During one of the hundreds of press conferences he gave during his 12 years in office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, was asked to define his political philosophy. Was he a socialist or a communist, as many critics of his New Deal alleged? No, the president replied. “I am a Christian and a Democrat. That’s all.”
Roosevelt, who passed away 80 years ago on April 12, 1945, was a scion of the Protestant gentry of New York’s Hudson Valley, a descendant of the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam on his father’s side and of the Mayflower Pilgrims on his mother’s. Yet he grew up to be arguably the most progressive president in American history, demonstrating a care for the common good and the needs of the nation’s poorest that few other presidents have matched.
His governance not only welcomed Catholics more fully into American public life (though he certainly did that; the social programs pioneered by urban Irish Democratic machines have been cited as inspiration for the New Deal, and he was known for his closeness with “Monsignor New Deal” John A. Ryan), but also instilled care for the most vulnerable—a Christian moral imperative, shared by Catholics and Protestants alike—into the heart of American politics.
It has often been easy for Americans to take for granted how many of our collective needs the federal government’s services meet, although recent moves by Elon Musk and the Trump administration to dismantle federal agency after federal agency have given us a crash course on the subject. We owe most of these services to Roosevelt’s leadership. Before he took office, the idea that the U.S. government should provide millions of jobs for the unemployed, insurance policies against unemployment, meals for the hungry or financial guarantees for retirement—on a national scale—was almost unthinkable. Even programs and agencies established after Roosevelt’s tenure, such as Medicare and U.S.A.I.D., are built upon the core premise of his New Deal: The end of politics is to care for people.
Roosevelt understood, as few American presidents had before him, that there was no inherent separation between Christian charity and democratic citizenship. Assistance to the vulnerable was not cheapened if it came branded with the U.S. flag rather than through private enterprise. Indeed, the sheer scale of systemic poverty—particularly during the Great Depression—required the full mobilization of the nation’s resources. He also knew that what made a nation great was not military might or territorial expansion, but morally decent treatment of its people.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much,” he said in his second inaugural address. “It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Roosevelt’s concern for the least among us was informed by his own experience of suffering and vulnerability. Paralyzed from the legs down after being stricken with polio at the age of 39, he spent years painstakingly adjusting to a new life in which he depended on others for his basic daily needs. One of the most moving moments of his presidency came in 1944, when he visited wounded Pacific War veterans at a Honolulu naval hospital. Many of the men had lost limbs or suffered spine damage, and would never walk again. He quietly visited the ward and greeted each soldier—in his wheelchair. According to Samuel Rosenman, Roosevelt’s White House counsel:
Roosevelt insisted on going past each individual bed. He had known for twenty-three years what it was to be deprived of the use of both legs.
He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to those boys who would have to face the same bitterness. This crippled man on the little wheelchair wanted to show them that it was possible to rise above such physical handicaps.
The humility and compassion in this visit has long stood out to me as a concrete example of the ethic that shaped Roosevelt’s political career—and as a stark contrast to some of our more bombastic leaders in the present.
If Roosevelt was a Christian and a democrat (in addition to being a capitalized Democrat), he was a Christian in seeking, as best he could through the medium of flawed human institutions, to honor Christ’s commandment in Matthew 25:40. And he was a democrat in recognizing that the government had to work for ordinary people if liberal democracy were to survive. Beholding the rise of fascist regimes overseas, he knew that a radically unequal society, in which government serves only the rich while the poor are left to fend for themselves, is the stuff of which dictatorship is made—both because of the danger to democracy inherent in the concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy coterie and because citizens who resent politicians for failing to meet their needs are more susceptible to the siren song of authoritarianism.
The political landscape of 2025, in which the world’s richest man helps to eviscerate countless federal services for the American people while right-wing media stokes citizens’ anger against “elitist” liberals, is the realization of Roosevelt’s worst fears. At a 1936 campaign appearance in New York City, Roosevelt warned Americans against the risks of oligarchy: “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.” His words ring all the more true after watching Mr. Musk take a chainsaw to our government—and reading accounts in which members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, attempting to force their way past security officers into federal facilities, have indeed behaved like a mob.
Roosevelt’s presidential record offers us warnings as well as inspiration. He at times fell into sin. His acquiescence to a xenophobic pressure campaign to intern 120,000 Japanese-Americans after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a notable moment of poor judgment—one that set a chilling precedent for the Trump administration, inclined as it is to round people up based on nationality or ethnicity. The current administration has in fact invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport people to El Salvador without due process, a law the Roosevelt White House also used to justify the internment policy.
His failure to live up to American ideals in that moment is made even more tragic by evidence that he keenly understood the dangers of bigotry. “We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background,” he wrote to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign-Born in 1940. “We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”
Roosevelt’s broader legacy is a rebuke to the plutocratic, anti-democratic paradigm promoted by those currently in power. I have long seen the Trump administration’s agenda—in its first term of tax cuts and efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but especially now in its Muskian form—as the latest salvo in a nearly century-long counteroffensive against Roosevelt. He inscribed in the American social contract a preferential option for the poor—the idea that the government had a responsibility, as an agent of the collective will of the American people, to provide for those who had nothing. Those who seek to undo his legacy today profess a simple creed: Deregulate, privatize and eliminate anything the government does to serve the most vulnerable.
At a 1932 campaign rally in Detroit, Roosevelt posited that political engagement could only come from a firm moral foundation of care for others. As a Christian and a social democrat in his mold, while I often weep for our nation today, I look to Roosevelt for hope, and I’ll give him the last word here:
In these days of difficulty, we Americans everywhere must and shall choose the path of social justice, the only path that will lead us to a permanent bettering of our civilization, the path that our children must tread and their children must tread, the path of faith, the path of hope, and the path of love toward our fellow man.
