32nd President of the US – Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt or Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on 30th January 1882 at Hyde Park in New York. Franklin D. Roosevelt became the 32nd President of United States of America. He served the nation from 1933 to 1945. He preceded Herbert Hoover as the President.

Many new programs were started by Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1938 to save the economy and people of America from the Great Depression. These new programs were referred to as New Deal. Roosevelt was successful in recovering the country from the Great Depression. Harry Truman succeeded Franklin D Roosevelt as the President of America.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s parents were James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. He was the only child of his parents. From Harvard University he completed his Bachelor degree in History. Later he joined Columbia University in New York to study law. Roosevelt married his distant cousin Anna Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905. Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of USA was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relative. In 1912, Franklin D Roosevelt was elected again to the State Senate. In 1913 Franklin D. Roosevelt was appointed as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson.

It was in 1864 that he was nominated as the reporter of the Indiana Supreme Court. He also contested the elections for the post of the Governor of Indiana State in 1876, but was unfortunately defeated by his opponent, James D Williams.

Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and asserted in his Inaugural Address, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Born in 1882 at Hyde Park, New York–now a national historic site–he attended Harvard University and Columbia Law School. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1905, he married Eleanor Roosevelt.

Following the example of his fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he greatly admired, Franklin D. Roosevelt entered public service through politics, but as a Democrat. He won election to the New York Senate in 1910. President Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920.

In the summer of 1921, when he was 39, disaster hit-he was stricken with poliomyelitis. Demonstrating indomitable courage, he fought to regain the use of his legs, particularly through swimming. At the 1924 Democratic Convention he dramatically appeared on crutches to nominate Alfred E. Smith as “the Happy Warrior.” In 1928 Roosevelt became Governor of New York.

He was elected President in November 1932, to the first of four terms. By March there were 13,000,000 unemployed, and almost every bank was closed. In his first “hundred days,” he proposed, and Congress enacted, a sweeping program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and to those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt’s New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

In 1936 he was re-elected by a top-heavy margin. Feeling he was armed with a popular mandate, he sought legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating key New Deal measures. Roosevelt lost the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law took place. Thereafter the Government could legally regulate the economy.

Roosevelt had pledged the United States to the “good neighbor” policy, transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral American manifesto into arrangements for mutual action against aggressors. He also sought through neutrality legislation to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, yet at the same time to strengthen nations threatened or attacked. When France fell and England came under siege in 1940, he began to send Great Britain all possible aid short of actual military involvement.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt directed organization of the Nation’s manpower and resources for global war. Feeling that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United States and Russia, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which, he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.

As the war drew to a close, Roosevelt’s health deteriorated, and on April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Some of the famous quotes of Franklin D. Roosevelt are as follows:

• “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”
• “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”
• “When you get to the end of your rope. Tie a knot and hang on.”
• “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”
• “I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.”
• “Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory… In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.”