The only four-term president, who carried America through depression and war and spent his last strength at Yalta
Returning from Yalta, Roosevelt addressed Congress on March 1, 1945 seated — the first time he publicly conceded to the disability he had hidden all his public life.
Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the United States, the only one elected to four terms, who led the country through the Great Depression and the Second World War. His New Deal redefined the role of the federal government, and after Pearl Harbor he drove the Allied war effort under a Europe-first strategy. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, already gravely weakened by congestive heart failure and hypertension, he staked his personal diplomacy with Stalin on two overriding goals: Soviet entry into the Pacific war and the founding of the United Nations. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months later, and his Yalta agreements (praised for securing the UN and criticized for conceding Eastern Europe) remained a flashpoint of Cold War historiography.
Career Timeline
- 1882Born into the wealthy Roosevelt and Delano families in Hyde Park, New York
- 1913–1920Assistant Secretary of the Navy, drove naval expansion during the First World War
- 1921Diagnosed with polio, permanently paralyzed from the waist down
- 1929–1932Governor of New York, pioneered unemployment relief during the Depression
- 1933–194532nd president, led the New Deal and the US war effort
- 1943.11Met Stalin for the first time at the Tehran Conference
- 1945.02.04–11Yalta Conference: secured Soviet entry into the Pacific war and the UN Security Council framework
- 1945.04.12Died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia
Related historical events
- 1941–1944The Second Front and the Normandy LandingsU.S. presidentIn May 1942 he told Molotov that a second front was expected, while explaining that landing craft and shipping constrained the timetable.
- 1945.02–08The Yalta and Potsdam ConferencesUS representative at YaltaAt Yalta he negotiated Soviet entry into the Pacific war and the founding of the United Nations, and died two months later.
- 1945.08The Soviet Entry into the War against JapanUS signatory to the Yalta secret protocolAt Yalta, alarmed by projected casualties from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall), he actively sought Stalin's commitment to enter the Pacific War and signed the secret protocol granting Soviet territorial concessions in return.
The New Deal and Political Realignment
Roosevelt's New Deal, launched in 1933, was less a single remedy than a federal experiment combining relief, recovery, and reform. Bank holidays and deposit insurance calmed financial panic; the Civilian Conservation Corps and public works supplied jobs; and agricultural controls and industrial regulation sought to stabilize a collapsing market. After 1935, Social Security and protections for collective bargaining institutionalized national claims for the elderly, unemployed, and organized workers, though the New Deal did not fundamentally dismantle racial exclusion or the discriminatory order of the South.
The New Deal failed to achieve full employment and faced the 1937 recession, Supreme Court decisions, and resistance from business and a conservative coalition. Yet it expanded expectations that the federal government should assume responsibility for economic security and labor standards, while building a Democratic New Deal coalition of unions, urban workers, Black voters, and white Southerners. Roosevelt's radio fireside chats translated these policies into everyday language and created a new political relationship between the administration and the public. Wartime mobilization ended mass unemployment, but the New Deal's legacy also reveals the limits and durability of reform that reorganized capitalism through state regulation and social concessions rather than abolishing it.