Franklin Delano Roosevelt: (1882-1945)

(2 of 9)

When Roosevelt assumed the presidency, America was in its third year of depression. No other decline in American history had been so deep, so lasting, so far reaching. Factories that had once produced steel, automobiles, furniture and textiles stood eerily silent. One out of every four Americans was unemployed, and in the cities the number reached nearly 50%. In the countryside, crops that could not be sold at market rotted in the fields. More than half a million homeowners, unable to pay their mortgages, had lost their homes and their farms; thousands of banks had failed, destroying the life savings of millions. The Federal Government had virtually no mechanisms in place to provide relief.

As the Great Depression circled the globe, democracy and capitalism were everywhere in retreat. The propaganda of the day proclaimed that the choice was one of two extremes--fascism or communism. In Germany, economic collapse led to the triumph of the Nazi party and the installation of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor; in Italy, Benito Mussolini assumed dictatorial power with an ideology called Fascism; in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and the communist ideology held sway.

"Capitalism is dying," theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued. "Let no one delude himself by hoping for reform from within." The American Communist Party believed its moment had come. "If I vote at all," social critic Lewis Mumford said, "it will be for the Communists." "The destruction of the Democratic Party," argued University of Chicago professor Paul Douglas (who would later become a pillar of the same party), "would be one of the best things that could happen in our political life." "The situation is critical," political analyst Walter Lippman warned Roosevelt two months before he took office. "You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial power."

It was Roosevelt's lasting accomplishment that he found a middle ground between the unbridled laissez-faire of the '20s and the brutal dictatorships of the '30s. His conviction that a democratic government had a responsibility to help Americans in distress--not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty--provided a moral compass to guide both his words and his actions. Believing there had never been a time other than the Civil War when democratic institutions had been in such jeopardy, Roosevelt fashioned a New Deal, which fundamentally altered the relationship of the government to its people, rearranged the balance of power between capital and labor and made the industrial system more humane.

Massive public works projects put millions to work building schools, roads, libraries, hospitals; repairing bridges; digging conservation trails; painting murals in public buildings. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulated a stock market that had been run as an insiders' game. Federal funds protected home mortgages so that property owners could keep their homes; legislation guaranteed labor's right to organize and established minimum wages and maximum hours. A sweeping Social Security system provided a measure of security and dignity to the elderly.