Franklin D. Roosevelt

How this president used executive orders

• Financial emergency and gold

  EO 6102 required most covered gold coin, bullion, and certificates to be delivered to banks, with payment in other lawful currency. It retained exemptions, including specified industrial uses and collectible coins. Treasury administered the rules; later orders changed the legal framework. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

• Organizing work relief

  EO 7034 established the Works Progress Administration and a process for reviewing projects and recommending funding allotments. Its administrative objective was to move people from relief into employment while coordinating progress reports, investigation, wages, and working conditions. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

• Mobilizing industrial production

  EO 9024 created the War Production Board to direct procurement and production policy. Its chairman could coordinate purchasing, plant expansion, conversion, and priorities across agencies, which were required to follow the board's policies and supply information. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

• Fair employment and unequal rights

  EO 8802 addressed discrimination in defense employment, while EO 9066 enabled exclusion that led to Japanese American incarceration. These were distinct policies: expanding participation in wartime work did not prevent the government from denying other Americans liberty and property. Sources: National Archives, source 1 · National Archives, source 2

Major events and executive response

Landmark orders and what they directed

Signed on April 5, 1933, EO 6102 invoked the banking emergency and statutory authority Congress had recently amended. It set May 1 as the delivery deadline for covered gold holdings. It exempted up to $100 in gold coin and certificates per person, rare collectible coins, specified industrial and professional requirements, and other defined transactions. Banks paid an equivalent amount in other lawful coin or currency. Describing the order as a prohibition on every gold object would erase important limits in its actual text. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

Roosevelt did not leave that initial gold directive unchanged. EO 6260, signed on August 28, 1933, introduced a broader licensing and reporting framework for gold and foreign-exchange transactions. Section 11 explicitly revoked the April 5 gold order and the April 20 order covering foreign exchange and gold exports, while preserving liabilities already incurred. EO 6102 is therefore a landmark in a sequence of emergency measures, rather than the enduring legal text governing all later gold restrictions. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

EO 7034 followed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. It created a division to receive and review project applications, an advisory committee to recommend allotments to the president, and the Works Progress Administration to coordinate execution. The order assigned responsibilities for investigating progress and reporting employment, rather than merely announcing a wish to create jobs. It illustrates how Roosevelt used directives to put an enacted relief program into administrative operation. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

EO 8802, issued on June 25, 1941, prohibited discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in defense employment and government. It required nondiscrimination provisions in defense contracts and established a committee to investigate complaints. The National Archives connects its adoption to A. Philip Randolph's threatened march on Washington. The order addressed jobs and training; it was not an order desegregating the armed forces. Sources: National Archives, source 1 · American Presidency Project, source 2

EO 9346 strengthened and reorganized that employment policy on May 27, 1943. It established a new Committee on Fair Employment Practice, required nondiscrimination terms in contracts and subcontracts, and authorized complaint investigations, hearings, findings, and steps to eliminate discrimination. It also called for nondiscriminatory vocational training. This was an institutional development within the wartime employment program, not a declaration that every segregated federal institution had been abolished. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

Exclusion, incarceration, and the courts

EO 9066, signed on February 19, 1942, authorized the secretary of war and designated commanders to establish military areas from which people could be excluded. Its wording did not name Japanese Americans, but its implementation targeted them for forced removal and confinement. Congress separately supplied criminal penalties, and military authorities issued implementing orders. These distinctions matter: the presidential directive enabled the machinery of exclusion, while later actions determined who had to leave and how the program operated. Sources: National Archives, source 1

In Korematsu v. United States in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld Fred Korematsu's conviction for violating the exclusion requirement. The National Archives records that his conviction was later vacated through a coram nobis proceeding in the 1980s. Ex parte Endo, also decided in 1944, reached a different question: the government could not detain a concededly loyal citizen without cause. Endo helped open the way to ending mass confinement; it should not be collapsed into Korematsu's ruling on exclusion. Sources: National Archives, source 1

What later presidents changed

After the war, Truman's EO 9638 transferred the War Production Board's functions to a Civilian Production Administration and terminated the board, effective at the close of business on November 3, 1945. Existing directives continued unless they conflicted with the new order or were later amended. The change combined administrative continuity with a stated goal of returning industry to peacetime production free from wartime controls; it did not simply cancel every production decision overnight. Sources: American Presidency Project, source 1

Roosevelt's fair-employment orders belong in the background to later civil-rights directives, but they must not be credited with Truman's military integration policy. Truman issued EO 9981 on July 26, 1948, establishing equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed services and a committee to recommend implementation. EO 8802 and EO 9346 addressed defense work and government employment. They were earlier uses of executive authority against discrimination, rather than orders that themselves desegregated military units. Sources: Presidential library, source 1 · American Presidency Project, source 2

Ford's EO 11825 revoked EO 6260 and specified related gold restrictions on December 31, 1974, preserving earlier liabilities and proceedings. In 1976, Ford addressed EO 9066 through Proclamation 4417, not a new executive order. That proclamation confirmed that the authority conferred by EO 9066 had terminated with the December 31, 1946 proclamation ending wartime hostilities. These later documents distinguish formal legal disposition from the continuing historical consequences of Roosevelt's actions. Sources: National Archives, source 1 · American Presidency Project, source 2

Reading the curated collection

The site's historic collection is a curated selection, not a complete inventory of Roosevelt's directives. See the historic-order collection for the guides available here.