Roosevelt's leadership, including his early career, the use of the fireside chats, his cabinet, and the expansion of presidential power

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to evaluate Roosevelt as a political leader: his background, his communication, his Cabinet, his expansion of the presidency, his limits, and the historiographical verdict. Strong answers integrate the personal (polio, the patrician background), the institutional (the Brain Trust, the Executive Office), and the historical (the comparison with Wilson and Lincoln).

The answer

Background and early career

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on 30 January 1882 at Hyde Park, New York, to a wealthy Dutch-descended family. He was a fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt (President 1901 to 1909, Republican) and married Theodore's niece Eleanor Roosevelt on 17 March 1905.

His pre-Depression career was conventionally Wilsonian. Harvard (1900 to 1904), Columbia Law (without finishing), New York State Senate (1911 to 1913), and Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913 to 1920) under President Wilson. He was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee on the unsuccessful 1920 ticket with James M. Cox.

In August 1921 at the family holiday home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Roosevelt contracted what was diagnosed as polio (modern medical analysis has suggested Guillain-Barre syndrome). The illness left him paralysed from the waist down. He was 39. He never walked again unaided.

The seven-year recovery period (1921 to 1928) included his political comeback as the keynote speaker at the 1924 Democratic National Convention (the "Happy Warrior" speech for Al Smith) and his development of the Warm Springs, Georgia, hydrotherapy facility into a national polio centre. The convention that nominated Smith for President in 1928 also drafted Roosevelt for Governor of New York.

Governor of New York (1929 to 1932)

Roosevelt won the New York governorship in 1928 by around 25,000 votes (his cousin Theodore's old office). The state was hit by the Depression in 1929. The Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (1931), funded by an income tax surcharge and administered by social worker Harry Hopkins, was the first state-level direct relief program in the country and the institutional prototype for FERA.

He won re-election in 1930 by 725,000 votes. The Albany governorship gave him executive experience, the lieutenants (Hopkins) he would take to Washington, and the public profile that secured the 1932 nomination.

The 1932 nomination and election

Roosevelt was nominated on the fourth ballot of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (1 July 1932) with the help of a deal that gave the vice-presidency to John Nance Garner of Texas. Roosevelt broke convention and flew to Chicago to accept in person, pledging "a new deal for the American people". He won the November election by 472 to 59 electoral votes and 57 to 40 per cent of the popular vote against Hoover.

Communication: the fireside chats

Roosevelt delivered 30 fireside chats over 12 years, beginning with the banking address on 12 March 1933 and ending in June 1944. Listenership was estimated at around 60 million Americans, about half the country.

The chats used conversational language and direct address: Roosevelt opened the banking chat with "I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking." Will Rogers said, "He explained the banking situation so clearly even the bankers could understand it."

The chats were politically essential. Around 80 per cent of American newspapers were Republican-leaning in the 1930s; radio bypassed press hostility. Roosevelt's voice (Atlantic patrician, warmed by polio) was widely seen as the voice of reassurance during the Depression and the war.

The Brain Trust and Cabinet

Roosevelt's recruitment of academics and administrators was unprecedented. The original "Brains Trust" (term coined by reporter James Kieran) included three Columbia professors: Raymond Moley (law), Rexford Tugwell (agriculture), and Adolf Berle (corporate law).

The Cabinet included:

• Cordell Hull (Tennessee), Secretary of State 1933 to 1944.
• Henry Morgenthau Jr. (New York), Secretary of the Treasury from January 1934 to July 1945, a personal friend and neighbour.
• Henry Stimson (New York), Secretary of War from June 1940. A Republican Hoover Secretary of State; his appointment was Roosevelt's bipartisan signal of war preparation.
• Frank Knox (Illinois), Secretary of the Navy from June 1940. The 1936 Republican vice-presidential nominee.
• Frances Perkins (New York), Secretary of Labor 1933 to 1945, the first woman in a Presidential Cabinet.
• Harold Ickes (Illinois), Secretary of the Interior 1933 to 1946, head of the PWA.
• Henry Wallace (Iowa), Secretary of Agriculture 1933 to 1940, Vice-President 1941 to 1945.
• Harry Hopkins (Iowa), head of FERA, CWA, and WPA; Commerce Secretary 1939 to 1940; Roosevelt's closest wartime adviser.
• James Farley (New York), Postmaster General and party manager.

