Franklin Roosevelt won his first race by motoring around rural New York
In 1910, a young Democrat named Franklin Roosevelt ran for a state senate seat in a solidly Republican district. Acting as his own campaign manager, he toured the countryside by automobile, at a time when few people could afford one. Helped by a national Democratic wave, he won a surprise victory that launched the longest presidency in American history.
Roosevelt was born in 1882 at Hyde Park, New York, the only child of a wealthy mother devoted to him, and grew up so sheltered that one historian likened his upbringing to that of English aristocrats. He learned German and French on trips abroad, attended the elite Groton School, and at Harvard edited the student newspaper, the Crimson. His distant cousin Theodore, president from 1901, became his role model, and in 1905 gave away the bride when Franklin married Eleanor, Theodore's niece.
In Albany, the new senator led insurgents against the Tammany Hall machine, then served as assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson from 1913, pushing hard for naval preparedness during the First World War. He was the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate in their losing 1920 campaign. In 1921 an illness permanently paralysed his legs. Encouraged partly by Eleanor, he returned to win New York's governorship in 1928.
Elected president in a landslide over Herbert Hoover in 1932, he launched the New Deal in his first hundred days, offering relief to the jobless and to farmers and reshaping American politics. Lasting creations include Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Act. He won again in 1936 by one of the largest margins ever, and in 1940 claimed a third term, possible because no term limit existed until 1951.
After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he led the country into war against Japan, Germany and Italy, mobilised the economy, prioritised defeating Europe's Axis powers first, launched the atomic bomb project and helped lay the groundwork for the United Nations. He won a fourth term in 1944 but died the following April. His ordering of the internment of Japanese, German and Italian Americans has drawn lasting criticism, yet historians consistently rank him among the three greatest American presidents.
Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt
