When he came to office in 1933, laissez-faire had undermined the temples of capitalism, thrown a quarter of the labor force out of work, cut the gross national product almost in half and provoked mutterings of revolution. No one knew why things had gone wrong or how to set them right. Only communists were happy, seeing in the Great Depression decisive proof of Karl Marx's prophecy that capitalism would be destroyed by its own contradictions.

Then F.D.R. appeared, a magnificent, serene, exhilarating personality, buoyantly embodying new ideas, new courage, new confidence in America's ability to regain control over its future. His New Deal swiftly introduced measures for social protection, regulation and control. Laissez-faire ideologues and Roosevelt haters cried that he was putting the country on the road to communism, the only alternative permitted by the either/or creed. But Roosevelt understood that Social Security, unemployment compensation, public works, securities regulation, rural electrification, farm price supports, reciprocal-trade agreements, minimum wages and maximum hours, guarantees of collective bargaining and all the rest were saving capitalism from itself.

"The test of our progress," he said in his second Inaugural, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." The job situation improved in the 1930s, aided by the Works Progress Administration, the famous WPA, with which government as employer of last resort built schools, post offices, airfields, parks, bridges, tunnels and sewage systems; protected the environment; and fostered the arts. By the 1940 election, the anticapitalist vote, almost a million in 1932, had dwindled to 150,000.

The New Deal never quite solved the problem of unemployment. Though F.D.R. was portrayed as a profligate spender, his largest peacetime deficit was a feeble $3.6 billion in 1936 — far less, even when corrected for inflation, than deficits routinely produced 50 years later by Reagan. It took World War II and the Defense Department to create deficits large enough to wipe out unemployment, proving the case for a compensatory fiscal policy.

Before F.D.R., the U.S. had had a depression every 20 years or so. The built-in economic stabilizers of the New Deal, vociferously denounced by business leaders at the time, have preserved the country against major depressions for more than a half-century. F.D.R.'s signal domestic achievement was to rescue capitalism from the capitalists.

"We are fighting," he said in 1936, "to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world." F.D.R.'s brilliant (and sometimes not so brilliant) improvisations restored America's faith in democratic institutions. Elsewhere on the planet, democracy was under assault. Hitler was on the march in Europe. Japan had invaded China and dreamed of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese domination.

F.D.R.'s education in foreign affairs had been at the hands of two Presidents he greatly admired. Theodore Roosevelt, his kinsman (a fifth cousin), taught him national-interest, balance-of-power geopolitics. Woodrow Wilson, whom he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, gave him the vision of a world beyond balances of power, an international order founded on the collective maintenance of the peace. F.D.R.'s internationalism used T.R.'s realism as the heart of Wilson's idealism.

But Americans, disenchanted with their participation in the Great War, had turned their backs on the world and reverted to isolationism. Rigid neutrality acts denied the President authority to discriminate between aggressor states and their victims and thereby prevented the U.S. from throwing its weight against aggression.

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May 26, 1923	Jan. 5, 1942	Feb. 1, 1982
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