Roosevelt Reshaped a Country’s Character

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected 32nd president of the United States on Nov. 8, 1932, no one was sure what to expect. The new chief executive had just concluded four years as governor of New York, where his famous name and his efforts to promote social reform helped gain him national attention.

Yet his performance in the state house at Albany was uneven, providing ammunition to detractors, such as the columnist Walter Lippmann, who had dismissed FDR as “a pleasant man who without any important qualifications for the office would very much like to be president.”

As it turned out, during his unprecedented--and now constitutionally unmatchable--four terms in the White House, Roosevelt conquered the Great Depression and the Axis powers. In the process he transformed the government into a force that shaped the everyday lives of average Americans.

His immense impact on the country was owed to the dynamism of his personality and the upheavals at home and abroad that marked his stewardship. His handsome, patrician features, leonine bearing and strong, resonant voice all reflected his invincible self-assurance. “He must have been psychoanalyzed by God,” a spellbound aide once remarked.

This buoyant self-confidence was exactly what the nation desperately needed when FDR took the oath of office. With the country’s economy in ruins, its social and civic institutions undermined, its populace demoralized and its government seemingly helpless, the new chief executive launched a program of reforms that extended far and wide into the American social and economic structure.

But he was careful to lay the groundwork for his innovations by restoring public confidence in the system. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning and unjustified terror,” he declared in the most memorable passage from his inaugural address.

The outlines of the New Deal’s activist approach to dealing with the crisis began to emerge during the celebrated first 100 days of his presidency, taking the form of an array of alphabet agencies such as the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Agency) to bring relief to hard-pressed farmers, the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) to deploy more than 2.5 million young men to conserve the nation’s fields and waters, and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to curb the excesses of Wall Street.

Perhaps the most important and enduring of the New Deal measures was the Social Security system, providing for federal payment of old-age pensions.

Roosevelt was hardly universally popular. His enemies derided him as “a traitor to his class.” He countered their opposition with rhetoric delivered in his silvery tenor over the powerful new megaphone of American politics, the living room radio. In his celebrated fireside chats and other orations, FDR summoned “my friends,” as he addressed his audience, to “a rendezvous with destiny” and brought new hope to the “one-third of a nation” he saw as “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

Roosevelt was still struggling against hard times at home when a new crisis loomed abroad with the outbreak of World War II and the threat of aggression from Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Roosevelt’s lend-lease program kept Great Britain and the Soviet Union in the fight against Hitler while he sought to maintain American neutrality. This strategy allowed Japan to strike the first blow in the notorious sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. A military disaster for the U.S., the Japanese attack silenced isolationist sentiment and united Americans behind Roosevelt’s leadership in the struggle against the Axis.

Though he had never fired a shot in anger, Roosevelt stepped into the post of wartime commander-in-chief as if he had been born for the role. He made the key decision to finish the war in Europe first, before tackling Japan, and gave the green light to the Manhattan Project, paving the road to V-J Day in the Pacific and to the Nuclear Age.

His sudden death at 63 from a stroke, on April 12, 1945, sent ripples of grief and shock across the land he had governed for more than 12 years and to far corners of the war-torn planet. In the Pacific, GIs on the way to reinforce the assault on the Japanese bastion of Okinawa wept unashamedly and worried--unnecessarily as it turned out--that Roosevelt’s death might prolong the war. On the home front, Americans mourned Roosevelt as the savior of their country after it had been laid low by the Great Depression.

The epitaph FDR himself probably would have preferred came from the lips of an elderly Georgian who remarked: “He made a way for folks when there wasn’t no way.”