Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thirty-second President of the United States, died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait. He was sixty-three. The war in Europe had weeks left; he did not live to see the peace or the United Nations he had already named. Born in Hyde Park, New York, on January 30, 1882, he served four terms, led the country through the Depression and most of the Second World War, and never walked unassisted in public after poliomyelitis in 1921. The New Deal remade the federal government: work programs, a social insurance that still carries his imprint, and a style of radio that made a distant office sound like a neighbor. The wartime alliance remade the world he did not live to see at peace. He could be evasive, charming, and ruthless in the same afternoon. Eleanor Roosevelt was partner and critic; Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd was in the Warm Springs room when he died, a fact the family managed and history later declined to manage. Hyde Park was the family house, the library he built, and the rose garden he chose for a grave. Warm Springs was the rehabilitation pool and the Little White House, not the hometown. This memorial names Hyde Park as the register city and does not pretend he died there. Both places still keep a room as he left it. The train that carried him north from Georgia passed through a country that had learned his voice better than his face. Hyde Park buried him as a neighbor who had also been president. Warm Springs still shows the unfinished portrait. The braces in the closet are the more accurate likeness.