98 Fun Facts About Franklin D. Roosevelt

What do presidents today call the retreat FDR named Shangri-La?

Camp David. President Eisenhower renamed it in 1953, honouring his grandson David.

After FDR won four elections, which constitutional amendment barred anyone from being elected president more than twice?

The 22nd Amendment. It wrote into law the two-term tradition set by George Washington, which FDR broke by running for a third term in 1940.

In which New York town was Roosevelt born and later buried?

Hyde Park. After he died in 1945, thousands lined the tracks as a funeral train carried him home to be buried in the Springwood rose garden.

In a 1944 speech, FDR mocked a false story that the Navy sent a destroyer back to fetch which companion?

His dog Fala. FDR joked that he and his family didn't resent the attacks, but Fala did.

Which student newspaper did Roosevelt edit as an undergraduate?

The Harvard Crimson. He stayed at Harvard an extra year for graduate courses, largely so he could keep working on the paper.

Who gave away the bride at Franklin and Eleanor's 1905 wedding?

Theodore Roosevelt. Eleanor was his niece, and he stood in for her father, his younger brother Elliott, who had died in 1894.

In his 1933 inaugural address, FDR said the only thing Americans had to fear was what?

Fear itself. Later in the address he warned that if Congress failed to act, he would ask for broad executive power to wage war against the emergency.

Which of Eleanor's social secretaries had a long affair with FDR and was with him when he died?

Lucy Mercer. After Eleanor discovered the affair in 1918, FDR promised never to see Lucy again, then quietly resumed seeing her.

Roosevelt began his political career in 1910 by winning election to which body?

New York State Senate. The young Democrat won in a Dutchess County district that was traditionally dominated by Republicans.

As a state senator, Roosevelt led the 'Insurgents' against which political machine?

Tammany Hall. The machine essentially ran New York City's Democratic Party, and in 1914 FDR failed to win his party's nomination for the US Senate.

Under President Wilson, Roosevelt held which post from 1913 to 1920?

Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He pushed so hard for a 'big Navy' and for entering World War I that he was at odds with the Wilson administration's neutrality.

Roosevelt was the vice-presidential running mate of which Democratic nominee in 1920?

James M. Cox. Popular feeling against Wilson's plan to join the League of Nations helped Warren Harding beat their ticket by a wide margin.

Before the 1920 ticket, Roosevelt approached which businessman about running for president as a Democrat?

Hoover declared himself a Republican instead, and Roosevelt beat him in a landslide twelve years later.

Where was FDR vacationing in August 1921 when he fell ill with the disease that paralysed his legs?

Campobello Island. After a plunge into cold sea water and an active day, he came down with chills and fever, and then paralysis.

In which Georgia town did FDR set up a rehabilitation centre for polio patients?

Warm Springs. He first went there hoping its mineral waters would heal him, and he died at his cottage there in April 1945.

What nickname did FDR's 1932 campaign advisers, mostly Columbia University professors, earn?

The Brain Trust. Members such as Raymond Moley went on to help shape the policies of the First New Deal.

Roosevelt clashed with which powerful planner while chairing the Taconic State Park Commission?

The two men's contentious relationship continued for the rest of their careers.

What name did FDR give the coalition of 26 Allied nations that pledged in 1942 to defeat the Axis?

The United Nations. FDR hoped the wartime alliance would outlast the war as a body for world peace, and the UN was founded in 1945.

What name was given to FDR's informal radio addresses to the nation?

Fireside chats. His first as president explained the banking crisis, and Americans returned about $1 billion to banks within weeks.

How did FDR break tradition after his 1932 nomination?

Flying to Chicago to accept it in person. The flight was meant to show voters that polio had not left him too frail to lead.

Who was Roosevelt's running mate in 1932 and 1936?

John Nance Garner. FDR clinched the 1932 nomination only after promising the vice presidency to Garner, whose Texas delegates then backed him.

Who became the first woman to hold a US cabinet post when Roosevelt named her Secretary of Labor?

