Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  * * *

  When Roosevelt’s injured leg had healed, he returned to Warm Springs—the official new name taken by Bullochville—and got straight to work. With the pool to himself all morning long, he alternated periods of exercise and sunbathing. He had a table placed in the water about a foot below the surface. Here he could sit and make his legs move this way and that. His optimism flowed back.

  He had been at the resort for only a couple of days when a message arrived. A polio survivor had just been helped off the train from Atlanta. She said her name was Thelma Steiger. She was from Missouri. She wanted to know where to find the healing waters.

  There was a young man at the station, too—one Lambert Hershheimer, from Falmouth Heights, Massachusetts. He asked the same question.

  FDR and Tom Loyless looked at each other. Both had been getting letters from people like this, people who had polio or their parents, who wanted to know: If they came to Warm Springs, could they be cured?

  All the letter-writers had read Cleburne Gregory’s newspaper story, with its glowing optimism about Warm Springs. Now, with the coming of spring, a few of them, in their search for a cure, had simply boarded trains bound for Georgia. And here they were.

  Where would they sleep? FDR was staying in one of the few nice cottages at the resort, lent to him by the owners. But the Meriwether Inn was a falling-down disaster. Most of the resort’s cottages had no heat or running water. Even the nicest and biggest was so dilapidated that FDR called the place “the Wreck.” And of course there was no staff to see to the special needs of disabled people, let alone to help them get better.

  So Roosevelt and Loyless had been writing back to say they were very sorry but they couldn’t help—not now, anyway.

  But here were these people at the railroad station, with desperate hopes and no place to stay.

  FDR and Loyless asked around in the village and found a couple of homeowners who agreed to house the visitors.

  The next day’s train brought a young man from Pennsylvania who looked more like a scarecrow than a man. He had made the trip in the baggage car, sitting in his wheelchair among three sacks of mail, some chicken crates, and a coffin. His brother had come along to help him.

  The man in the wheelchair was named Fred Botts. He had come down with infantile paralysis in the epidemic of 1916 and never taken another step. For nine years he had been cooped up in his parents’ house, dwindling to skin and bones. Then his father noticed the story about FDR and Warm Springs in the local newspaper. Botts had once hoped to become an opera singer and still had his lovely baritone voice, so his family arranged for him to perform at their church for friends who donated money to hear him sing, and he used the money to buy train tickets to Georgia. He was so emaciated that FDR thought he looked like he was in the late stages of tuberculosis, often called “consumption” because it seemed to consume the body pound by pound.

  Over the next few days more people with arms and legs damaged by “infantile” trickled into town.

  FDR was there to work on his own recovery. He had neither the time nor, to be honest, the proper professional training to help these strangers.

  But their need, so like his own, spoke to him. Perhaps he could do something for them. After all, he had spent many hours in conversation with the nation’s leading experts in after-polio treatments, and he had his own ideas, based on intensive personal experience, about which treatments worked best.

  So one by one, he began to quiz the newcomers about their cases, and he sized up the strength left in their limbs.

  Some were better off than he—a teenaged girl from Boston who could walk with only one brace, for instance, and a nineteen-year-old boy from Alabama who could walk well with crutches. Some were worse off. Fred Botts, with “practically nothing below the hips,” was one of those. Mrs. Steiger from Missouri was in the same boat. FDR thought a man in his thirties named Rogers, from Wisconsin, had hurt his early chances of recovery by returning to work only three weeks after contracting the disease. “He had made up his mind that nothing could ever be done,” FDR said, but now Rogers had grasped at one last straw by traveling to Warm Springs.

  FDR and Tom Loyless asked a few people from the village to help with pushing wheelchairs and getting people in and out of the pool. They spoke frankly to the visitors. There was no staff of doctors and nurses here, they said. Together, they would all have to be their own doctors. Then they got into the pool, and Franklin Roosevelt began to teach them the exercises he had learned from Kathleen Lake and Wilhelmine Wright.

