My Political Hero: Franklin D. Roosevelt

Very few Presidents leave positive and lasting legacies, and fewer still are used as political benchmarks for decades to come. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one such President. Elected during the Great Depression, and commander in chief throughout most of World War 2, Roosevelt overcame substantial obstacles in his path, and is rightly considered one of the greatest ever US Presidents.

Born January 30th in 1882 and a distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, FDR grew up in a wealthy background, and attended Harvard University before marrying future civil rights campaigner Eleanor in 1905. Elected as a Democrat to the New York State Senate in 1910, he was appointed Assistant Secretary to the Navy by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, before running as James M. Cox’s running mate for the 1920 Presidential Election.  However, Republican Warren G. Harding won a landslide on a minimal government “return to normalcy” platform.

In 1921, FDR contracted polio, yet he refused to submit to his paralysis, and was gradually able to walk again with the aid of leg braces. When faced with adversity in office, he once noted “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toes, after that anything would seem easy”. The episode deepened his compassion for human suffering, a key element of his Presidential social agenda. Elected as Governor of New York in 1928 after maintaining his links with the Democratic Party, he won the nomination for President in 1932, pledging “a New Deal for the American people”.

Whilst the boom period of the 1920s had been characterised by affluence, minimal government intervention and the 1929 Wall Street Crash, FDR caught the public imagination by calling for the Government to help “the forgotten man”. With a quarter of the workforce unemployed and all but ten of the nation’s forty-eight states forced to close their banks, Republican President Herbert Hoover was soundly defeated by a 57.4% winning margin. Political journalist Walter Lippmann foolishly surmised that “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who…would very much like to be President”.

FDR’s New Deal coalition of labour unions, city machines, blue collar workers, minorities, farmers and intellectuals signaled not only the end of Republican hegemony, but the end of classic liberalism in America. Asserting that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, FDR’s three ‘R’s (relief, recovery and reform) permanently changed the role of the Federal Government. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 secured depositors’ savings against speculative purposes by separating investment banks from commercial banks, a legal demarcation repealed only in 1999 (arguably an instigator of the Great Recession of 2008 onwards). The Works Progress Administration signed up 5 million people by the end of 1938 (an eighth of the workforce) to work relief programmes, whilst the Social Security Act of 1935 established unemployment compensation and old-age pensions for the whole nation through payroll taxes. The National Labor Relations Act gave federal support to the right of workers to organise unions and engage in collective bargaining, whilst Lippmann’s conservative thesis was disproved by FDR’s willingness to to try “bold, persistent experimentation” to alleviate the Depression. As the only US President in history to win more than two terms (now constitutionally mandatory), FDR’s reforms received widespread public support, not least his landslide 1936 re-election with 60.8% of the popular vote.

The US entered World War 2 in 1941 after the “day that will live in infamy” of Pearl Harbour, and the “arsenal of democracy” that FDR had promised in 1940 helped to aid the Allied forces to victory, along with establishing the start of the much repeated “Special Relationship” with the UK, with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill striking up a friendship. FDR died in office in 1945, a year after his fourth election victory, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

He is my political hero, without question, because he not only challenged and reformed an outdated economic model, but he also allocated to his New Deal the less-fortunate and ‘underdog’ members of society who had been ignored during the years of prosperity. Thanks to my Year 13 History teacher Mr Edwards, my political interests and philosophies were arguably formulated by studying FDR. In terms of FDR’s legacy, Lyndon Johnson’s progressive ‘Great Society’ programmes built upon much of the New Deal foundations, with LBJ saying of his mentor “he was like a daddy to me”. Social Security remains a key pillar of the American welfare state, a programme that even George W Bush dared not to privatise, whilst Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package of 2009 was reminiscent of FDR’s “pump priming” into the economy. He is a benchmark not only for budding Democrats, but for progressive causes and beliefs.