Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born to a wealthy Hudson Valley family, educated at Groton and Harvard, and by every early appearance destined for a comfortable, unremarkable political career in the shadow of his distant cousin Theodore. He served in the New York State Senate and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, and in 1920 ran unsuccessfully for vice president. The following year, at thirty-nine, he was struck by polio and permanently lost the use of his legs.
He spent seven years rebuilding a public career from a wheelchair he would not allow to be photographed, mastering the appearance of standing with braces and a cane, and returned to politics as Governor of New York in 1929 — just as the state, and then the country, began to fall apart around him. He ran for president in 1932 promising, deliberately vaguely, “a new deal for the American people,” and beat Hoover by 472 electoral votes to 59.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”— First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933
The Hundred Days
Roosevelt was inaugurated on 4 March 1933, at the exact bottom of the banking crisis: every state in the union had either closed its banks outright or restricted withdrawals. He declared a national bank holiday on his second day in office, called Congress into emergency session, and had the Emergency Banking Act passed and signed within eight hours of its introduction. On 12 March he gave the first of his fireside chats, explaining bank soundness directly to the public over the radio in plain, unhurried language; when the banks reopened the next day, deposits exceeded withdrawals for the first time in weeks.
What followed over the next hundred days was the most concentrated legislative programme in American history to that point: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Industrial Recovery Act, federal deposit insurance, and the Securities Act, among a dozen others. Not all of it worked, and not all of it survived — the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA and the AAA within a few years — but the underlying premise, that the federal government bore direct responsibility for the economic security of ordinary citizens, was never seriously abandoned by any president after him.
Direct Federal Responsibility
Where Hoover had treated relief as the proper business of local charity, Roosevelt made federal relief, federal insurance and federal employment permanent features of American government. “The test of our progress,” he said in his second inaugural, “is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Concealing the Wheelchair
Roosevelt never denied having had polio, but he and his staff worked deliberately, for twelve years, to prevent the public from seeing the extent of his paralysis. Secret Service agents were instructed to block photographers who tried to capture him being lifted or wheeled; of the tens of thousands of photographs taken of him as president, only a handful show the wheelchair. He was, by any modern standard of political transparency, hiding a central fact of his own condition — and doing so with the near-total cooperation of the press corps that covered him.
Court-Packing and the Third Term
Roosevelt’s momentum was not unbroken. After the Supreme Court struck down several New Deal programmes, he proposed in 1937 to add up to six additional justices, one for every sitting member over the age of seventy who refused to retire. The plan was seen, even by many allies, as a naked attempt to pack the bench, and it failed in Congress — his first major legislative defeat. He broke with two-term precedent in 1940 as war in Europe made the argument for continuity, and again in 1944; his death in office in April 1945, months into an unprecedented fourth term, directly led to the ratification of the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting future presidents to two terms.
Roosevelt in the Film
The film opens its Roosevelt scenes not with a speech but with the mechanics behind one — the leg braces locked into place out of frame, the practiced turn toward the podium timed to look effortless. It is the one recurring visual motif shared with no other character: the machinery of appearing untroubled.
His fireside chat on banking is staged as a single unbroken take on his face, without cutting to the radio audience, forcing the viewer to sit inside the same plain, unhurried voice that persuaded a country to put its money back in the banks.