Frances Perkins. She chaired the committee that shaped the Social Security Act and served as Labor Secretary for all twelve years of FDR's presidency.

Who was killed in the February 1933 assassination attempt on president-elect Roosevelt in Florida?

Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Gunman Giuseppe Zangara, first sentenced to 80 years in prison, was retried after Cermak died and executed that March.

What did FDR declare shortly after his 1933 inauguration to stop runs on the banks?

A national bank holiday. When stock trading resumed after it, the Dow jumped about 15 percent in a single day.

In March 1933, FDR signed a law letting Americans legally buy which drink again?

Beer. April 7, 1933, the day legal sales resumed, is now celebrated every year as National Beer Day.

Which New Deal agency sent young unemployed men to rural work camps?

Civilian Conservation Corps. Its young men planted trees and built trails, earning $30 a month but sending $25 of it home to their families.

What did Executive Order 6102 require Americans to turn in to the Federal Reserve in 1933?

Privately held gold. In 1934 the government raised gold's official price from $20.67 to $35 an ounce, devaluing the dollar.

Which New Deal act created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation?

Glass-Steagall Act. Representative Steagall backed Senator Glass's bank reforms only once federal deposit insurance was added.

Roosevelt insisted Social Security be funded by payroll taxes so no politician could ever do what?

Scrap the programme. FDR said the contributions gave workers a 'legal, moral, and political right' to their benefits, so 'no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.'

Which New Deal agency, led by Harry Hopkins, gave millions of jobless Americans paid jobs instead of the dole?

Works Progress Administration. Besides building schools, hospitals and airports, it paid writers, actors and musicians for cultural projects.

Which two states did Roosevelt fail to carry in his 1936 landslide?

Maine and Vermont. The landslide sealed a New Deal coalition, including union members and Black voters, that powered Democrats for decades.

FDR's failed 1937 Judicial Procedures Reform Bill is known by what nickname?

Court packing. While Congress debated it, the Supreme Court began upholding New Deal laws, and the plan died that July.

Which 1938 law signed by Roosevelt outlawed child labour and set a federal minimum wage?

Fair Labor Standards Act. The justices upheld it in 1941, overruling a 1918 decision that had struck down Congress's child-labor law.

Roosevelt's first-term approach of non-intervention in Latin America was known by what name?

Good Neighbor Policy. He withdrew US Marines from Haiti and scrapped the treaty that had given the US a right to intervene in Cuba.

Which 1941 program let FDR send Britain weapons and supplies?

Lend-Lease. Churchill had warned that Britain could no longer pay for American supplies, so the US stopped insisting on payment.

Who was the Republican nominee Roosevelt defeated when he won a third term in 1940?

Wendell Willkie. The Republican nominee had spent most of his career as an active Democrat before switching parties.

Which four freedoms did Roosevelt name in his January 1941 State of the Union address?

Speech, worship, from want and from fear. Norman Rockwell's 1943 paintings of them became the centrepiece of a huge war bond drive.

Which political journalist befriended FDR in 1912 and became his closest political adviser?

Louis Howe. When polio struck, he and Eleanor pushed FDR to stay active in politics throughout his long recovery.

Which word completes FDR's description of December 7, 1941: 'a date which will live in…'?

Infamy. His first typed draft read 'a date which will live in world history', and he changed it by hand.

What term did Roosevelt coin for the major Allied powers he expected to police the postwar world?

He meant the US, the UK, the Soviet Union and China.

At which 1943 conference did Roosevelt meet Stalin for the first time?

Tehran. Britain and the US committed there to invading France in 1944, and Stalin agreed to declare war on Japan once Germany was beaten.

What did FDR's Executive Order 9066 of February 1942 lead to?

Internment of Japanese Americans. The order never named an ethnic group, and in 1988 Congress formally apologised for the incarceration.

Which two scientists' 1939 letter warned Roosevelt about a possible German atomic bomb?

Einstein and Szilard. Economist Alexander Sachs read it to FDR in October 1939, and the president set up a committee on uranium, an early step toward the bomb.

