Updated April 17, 2025 at 05:02 AM ET
WARM SPRINGS, Ga. — Under a clear blue sky and a crisp spring breeze, an honor guard plants the U.S. flag in front of the Little White House, now a national historic landmark and state park.
People gather on the lawn to mark the day Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died here on April 12, 1945, just months into his fourth term as president, and weeks before the end of World War II.
But first, Hal "Toby" Raper points through the tree canopy to a mountain in the distance. "I was the last house on the top of the mountain when he died in this house," he recalls. "I'd just turned six."
The retired dentist is now on the memorial advisory committee here, dedicated to preserving the story of Roosevelt's relationship with Warm Springs, where he'd found relief from polio in the town's namesake therapeutic waters. "He swam in the water of the pool," Raper says. "And he liked it. He said, 'I can feel some movement in my toe for the first time ever.'"
Roosevelt established a foundation here in 1927 to treat people with polio. After he was elected president in 1932, he regularly returned to his retreat in Warm Springs named the Little White House. That's where he died, after collapsing from a stroke as he was sitting for a portrait. That "unfinished portrait" is on display at a museum on the property.
Raper says he was known to tour the countryside, connecting with Americans struggling in the Great Depression.
"This was a very poor part of the country in those days," says Raper. "He really learned and knew many, many of the common working people who lived here."
It was a very different experience than where Roosevelt grew up in Hyde Park, N.Y., among business titans.
"When he came to this part of Georgia, he saw people in a different way than he had ever seen them before," says local state representative Debbie Buckner, a Democrat.
The rural landscape and its people helped shape his political philosophy that the federal government could pull the nation out of the Depression. Buckner says that remains a source of pride here.
"I like to think that as Georgians, we helped him be the president that he was — providing services for people to have a hand up, not necessarily a handout," Buckner says. "I think we still need that today."
Roosevelt's New Deal included rural electrification, agriculture programs, social security, banking and labor reforms, along with new government spending on roads and bridges, libraries, and parks.
"He sought simply to make America great. Period," says U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, contrasting FDR's legacy to President Trump's MAGA agenda. The reverend and Georgia Democrat is the keynote speaker at the ceremony commemorating 80 years since Roosevelt's death.
"An unfinished portrait, an unfinished presidential term, an unfinished legacy," he says. "And in many ways the America he fought for remains unfinished."
Warnock uses the opportunity to criticize the Trump administration, and its work to slash the federal workforce.
"Roosevelt said, 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself,'" Warnock says. "President Trump is bent on weaponizing fear. He and those who are working alongside him, Elon Musk and others, are counting on a context in which federal workers wake up every day and wonder whether or not they have a job. They seem to enjoy that. They want us to be afraid of one another."
But there's a debate over whether the U.S. still needs, or can afford the build-up of government programs that FDR spearheaded.
"I think that was the first step in the U.S. moving toward a more redistributionist view of the economy," says Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard and vice president for research at the libertarian CATO Institute.
"FDR sort of changed the thinking that the federal government needs to be involved in controlling the economy and running the economy and expanding expenditures up and down to moderate business cycles and all those sorts of things," Miron says. "On the whole, that's been negative."
But in Warm Springs, Ga., there remains a fondness for FDR.
His great-grandson, Haven Roosevelt Luke, finds it gratifying to see the community's bond with his great-grandfather is still strong.
"The state of Georgia gave so much to FDR — not just his vision politically, but personally," he says. "I think he felt most comfortable here."
But Luke says he's alarmed at what's happening in the country. "I feel like we're in an extraordinarily divisive time when the foundation that FDR laid is being torn down," says Luke. "It's really, really important to come here and try to keep that legacy alive."
Luke says his great-grandfather built a coalition that advocated how the government can serve the interests of all Americans, not just those with access to power.
He fears another key part of FDR's legacy is breaking down — the international consensus that endured for decades after the end of WWII. "The notion that global peace was based on global economic security for everybody," Luke says. "He promoted free trade. He promoted open borders. He was in favor of a global community because he felt that didn't just enhance our security. It enhanced everybody's security."
Despite his sense of his great-grandfather's legacy facing what he calls "death buy a thousand cuts," Luke remains hopeful for America's future.
"FDR never stopped hoping and believing in the nation. We can't give up hope."
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