  From the moment Fred Botts was lowered in, he was delighted.

  “The water was of the most pleasing temperature,” he remembered later, “not so cold that it would chill a person, nor so warm that it would enervate.” He had not been able to move by himself in nine years. Now, with inner tubes keeping him upright, “I paddled around with my hands and was surprised with what little ease I could move my legs … The gentle caress of the water as we moved our limbs through it had a most stimulating effect.” It was as if his legs and arms were all being massaged at once, and he was free of gravity’s burden.

  In the shallow end, about three feet deep, FDR got himself seated on the bottom with water up to his shoulders for support. One by one he had each “patient” sit on the edge of the pool with legs extended. He would gently grasp one of their legs and begin to move it. “Just hang on,” he would say, “and concentrate on kicking while I move your legs.” Up and down, up and down—“Move along with me, and before you know it, you’ll be moving by yourself—that’s the beauty of this water!” In a different spot there was a strong bar for swimmers to grab while moving their legs from side to side—a different motion for different muscles. FDR demonstrated. “Catch hold of the bar this way,” he would say. “Now … swing … in and out … Hard! Harder! That’s it … that’s fine! Now, again, this way…”

  He was soon calling himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt.” He began to make charts recording the strength in the patients’ muscles so they could keep track of improvements over time. He said they had been sitting still for so long that even their good muscles had gone to sleep. This was the time and place to wake them up, in the sparkling waters of the Warm Springs pool.

  Two of the patients, Thelma Steiger and Dorothy Weaver, were women of generous proportions. FDR was determined to help them place their feet on the bottom of the pool and keep them there. “One of these ladies,” he recalled later, “had great difficulty in getting both feet down to the bottom of the pool. Well, I would take one large knee and I would force this large knee down, then I would say, ‘Have you got it?’ and she would say, ‘Yes,’ and I would say, ‘Hold it, hold it.’ Then I would reach up and get hold of the other knee very quickly and start to put it down and then number one knee would pop up.” This would go on until the three of them were laughing so hard they had to take a break. The next day, and the next, they worked at it again. And by the time he left the resort a few weeks later, he recalled, “I could get both those knees down at the same time.”

  None of them had ever laughed about polio. Now, with each other, they could laugh all they wanted, because they all knew the strange and funny frustrations of limbs that refused to obey their commands.

  After a session of thirty minutes in the pool, FDR would call out, “All right now, everybody stay in the sun for an hour!” FDR would tell them tales about his own effort to recover. “You’ve got to know you’re going to improve,” one of the visitors remembered him saying. “Keep yourselves mentally alert. Don’t lose contact with the things you enjoyed before infantile paralysis.” Then—back into the pool for another half hour, followed by a final half hour of sunbathing.

  Sometimes in the late afternoon they would gather on the creaking veranda of the inn to sip cool drinks and talk some more. What a luxury—since the disease had struck, who had they spoken to who really understood?

  A young girl from the village named Ruth Stevens sometimes came to sit and listen,
bringing wild violets for Fred Botts, whom she especially liked.

  One day she heard Mr. Roosevelt say, “I hope my medical fraternity will allow me to come back and practice here. I feel I’m rather good at giving exercise in the water.”

  * * *

  Two weeks rolled by, then three and four. In the evenings, FDR invited guests for steak dinners. In the afternoons he took motor jaunts with Loyless to see the countryside around Warm Springs. They stopped to chat with farmers about crops and with politicians about campaigns—who might run for mayor of this town or prosecutor of that county.

  He was getting a feel for the place. In so many ways it was different from his home territory in the Hudson Valley. Much of the farmland was exhausted. There was hardly a paved road anywhere. So many of the people, Black and white, were living in rough little shacks with no running water and no electricity. But that was part of what fascinated him—people living in poor circumstances who might thrive with a little of the right sort of help. Like the resort at Warm Springs, the countryside of southwest Georgia struck him as a challenge. “He always tended to believe that something could be done with apparently hopeless enterprises,” said a man who would come to know him well. “The more difficult the problem, it often seemed, the more the satisfaction in maneuvering for improvement.”

