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, thirty-second President of the United Sates, greatly expanded the role of the federal government with a wide-ranging economic and social program, the New Deal, designed to counter the Great Depression of the 1930s. He also led the nation through most of its par ....

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.... for president. He won that election and in 1932 he won the party's presidential nomination. Despite his opponents claiming that he was physically and mentally unfit for the presidency, he flew to Chicago and pledged to the people at the Democratic National Convention, a New Deal. That expression, a symbol of an era in American history, represented a cluster of ideas formulated by the candidate and his Brain Trust, a group of advisors recruited from New York's Columbia University. On the eve of the March 1933 inauguration, the nation's banking system collapsed as millions of panicky depositors tried to withdraw savings that the banks ....