by James Tobin
But Eleanor had good reasons for inviting people to dinner so often. She knew her husband’s limbs needed exercise, but his brain needed exercise, too. She knew how he loved to keep up with news of what was happening inside the political parties, how he loved to discuss ideas for new policies and laws, how he savored gossip about politicians and friends.
She had never fully shared her husband’s confidence that he could learn to walk again and then run for office. (In October 1922, Dr. Draper had written to Dr. Lovett: “His wife told me on the side that she did not feel very sanguine [hopeful].”) Now, as the months passed, she was losing whatever hope she might have had.
But even if he never walked again, she believed he must stay active in the affairs of his state and his country.
“I want to keep him interested in politics,” she wrote to a friend. “This is what he cares for more than anything else. I don’t want him forgotten.”
Besides, it really wasn’t Eleanor who was distracting FDR from his exercises. He was distracting himself.
About this time he offered some advice to a friend who hoped to make his living as a writer. FDR sent his best wishes but said he doubted the friend could handle such a quiet and lonely life for long. “I can’t help feeling that you are built a bit like me,” he said, “that you need something physically more active, with constant contact with all sorts of people in many kinds of places.” As he told a reporter, “I have never specialized in any one thing. I am interested in too many things.”
It was true. When he was supposed to be concentrating on his workouts, he was giving his time to a dozen other pastimes, hobbies, and projects. Some were serious; others, pure fun. He had always been a busy man, but now his hunger to do things seemed insatiable, as if he could defy paralysis just by crowding his days and nights with activity.
For example:
He was a dedicated tree farmer. He directed the planting of thousands of seedlings on the Roosevelts’ lands around Hyde Park.
He invested in business ventures.
He designed and built big model sailboats for time trials on the Hudson River.
He made a study of the historic Dutch American farmhouses that lined the valley of the Hudson.
He continued to act as chairman of the regional Boy Scouts organization.
He sent Louis Howe to search shops in New York and Boston for valuable old stamps, books, and art prints, especially pictures of ships and boats. With magnifying glass and tweezers in hand, he sat for hours with his stamps, sorting and studying them for the tales they told of distant places and ages past. He thought everyone should collect stamps. Stamp collecting, he wrote, “dispels boredom, enlarges our vision, broadens our knowledge of geography and in innumerable ways enriches life and adds to its joy.”
He started to write a history of the United States. He dropped it after just fourteen pages. “But I had a real idea,” he told a friend later. “I thought all our histories lacked movement and a sense of direction. The nation was clearly going somewhere right from the first. I thought I could do better with those ideas than had been done before.”
He sent streams of letters to all parts of the country, keeping in touch with Democrats, college friends, navy friends, aunts, uncles, cousins, and countless others, including other people with polio, trading encouragement and ideas for treatments and exercises.
And he read more than he ever had, especially about the past.
“Roosevelt was a walking American history book,” Frances Perkins said. “He knew exactly how the troops went here and there … He knew exactly what the trading towns were and the trading routes across the valleys.” Yet he might also spend half a day reading a book on edible plants.
So his nurses were right. He wasn’t doing his exercises as much as he should have, or even as much as he meant to. He was living a full life and stocking his mind with a thousand nuggets of knowledge.
But he was hardly any closer to walking on his own than he had been on the day he first stood up with crutches.
In the spring of 1923, nearly two years since the poliovirus had struck, Dr. Lovett tested the strength of forty-four of FDR’s muscles, the same ones he had tested a year earlier. Seven were slightly stronger. Seven were a little weaker. Thirty showed no difference at all.
But month after month, FDR insisted to friends that he was getting better all the time:
APRIL 1923: “My legs are a lot better.”
JUNE 1923: “My doctor … is delighted with my progress.”
JULY 1923: “Though I am still on crutches I hope to be able to discard them very soon.”
OCTOBER 1923: “A cheerful doctor friend of mine … said to me the other day … ‘You … will get better year by year.’”
