Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into a patrician Hudson Valley family whose wealth and connections opened doors from Groton School to Harvard to a career in law and politics. Stricken by polio in 1921, he nevertheless rose to the presidency in 1933, leading the United States through the Great Depression with the New Deal and through most of World War II, dying in office in April 1945 after being elected to a record four terms.
Roosevelt was born at the family estate of Springwood in Hyde Park, delivered after a difficult labor that nearly killed his mother, Sara. He grew up an only child, doted on and tutored privately until age 14, riding, sailing, and collecting stamps—a hobby he kept his entire life, even using it later as a diplomatic tool, trading rare stamps with foreign dignitaries.
His charmed early trajectory—Groton, Harvard, Columbia Law School, a rising career in New York politics—was upended in 1921 when, at 39, he was paralyzed from the waist down by what was diagnosed as polio. He never walked unassisted again, though he developed elaborate methods to appear to stand and walk for public appearances, and the press, by tacit agreement, rarely photographed him in his wheelchair.
Elected president in 1932 amid the depths of the Depression, he reshaped the role of American government with the New Deal's alphabet-soup agencies, and later steered the Allied war effort, forging the wartime partnership with Churchill and Stalin. He remains the only U.S. president elected to four terms, a feat later barred by constitutional amendment.