Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882–1945

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the thirty-second and longest-serving president of the United States, leading the nation from the depths of the Great Depression in 1933 until the final months of World War II. An inspiring personality, innovative policy maker, and exceptionally skillful politician, he brought the country through two of its most formidable challenges and left a legacy of hope and progress. Roosevelt was born in 1882 into a family of Dutch and French ancestry at the ancestral home in Hyde Park, New York, with every privilege that the Gilded Age could offer. While he was attending Harvard College, his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt became president, through his policies reinforcing the notion of service in the pursuit of a better society. In 1902 Franklin Roosevelt encountered Theodore’s niece Eleanor during a visit to the White House; the two married three years later while Franklin was attending Columbia Law School. Roosevelt left Columbia in 1907 to take the bar exam and entered private practice at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn the following year. He and Eleanor remained married until his death forty years later, but over time they came to live somewhat separate personal lives.