Who replaced Henry Wallace as FDR's running mate in 1944?

Harry S. Truman. He had been vice president for just 82 days when FDR's death made him president in April 1945.

What were Roosevelt's last recorded words, spoken while sitting for a portrait on April 12, 1945?

'I have a terrific headache'. Other accounts give it as 'a terrific pain in the back of my head'; he died hours later of a cerebral haemorrhage.

Which charity did FDR found in 1938 as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis?

March of Dimes. It funded the vaccine research that went on to wipe out polio in the United States.

What name was given to FDR's flurry of lawmaking after he took office in 1933?

The Hundred Days. In the rush, Congress passed his emergency banking bill nearly sight unseen.

Which actor played Roosevelt in the 2012 film about his relationship with his cousin Daisy Suckley?

The film drew on Suckley's private diaries, discovered only after her death.

Which all-American food did Roosevelt famously serve King George VI at his New York estate in June 1939?

Hot dogs shared the table with smoked turkey and strawberry shortcake. The king and queen had toured the New York World's Fair only the day before.

Which holiday did Roosevelt move a week earlier in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season?

Thanksgiving would have fallen on November 30 that year, which worried retailers. The switch was nicknamed Franksgiving, and a late-1939 Gallup poll found 62% of Americans opposed it.

What White House feature, installed for Roosevelt, now lies hidden beneath the press briefing room?

A swimming pool sat there until Richard Nixon had it covered over to make room for a growing press corps. The empty basin now holds computer servers.

Opening the 1939 New York World's Fair, Roosevelt became the first sitting president to appear on what?

Television was so new that household sets were a rarity, so few people saw the April 30 broadcast. Regular viewing took off only after the Second World War.

Roosevelt's 1942 'Green Light Letter' urged which professional sport to keep playing through the Second World War?

Baseball got its answer in a letter to commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, weeks after America entered the war. The president wrote that keeping the game going would be best for the country.

Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano made a large fortune in China by trading which commodity?

Opium was illegal in China, so Delano smuggled it into Canton for the trading house Russell & Company. He first sailed east at 24, before the First Opium War.

Which Tony-winning Broadway musical, set in the Great Depression, puts Roosevelt and his Cabinet on stage?

Annie sends its orphan heroine to meet the president, whose Cabinet is so cheered by her optimism that they make it a cornerstone of policy. The 1977 original won seven Tony Awards.

Roosevelt, a devoted collector, personally designed several American commemorative what during his presidency?

Stamps were a passion he shared with Britain's King George V, who owned one of the most valuable collections in the world.

Which upbeat song became the theme of Roosevelt's 1932 presidential campaign and an unofficial Democratic anthem?

Happy Days Are Here Again was a spur-of-the-moment choice: the convention band switched to it after a dirge-like rendition of Anchors Aweigh fell flat with the delegates.

Which Boston-born financier and father of a future president did Roosevelt make first chairman of the SEC?

Joseph Kennedy led the new stock-market watchdog from 1934 to 1935, then went to London in 1938 as ambassador to Britain.

Roosevelt became the first sitting president to fly when he crossed the ocean in 1943 for talks in which city?

Casablanca was reached in stages: the Dixie Clipper flying boat carried him by way of Trinidad, Brazil and Gambia, and a Douglas C-54 flew the last leg.

At which Black Sea resort did Roosevelt hold his final summit with Churchill and Stalin in February 1945?

Yalta was Stalin's choice: he said his doctors opposed any long trip and turned down every other venue. The three leaders met in former palaces to plan postwar Europe.

Which 1944 law signed by Roosevelt gave returning veterans paid tuition and low-cost mortgages?

The G.I. Bill, formally the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, was largely designed and steered through Congress by the American Legion, which wanted to reward practically every wartime veteran.

Which secret wartime programme did Roosevelt approve in 1942 yet never mention to his last vice president?

The Manhattan Project stayed so secret that the vice president heard about the atomic bomb only after he had been sworn in as president in April 1945.

