Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt was elected president four times, remade the American state, and led it through the Depression and most of the Second World War from a wheelchair the public was not shown. Born in 1882 into a wealthy Hudson valley family and a distant cousin of Theodore, he followed the same route — state legislature, assistant secretary of the navy, a losing vice-presidential nomination in 1920 — and then contracted a paralytic illness in 1921 at thirty-nine that cost him the use of his legs. He spent seven years out of politics, bought a hydrotherapy resort at Warm Springs, and taught himself to stand in braces and appear to walk while gripping a son's arm. He became governor of New York in 1928 and president in 1932, in the worst year of the Depression, with a quarter of the workforce unemployed and the banks closing. The first hundred days produced fifteen major laws: the banks reopened under federal guarantee, deposit insurance, the securities regulator, work relief, farm price supports, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Social security, the labour relations act and the minimum wage followed. He also interned some 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942, most of them citizens. He supplied Britain before American entry through lend-lease, met Churchill and Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, and set the shape of the postwar institutions. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in April 1945, three weeks before Germany surrendered, without having told his vice-president that an atomic bomb existed. The scale of the personal deception is worth stating. He was photographed thousands of times and there are perhaps two images of him in the chair, by an agreement with the press corps that no modern presidency could sustain for a week.
- Lived: 1882 CE – 1945 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: president, commander_in_chief
