We’re not saying someone like Grover Cleveland or Martin Van Buren never stepped foot in our part of North Carolina at some point in history, but only twice has a U.S. president ever “officially” paid a visit to our fair burgh in the last 150 years. 

Many will remember the most recent — President Bill Clinton (eight years after his days in the Oval Office) spoke from the back of a red, flat-bed truck outside of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension in Sanford on April 30, 2008, to campaign for his wife, former First Lady Hillary Clinton. Hillary would eventually bow out to Barack Obama that year in the Democratic Primary, but her husband’s swing through rural North Carolina was a big deal at the time.

Seventy years earlier, Sanford was a pick-up point for President Franklin D. Roosevelt — this time, while in office — on his way to Chapel Hill to make a speech considered one of his most important of his political career. On Dec. 5, 1938 — almost exactly three years before his most famous “A Day That Will Live in Infamy” speech in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor — Roosevelt began his day in Columbia, South Carolina, for breakfast at the Governor’s Mansion and a speech at the South Carolina State House. 

According to his travel logs, Roosevelt and his party left Columbia by train at 10:30 a.m. and arrived at the train depot in downtown Sanford at 2:30 p.m. He spent a grand total of 15 minutes here before hopping in a motorcade with Gov. Clyde Hoey for the nearly 90-minute drive to Chapel Hill, where he spoke at UNC roughly a month after midterm elections that saw his fellow Democrats lose 72 seats in the U.S. House and seven in the U.S. Senate. 

According to a recent “look back” published in 2018 by WUNC Radio, the visit marked Roosevelt’s first public address about his setback that year. The president, the article states, was questioning whether his New Deal and liberal outlook could survive at the time. 

More than 6,000 people packed into the gym at UNC to hear Roosevelt speak, and those unable to be there listened from Memorial Hall, where the speech was being broadcast. CBS and NBC’s radio networks also broadcast it live to more than 225 stations across the country. The BBC also carried the speech overseas. 

 In his speech, Roosevelt “invoked the shade of Theodore Roosevelt as a fighting liberal” and encouraged the young UNC crowd to “go places” for democracy.

“You undergraduates who see me for the first time have read your newspapers and heard on the air that I am, at the very least, an ogre — a consorter with communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions,” his speech began. “You think of me perhaps as the inventor of the economic royalist, of the wicked utilities, of the money changers of the temple. You have heard for six years that I was about to plunge the nation into war; that you and your little brothers would be sent to the bloody fields of battle in Europe; that I was driving the nation into bankruptcy, and that I breakfasted every morning on a dish of ‘grilled millionaire.’”


Roosevelt (left) with North Carolina Gov. Clyde Hoey and UNC President Frank Graham on Dec. 5, 1938, after their motorcade (which began at the train station in Sanford) arrived in Chapel Hill for Roosevelt’s speech to the UNC student body. Photo: Daily Tar Heel, December 1938

His opening drew laughter, but Roosevelt answered, “Actually, I am an exceedingly mild-mannered person, a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believe in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast, a devotee of scrambled eggs.”

He listed his many New Deal accomplishments and encouraged the college crowd to become politically active. His visit received extensive coverage in newspapers throughout the nation. He would go on to win his third election by a landslide over Republican Wendell Wilkie in the 1940 election. A year later, the “practitioner of peace” would lead the U.S. into World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.


Roosevelt (left) with North Carolina Gov. Clyde Hoey and UNC President Frank Graham on Dec. 5, 1938, after their motorcade (which began at the train station in Sanford) arrived in Chapel Hill for Roosevelt’s speech to the UNC student body.