# Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) was the 32nd President of the United States (1933–1945), the only president to serve more than two terms (winning four consecutive elections in [[1932 Presidential Election]], [[1936 Presidential Election]], [[1940 Presidential Election]], and [[1944 Presidential Election]]), and the structural foil against which every variant of 20th- and 21st-century American conservatism has been built. He was a Hyde Park, New York patrician, a distant cousin of [[Theodore Roosevelt]], a polio survivor who used a wheelchair throughout his presidency (substantially concealed from the public by press cooperation), and the political figure who fundamentally remade the relationship between the federal government and American life. The [[New Deal]] — the alphabet agencies (CCC, WPA, TVA, NRA, AAA, SEC, FDIC, NLRB, etc.), the [[Social Security Act]] (1935), the [[National Labor Relations Act]] (1935), the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) — built the modern American regulatory and welfare state. He defeated [[Herbert Hoover]] in 1932 with 57.4% of the popular vote, then crushed Alf Landon in 1936 with 60.8% — the largest [[Electoral College]] margin since 1820. He assembled the New Deal coalition — Northern urban workers, Catholic and Jewish immigrants, organized labor, African Americans (a partial defection from [[Republican Party]] loyalty dating to Lincoln), Southern white Democrats (the still-segregated Solid South), and intellectuals — that dominated American politics from 1932 through approximately 1968 and whose dissolution is the central story of [[Party Realignment]]. He led the United States through World War II, appointing [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] as Supreme Allied Commander, presided over the Manhattan Project, established the architecture of wartime executive power that would become permanent in the national security state, and died in office on April 12, 1945, weeks before the German surrender. The [[22nd Amendment]] (1947, ratified 1951) limiting presidents to two terms was a direct Republican response to his four elections — the first structural constitutional check motivated by a single president since the [[12th Amendment]] responded to the Jefferson-Burr crisis. FDR's presidency also produced the most aggressive assertion of presidential power over the judiciary in American history: the 1937 court-packing plan. After the Supreme Court struck down key New Deal legislation (the NRA in *Schechter Poultry v. United States*, the AAA in *United States v. Butler*), Roosevelt proposed expanding the Court from nine to as many as fifteen justices. The plan failed legislatively — even Democratic senators rejected it — but the Court reversed course anyway (the "switch in time that saved nine"), and subsequent retirements allowed FDR to appoint eight justices and reshape constitutional law for a generation. The episode established the modern template for presidential conflict with the judiciary and is regularly invoked in debates over court reform. ## Right-wing relevance FDR is the foundational antagonist of American conservatism. Every major 20th-century conservative intellectual project — the Old Right ([[Robert Taft]], Frank Chodorov, Albert Jay Nock), Buckleyism (*National Review* 1955), Goldwaterism, Reaganism, the [[Federalist Society]], the contemporary administrative-state-deconstruction project ([[Project 2025]], [[Schedule F]]) — is structurally an attack on the New Deal regulatory order FDR built and the [[Administrative State]] it required. The Federalist Society's non-delegation doctrine revival, the major questions doctrine that emerged on the Supreme Court in 2022–2024, and the *Chevron* deference reversal in *[[Loper Bright v. Raimondo]] Enterprises v. Raimondo* (2024) are explicit attacks on the FDR-era administrative-law framework. The contemporary right-wing project to "dismantle the administrative state" is, in the most literal sense, the project to undo FDR. The New Deal also generated the first wave of right-wing populist opposition that prefigures modern [[Right-Wing Populism]]. Figures like [[Huey Long]] (Share Our Wealth), [[Charles Coughlin]] (the radio priest whose broadcasts reached 30 million listeners and turned from New Deal support to antisemitic proto-fascism), and the Liberty League (du Pont-funded corporate opposition) established the template for populist revolt against federal power that runs through [[George Wallace]], [[Pat Buchanan]], the [[Tea Party Movement]], and [[MAGA]]. FDR's internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans by executive order ([[Executive Order 9066]], February 1942) is the most extreme exercise of wartime executive power over a civilian population in modern American history — a precedent invoked in contemporary debates over [[Immigration]] enforcement, Muslim travel bans, and the limits of emergency executive authority. He is also the figure whose four-term run is invoked in contemporary discussions of presidential term limits and Trump-era musings about a third term. ## Key policies and episodes - **New Deal programs (1933–1938).** The most comprehensive restructuring of the American economy and state in the 20th century. The first hundred days (March–June 1933) produced the Emergency Banking Act, the CCC, the AAA, the TVA, the NRA, and the Glass-Steagall Act. The second New Deal (1935–1936) added Social Security, the Wagner Act (guaranteeing collective bargaining), the WPA, and the Rural Electrification Administration. These programs created the [[Administrative State]] — the apparatus of independent regulatory agencies, executive rulemaking, and federal administrative law — that remains the central target of conservative legal and institutional attack. - **Gold standard abandonment (1933–1934).