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Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1881-1945)
Born to wealthy parents in Hyde Park, New York, Franklin Roosevelt graduated Harvard and attended Columbia Law School. He practiced law briefly before being elected to the New York Senate in 1910. He was a prominent supporter of Woodrow Wilson and served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913-19.
After running unsuccessfully for vice president in 1920, he became partially paralyzed due to either polio or Guillain-Barré syndrome and spent several years convalescing. He reentered politics in 1928 and was elected Governor of New York. When the Depression occurred, he called for unemployment compensation and old-age pensions, and was reelected in 1930.
Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination for president in 1932 and ran against incumbent Herbert Hoover. He trounced Hoover in the general election while setting a record for most electoral votes. He broke that record when he ran for reelection in 1936.
FDR spent his first term trying to resurrect the economy. When a series of government work programs failed to spark recovery, he pivoted to direct aid to the poor and unemployed. That was more successful, but the economy was stalled until World War II began. In 1940, Democrats convinced him to run for a unprecedented third term, and during World War II he was elected to a fourth term. He had only completed about three months of his last term before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. He remains the only person with a significant physical disability to serve as president.
Address to the Commonwealth Club (1932)
…The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government of economics, or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women. This question has persistently dominated the discussion of government for many generations.
On questions relating to these things men have differed, and for time immemorial it is probable that honest men will continue to differ. The final word belongs to no man; yet we can still believe in change and in progress. Democracy, as a dear old friend of mine in Indiana, Meredith Nicholson, has called it, is a quest, a never-ending seeking for better things, and in the seeking for these things and the striving for better things, and in the seeking for these things and the striving for them, there are many roads to follow. But, if we map the course of these roads, we find that there are only two general directions.
When we look about us, we are likely to forget how hard people have worked to win the privilege of government. The growth of the national governments of Europe was a struggle for the development of a centralized force in the nation, strong enough to impose peace upon ruling barons. In many instances the victory of the central government, the creation of a strong central government, was a haven of refuge to the individual. The people preferred the master far