Which magazine named Roosevelt its Man of the Year three times, starting in 1932 while he was president-elect?

Time honoured him again as the sitting president in 1934 and 1941, the year America entered the war.

Which New York governor came closer than any other opponent to beating Roosevelt, losing to him in 1944?

Thomas Dewey, a former racket-busting prosecutor, painted the president as a tired old man. He won the Republican nomination again four years later and lost in a famous upset.

At a January 1943 press conference in Morocco, Roosevelt announced the Allies would accept only what from the Axis?

Unconditional surrender was a term he borrowed from Ulysses S. Grant, who had demanded it of a Confederate commander and been nicknamed for it during the Civil War.

Which documentary maker devoted a seven-part 2014 series to Roosevelt and two of his famous relatives?

Ken Burns titled it The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and gave Eleanor equal billing with the family's two presidents.

What did Roosevelt have fitted to the 1936 Ford Phaeton he bought while president?

Hand controls let him drive despite his paralysed legs, defying a Secret Service directive that barred sitting presidents from getting behind the wheel.

In September 1940 Roosevelt signed a law giving the United States its first peacetime version of what?

A military draft made men aged 21 to 35 register, with a national lottery setting the order of call-up. Those chosen served twelve months on active duty.

In December 1943 Roosevelt chose which general, rather than George Marshall, to command the invasion of France?

Dwight Eisenhower had already led a multinational coalition in North Africa and Sicily. He launched the Normandy landings six months after getting the job.

In which city did Roosevelt and Churchill meet China's Chiang Kai-shek for a five-day conference in November 1943?

Cairo hosted the three leaders from 22 to 26 November, when they set out the Allied position on the war in Asia and made decisions about the continent's postwar future.

On the evening of D-Day, Roosevelt went on national radio and read what to the American people?

A prayer was how he broke his silence: the invasion's timing had been top secret, and the night before he had spoken on air about the fall of Rome without a word about Normandy.

Roosevelt's December 1940 radio pledge to arm Britain is remembered by which three-word phrase?

Arsenal of democracy meant selling Britain weapons while America stayed out of the fighting. The broadcast came nearly a year before the country entered the war.

Which Louisiana populist, nicknamed the Kingfish, turned on Roosevelt with his rival Share Our Wealth plan?

Huey Long had helped secure the 1932 nomination before the two fell out. He was poised for a presidential bid of his own in 1936 when he was assassinated the year before.

Before their 1905 wedding, how were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt already related to each other?

Fifth cousins once removed, the pair had been childhood acquaintances. His mother resisted the match at first, but they married on St Patrick's Day.

Which 1941 declaration came out of Roosevelt's secret meeting with Churchill in a bay off Newfoundland?

The Atlantic Charter followed days of talks aboard warships. Both men had travelled in secret, with the president officially away on a ten-day fishing trip.

In 1933 Roosevelt used presidential authority to open normal diplomatic relations with which long-shunned country?

The Soviet Union first had to promise not to spy on America. The president hoped for large-scale trade and some repayment of old tsarist debts.

Roosevelt asked for the kneehole panel on the White House's Resolute desk, its carver said, to hide what?

His leg braces were one reason the carver gave; a safe behind the panel was the other. The panel was fitted in 1945, only after the president had died.

Which Kansas governor did Roosevelt bury in the 1936 election, winning all but eight electoral votes?

Alf Landon carried just two states. He had courted voters who approved of the president's goals but not the way his programmes were being run.

Which 'Happy Warrior' did Roosevelt nominate for president in 1924, then replace as governor of New York?

Alfred E. Smith became the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party. He lost that 1928 race in the very election that sent his ally to the governor's mansion.

At which Massachusetts boarding school did headmaster Endicott Peabody shape the teenage Roosevelt?

Groton left its mark: the headmaster urged his boys to enter public service and stayed close to his old pupil, later officiating at his wedding.

Which Michigan 'Radio Priest' backed Roosevelt at first, then attacked him before millions of weekly listeners?

