Franklin Delano Roosevelt

1920 vice presidential campaign

With Wilson's presidency nearing its end, Roosevelt planned his next run for office. He approached the public-minded businessman Herbert Hoover about running for the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination, with Roosevelt as his running mate. Roosevelt's plan for Hoover to run fell through after Hoover declared his alignment with the Republican Party, but Roosevelt continued to seek the 1920 vice presidential nomination. After Governor James M. Cox of Ohio won the party's presidential nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, he chose Roosevelt as his running mate. Although his nomination surprised most people, he balanced the ticket as a moderate and a prohibitionist with a famous name.

During the campaign, Cox and Roosevelt defended Wilson's presidency and the League of Nations, both of which were unpopular in 1920. Roosevelt personally supported US membership in the League, but, unlike Wilson, he favored compromising with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other "Reservationists". Republican Warren G. Harding and his running mate Calvin Coolidge defeated the Cox–Roosevelt ticket in the presidential election by a wide margin. Roosevelt later reflected that the relationships and goodwill that he built in the 1920 campaign proved to be a major asset in his 1932 campaign. The 1920 election also saw the first public participation of Eleanor Roosevelt, who established herself as a valuable political player. After the election, Roosevelt returned to New York City, where he practiced law and served as a vice president of the Fidelity and Deposit Company.

GNP and unemployment rates

Government spending increased from 8.0% of the gross national product (GNP) under Hoover in 1932 to 10.2% in 1936. The national debt as a percentage of the GNP had more than doubled under Hoover from 16% to 40% of the GNP in early 1933. It held steady at close to 40% as late as fall 1941, then grew rapidly during the war. The GNP was 34% higher in 1936 than in 1932 and 58% higher in 1940 on the eve of war. The economy grew 58% from 1932 to 1940, and then grew 56% from 1940 to 1945 in five years of wartime. Unemployment fell dramatically during Roosevelt's first term. It increased in 1938 but continually declined after 1938. Total employment during Roosevelt's term expanded by 18.31 million jobs.

Home front

The home front was subject to dynamic social changes throughout the war, though domestic issues were no longer Roosevelt's most urgent policy concern. The military buildup spurred economic growth. Unemployment fell from 7.7 million in spring 1940 to 3.4 million in fall 1941 and to 1.5 million in fall 1942, out of a labor force of 54 million. There was a growing labor shortage, accelerating the second wave of the Great Migration of African Americans and rural populations to manufacturing centers. To pay for increased government spending, the Revenue Act of 1942 instituted top tax rates as high as 94% (after accounting for the excess profits tax), greatly increased the tax base, and instituted the first federal withholding tax. In 1944, Roosevelt requested that Congress enact legislation to tax all "unreasonable" profits, both corporate and individual. Congress overrode Roosevelt's veto to pass a smaller revenue bill raising $2 billion.

In 1942, war production increased dramatically but fell short of Roosevelt's goals, due in part to manpower shortages. The effort was also hindered by strikes, especially in the coal mining and railroad industries, which lasted well into 1944. Nonetheless, between 1941 and 1945, the US produced 2.4 million trucks, 300,000 military aircraft, 88,400 tanks, and 40 billion rounds of ammunition. The production capacity of the US dwarfed that of other countries; for example, in 1944, the US produced more military aircraft than the combined production of Germany, Japan, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The White House became the ultimate site for labor mediation, conciliation or arbitration. One particular conflict occurred between Vice President Wallace, who headed the Board of Economic Warfare, and Jesse H. Jones, in charge of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; both agencies assumed responsibility for the acquisition of rubber supplies and came to loggerheads over funding. Roosevelt resolved the dispute by dissolving both agencies. In 1943, Roosevelt established the Office of War Mobilization to oversee the home front; the agency was led by James F. Byrnes, who came to be known as the "assistant president" due to his influence.

Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union Address advocated a Second Bill of Rights, guaranteeing "adequate medical care", "a good education", "a decent home", and a "useful and remunerative job". In the most ambitious domestic proposal of his third term, Roosevelt proposed the G.I. Bill, which would create a massive benefits program for returning soldiers, including post-secondary education, medical care, unemployment insurance, job counseling, and low-cost loans for homes and businesses. The G.I. Bill passed unanimously in Congress and was signed into law in June 1944. Of the fifteen million Americans who served in World War II, more than half benefitted from the educational opportunities provided for in the G.I. Bill.

