After 1938, Roosevelt championed rearmament and led the nation away from isolationism as the world headed into World War II. He provided extensive support to Winston Churchill and the British war effort before the attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the U.S. into the fighting. During the war, Roosevelt and the United States provided decisive leadership against Nazi Germany and made the United States the principal arms supplier and financier of the Allies who defeated Germany, Italy and Japan. Roosevelt led the United States as it became the Arsenal of Democracy, putting 16 million American men and women into uniform.
On the homefront his term saw the end of unemployment, restoration of prosperity, significant new taxes and controls, 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans sent to relocation camps, and new opportunities opened for African Americans and women. As the Allies neared victory, Roosevelt played a critical role in shaping the post-war world, particularly through the Yalta Conference and the creation of the United Nations. Roosevelt died on the eve of victory in World War II and was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman.
Roosevelt's administration redefined liberalism for subsequent generations and realigned the Democratic Party based his New Deal coalition on labor, ethnic and racial minorities, the South, big city machines, and the poor.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, in the Hudson River valley in upstate New York. His father, James Roosevelt, Sr., and his mother, Sara Ann Delano, were each from wealthy old New York families. Franklin was their only child.
Roosevelt grew up in an atmosphere of privilege. Sara was a possessive mother, while James was an elderly and remote father (he was 54 when Franklin was born). Sara was the dominant influence in Franklin's early years. Frequent trips to Europe made Roosevelt conversant in German and French. He learned to ride, shoot, row, and play polo and lawn tennis The fact that his family were Democrats, however, set him apart to some extent from most other members of the Hudson Valley aristocracy.
Roosevelt went to Groton School, an Episcopal boarding school in Massachusetts. He was heavily influenced by the headmaster, Endicott Peabody, who preached the duty of Christians to help the less fortunate and urged his students to enter public service. While Roosevelt was at Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt became President, and his vigorous leadership style and reforming zeal made him Franklin's role model. In 1903, he met his future wife Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore's niece, at a White House reception. (They had previously met as children, but this was their first serious encounter.) They married two years later in 1905.
Roosevelt next attended Columbia Law School. He passed the bar exam and completed the requirements for a law degree in 1907 but did not attend graduation. In 1908 he took a job with the prestigious Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, dealing mainly with corporate law.
