Franklin D. Roosevelt was the president of the United States from 1933 to 1945. While he is widely admired for supporting Americans during the Great Depression through the New Deal programs and leading the nation through World War II, he also tried to greatly expand executive power and frequently broke the democratic norm of institutional forbearance. For instance, he tried to weaponize the Supreme Court by expanding it and packing it with loyalists, and he continued running for office after completing the traditional two terms. (He died just after winning a fourth term.) However, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that democratic norms still prevailed in both cases, because Congress united to deny his court-packing scheme and pass an amendment limiting presidents to two terms. This demonstrates how strong democratic norms can check leaders’ overreach.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt Character Timeline in How Democracies Die
The timeline below shows where the character Franklin D. Roosevelt appears in How Democracies Die. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5: The Guardrails of Democracy
...themselves to two terms, following the precedent set by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. When Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the norm in the 1940s, Congress formalized it in the Twenty-Second Amendment.
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Chapter 6: The Unwritten Rules of American Politics
During his first inaugural address in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress for war powers to face the Great Depression. Later, the conservative Supreme Court...
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...Supreme Court, whether by impeaching and replacing justices or by expanding the court itself. When Franklin D. Roosevelt tried in 1937, he encountered severe opposition and failed.
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...predominated in the 20th century U.S., they also broke down in three key moments. First, Franklin D. Roosevelt discarded forbearance: he tried to pack the courts, issued an unprecedented number of executive orders,...
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