Questions to ask Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt in brief

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on 30 January 1882 at Hyde Park, New York, the only child of a wealthy family. He went to Groton School and Harvard, married his distant cousin in 1905 and entered politics as a New York state senator in 1910. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1920 and ran for Vice President in 1920, losing badly.

In August 1921, aged 39, he fell ill at Campobello Island and never walked unaided again. He came back as Governor of New York (1929 to 1932) and was elected President four times, in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, the only President to serve more than two terms. He died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12 April 1945, less than a month before Germany surrendered. Theodore Roosevelt was his fifth cousin; see the questions to ask Theodore Roosevelt.

How to use FDR's voice in your project

Roosevelt is one of the first leaders whose voice you can hear at length. Recordings of his inaugural addresses and about thirty fireside chats survive, and the FDR Presidential Library has many of them. Listen to one before you write: notice how slowly he speaks, how plain his words are, and how often he says “you”. Then write questions that let him explain, the way he did on the radio. For a wax museum, one fireside chat sentence and a date make a strong 40 second answer.

Crisis one: polio, 1921

• 1. What happened at Campobello in August 1921?
• 2. Your mother wanted you to retire to Hyde Park as an invalid. Why did you refuse?
• 3. Why did you buy a run-down resort at Warm Springs, Georgia, and turn it into a treatment centre?
• 4. You almost never let yourself be photographed in a wheelchair. Why hide it?

What the record says: he was diagnosed with poliomyelitis; some researchers in 2003 argued Guillain-Barré syndrome fits the symptoms better, but this cannot be proved. He taught himself to “walk” short distances with steel leg braces, a cane and a son's arm. He founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation in 1927, and in 1938 he launched the national foundation whose fundraising became the March of Dimes. Of thousands of photographs, only a few show him in his wheelchair; the press largely agreed not to take them. Answer these with dignity and without pity.

Crisis two: the bank panic and the Hundred Days, 1933

• 5. When you took office on 4 March 1933, banks in most states were closed or restricted. What did you do in the first week?
• 6. What did you mean when you said the only thing to fear was fear itself?
• 7. Why did you explain banking on the radio on 12 March 1933, and how did people react?
• 8. Which of the Hundred Days laws do you think mattered most?
• 9. Why did you create the Civilian Conservation Corps?

What the record says: he declared a national bank holiday on 6 March, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act on 9 March, and his first fireside chat followed on 12 March. When banks reopened, deposits exceeded withdrawals. Between March and June 1933 Congress passed fifteen major laws, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Industrial Recovery Act. The CCC put about three million young men to work on forests and parks over its life.

Crisis three: making the New Deal stick

• 10. Why did you think old people and the unemployed needed Social Security in 1935?
• 11. Farm workers and domestic servants, many of them Black, were left out of Social Security. Why did you accept that?
• 12. Why did you never back a federal law against lynching?
• 13. In 1937 you asked to add up to six justices to the Supreme Court. Why, and why did Congress refuse?
• 14. Critics say the New Deal did not end the Depression. How do you answer them?

What the record says: the Social Security Act was signed on 14 August 1935. Southern Democrats in Congress, whose votes he needed, shaped the exclusions, and he told advisers he could not risk his programme for an anti-lynching bill. His court plan was announced in February 1937 and defended in a fireside chat on 9 March; the Senate killed it, though the Court began upholding New Deal laws that spring. Unemployment fell from about 25 per cent in 1933 but stayed high until wartime production; economists still argue about why.

Crisis four: war

• 15. Before Pearl Harbor most Americans wanted to stay out of the war. How did you help Britain anyway?
• 16. What were the Four Freedoms?
• 17. What did you feel on 7 December 1941?
• 18. Why did you sign Executive Order 9066, which led to the removal of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast?
• 19. Could your government have done more for Jewish refugees from Europe?
• 20. Why did you approve the secret atomic bomb project?
• 21. How did you get on with Winston Churchill and with Stalin at Yalta?

What the record says: Lend-Lease became law in March 1941. The Four Freedoms come from his State of the Union address of 6 January 1941. Executive Order 9066 was signed on 19 February 1942; about two thirds of those removed were US citizens. A federal commission in 1983 blamed “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership”, and Congress apologised in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. On refugees, quotas stayed largely unfilled and the War Refugee Board was set up only in January 1944. These are the questions where your Roosevelt must answer as he did then, followed by the verdict historians have reached since.

Questions about the man

• 22. What did your wife's travels and reports mean to your presidency?
• 23. Why did you run for a fourth term in 1944 when you were seriously ill?
• 24. What did you think the presidency should feel like to ordinary people?

What the record says: his wife travelled the country and the world as his eyes and ears and pressed him on civil rights, sometimes against his political judgement. His doctors found severe high blood pressure and heart failure in March 1944, and it was kept from the public. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Keep questions about his private life short and factual.

Sample answers from his speeches

For question 6:

For question 14, on experiment:

For question 24:

For question 16: in January 1941 he named freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear, “everywhere in the world”. In January 1944 he went further and proposed an economic bill of rights, including the right to a useful job, a decent home, medical care and a good education.

Anachronisms to avoid

• He died before the German and Japanese surrenders, Hiroshima and the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. Do not ask how the war ended.
• The Twenty-second Amendment, limiting presidents to two terms, was ratified in 1951.
• He never saw television become a mass medium, though he appeared on an experimental broadcast at the 1939 World's Fair.
• Medicare (1965) and modern Social Security debates came long after him.

A fireside chat of your own

Try the format for real: write a two-minute explanation as FDR, then let a partner ask follow-up questions. You can also rehearse with an AI recreation of Franklin D. Roosevelt on Yuga, by voice or text. It is built from his speeches and the historical record, but it is not him and it can be wrong; it will also give you the historians' view on the hard questions. Cite the speeches themselves in your work.

Where to find his words

• The American Presidency Project (University of California, Santa Barbara): full texts of his inaugurals, fireside chats and State of the Union addresses.
• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park: papers, photographs and audio recordings.
• National Archives: Executive Order 9066 with a transcript and teaching notes.
• Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, Hyde Park, run by the National Park Service.
• Jean Edward Smith, FDR (2007), a readable full biography.

For how to judge any source you find, see primary and secondary sources.