  * * *

  Eleanor said her husband hardly went anywhere new without conceiving a desire to buy land and start building something. He knew she was right. “I sometimes wish I could find some spot on the globe where it was not essential and necessary for me to start something new,” he wrote a friend. “A sand bar in the ocean might answer, but I would probably start building a sea wall around it and digging for pirate treasure in the middle.”

  The new idea sprouting in his mind was grander than simply buying land.

  He felt as if he had dropped by accident into the middle of a wildly successful medical experiment that no one else knew about. The results were right there in the pool. In just a few weeks, the people who had turned up at the train station were unquestionably doing better. FDR tallied the results. Elizabeth Retan, the young woman from Boston, had “improved remarkably.” The nineteen-year-old from Alabama had “improved much in 3 weeks.” Even without exercising every day, a rebellious boy from New York had “undoubtedly improved.” Mrs. Steiger reported movement in muscles where there had been none at all before. Fred Botts had seen “really extraordinary” changes. Even the most severely disabled patient—the man from Wisconsin who had overexercised too soon after his infection—was reporting a bit of progress in his toes and hamstring muscles. As for FDR himself, he cited his “rough and ready measure” of progress. The previous fall, he could stand without support in water that reached the tops of his shoulders. After making no more progress over the winter, he had exercised every day for six weeks at Warm Springs, and now he could stand with his shoulders four inches out of the water. This, he said, proved that “all [his] muscles had undoubtedly strengthened.”

  FDR and the enthusiastic young Dr. Johnson had been talking. What if Warm Springs could be built up as an actual medical center devoted to the treatment of people with polio? In the short term, he wrote one of his doctors back in New York, “It is absolutely essential that the place have a doctor and ‘exercise lady.’” In the long run, “the place offers a wonderful opportunity for polyo [sic] cases from all parts of the country.” Some six hundred letters in all had reached him. If that many people had responded to a single newspaper story, surely there were thousands of Americans in need of the waters at Warm Springs.

  * * *

  Basil O’Connor thought the world of FDR. But when FDR started to talk about some big new idea, O’Connor, like Louis Howe, took it as part of his job to throw cold water on it.

  So it was when Roosevelt asked O’Connor to meet with the attorney of George Foster Peabody.

  Technically, Peabody did not own Warm Springs, but he had paid a sum of money to keep anyone else from buying it while he made up his mind. The price tag set by the owner was $100,000. Peabody’s lawyer told O’Connor that if anyone wanted to buy Warm Springs right now, it would cost twice that figure. And $200,000 was about two-thirds of all the money FDR had.

  What did O’Connor think? FDR wanted to know.

  O’Connor practically laughed out loud. Was Roosevelt crazy? Buy a falling-down resort a thousand miles from home and try to turn it into a treatment center for a bunch of cripples?

  But FDR was falling in love with the idea of owning Warm Springs.

  “It does something for me,” he said.

  All that summer and fall of 1925, he kept thinking about it.

  Chapter 10

  “THE ONE AND ONLY TOPIC OF CONVERSATION”

  Again and again, FDR had listened and nodded as Dr. Robert Lovett explained why he must wear his metal braces whenever he stood up to exercise or to walk with his crutches. Braces were substitutes for failing muscles, Lovett said. They protected bones and joints from pressure, strain, and fatigue, and they kept limbs in their proper alignment. When polio patients exercised without braces, it made weak muscles even weaker and pushed bones out of their proper alignment. Dr. Lovett was well aware that braces were unpleasant. But wearing them was a lot better than suffering the damage they prevented.

