Franklin D. Roosevelt was born.
Franklin D. Roosevelt . He is often rated by scholars as one of the three greatest U.S. Presidents , along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln . In the 1932 presidential election , Roosevelt defeated incumbent Republican president Herbert Hoover in a landslide to win the presidency . When the war began and unemployment ended , conservatives in Congress repealed the two major relief programs , the Works Progress Administration ( WPA ) and Civilian Conservation Corps ( CCC ) .