Tag Archives: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

WHEN Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated in 1932, he was fifty years old. A fifth cousin of former President Theodore Roosevelt, he came of a wealthy family. He grew up on a large estate at Hyde Park, New York, overlooking the Hudson River. At the age of twenty-four he married Eleanor Roosevelt, a distant cousin and a niece of Theodore Roosevelt. Several years after graduating from Harvard and studying law at Columbia University, he entered politics and was elected to the state senate. In the presidential campaign of 1912 he supported Woodrow Wilson, who named him assistant secretary of the …

AS MILLIONS of Americans hurried to work on the morning of October 24, 1929, it seemed like the start of an ordinary day. It seemed just as ordinary to the brokers and bankers who were entering their offices on New York’s Wall Street. True, the prices of stocks had been falling for several days, but that was nothing to worry about. There were bound to be ups and downs in the stock market and prices would surely rise again. For never before had the United States known such prosperity as it did in the 1920’s. Herbert Hoover, who had become …