Eleanor Roosevelt was an unprecedented First Lady. She wrote a daily syndicated column ("My Day", from December 1935), held weekly press conferences with women journalists, took public stands on civil rights (her 1939 resignation from the DAR over Marian Anderson's exclusion from Constitution Hall), and travelled to inspect New Deal projects when polio made her husband's travel difficult.

Expansion of presidential power

Roosevelt remade the office.

Legislative leadership. The First Hundred Days (4 March to 16 June 1933) passed 15 major Acts. The Hundred Days remained the benchmark for presidential legislative achievement until Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

Administrative state. The number of federal employees rose from around 580,000 (1933) to around 1.4 million (1941). The Executive Office of the President was created in 1939 on the recommendation of the Brownlow Committee (1937), bringing the Bureau of the Budget into the White House.

Judicial reshaping. Roosevelt appointed eight Supreme Court justices over his presidency (Hugo Black 1937, Stanley Reed 1938, Felix Frankfurter 1939, William O. Douglas 1939, Frank Murphy 1940, James F. Byrnes 1941, Robert Jackson 1941, and Wiley Rutledge 1943), plus the elevation of Harlan F. Stone to Chief Justice in 1941. No president since Washington had so reshaped the Court.

Foreign policy. Roosevelt expanded the President's foreign policy role through Lend-Lease (March 1941), the Destroyer-for-Bases Agreement (September 1940), the Atlantic Charter (August 1941), and the conduct of the war.

Four terms

Roosevelt broke the unwritten two-term limit that George Washington had set, winning the 1940 nomination over Cordell Hull and James Farley and the 1940 election by 449 to 82 electoral votes against Wendell Willkie. He won 1944 against Thomas Dewey by 432 to 99 electoral votes and died in office on 12 April 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia.

The Twenty-second Amendment (passed 21 March 1947, ratified 27 February 1951) restored the two-term limit.

Limits and criticisms

The court-packing plan of 5 February 1937 was the Roosevelt presidency's worst political failure; the Senate rejected the bill on 22 July 1937. The "Roosevelt recession" of 1937 to 1938 exposed the limits of the recovery. The 1938 mid-terms gave the conservative coalition control of domestic legislation.

Roosevelt's compromises on civil rights (refusing to push the anti-lynching bills, accepting Southern exclusion of farm and domestic workers from Social Security), his approval of Executive Order 9066 (19 February 1942) interning around 120,000 Japanese Americans, and his accommodation of Stalin at the Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945) conferences are continuing critiques.

Historiography

James MacGregor Burns (Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1956; Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1970) is the standard two-volume biography.

Frank Freidel (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 4 vols, 1952 to 1973) is the major scholarly biography.

Conrad Black (Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, 2003) is the major recent conservative biography, more sympathetic than the title implies.

Jean Edward Smith (FDR, 2007) is a major modern one-volume study.

H.W. Brands (Traitor to His Class, 2008) is the standard recent account of Roosevelt's class background.

George McJimsey (The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 2000) is the standard institutional study.

Eleanor Roosevelt has her own historiography. Blanche Wiesen Cook (Eleanor Roosevelt, 3 vols, 1992 to 2016) is the standard biography.

Common exam traps

Treating Roosevelt's polio as a minor detail. It shaped his temperament, his political style, and the staging of his public appearances.

Forgetting Eleanor. Her independent influence on civil rights, women, and refugees is part of the answer.

Confusing the 1939 Executive Office reform with the failed 1937 court-packing. Both were Brownlow Committee recommendations; one passed, one failed.

In one sentence

Franklin Roosevelt, born at Hyde Park on 30 January 1882, paralysed by polio in 1921, Governor of New York from 1929, transformed the American presidency through the fireside chats (30, from 12 March 1933), the unprecedented Brain Trust and Cabinet (Perkins, Ickes, Hopkins, Wallace), the four electoral victories (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944), the Executive Office reorganisation of 1939, and the appointment of eight Supreme Court justices, and remains, alongside Lincoln, the most consequential American president, his legacy assessed by Leuchtenburg, McJimsey, and Brands against Hofstadter and Powell.