity

Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

 

Born Jan. 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, N. Y.; died Apr. 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Ga. US statesman; president from 1933 to 1945.

Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy landowner and entrepreneur. His family had extensive political connections in the northeastern states. Educated as a lawyer, he attended Groton, a privileged private school, and Harvard and Columbia universities. In 1905 he married a distant relative, Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of T. Roosevelt. He worked for a law firm from 1907 to 1910, when he was elected to the New York State Senate. He was a member of the Democratic Party. As assistant secretary of the navy from 1913 to 1920, during W. Wilson’s administration, Roosevelt advocated the strengthening of US naval power. In 1920 he was the Democratic Party’s candidate for vice-president. Defeated in the election, he returned to private law practice and entrepreneurial concerns.

Stricken with poliomyelitis in August 1921, Roosevelt never fully regained the use of his legs. Despite his illness, Roosevelt played an increasingly prominent role in the leadership of the Democratic Party. In 1928 he was elected governor of New York.

During the world economic crisis of 1929–33, with the exacerbation of the class struggle in the USA, Roosevelt gained popularity by criticizing the reactionary policy of the ruling Republican Party. The candidate of the Democratic Party, he was elected president in 1932. After taking office in 1933, he adopted a number of emergency measures instituting government regulation of the economy. Roosevelt believed that these measures could reinvigorate the economy and save the capitalist system. Under pressure from the toiling masses, the Roosevelt administration also made some concessions in social legislation.

Roosevelt’s reforms, which were collectively referred to as the New Deal, signified a new stage in the development of state-monopoly capitalism in the USA. In 1936, Roosevelt was re-elected with the decisive support of the popular masses. The New Deal had limited, contradictory results, owing to the class character of bourgeois reformism, but Roosevelt continued to enjoy the support of the majority of voters. He was the only president in US history to be elected to a third (1940) and fourth term (1944).

In foreign policy Roosevelt was a realist. On Nov. 16, 1933, his administration established diplomatic relations with the USSR. Taking into consideration the growing resistance to the expansion of American imperialism in Latin America, Roosevelt proclaimed a Good Neighbor policy, which gave preference to subtle methods of penetrating Latin America.

Roosevelt was aware that fascism posed a threat to the USA, and he condemned the aggressive plans of Germany, Italy, and Japan. With the outbreak of World War II (1939–45), he advocated American support for Great Britain and France against fascist Germany. On June 24, 1941, after fascist Germany attacked the USSR, Roosevelt declared the readiness of the USA to support the struggle of the Soviet people. Opposing reactionary forces in the USA, which adopted anti-Soviet positions, he upheld the idea of rapprochement between the US and the USSR, and he favored providing material assistance to the USSR.

After the US entry into the war in December 1941, Roosevelt made an important contribution to the creation and strengthening of the anti-Hitlerite coalition. Representing the USA at conferences in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), he emphasized the importance of the development of postwar international cooperation and the creation of the UN. He thought highly of the courage and fortitude of the Soviet people in their struggle against the invaders. Roosevelt was a strong advocate of the postwar maintenance and strengthening of US-Soviet cooperation, which he viewed as a very important condition for the preservation of world peace.

REFERENCES

Iakovlev, N. N. F. Ruzvel’t—chelovek i politik. Moscow, 1965.
Mal’kov, V. L. “Novyi kurs” ν SShA: Sotsial’nye dvizheniia i sotsial’naia politika. Moscow, 1973.
Rauch, B. The History of the New Deal, 1933–1938. New York [1963].
Schlesinger, A. M. The Age of Roosevelt, vols. 1–3. Boston, 1957–60.
Leuchtenburg, W. E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. New York [1963].

V. L. MAL’KOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.