** FDR took the United States off the [[Gold Standard]] domestically in 1933, forbade private gold hoarding (Executive Order 6102), and devalued the dollar against gold from $20.67 to $35.00 per ounce via the Gold Reserve Act (1934). This is a foundational grievance of hard-money conservatism and the Austrian economics tradition that runs through [[Ron Paul]], the libertarian right, and contemporary cryptocurrency politics. - **Court-packing plan (1937).** After the Supreme Court struck down NRA and AAA provisions, FDR proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill to add up to six additional justices. The plan was defeated in the Senate by a bipartisan coalition including many Democrats, but the Court shifted toward New Deal validation anyway. The episode established the precedent for presidential pressure on the judiciary and is cited in every subsequent court-expansion or court-reform debate, including progressive proposals in 2021–2024. - **Executive Order 9066 — Japanese American internment (1942).** The forced relocation and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of them U.S. citizens) from [[the West]] Coast into concentration camps. Upheld by the Supreme Court in *Korematsu v. United States* (1944), a decision not formally overruled until *[[Trump v. Hawaii]]* (2018) — though the *Trump v. Hawaii* majority simultaneously upheld the Muslim travel ban. The internment is the extreme case study in wartime executive overreach and racial targeting. - **New Deal coalition assembly (1932–1936).** FDR built the electoral coalition — labor unions, urban ethnic minorities, African Americans, Southern whites, intellectuals, farmers — that gave the [[Democratic Party]] majority status for a generation. The coalition's internal contradiction (Black voters and segregationist Southern Democrats in the same party) was the time bomb that detonated with [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the [[Southern Strategy]], producing the modern two-party alignment. - **Lend-Lease and wartime executive expansion (1941–1945).** The Lend-Lease Act (March 1941) committed the United States to Allied support before Pearl Harbor. Wartime mobilization created the precedent for permanent peacetime military-industrial capacity, the national security state, and the executive-branch war-making authority that Congress has never fully reclaimed — the dynamic Eisenhower warned against and that the [[War Powers Resolution]] of 1973 attempted, unsuccessfully, to constrain. - **Yalta Conference (February 1945).** FDR's agreements with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta — including Soviet entry into the Pacific war and the postwar division of Europe — became a central right-wing grievance. The accusation that FDR "gave away" Eastern Europe at Yalta fueled [[McCarthyism]], the "Who lost China?" debate, and the broader conservative narrative that New Deal liberals were soft on communism or actively treasonous. - **22nd Amendment (proposed 1947, ratified 1951).** The Republican-led constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms was a posthumous rebuke to FDR's four elections. It remains the structural constraint that shapes contemporary presidential-power debates, including Trump's public musings about a third term. ## Connections - [[Theodore Roosevelt]] — Distant cousin; the family's earlier political star; ideological predecessor on activist-state governance, though TR was a Republican and FDR's New Deal went far beyond TR's [[Progressive Era]] reforms. - [[Herbert Hoover]] — Predecessor; defeated in the [[1932 Presidential Election]]; lifelong political and ideological foe whose laissez-faire response to the [[Great Depression]] became the origin story for the New Deal. - [[Harry S. Truman]] — Vice President in FDR's fourth term (1945); succeeded on FDR's death; extended and consolidated the New Deal state through the Fair Deal and the [[Truman Doctrine]]. - [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] — Supreme Allied Commander appointed by FDR; later the first Republican president after the New Deal era, whose "Modern Republicanism" accepted rather than dismantled FDR's domestic framework. - [[Huey Long]] — Louisiana senator and populist demagogue who challenged FDR from the left with the Share Our Wealth program before his assassination in 1935; prefigured later right-wing populist challenges to federal authority. - [[Wendell Willkie]] — 1940 Republican nominee who lost to FDR but represented the internationalist wing of the GOP, contrasting with the isolationist Old Right that opposed FDR's war preparations. ## See also - [[New Deal]] — The program suite that built the administrative state and defined the central target of American conservatism - [[Administrative State]] — The regulatory apparatus FDR created and the contemporary right seeks to dismantle - [[Party Realignment]] — The coalition FDR built in the 1930s and its dissolution from the 1960s onward - [[Great Depression]] — The economic catastrophe that made the New Deal politically possible - [[Gold Standard]] — The monetary regime FDR abandoned, generating a permanent conservative grievance - [[Project 2025]] — The contemporary institutional project to dismantle the administrative state FDR built - [[Federalist Society]] — The legal organization whose jurisprudential project targets New Deal-era administrative law - [[McCarthyism]] — The anti-communist movement fueled partly by conservative rage at FDR-era foreign policy decisions - [[Economic Bill of Rights]] — FDR's January 1944 "second Bill of Rights," the postwar rights claim [[Harry S. Truman]] renamed and carried forward ## Notable Quotes - [[Franklin D. Roosevelt - descended from immigrants and revolutionists]] — 1938 remarks to the Daughters of the [[American Revolution]], turning founding-stock pride into an argument for immigration. Featured in [[Presidents on the Nation of Immigrants]]. - [[Franklin D. Roosevelt - taxes according to ability to pay]] — 1936; "Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." Featured in [[Presidents on Tax Fairness]].