Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  FDR, still on his back, beamed his old smile.

  “Well, I’m glad you are back, Mummy, and I got up this party for you!”

  Sara “controlled herself remarkably,” Eleanor recalled.

  FDR chattered away, asking questions about her summer trip.

  Dr. Bennet was all smiles, too, saying: “This boy is going to get well!”

  That night Sara sat in a room by herself, writing letters to her sisters and brothers.

  “I hear them all laughing, Eleanor in the lead,” she wrote. “He and Eleanor decided at once to be cheerful and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness. So I have fallen in and follow their glorious example …

  “Below his waist he cannot move at all. His legs (that I have always been so proud of) have to be moved often as they ache when long in one position … They have no power … He looks well and eats well and is very keen and full of interest in everything … Dr. Lovett, the greatest authority we have on infantile paralysis … says he will get well.”

  * * *

  FDR may have fooled his mother into thinking he was feeling “very keen.” But we can be sure that underneath his show of good cheer, he was struggling against panic.

  Anyone who suddenly can’t walk is going to feel shocked and frightened. A “state of nervous collapse” is typical at first, according to one polio expert. All your life you take it for granted that your body will do what you tell it to do. Then one day it refuses to obey.

  In a situation like this, people tend to follow the examples set by their families. That’s what FDR was doing when he tried so hard to be cheerful. He had been taught not to “whine about trouble,” and so had Eleanor.

  Both of them knew about Theodore Roosevelt’s ordeals in his youth—how he had fought the smothering effects of severe asthma by building himself up with tireless exercise; and how, when his young wife, Alice, had died, he had thrown himself into strenuous adventures on horseback. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Theodore once wrote, “at any rate, not when he first feels the horse move under him.” FDR certainly couldn’t ride a horse, not right now, but his instincts were telling him to follow the spirit of Theodore’s advice—to fight his anxiety and sadness with action.

  From the Delano side of his family—his mother’s side—he got advice along the same line.

  Franklin’s uncle, Fred Delano, the one who had persuaded Dr. Lovett to visit Campobello, had been wondering what else he might do to help. He sat down to write Franklin “some ‘fatherly’ advice.”

  Franklin must keep a cool head, Delano said. He must analyze his new problem as he would any other. He must not fool himself into thinking things were better than they really were. Doctors could help, but “the construction work of getting well depends largely on your own character …

  “I realize you are up against a hard problem, and hard, cruel facts … I feel so confident of your background of health and good habits, and of your courage and good temper, that I refuse to be cast down.”

  * * *

  By the middle of September, more than a month after the earliest symptoms, the doctors said FDR was ready to travel by train to New York, where he would stay in Presbyterian Hospital, not far from the Roosevelts’ townhouse, for several more weeks of rest.

  The older children, Anna and Jimmy and Elliott, had already left Campobello to return to their boarding schools. Eleanor was to go with Franklin on the train. The younger boys, Franklin Jr., seven, and John, five, would stay on the island a bit longer with their governess while their parents got settled at home.

  Eleanor had told Franklin and John simply that their father was very ill and couldn’t play with them for a while. She didn’t try to explain what polio was.

  They had hardly seen him for weeks. They heard the adults talking but couldn’t really tell what was wrong.

  Franklin Jr. thought he heard one of his older brothers say something about a heart attack, which he knew was very serious.

  John Roosevelt watched four men carry his father down the stairs on a stretcher, then cross the lawn to the bay, where a boat was waiting to take him to the train station at Eastport, Maine.

  “He managed to wave to me,” John remembered many years later, “and his whole face burst into a tremendous sunny smile. So I decided he couldn’t be so sick after all.”

  * * *

  The journey by train from coastal Maine to New York City was long and slow. There was plenty of time for FDR to reflect on the frightening turn his life had taken.

  A trauma like sudden paralysis tears the foundation out from under every ambition and plan. But few people had ambitions and plans as large as Franklin Roosevelt’s.

  For most of his life, he had pictured himself as a leader-in-the-making. Even his earliest memory, or so he claimed, was of a torchlight parade that trundled past his family’s home on the night that Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, a friend of his father’s, was elected president of the United States. Before long he imagined that he himself might become the sort of man who could inspire that sort of celebration.

  But he was not a born leader. When he was thirteen, the age when many boys of his social class went away to boarding school, his mother kept him at home for an extra year. So when she finally sent him off to Groton, a school near Boston, he got a late start in making friends and never quite caught up. Franklin was sometimes invited to visit the home of Theodore Roosevelt and play with his five children. But that exuberant crew whispered that Franklin was a bit of a sissy. He was good at sailing and golf, but in the top-tier sports of football and baseball, he never made the team. He was the kind of kid who always seemed to be trying a little too hard to be popular. At Harvard College he was chosen to be president of the school newspaper, the Crimson, but he failed to win an invitation to join the most prestigious social club, Porcellian, a slight that left him deeply disappointed.

