The presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt began on March 4, 1933, when he was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, and ended upon his death on April 12, 1945, a span of 12 years, 39 days. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in the midst of the Great Depression. Starting with his landslide victory over Republican President Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election, he would go on to win a record four presidential terms, and became a central figure in world affairs during World War II. His program for relief, recovery and reform, known as the New Deal, involved a great expansion of the role of the federal government in the economy. Under his steady leadership, the Democratic Party built a "New Deal Coalition" of labor unions, big city machines, white ethnics, African Americans, and rural white Southerners, that would significantly realign American politics for the next several decades in the Fifth Party System and also define modern American liberalism.