General Info And Early Political Career - 1401 Words

General info and Early Political Career Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in 1882 in New York to a rich family. He went to Groton School and Harvard College to get an education. He married Eleanor Roosevelt and had six children with her. His hobbies included stamp collecting and relaxing on his yacht. He started his political career in 1910 when he joined the New York State Senate and then continued on as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. He ran for vice president in 1920 under James M. Cox but lost. However he did not give up and was then elected to be governor of New York from 1929 to 1932. He finally was elected president in 1933 and served for a record holding four terms from 1933 to 1945 (â€Å"FDR†¦show more content†¦All these laws passed by Roosevelt eventually led to the end of unemployment and the dreaded Great Depression (â€Å"New Deal†). Lend-Lease Program On January 10, 1941, Franklin D Roosevelt introduce the lend-lease program to congress. The program was intended to help Britain defend itself from Hitler while keeping the United States from getting directly involved in the war. Britain was having trouble fighting Hitler with a lack of tanks, planes, and ships. Winston Churchill asked for Roosevelt’s help but Roosevelt wanted to obey his people’s wishes by staying out of another gruesome world war. What the lend-lease program actually did was allow the US to provide military aid to any country whose protection was vital to the security of the US. This program gave Roosevelt the power to lend arms to Britain to defend from Hitler and be payed back at a later time. In the end, the US had given out $50 billion in armaments to 38 different countries (â€Å"Lend-Lease†). Pearl Harbor On December 7, 1941, Japan executed a kamikaze attack on Pearl Harbor, a US naval base located in Hawaii. The attack killed more than 2400 military personnel. It was also reported that American ships were torpedoed. When Roosevelt received this news, he was reported to be â€Å"deadly calm†, but his wife knew that he was concerned. Roosevelt was worried that the attack might cause Germany to also attack the US, making