  At last, in college, he did make some close friends. They were the ones who heard him voice his great ambition. “I can remember so well sitting out with him at a party,” one said later, “and he was perfectly definite about so many things for the future, and he said, ‘I know I want to try for the presidency of the United States.’”

  The example of his distant cousin Theodore towered in his mind. Franklin’s parents had always looked down on the common run of politicians as rough and corrupt men. But “Cousin Theodore” broke that mold. T.R., as he was known, had proven that a man of their own class—a true “gentleman”—could battle for good in the public arena without using dirty tactics. As Sara once put it, T.R. showed that a gentleman could “go into politics but not be a politician.” When FDR was about to leave for Harvard, his uncle Fred had suggested he read a speech by his “noble kinsman,” who urged well-to-do young Americans like Franklin to embrace “the strenuous life.” T.R. had declared, “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

  Theodore had started as a crusading reformer in politics, cleaning up the police department in New York City and fighting corrupt political bosses in the state capital of Albany. At the same time he wrote popular books about American history and his own adventures as a hunter and cowboy in the Dakotas. Next, as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, he took a hand in launching a war with Spain. Just a few months later, he led a cavalry squadron called the Rough Riders against the Spanish army in Cuba. Welcomed home as a war hero in 1898, he was promptly elected governor of New York. Two years later he became vice president of the United States. And when President William McKinley was shot dead by an assassin in 1901, Theodore assumed the presidency.

  Until then, Franklin had admired his older cousin from a distance. They knew each other, but not very well. That changed in 1903, when Franklin proposed marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s favorit
e niece and Franklin’s own fifth cousin once removed. FDR loved Eleanor. There was no doubt of that. But it’s hard not to suspect that he also enjoyed the prospect of forging a closer tie through marriage to the president of the United States. In 1905—after a long engagement, which Franklin’s mother had insisted on, and two years in law school at Columbia University—the two young representatives of different branches of the extended Roosevelt clan were married in a big “society wedding” in New York City. Relatives and friends looked on as the president, up from Washington, escorted the bride down the aisle. Her name remained what it had always been—Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

  As president, Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, fought the power of overgrown corporations, started the national park system, and hunted grizzly bears for fun. He was a Republican. Franklin’s branch of the family were Democrats. But Franklin hung a portrait of Theodore next to a portrait of his father. The difference in political parties didn’t matter. He wanted a life like that of the man he now called Uncle Ted.

  Another friend remembered Franklin saying that he planned to follow T.R.’s example step-by-step. First he would run for the New York state legislature. Then, again like Uncle Ted, he would go to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy. Next: governor of New York—“and anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be president,” he said.

  Many people, when they’re young, spin visions of a grand future. Most of them find out it’s a lot easier to dream about doing great things than it is to actually do them. So they put their dreams away and settle for less.

  It was different with Franklin Roosevelt.

  By 1921, he had taken two of the steps marked out by T.R.—serving in the New York legislature, then as assistant secretary of the navy. He had even been nominated for vice president, like T.R., though the older Roosevelt had won his election to that post, while FDR had lost his race in 1920.

  At the start of his career he’d not been a natural politician, just as he’d not been a natural leader in school. Politics rewards people who can make friends with practically anybody, from street cleaners and farmers to judges and senators. As a rookie state senator at age twenty-eight, FDR felt at home on the upper rungs of society’s ladder, but not the lower. And he had to learn that in politics, even an idealist had to give a little to get things done.

  In Albany he met a gifted young political activist named Frances Perkins, who was urging legislators to pass a law to limit the hours of working women. In time the two would become close friends and colleagues. But in their early meetings, Perkins thought FDR was stuck-up, and so did others. Perkins remembered a friendly old senator named Tim Sullivan saying: “Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt.”

  She described the young FDR at work in the state senate, “tall and slender, very active and alert … rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious of face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez [glasses] and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.” She recalled him facing off with a couple of older senators who were “arguing with him to be ‘reasonable,’ as they called it, about something.” But he tossed that chin up and in “his cool, remote voice” said, “No, no, I won’t hear of it!”

  Ten years in politics and government rubbed off the arrogance. In the state senate he had been trying too hard to be serious and “senatorial.” But even then, Frances Perkins said, he loved to laugh. Gradually he relaxed into a political style more in line with his natural warmth and humor. Meanwhile, Louis Howe helped him learn the tactics needed to get things done and advance his own prospects.

  It wasn’t easy.

  He made his name in the state senate by fighting the powerful men who ran the Democratic Party in giant New York City. The local Democratic organization was known by the name of its headquarters, Tammany Hall. The bosses of Tammany were mostly Irish Americans whose ancestors had been snubbed by New York’s elite for generations. Through politics they had grabbed a share of power, and often they used it for personal gain. The “Tammany machine,” it was called—a political factory where elections were rigged and corrupt deals were hatched.