Severe health decline and death

Roosevelt, a chain-smoker, had been in declining health since at least 1940. In March 1944, he underwent testing at Bethesda Hospital and was found to have hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease causing angina pectoris, and congestive heart failure. Physicians ordered Roosevelt to rest. His personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, created a daily schedule that incorporated two hours of rest and banned business guests for lunch. During the 1944 re-election campaign, McIntire denied several times that Roosevelt's health was poor. Roosevelt realized that his declining health could eventually make it impossible for him to continue as president, and in 1945 he told a confidant that he might resign following the end of the war.

Everyone who saw Roosevelt was reportedly shocked by how old and frail he looked upon his return to the US from the Yalta Conference. He spoke while seated in his address to Congress, an unprecedented concession to his physical incapacity. On March 29, Roosevelt departed for the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest before his anticipated appearance at the founding conference of the United Nations. On April 12, at the Little White House, he sat for a portrait by painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff. He told Shoumatoff, "I have a terrific headache." He then slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom. At 3:35 p.m. that day, his doctor Howard Bruenn diagnosed a massive intracerebral hemorrhage and pronounced him dead at age 63.

Funeral and burial

On April 13, Roosevelt's body was placed in a flag-draped coffin and loaded onto the Ferdinand Magellan presidential railcar for the trip back to Washington. A state funeral was deemed inappropriate during wartime, so a smaller ceremony was undertaken. Despite this, thousands flocked to the route to pay their respects. Rather than lying in state at the Capitol as is tradition, Roosevelt's remains were placed in the White House's East Room, where a simple funeral service was held on April 14. His body was then transported by train transfers from Washington to his birthplace of Hyde Park, New York. On April 15, per his wishes, he was buried in the rose garden of his Springwood estate.

Roosevelt's death was met with shock and grief across the world. Germany surrendered during the 30-day mourning period, but Truman as Roosevelt's successor ordered flags to remain at half-staff, in addition to dedicating Victory in Europe Day and its celebrations to Roosevelt's memory. World War II ended with the surrender of Japan in September.

Roosevelt's declining physical health and use of a wheelchair had been kept secret from the public. Although he was allowed to work only four hours a day, the illusion of activity was kept up. Robert Ferrell's 1998 book The Dying President explores the extent to which Roosevelt and his top aides went to keep the public in the dark about his decline. Ferrell argues that Roosevelt was too sick to have remained in office, and that his inability to work led to critical foreign policy mistakes in 1944 and 1945, as well as a failure to prepare Truman for succeeding him.

Religious views and ethics

Religious views

Near the Springwood estate in Hyde Park is the St. James Episcopal Church, where from a young age Roosevelt attended services with his family. Roosevelt grew to be an active member of the church.

In his first inaugural address, in 1933, Roosevelt declared that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and made numerous religious references, which were widely commented upon at the time. Although Roosevelt did not use the term "Judeo-Christian", it has come to be seen by scholars as in tune with the emerging view of a Judeo-Christian tradition. Historian Mary Stuckey emphasizes "Roosevelt's use of the shared values grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition" as a way to unify the nation, and justify his own role as its chief policymaker.

In the speech, Roosevelt criticized the bankers and promised a reform in an echo of the gospels: "The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit." Houck and Nocasian, examining the flood of responses to the First Inaugural, and commenting on this passage, argue: "For those inclined to see the Divine Hand of Providence at work, Roosevelt's miraculous escape [from assassination] in Miami was a sign—perhaps The Sign—that God had sent another Washington or Lincoln at the appointed hour.... Many others could not resist the subject position that Roosevelt... had cultivated throughout the address—that of savior."

Gary Scott Smith stresses that Roosevelt believed his welfare programs were "wholly in accord with the social teachings of Christianity". He saw the achievement of social justice through government action as morally superior to the old laissez-faire approach. He proclaimed, "The thing we are seeking is justice," as guided by the precept of "Do unto your neighbor as you would be done by." Roosevelt saw the moral issue as religiosity versus anti-religion. According to Smith, "He pleaded with Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to transcend their sectarian creeds and 'unite in good works' whenever they could 'find common cause.'"

Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs point to Roosevelt's 1939 State of the Union Address, which called upon Americans to "defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on with which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded". They state that, "This familiar rhetoric invoked a conception of the sanctity of the United States' Judeo-Christian values as a basis for war." Timothy Wyatt notes that in the coming of World War II Roosevelt's isolationist opponents said he was calling for a "holy war". Wyatt says: "Often in his Fireside Chats or speeches to the houses of Congress, Roosevelt argued for the entrance of America into the war by using both blatant and subtle religious rhetoric. Roosevelt portrayed the conflict in the light of good versus evil, the religious against the irreligious. In doing so, he pitted the Christian ideals of democracy against the atheism of National Socialism.

Judeo-Christian ethics

There is controversy among historians about Roosevelt's attitude to Jews and the Holocaust. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. says Roosevelt "did what he could do" to help Jews. David Wyman says Roosevelt's record on Jewish refugees was one of the worst failures of his presidency. In 1923, as a member of the Harvard University board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at Harvard and helped institute a quota to limit the number of Jews admitted. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Roosevelt had his ambassador to Germany recalled to Washington. He did not loosen immigration quotas but did allow German Jews already in the US on visas to stay indefinitely. According to Rafael Medoff, Roosevelt could have saved 190,000 Jewish lives by telling his State Department to fill immigration quotas to the legal limit, but his presidency discouraged and disqualified Jewish refugees based on its prohibitive requirements that left less than 25 percent of the quotas filled. In 1939, Roosevelt refused to allow the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying more than 900 Jews fleeing the Nazis, to enter the United States, and it was forced to return to Europe.

Nazi leaders chose to implement the "Final Solution"—the extermination of the European Jewish population—by January 1942, and American officials learned of the scale of the Nazi extermination campaign in the following months. Against the objections of the State Department, Roosevelt convinced the other Allied leaders to issue the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, which condemned The Holocaust that was ongoing. In 1943, Roosevelt told US government officials that there should be limits on Jews in various professions to "eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany." The same year, Roosevelt was personally briefed by Polish Home Army intelligence agent Jan Karski who was an eyewitness of the Holocaust. Pleading for action, Karski told him that 1.8 million Jews had already been exterminated. In January 1944, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to aid Jews and other victims of Axis atrocities. Aside from these actions, Roosevelt believed that the best way to help the persecuted populations of Europe was to end the war as quickly as possible. Top military leaders and War Department leaders rejected any campaign to bomb the extermination camps or the rail lines leading to them, fearing it would be a diversion from the war effort. According to biographer Jean Edward Smith, there is no evidence that anyone ever proposed such a campaign to Roosevelt.

Geopolitical philosophy

In late December 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt met at the Arcadia Conference, which established a joint strategy between the US and Britain. Both agreed on a Europe first strategy that would prioritize the defeat of Germany before Japan. Roosevelt coined the term "Four Policemen" to refer to the "Big Four" Allied powers of World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. Roosevelt, Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek cooperated informally on a plan in which American and British troops concentrated in the West, Soviet troops fought on the Eastern front, and Chinese, British, and American troops fought in Asia and the Pacific. Roosevelt had a close relationship with Churchill, but he and his advisers quickly lost respect for Chiang's government, viewing it as hopelessly corrupt. US and Soviet leaders distrusted each other throughout the war, and relations further suffered after 1943 as both sides supported sympathetic governments in liberated territories.

To coordinate war production and other aspects of the home front, Roosevelt established the War Shipping Administration, the Office of Price Administration, the Board of Economic Warfare, and the War Labor Board. In 1943, Roosevelt established the Office of War Mobilization (OWM) to oversee war production.

In August 1939, Roosevelt had aligned his geopolitics with the imminent reality of developing nuclear arms as weapons of mass destruction. Roosevelt authorized the research and development of such destructive military capabilities. The Manhattan Project was soon instituted with British cooperation, leading to the eventual decades-long arms race with the Soviet Union.