President from 1933 until his death in 1945, Roosevelt was the architect of the New Deal and the leader who guided the United States to victory over Japan and Germany in the Second World War. His legacy remained great through much of the second half of the twentieth century Elected to the presidency in 1932, Roosevelt and the Democratic Party benefited from Herbert Hoover’s failure to respond to the plight of many Americans suffering the economic consequences of the Great Depression. In fact, Roosevelt’s own response to the Depression was neither radical nor systematic. Many of his policy initiatives were ones that Hoover had tried unsuccessfully to implement. Roosevelt was not an ideologue committed to the idea of a welfare state. Instead, he was a pragmatist who moved with the times and carried out different policies as conditions warranted. Unlike Hoover, he realized that Americans wanted action, if only to give the appearance that something was being done. As he said during the 1932 campaign, “the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” In March 1933, therefore, when inaugurated, Roosevelt immediately set about establishing what he called a New Deal for the American people, including a plethora of acts establishing different bodies to administer the economy (e.g. the National Recovery, Social Security, Agricultural, and Works Progress Administrations). While both liberals and conservatives at the time proclaimed its revolutionary character, more revisionist views have recognized there was very little that was systematic about the New Deal. It included many ad hoc initiatives to deal with particular problems, some of which cancelled out or undermined others. Marked by the pragmatic and reactive politics of which Roosevelt was the master, the reforms were essentially conservative in nature, endeavoring to re-establish stability for corporate capitalism in the United States.

This lack of an ideological justification for welfare was both a strength and a weakness in the reforms. The New Deal actually failed to accomplish its major goal (re-establishing economic health for the country), but this was achieved by wartime prosperity. However, its apparent success and Roosevelt’s obvious popularity gave some of the programs a longevity that they might not have had, had they been more ideologically grounded.

Consequently following the Second World War, presidents from Truman to Carter remained committed to the New Deal. By the same token, when the prosperity of the postwar years was threatened during the 1970s, there was no ideological commitment to welfare that might safeguard it from the onslaught of a Reagan, who argued that it was a millstone weighing down American capitalism.

As the president who guided the United States through the Second World War, Roosevelt was able to enshrine Wilsonian internationalism at the heart of American foreign policy. However, while he was able to secure American support for the United Nations, his internationalism was also more prag-matic than ideological. Bringing together a wartime coalition to defeat Hitler, he was unable to guide this alliance towards a new relationship with the Soviet Union that could survive their postwar competition.

Consequently, his repudiation of isolationism fed into a greater commitment to engagement abroad to counteract the Soviets rather than to a philosophical commitment to internationalism.