JANUARY 1924: “The old legs are coming along in good shape, and I am hopeful that by the end of the year I can get off at least one crutch and perhaps a brace.”
FEBRUARY 1924: “The legs … are improving steadily.”
* * *
He struggled to find something that would make his optimistic predictions come true.
In newspapers and magazines, in letters that came to him from doctors and other polio patients, FDR searched for clues that might lead to a breakthrough treatment. He never fell for the fake doctors and con artists who tried to sell outlandish medical schemes to desperate patients. (He laughed at ads for one “quack medicine” after another. “It may be monkey glands or perhaps it is made out of the dried eyes of the extinct three-toed rhinoceros,” he wrote Dr. Draper. “You doctors have sure got imaginations!”) But he was open to any experiment or device that seemed to be truly worth a try, whether to strengthen his legs or improve his ability to get around by mechanical means.
He sent for information about a doctor who treated patients by sealing them into a pressurized steel tube as big as a railroad car.
He considered advice about the Whiteley Exerciser, a wall-mounted contraption with rubber cables attached to the patient’s legs, and an electric-powered wheelchair that could carry its passenger at a rate of forty miles per hour.
He tried an adult-sized tricycle.
He installed “an old-fashioned children’s double-swing” that seemed “to develop the knee muscles in a splendid way.”
He studied the designs of Gabriel Bidou, a French doctor who was equipping paralyzed patients with spring-loaded leg braces. “There is no question that the French are far ahead of us in their mechanical appliances,” he wrote to a friend with polio. “If you and I do not greatly improve this coming winter [1923–1924] we shall have to get together and work out something along the line of Dr. Bidou’s springs.”
When he heard about two doctors from Kansas City who were treating their patients with rays from powerful electric lamps, he recalled his experience in the Florida sun and invited the doctors to visit him. Their names were Starr and Barrett. They were osteopaths—doctors who use a system of healing that works more by manipulating patients’ body parts than by giving them drugs.
FDR told Starr and Barrett all about his symptoms and the treatments he had tried, then listened closely to what they said. He was impressed, and he wanted to know if their advice was safe. But he knew Dr. Lovett was just about fed up with his enthusiasm for unusual treatments. So he went around Lovett’s back.
He wrote to Nurse Lake, saying the letter was just “for your personal and confidential information.” He told her the doctors from Kansas City had confirmed his opinion about the good effects of sunlight on damaged nerves. The new doctors had told him “that as I am going at present, the process of muscular development will be very long drawn out, and that the only method of hastening matters is by going to the seat of the trouble—i.e., the nerve cells—and building them up faster than they are building at present. They therefore suggest that I start up here at Hyde Park with a simple light machine … i.e., taking an artificial sunbath in my room all over the body for about an hour every morning.”
This was “absolutely in line wi
th the undoubted fact which I discovered for myself, that the sun down in Florida, and since I have been up here, has done much to keep the circulation going. For instance, it is absolutely a fact that the mornings I am able to sit in the sun for an hour or two my legs do not get cold in the evening, whereas if the day is cloudy and I do not get my sun bath, the legs freeze up from about 5 p.m. on.
“Don’t you (in your purely private and non-professional capacity) agree that it can do no harm to try [the sun-lamp] out at least for a month or two?”
FDR was determined that Dr. Lovett must not know about this new treatment. “I have impressed on Starr the absolute necessity of saying nothing to anybody about the fact that I am taking any treatment from him. I have told him frankly that I do so only as a supplementary experiment and that I have not given up Lovett, do not intend to, and want to be able to discuss the case with Lovett at any time.”