  FDR had obeyed orders. He had submitted to being measured for braces, and when one pair didn’t fit just right, he would be measured for another. He wore them when he had to. He knew they were essential to the only kind of walking he could manage right now.

  But he detested those braces.

  Jimmy Roosevelt said later, “He hated putting them on in the morning and he hated taking them off at night.”

  To get the braces on, he would sit in his underwear on the edge of his bed. LeRoy Jones or some other helper would place the braces next to him with the belts, straps, and laces open. FDR would put his hands at his sides and push his buttocks up off the bed, then hitch himself sideways and lower himself into the big heavy belt at the waist. Then four sets of straps had to be buckled—at the hips, thighs, knees, and calves. Then—again, with another person’s help—his trousers had to be pulled up his legs over the braces. Next, he had to lift himself off the bed so the trousers could be pulled all the way up. At his feet, the braces were attached to specially designed shoes.

  Once they were on, it felt as if his legs were trapped in metal cages. In warm weather his skin sweated under the thick leather straps. No matter how well designed, straps and metal rubbed against his skin and pressed into his flesh, which was just as susceptible to pain as ever. The braces rubbed so much they wore holes in his pants. When he felt the natural instinct to shift his weight, the braces pushed back.

  Then there was the symbolism. One writer who went through polio, Paul K. Longmore, said the sight of braces on a polio patient reminded people of what they “fear most: limitation and dependence, failure and incapacity, loss of control, loss of autonomy, at its deepest level, confinement within the human condition, subjection to fate.”

  When the time came to take them off, he went through the routine in reverse. He would sit on the bed and hoist his buttocks up so that his trousers could be pulled off. Then the straps would be undone. Then he would heave himself up and out as his helper pulled the braces out from under him. At last his legs would be out of their cages, but just as useless as ever.

  With anyone who would listen—Eleanor, his mother, Howe, Dr. Draper—he tried to argue the braces did more harm than good. After one meeting with Dr. Lovett, he came away believing—or wanting to believe—the doctor had finally given him permission to use the braces only when they were convenient. Some weeks later, when Eleanor mentioned to Dr. Lovett that FDR had all but abandoned the braces, Lovett told her he was “horrified.” So FDR grudgingly resumed what he called “the strenuous life” and submitted to the daily indignity and discomfort of the braces. But he kept saying his exercises would do more good if his legs were free.

  Then, in t
he summer of 1925, Fred Delano told him about a neurologist—a doctor who specializes in diseases of the nervous system, including polio—who was running an unusual program for polio patients in Marion, Massachusetts, not far from where Louis Howe had a cabin on the beach at Buzzards Bay. The doctor’s name was William McDonald. Until recently he had practiced medicine in Providence, Rhode Island, and taught at the Yale Medical School. In August, FDR, Howe, and LeRoy Jones piled into a car and went to have a talk with the doctor.

  In Marion they were greeted by a peppery little man who acted and spoke like the spark-plug coach of a baseball team. He insisted that FDR call him “Billie,” and FDR liked him right away. He was “a peach,” FDR told Dr. Draper. “Talks your language and mine!”—which meant McDonald endorsed bigger, bolder goals for his patients than the sober, cautious Dr. Lovett. In no time, FDR was calling him Billie.

  McDonald explained his methods. He worked with only four patients at a time, he said. He coached them through weeks of intensive exercises, some in the water, some on an apparatus of his own invention called a “walking board.” This was a rectangular platform of wooden planks, posts, and rails where patients stood upright and pulled themselves around and around for periods of an hour or more—without braces. He was “hot against them,” FDR reported.

  McDonald had a theory. Lovett and most other experts prescribed exercises for just one set of damaged muscles at a time. Those exercises were fine, McDonald said, but he also wanted his patients to exert all the damaged muscles at the same time, in coordination with each other. McDonald’s idea was that braces gave the muscles too much help. Take the braces away and the muscles would have to work harder, and the patient would progress much faster toward the goal of normal movement.