Franklin D. Roosevelt
U.S. President 1933-1945, architect of the New Deal and wartime alliance (1882-1945)
Also known as: Roosevelt, FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) was the 32nd President of the United States, serving an unprecedented four terms from 1933 until his death in April 1945. Under him the Great Depression was managed via the New Deal, the United States entered the Second World War, and the post-war international institutional architecture — Bretton Woods, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank — was set up. Quigley treats Roosevelt as the figure under whom the United States became the dominant power of the world system.
1932 election and New Deal
Roosevelt was elected in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression. Quigley summarizes the electoral coalition: 'all department stores, real estate, professional people, and mass, unskilled labor to the Democratic Party in 1932 resulted in the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The new administration began to curtail the power of the two opposition and exploiting groups (bankers and heavy industry) and to reward and help the groups which had elected it. The farmers were helped by subsidies' (T&H 546). Quigley reads the New Deal as 'fundamentally orthodox in its ideas on the nature of money. Roosevelt was quite willing to unbalance the budget and to spend in a depression in an unorthodox fashion because he grasped the idea that lack of purchasing power was the cause' of the depression — but did not grasp 'the nature of the economic crisis itself' (T&H 547-548).
1933 World Economic Conference
Roosevelt's earliest international decision was to torpedo the 1933 London World Economic Conference: 'The mere hint of a stabilization agreement was sufficient to cause a sharp break in the rise of security and commodity prices (June 17, 1933), so Roosevelt broke off all negotiations toward stabilization' (T&H 364). Quigley uses this as a textbook example of Roosevelt's preference for domestic recovery over international monetary cooperation — a preference that defined the 1933-1939 American foreign-economic policy and helped shape the dollar's eventual emergence as the post-war reserve currency.
Wartime alliance and post-war architecture
Roosevelt led the United States from the 1937-1939 fence-sitting period through Lend-Lease (1941), Pearl Harbor (December 1941), the Atlantic Charter, the joint military strategy with Britain and the Soviet Union, and the post-war planning that produced Bretton Woods (July 1944), the UN Charter (April-June 1945), and the broader Anglo-American-Soviet hierarchy of the early Cold War. He died on 12 April 1945, before the war was over and before the post-war Soviet-American confrontation had crystallized. The Stalin-Churchill conversations Quigley cites — 'twelve years later, in 1945, Stalin told Winston Churchill that twelve million peasants died' in collectivization (T&H 411) — record the kind of factual exchanges among the Big Three that Roosevelt presided over but was less involved in than his two counterparts.
Quigley's framing
Quigley does not list Roosevelt as a member of any Group network — the American political system was organized along different lines than the British. But he treats Roosevelt and the New York-Washington circle that supported him (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, the major Eastern banks) as the American institutional counterpart to the Milner Group's British infrastructure. The post-war Bretton Woods institutions, in Quigley's reading, marked the moment at which the Anglo-American power network shifted its operational center of gravity from London to New York and Washington — a shift Roosevelt's death accelerated rather than reversed.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 364 Quigley
The mere hint of a stabilization agreement was sufficient to cause a sharp break in the rise of security and commodity prices (June 17, 1933), so Roosevelt broke off all negotiations toward stabilization.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 546 Quigley
all department stores, real estate, professional people, and mass, unskilled labor to the Democratic Party in 1932 resulted in the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 547 Quigley
The reason for this was that the New Deal, because President Roosevelt, was fundamentally orthodox in its ideas on the nature of money. Roosevelt was quite willing to unbalance the budget and to spend in a depression in an unorthodox fashion because he grasped the idea that lack of purchasing power was the cause.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 11 Quigley
in the depression of the 1930s, we turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He took us through the depression and World War II. We were buoyed by his optimism and reassured by the strength and confidence of his personality. Within the Western tradition he provided us with no solutions; he simply preserved our existing institutions.