Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in 1882 to wealthy Dutch-American gentry at Hyde Park, New York, the only child of an older father. Trained as a lawyer, he served as assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson and ran for Vice President in 1920, losing. In 1921, at thirty-nine, he was paralysed from the waist down by what was then diagnosed as polio. He returned to politics as Governor of New York in 1929 and won the White House in 1932 at the depth of the Depression. The New Deal — Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, the TVA — rewrote the role of the federal government. He won re-election in 1936, 1940, and 1944, the only four-term president in American history. He led the United States from the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941) through almost all of the Second World War, dying of a cerebral haemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, three weeks before V-E Day. The 22nd Amendment, capping presidential terms at two, was ratified in his memory.
All Figures
32nd US President · Four-term Wartime Leader
Franklin D. Roosevelt
1,882 CE – 1,945 CE
The Hyde Park aristocrat who, paralysed by polio at thirty-nine, led the United States through the Great Depression and most of the Second World War — and remains the only president to be elected four times.
Lifetime
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