Father Coughlin accused the president of being too friendly to bankers and in 1934 founded his own movement, the National Union for Social Justice.

A 2003 study argued the paralysis that struck Roosevelt in 1921 was probably which condition, not polio?

Guillain–Barré syndrome was never raised by his doctors: every report of it before 1921 had appeared in European journals, so very few American physicians had heard of it.

While serving as president, Roosevelt recorded which occupation for himself when he went to vote?

Tree farmer was a title he had earned: nearly half a million trees were planted on his land over 34 years, including Christmas trees, some of them sent to Winston Churchill.

Which Tennessean served Roosevelt as Secretary of State for nearly twelve years, longer than anyone in the job?

Cordell Hull, born in a log cabin, resigned in failing health in 1944. He won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, an honour the president had nominated him for.

Which railway union leader's threat of a mass protest pushed Roosevelt to ban bias in defence hiring in 1941?

A. Philip Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and had planned to bring marchers to the capital on July 1. Executive Order 8802 was the president's answer.

Which battleship was fitted with a bathtub to take Roosevelt to wartime summits in late 1943?

USS Iowa had a scare on the way: an escorting destroyer accidentally fired a live torpedo toward the battleship during a drill, and the big ship had to turn hard to dodge it.

Which cowboy song, popularised by David Guion's sheet-music arrangement, did Roosevelt proclaim his favourite?

Home on the Range began as an 1870s poem by a Kansas settler and was a little-known tune before Guion reworked it. Kansas adopted it as the state song in 1947.

Which Arabian king met Roosevelt aboard an American cruiser in the Suez Canal in February 1945?

Ibn Saud met the president for a single day aboard USS Quincy, in talks that laid the basis for relations between the two countries.

Which campaign manager did Roosevelt reward with the job of Postmaster General, only to lose him over the third term?

James Farley opposed the 1940 run so strongly that he became a candidate for the Democratic nomination himself, then resigned from the Cabinet and as national party chairman.

Which bricklayer fired five shots at president-elect Roosevelt in Miami in February 1933?

Giuseppe Zangara had bought his handgun only a few days earlier. He pleaded guilty, refused to appeal and went to Florida's electric chair little more than a month later.

Which retired Marine general testified in 1934 that businessmen wanted him to lead a coup against Roosevelt?

Smedley Butler told a House committee that wealthy plotters wanted a fascist veterans' organisation with him as its leader. A New York Times editorial dismissed the story as a gigantic hoax.

Which Republican elder statesman did Roosevelt bring in as Secretary of War in 1940, a job he first held under Taft?

Henry Stimson oversaw the American war effort through the whole of the Second World War, staying on under the next president until 1945.

What nickname was given to the first purpose-built presidential aircraft, which had a lift for Roosevelt's wheelchair?

Sacred Cow, a converted Douglas C-54 with a sleeping area and radiotelephone, carried him only once, to his last summit with Stalin in February 1945.

Roosevelt said any memorial to him should be a plain block no larger than his desk, outside which building?

The National Archives got exactly that in 1965: a block of white marble three feet tall, on the green plot he had described to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1941.

Which actor played Roosevelt in the 1976 drama Eleanor and Franklin and later Richard Gilmore in Gilmore Girls?

Edward Herrmann earned Emmy nominations for both of his 1970s turns as the president, then played him once more on the big screen in 1982.

Which policy, announced by Roosevelt weeks after war began in Europe in 1939, opened arms sales to Britain and France?

Cash and carry was a deliberate way to help the two allies: he realised that only they had both the hard currency to pay upfront and the ships to haul the weapons away.

By what name is Roosevelt's October 1937 Chicago address against aggressor nations known?

The Quarantine Speech likened aggression to a spreading epidemic, named no country and proposed economic pressure rather than outright force.

Which private secretary of 21 years does her biographer credit as Roosevelt's de facto White House chief of staff?

Missy LeHand first worked on his 1920 campaign. She later lived on the third floor of the White House, managing his daily business until a 1941 stroke left her partially paralysed.