Franklin Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882 in Hyde Park, NY. He graduated from Harvard in 1903 with an A.B. in history and passed the New York Bar Examination in 1907. In 1910, he was elected to the New York State Senate, and in 1913, became Assistant Secretary to the Navy, serving in that role through World War I. In 1921, he was stricken with a disease, diagnosed as polio, that left him paralyzed from the waist down, yet by 1928 he had made his way back into politics as Governor of New York. In 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the 32nd president of the United States. In that role he initiated The New Deal that opened the purse strings of the federal government to provide aid to farmers, the unemployed, and those struggling to pay their mortgages. In 1940, he was elected to a third term as president of the United States on the promise to keep America out of World War II. However, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 prompted him to initiate the Manhattan Project, dedicated to creating an atomic bomb, and entering the war across two oceans. On April 12, 1945, shortly after returning from Yalta, where he conferred with the Allies on the postwar reorganization of Europe, and while serving an unprecedented fourth term as president, Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage.
Franklin’s life modelled his own advice, “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”
