Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Pearl Harbor” Speech

About the Author

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York. The Roosevelts were a wealthy family and sent their son to the best private schools—Groton, Harvard, and Columbia. Roosevelt became a member of the New York State Bar and practiced law in New York City for three years.

Early on, Roosevelt developed an interest in politics, as stimulated in part by the career of his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1901, at age forty-two, became the youngest man to serve as president of the United States. In 1910, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the New York state senate as a Democrat, proving himself a zealous campaigner and ambitious legislator. His political connections led to his appointment as assistant secretary of the navy in Woodrow Wilson's administration (1913–1921). An able hands-on administrator, Roosevelt modernized the navy and schooled himself in the workings of the federal government—experiences that would serve him especially well as a wartime president.

Roosevelt's rapid rise in politics seemed to be halted when he contracted polio in 1921. Although his legs became paralyzed and he would never walk again, his physical stamina eventually returned, and he courageously reentered public life. In 1929 he was elected governor of New York. Continuing the progressive agenda pursued by his predecessor, Al Smith, Roosevelt captured the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 1932 and won the office, over Herbert Hoover, later that year.

Roosevelt was elected president at a time when forceful action was needed to restore the country to prosperity. The United States had been suffering from mass unemployment and a poorly performing economy—the Great Depression—for three years. In the midst of this depression, Roosevelt used his large Democratic majority in Congress to pass an unprecedented number of legislative acts aimed at economic recovery in both the agricultural and industrial sectors.

Even as he devoted most of his attention to domestic problems, Roosevelt sought to prepare the country for possible involvement in what would become World War II. Although he declared his support for several Neutrality Acts amid a public mood of isolationism, he moved toward open support of the western democracies when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and later occupied France and most of western Europe. When Great Britain stood virtually alone as Germany's foe, Roosevelt effected passage of the Lend-Lease Act (1941), which supplied munitions to those countries opposing the Axis powers.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, public outrage was such that Roosevelt easily secured a declaration of war against Japan, a country now seen as spreading the same kind of totalitarian rule that Great Britain had been fighting in Europe. Roosevelt's vigorous prosecution of the war, his steadfast support of the Allies, and his postwar plans for the United Nations would become part of his enduring legacy as a war leader. Roosevelt broke the tradition of presidents serving no more than two terms, gaining election to a third term in 1940 and to a fourth term in 1944. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945.