Know Your Roosevelts: a Look at the Lives of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Teddy Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in 1882 into an extremely wealthy family. We’re talking townhouse in Hyde Park, summer home in Maine, private railroad car wealthy. Contrary to what you might expect, however, his upbringing was extremely disciplined. As a child he had a strict daily routine, private tutoring, and intensive French and German lessons. In a deliciously ironic twist, the Roosevelts moved to Germany when Franklin was nine. Little did his teachers know that they were training the boy whose military would conquer their country just 54 years later.

Franklin met Eleanor Roosevelt while attending Harvard in 1902. In case you didn’t catch it the first time, that’s Eleanor neé Roosevelt, his fifth cousin twice removed. At their wedding ceremony three years later, Franklin’s uncle Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t help but remark, “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.” Franklin wasn’t as good at keeping other things in the family, however, and in 1916, he began an affair with a woman named Lucy Mercy that almost ended his marriage. Although the Roosevelts agreed not to divorce, the betrayal was never forgotten and caused the two to lead romantically separate lives.

After Harvard, Roosevelt was accepted to Columbia Law School, where he socialized often, worked seldom, and displayed “little aptitude for the law,” according to his professors. After two years, he simply took the bar exam, passed, and dropped out of school. He was ready to embark on a path to the presidency, which, as he saw it, would be as easy as a) winning a seat in the State Assembly, b) getting appointed as Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, c) becoming governor of New York, and d) captivating the hearts and minds of at least half of the American voting public in a presidential election. Scarily enough, this is almost exactly what happened.

In 1921, while fulfilling his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt contracted a paralytic illness that was then believed to be polio (but is now thought to have been Guillain-Barré). Roosevelt kept a low profile for the next eight years but refused to let his condition interrupt the larger plan. Eleanor encouraged him to return to the limelight and even made appearances on his behalf to gauge the level of public support. In 1929, Roosevelt became governor of New York and by 1932 – after escaping a possible assassination attempt that killed the mayor sitting next to him – FDR was campaigning against Republican president Herbert Hoover.

In some of the most spectacular PR work in our nation’s history, Roosevelt ran on a platform of down-home sensibility against what he claimed was an over-privileged, out-of-touch incumbent president. Economist Marriner Eccles later remarked that "the campaign speeches often read like a giant misprint, in which Roosevelt and Hoover speak each other's lines." The strategy worked, however, with Roosevelt winning the presidential office by a landslide.

After his inauguration in January of 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) jumped into action, forever changing the way we look at a president’s “First Hundred Days” in office. In his first term, FDR helped create a so-called “alphabet soup” of measures designed to fight the Great Depression, such as the FDIC, CCC, AAA, NIRA, TVA, and WPA, to name a few. The Roosevelt White House gave hope to millions and easily scored FDR a second term of office in the 1936 election. Although his efforts were herculean, historians still debate over whether or not they could have gotten the U.S. out of the depression without the economic boom created by WWII.

By 1940, FDR remained so popular that he broke one hundred and fifty years of American tradition in becoming the first president ever elected to serve a third term. However, after having promised to keep out of the growing conflict in Europe, FDR announced America’s entrance into WWII after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Although the US initially resisted getting involved, the war effort created millions of jobs and not only resuscitated the American economy, but also secured the US’s status alongside the USSR as a world superpower.

Leading the US from the worst economic collapse in its history to the brink of victory in the largest war the world has ever seen, FDR was pretty much a shoo-in for a fourth consecutive term, which he won in 1944. Just months into the term and weeks away from an Allied victory, however, he died of a massive stroke. At his side? Not Eleanor, but Lucy.