Franklin Delano Roosevelt

January 30, 1882 — April 12, 1945

Who Was Franklin D. Roosevelt?

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also known as FDR.
• He attended Harvard University in 1900.
• He married his fifth cousin once removed, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (Roosevelt was both her maiden and married name) in 1905. Together they had six children, one of whom died in infancy.
• President Theodore Roosevelt was his fifth cousin (and Eleanor’s uncle).
• He was President Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy as the U.S. entered World War I.
• He was paralyzed from the waist down after suffering a bout of polio in 1921.

FDR and his daughter.

• He became the governor of New York in 1928.
• He won the United States presidency in the landslide election of 1932 and remained president until his death in 1945.
• He was elected president of the United States an unprecedented four times.
• He led the U.S. as its president during both the Great Depression and World War II.
• He was the mastermind behind the New Deal and other government acts and policies (the AAA, CCC, FERA, TVA, and TWA) that got the nation back on its feet during the Great Depression.
• He became known for his “fireside chats” via the radio.
• He was one of the “Big Three” (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) that led the Allies during World War II.

“The Big Three” at the Teheran Conference in Teheran, Iraq.

• He died at age 63 on April 12, 1945, a year after his fourth presidential election in 1944 and less than one month before the end of World War II.

A Voice of Hope

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, taking upon his shoulders the most devastating financial crisis in the United States. Roosevelt was still pressing on in 1934, the year that Billie Jo began narrating Out of the Dust. Billie Jo’s attitude towards FDR appears to be one of hope and admiration, with occasional moments of doubt and cynicism. President Roosevelt may constantly be portrayed as the hero of the Great Depression in hindsight, but when you’re choking on dust every day, it’s probably hard to have hope in much of anything. One method that FDR used to keep the hope alive in the American people was through a radio series known as his “fireside chats.”

President Roosevelt broadcasting a fireside chat during the Great Depression.

Over the course of his presidency, Roosevelt broadcast thirty fireside chats into the living rooms of America, intimately addressing the listeners as if they were close friends. Roosevelt’s words provided comfort and his unwavering voice served as a source of strength throughout the Great Depression as well as WWII.

The New Deal: Relief, Reform, and Recovery (Hopefully)

President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was initiated in 1933 and was outlined by three major points: relief, reform, and recovery. As far as relief goes, FDR’s New Deal was incredibly successful. Immediate, short-term relief spared many Americans from starvation through organizations including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

A 1930’s WPA advertisement.

The WPA employed millions of those left unemployed by the Great Depression, providing jobs for public works projects, such as constructing roads and buildings. By 1935, the WPA had provided approximately 8 million jobs, even creating its own youth division. In Out of the Dust, Billie Jo also mentions the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in a poem titled, “Help From Uncle Sam.” The purpose of the AAA was to subsidize farmers to slaughter excess livestock and to refrain from growing a certain amount of crops in order to reduce the surplus and thus raise prices on crops so farmers could gain profit.

The government/ is lending us money/to keep the farm going/ money to buy seed/ feed loans for our cow/ for our mule/ for the chickens still alive and the hog/ as well as a little bit of feed/for us….

…So my father said/okay./ Anything to keep going.

However, the New Deal was unsuccessful in fully implementing policies of recovery. The relief programs could prevent the economy from total deterioration, but the recovery programs failed to pump life back into it again and begin improvement. The only perk of WWII was the fact that it pulled America out of the Great Depression and restored employment.

Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph “Migrant Mother” depicts the anguish of poverty in the 1930's.

The reform policies of the New Deal were perhaps the most lasting, re-structuring the American economy to protect citizens from unpredictable downfalls of the U.S. market.