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Transcription: [00:02:05]
{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
I want to give you a brief biography of FDR.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York into a wealthy family whose money came from real estate investments.

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Actually, over many generations - I'm getting a little bit off book here - over many generations, as well as real estate and investments, the Roosevelt men had the good fortune to marry women who also were wealthy.

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He attended Harvard, graduated, then attended Columbia University law school.

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He was married to Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin, in 1905 and was admitted to the bar in 1907.

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He was elected to the New York State legislature in 1911, and he was a strong supporter of Woodrow Wilson in the election, the presidential election of 1912.

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He was named Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, a post he kept until the end of Wilson's administration in 1920.

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One of Roosevelt's classmates at Harvard, Granville Clark, remembered Roosevelt at school, describing what he considered to be a reasonable ascent to the presidency,

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with both the New York State legislature and the Office of Assistant Secretary of the Navy being stopping points on the way to the White House - it's like he predicted his career.

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He also believed that he would be governor of New York en route to the presidency, and sure enough he was elected governor of New York in 1928 and served from 1929 to 1932.

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One thing FDR could not predict was that he would be struck down by polio in 1921,

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this after being on the democratic ticket for the presidency - being the vice presidential candidate on the ticket for the presidency - in the 1920 election.

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He spent much of the 1920s, however, in convalescence.

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He was nominated for the democratic party-by the democratic party for the presidency in 1932, and won the election in the midst of the nation's worst ever economic collapse.

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By invoking powers never before given to the president, Roosevelt issued directives which placed the government front and center in the efforts to recover the stability of the nation's economy.

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His administration sponsored war programs for the unemployed, imposed regulation on banking and security industries, and created welfare supplements for Americans in poverty.

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Many of Roosevelt's initiatives were eventually ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and Roosevelt's New Deal was the primary issue in the 1936 election which Roosevelt won over Alfred Landon, 523 electoral votes to 8.

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With Adolf Hitler's armies marching all over Europe by 1940, Roosevelt was compelled to accept the nomination offered him by the democratic party and again he won the 1940 election, this time against Wendell Willkie, 449 to 82 electoral votes.

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After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Roosevelt led America into World War II, and saw the U.S. almost completely through to victory, succumbing to a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. Now—
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