  When the current boss of Tammany Hall, “Silent Charlie” Murphy, tried to put one of his pals in the U.S. Senate, Roosevelt led the idealistic reformers who quashed the scheme. That earned him a big black mark in Tammany’s ledger. When he tried to make his own run for the U.S. Senate in 1914, the Tammany machine slapped him down. He had to face the fact that if he was ever to run for statewide office, he would have to make peace with Tammany. So by quiet signals he let the bosses know that while he would never play the game their way, neither would he make them his target.

  He also learned that politics was not a simple matter of good and evil. With experience, he saw that Tammany politicians often did more practical good—giving food to poor families in trouble, helping the jobless find work—than high-minded reformers who talked about helping the oppressed people of the earth but didn’t actually know any.

  One of those politicians was Tim Sullivan, the state senator who had found the young Roosevelt so arrogant. Born in the poor and violent Irish American neighborhood called Five Points, Sullivan had come up from shining shoes and selling newspapers to owning saloons, vaudeville theaters, and racetracks. Then he’d joined the Tammany machine, which sent him to the state assembly, the state senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives. Sullivan took payoffs and traded political favors for votes. He also gave new shoes by the thousand to destitute people in his district. Knowing the everyday dangers of the city’s slums, he pushed through the state’s first law against carrying concealed weapons. When Frances Perkins was fighting for shorter hours for working women, Roosevelt opposed her. So did the Tammany legislators in Albany—except Tim Sullivan, whose sister had gone to work in a factory at fourteen to help her family.

  FDR got to know Sullivan. Later on, when Franklin had become a firm supporter of women’s rights, he told Frances Perkins, “Tim Sullivan used to say that the America of the future would be made out of the people who had come over in steerage [emigrated from Europe to the United States in the worst quarters of passenger ships] and who knew in their own hearts and lives the difference between being despised and being accepted and liked.

  “Poor old Tim Sullivan never understood about modern politics. But he was right about the human heart.”

  * * *

  FDR’s cousin Joseph Alsop later said that after the 1920 election, Roosevelt “looked remarkably like another specimen of a familiar American political type—the attractive young man who makes politics his profession, comes up fast at first, and then runs into a dead end and spends the rest of his life regretting former glories that everyone else soon forgets.”

  FDR had no intention of letting that happen.

  First, he laid plans to support his family by earning more money than he had been able to make in his ten years of government service. He wanted to supplement the handouts from his mother, perhaps even make them unnecessary. So he joined Langdon Marvin, his old friend from Harvard, in a New York law firm that was promptly renamed Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt. At the same time he accepted a job offer from Van Lear Black, whose businesses included the Fidelity & Deposit Company, an insurance firm; Black wanted FDR to run the New York office. In both cases—the law firm and the insurance company—it was understood that Roosevelt would be a part-timer. His main value lay in the prestige of having the name Roosevelt on the door. His associates knew he would be devoting much of his time to politics.

  He wasn’t running for anything yet. That would happen at some point down the road—just when was hard to say. After eight years in Washington, his job right now was to get back into New York’s political ecosystem. He looked out for trusted assistants who had worked for him at the Navy Department and on the 1920 campaig
n, so that when the next campaign came, he could bring them back on board. He arranged for jobs for several of them, including Louis Howe, who went to work for Fidelity & Deposit, and Marguerite LeHand, who became his full-time secretary. (She soon was so close to the Roosevelt family that the children began to call her “Missy,” and the nickname stuck.)

  FDR didn’t talk about his long-term intentions, not with anyone but Howe. But hints slipped out now and then. When a deeply loyal booster named Tom Lynch couldn’t get past his disappointment over Roosevelt’s defeat in the race for vice president, FDR counseled him to be patient.

  “Tom,” he said, “1932 will be our year.”

  Now any such hopes depended on his legs. If his strength returned, if he could stand up and walk again, he could get back on the track he had set for himself.

  If not, his future was lost.

  * * *

  From Grand Central Terminal in New York, FDR was driven to Presbyterian Hospital, then carted up to a private room for several more weeks of rest. His personal physician, Dr. George Draper, had taken charge of the case. After a brief examination of his patient, Dr. Draper would meet with reporters demanding news about the famous young politician.

  It was good for FDR to have a man like Draper on his side. They had known each other since Groton School. Dr. Draper was smart and serious about his work. He had been a physician in the U.S. Army during World War I. (In fact, he still looked like a strict army officer, with a narrow face, a high forehead, and piercing eyes.) He knew perhaps as much about polio as Dr. Lovett did, since he had treated many patients in the 1916 epidemic and studied the disease in the years since then. He didn’t have time to examine Roosevelt carefully before he met with reporters that day, but otherwise he was well prepared to answer their questions.