FDR used the sunlamp and believed it helped. So, to get more exposure to natural sunlight, he made up his mind to return to Florida for another winter cruise in the early weeks of 1924. This time, instead of renting a boat, he struck a deal with an old friend from college days, John Lawrence, to go in together on the cost of a used houseboat. (Lawrence, too, was recovering from an injury to his legs, though not from polio.) For a new name for the boat, Lawrence suggested they mash up “Lawrence, Roosevelt and Company” to make Larooco (pronounced la-ROW-co). FDR waded into the agreeable work of equipping the boat, hiring a small crew, planning a schedule, and inviting old friends to come along.
Then, just a few days before he was to board the train for Florida, he had an appointment with Dr. Draper.
The doctor examined his old friend’s lower body very carefully. He felt the muscle mass in the thighs and calves. He watched while FDR walked with his braces and crutches.
We do not know exactly what Dr. Draper said to FDR when they sat down to discuss where things stood. But the doctor may have given his patient—as gently and kindly as he could—the same assessment he sent to Dr. Lovett in a letter a few days later.
“I am very much disheartened about his ultimate recovery,” Dr. Draper wrote. “I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limit of his possibilities.”
* * *
It had now been two and a half years since the virus had brought him down. For all that time, hard facts had been bombarding his inborn optimism and his fierce determination to recover. Month after month he had shielded himself from these truths. Every time he told a friend that “my legs are a lot better” or that his doctors were amazed by his progress, he was pushing away the plain fact that his legs were hardly better at all and that his doctors were advising him to make the most of what little mobility he had, not to expect a day coming soon when he would rise and walk on his own.
The problem was not what his body could or couldn’t do. The real work of a political leader has virtually nothing to do with physical ability. Day by day, a politician’s work is to think, to write, and especially to talk—to ask questions, discuss possibilities, give instructions, explain a vision, command an audience. Roosevelt could do all those things as well as ever—better, in fact, since polio had given him much more time to read and think things through. Pain and loss had made him wiser, more compassionate. He could understand people as never before. Certainly his gift for talking, whether to a single person or a crowd, was as strong as ever.
No, the problem was not in himself. The problem lay in what others thought of him. If they saw only an invalid struck down by a tragic accident, he could never succeed in politics again.
One day shortly before his cruise on the Larooco, FDR had welcomed a caller to the house on East Sixty-Fifth Street, a young newspaperman named Lowell Mellett. The two men had never met, and somehow Mellett had never learned of FDR’s paralysis. Recalling that day many years later, Mellett told how he had been admitted to the house by Sara Roosevelt’s butler, who directed him to the second floor, where visitors were customarily received in the library. Mellett saw FDR waiting at the top of the stairs to greet him, standing straight and holding tight to the heavy railing that crowned the staircase. FDR waved Mellett down the corridor to the library and slowly followed. Mellett looked back, and “I realized then that Roosevelt was propelling himself forward by clasping the railing, hand over hand.” Later Mellett went to work for Roosevelt and came to know him well, but “I never got over the hurt of seeing him in his crippled state, either then or afterward.”
FDR must have caught the look of shock and regret on Mellett’s face—and on the face of everyone as they first met this man who had to go through a pitiable struggle just to walk a few steps in his own house. How could he ever run for office if everyone he met reacted with that expression of pity and fear? In letters to friends he could insist all he wanted that he was getting better by the day, and from a distance they might believe him. But the moment they saw him they would know the truth, just as he must have known it himself in the part of his mind that saw facts as plainly as Lowell Mellett saw them that day by the stairs.
* * *
Four years earlier, in 1920, he had been his party’s rising star. Now, as the election season of 1924 approached, Franklin Roosevelt was in the thoughts of only one important Democrat—Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York. Smith was preparing for a long-shot campaign to win his party’s presidential nomination. And in his view, Roosevelt’s physical condition seemed to be not a minus but a plus. A plus for Alfred E. Smith, that is.
The two men, soon to become allies and even friends, were from different worlds.
Al Smith, eight years older than FDR, had grown up roaming the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He came from the sort of working-class Irish, Italian, and German ancestors whom earlier generations of upper-crust Roosevelts had moved uptown to get away from.
