Supreme Court Appointments by President Franklin D. Roosevelt | ||
---|---|---|
Position | Name | Term |
Chief Justice | Harlan Fiske Stone | 1941–1946 |
Associate Justice | Hugo Black | 1937–1971 |
Stanley Forman Reed | 1938–1957 | |
Felix Frankfurter | 1939–1962 | |
William O. Douglas | 1939–1975 | |
Frank Murphy | 1940–1949 | |
James F. Byrnes | 1941–1942 | |
Robert H. Jackson | 1941–1954 | |
Wiley Blount Rutledge | 1943–1949 |
The presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt began on March 4, 1933, when he was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, and ended upon his death on April 12, 1945, a span of 12 years and 39 days. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in the midst of the Great Depression. Starting with his landslide victory over Republican President Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election. He won a record four presidential terms, and became a central figure in world affairs during World War II. His program for relief, recovery and reform, known as the New Deal, involved a great expansion of the role of the federal government in the economy. Under his steady leadership, the Democratic Party built a "New Deal Coalition" of labor unions, big city machines, white ethnics, African Americans, and rural white Southerners, that would significantly realign American politics for the next several decades in the Fifth Party System and also define modern American liberalism.
During his first hundred days in office, Roosevelt spearheaded unprecedented major legislation and issued a profusion of executive orders that instituted the New Deal—a variety of programs designed to produce relief (government jobs for the unemployed), recovery (economic growth), and reform (through regulation of Wall Street, banks and transportation). He created numerous programs to support the unemployed and farmers, and to encourage labor union growth while more closely regulating business and high finance. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 added to his popularity, helping him win re-election by a landslide in 1936. The economy improved rapidly from 1933 to 1937, but then relapsed into a deep recession in 1937–38. The bipartisan Conservative Coalition that formed in 1937 prevented his attempted packing of the Supreme Court, and blocked most of his legislative proposals, aside from the Fair Labor Standards Act. When the war began and unemployment largely became a non-issue, conservatives in Congress repealed the two major relief programs, the WPA and CCC, but kept most of the regulations on business. Along with several smaller programs, major surviving programs from the New Deal include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wagner Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Social Security.