The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Franklin D. Roosevelt.md

created	updated	title	aliases	tags	category	summary	born	died	location	relations
2026-06-13	2026-10-26	Franklin D. Roosevelt	FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt Franklin Roosevelt	Person President WorldWarII 1930s 1940s	Political Figure	Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd U.S. president, in office from 1933 to 1945, who led the country through the Depression and most of World War II and authorized the OSS and the Manhattan Project.	1882-01-30	1945-04-12	Hyde Park, New York	type with role fn relative_of Warren Delano Jr. maternal grandfather (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library catalogues him as Warren Delano II) 2

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 - April 12, 1945) was the thirty-second president of the United States, elected to four terms from 1933 until his death in office in April 1945. His administration enacted the New Deal response to the Great Depression and led the country through most of World War II.¹

Maternal family

Roosevelt's maternal grandfather, Warren Delano Jr. (catalogued by the Roosevelt Library as Warren Delano II, 1809 to 1898), sailed to Canton in 1833 as supercargo on the Commerce, was associated there with Russell Sturgis and Company, and in January 1840 became a partner in Russell and Company, the American commission house at Canton. He remained in Canton and Macao during the Opium War and served as acting consul. The panic of 1857 brought him severe losses, and in 1859 he returned to China.² The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library holds the Delano family papers, and its finding aid lists the Russell and Company records among the family's China interests.²

Wartime Intelligence and Science

In July 1941 Roosevelt appointed William J. Donovan as Coordinator of Information, and in 1942 he authorized the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency that became the institutional ancestor of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also approved the Manhattan Project, the secret program to build an atomic bomb, and appointed Nelson Rockefeller as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs to manage hemispheric policy and propaganda.³

Death and Succession

Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, and was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman, who had not been briefed on the atomic bomb and learned of its existence only after taking office.¹

Footnotes

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1. Smith, Jean Edward. FDR. Random House, 2007. ↩︎

2. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, finding aid for the Delano family papers, biographical introduction to Warren Delano II, pp. 1-2 of the PDF. https://www.fdrlibrary.org/documents/356632/390886/findingaid_delanofamily.pdf ↩︎

3. Colby, Gerard, and Charlotte Dennett. Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. HarperCollins, 1995. ↩︎