Just thirteen when his father died, young Al promptly quit school to earn money cleaning fish and selling newspapers. A smart and friendly kid, he caught the eye of neighborhood politicians, who gave him odd jobs. Soon he was working for Tammany Hall full-time, and when he was only thirty, he was put up for election to the state assembly, and he won. Before long he became the state’s most powerful Democrat and a leading voice among the swelling millions of Americans who were first- or second-generation immigrants.
Smith was of the city, Roosevelt of the countryside. Before Smith took his first trip on the New York Central Railroad to the state capital at Albany, he had never seen a farm. He so loved New York that he once said he would rather be a lamppost on Manhattan’s Park Avenue than the governor of California. FDR, by contrast, treasured his family’s old roots in the rural Hudson Valley, and he liked to call himself a farmer, though his only crop was trees. As an adult, he used New York City as his home base, but he privately called it “this vile burgh” and fled it for tiny Hyde Park whenever he could.
FDR was an Episcopalian, the favored religious denomination of the well-to-do and the powerful. Smith was a proud Catholic, the religion of immigrants who worked in factories and swept the streets.
FDR had learned the law from distinguished professors in wood-paneled rooms at Columbia University. Smith had taught himself the law, sweating over books that he read late at night.
Roosevelt read widely and collected fine books as a hobby. Smith declared he had never read a book for pleasure.
In politics, Smith had become the best-known and most respected product of the Tammany Hall machine. Other Tammany politicians took bribes, but not Al, or so it was said. The Tammany boss “Silent Charlie” Murphy had nurtured Smith’s career and steered him clear of trouble, hoping that Al might make Tammany Hall respectable. During Smith’s lifetime he was never accused of dirty dealing. But he always bore the brand of the machine.
Smith and FDR differed on the biggest issue of the day—whether to keep or get rid of the unpopular laws known as Prohibition, which, since 1920, had banned the sale of liquor, beer, and wine throughout the United States. Millio
ns of Americans, especially European immigrants with cherished traditions of enjoying wine and beer, wanted Prohibition overturned. Just as fiercely, other millions, especially conservative Protestants in rural America and the South who hated “the demon rum,” wanted Prohibition to remain in place.
Like many others, Smith and FDR privately scoffed at Prohibition and drank bootleg beer and liquor in private. (Despite the laws against alcohol, it was still easy to get.) But in public, FDR was a “dry,” in favor of enforcing the Prohibition laws. Smith was a “wet,” who wanted to do away with them.
In their personal manners the contrast was sharpest of all. One of FDR’s favorite expressions from his Harvard days was infra dig, short for the Latin phrase infra dignitatem, meaning “low class” or “beneath one’s dignity.” So much about Al Smith, in the eyes of the Roosevelts, was infra dig.
Smith chewed on a fat cigar; FDR smoked slim cigarettes in an elegant holder. Smith was legendary for the raspy roar of his voice; Roosevelt spoke in a cultured tenor. Smith played cards with his old pals from the Bowery. FDR, before contracting polio, had golfed and sailed with his old classmates from Harvard.
When Governor Smith was invited to dine at Hyde Park, Sara Roosevelt had to master her emotions to treat him with respect. He was exactly the sort of man who had made her son’s entry into politics so appalling to her.
On his side, of course, Smith viewed the Roosevelts as “swells” with barely a clue about what life was really like for most people.
But there was common ground, too.
FDR and Eleanor had long since come to admire Smith’s ability to win elections and get laws passed. More than that, like many a progressive New Yorker, they knew the governor truly believed in liberal principles. When a fire killed 146 women workers in New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911, Smith was among the leaders who won new laws to make workplaces safer. When conservative clergy argued against a law that would give women and children in the oppressive canning industry one day off a week, Smith stared them down and said: “I have read carefully the commandment ‘Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.’ I am unable to find any language in it that says, ‘Except in the canneries.’”
