Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  After the wedding service, the bridal party and guests were transported to the Roosevelt estate, where they spread across the lawn for refreshments and wedding cake. On such occasions, a friend said, FDR, seated in a centrally placed chair, would be “talking to everybody, bantering with his children, teasing them and they him. The youngsters would tell preposterous stories to dignified visitors to see if they could get away with them, and would burst into gales of laughter regardless of whether the visitor fell for the story or saw through them.” Sara glided gracefully from one group of guests to another—“such an indomitable and exciting personality,” as a friend said—while Eleanor tended to minor emergencies and looked after guests’ special needs.

  The guests chattered about mutual friends and social connections, of plans for travel and recreation in the coming summer—all casual, pleasant, and far removed from serious public affairs. But anyone watching closely would have seen that political calculations were not far from the mind of the bride’s father, even on his daughter’s wedding day.

  The evidence turned up when formal photographs were taken. These photos wouldn’t be just keepsakes for family albums. When the daughter of such a famous man was married, it was news, so a press photographer was on the scene, and his pictures would be sent all over the country for publication on the society pages of major newspapers.

  The lead photograph shows Anna in the center of the frame in her lace wedding gown; her new husband, Curtis, tall and gangly, at the left; and at the right her father, somehow dominating the image, his broad shoulders and powerful chest filling out his tuxedo, looking remarkably strong and fit for a man who was known to have weathered an awful disease.

  You had to look carefully at the photograph to see that FDR was grasping the handle of a cane in his left hand. The rest of the cane is hidden behind Anna’s big German shepherd, Chief.

  Why, any casual viewer would say, he looks fit as a fiddle.

  And he was—in every way except the ability to walk on his own.

  But for the moment, the important thing—to FDR and Louis Howe—was that he looked that way.

  Chapter 12

  “HE WAS GETTING READY FOR SOMETHING”

  At the end of the summer of 1926, Dr. Leroy Hubbard came in for a long chat.

  Hubbard was not a man like Roosevelt, who bubbled over with optimism at the slightest excuse. But two months of observation had persuaded the sober, cautious Hubbard that optimism was justified. Warm Springs appeared to be the real thing.

  These were his findings:

  Of the twenty-three patients he’d studied—twelve males and eleven females, ages four to forty-four—nearly all had arrived at Warm Springs as “severe” cases with little hope of getting any better. After eight weeks, almost all had achieved notable improvements in mobility. All but one had learned to swim without support. Fred Botts, the singer from Pennsylvania who had come to Warm Springs a year earlier confined entirely to a wheelchair, was now up and walking with one crutch. A twenty-two-year-old man from Massachusetts, completely paralyzed at the start of the summer, was also walking with one crutch. A fifteen-year-old girl had “improved considerably.” A seven-year-old girl “walks considerably better than she did when she came.” A four-year-old boy who had arrived with both legs paralyzed now walked with crutches and was “fearless in the pool.”

  “No miracles can be performed at Warm Springs,” Dr. Hubbard would tell his fellow orthopedists. “No false hopes should be aroused in the minds of patients or their families.” Yet he could say beyond a reasonable doubt that “the exercises and warm water under proper supervision give a better hope for fairly rapid improvement in muscle power than any other method with which I am familiar.”

  He didn’t know why, exactly. Maybe the same program of exercise and instruction conducted somewhere else would bring the same sort of results. But if so, Dr. Hubbard hadn’t seen it, and he’d been working with polio patients for years. Certainly there was something in the water at Warm Springs—the perfect temperature or the minerals or both—that made it easy to exercise for long periods. In fresh water most people get tired after half an hour, while at Warm Springs the patients could work out for two hours before fatigue set in. That was probably the chief factor—simply that people could exercise for much longer periods than on dry land or in cold water.

  But a human factor was at work, too. The patients were helping each other. There was “a psychological effect due to each striving to equal the other in improvement,” Dr. Hubbard said. “Also the fact that these boys and girls deprived of the usual sports are able in the water to rival the normal boy and girl and have a feeling that at least in one sport they can take part.”

  We don’t know if the conversation between FDR and Dr. Hubbard turned to FDR’s own case. But we do know what Dr. Hubbard believed about cases like FDR’s, because he stated his views just a few weeks later in his formal report on Warm Springs.

  Dr. Hubbard had been looking for two kinds of changes in the patients. First, did they show growing strength in tests of isolated muscle groups? Second, could they use their arms and legs more skillfully in everyday activity?

  The doctor observed that the two things usually went together, but not always. He saw that some patients—especially those who had been paralyzed for years—could achieve little or no gain in strength in isolated muscle groups. But they could “obtain quite a considerable improvement in function”—that is, in the ability to move around. Of patients like this, he said, “very few, or perhaps none of them, can expect to come back to normal or approximately normal. The most we can hope for is such a gain in muscle power and functional activity that they can get about … and some of them ultimately pro-gress enough to discard all apparatus” (that is, braces, crutches, or canes).

  In other words, such people could not bring dead nerves back to life. But they could learn to walk much better.

  As the two men talked that day, did Dr. Hubbard spell out the clear implications for FDR’s own case? Maybe so, maybe not. But even if he didn’t say it out loud, the meaning of Dr. Hubbard’s observations must have struck FDR with full force.

  It was the same thing Dr. Lovett and Dr. Draper had hinted at years earlier. FDR had been able to push the message away, believing he would be different. With the special willpower of a Roosevelt and a Delano, he would defy the odds, recover all his strength, and walk again as he once had. But now he was facing the results of a full-out effort to restore as much mobility as possible among people whose cases, on average, were just like his. With proper instruction, they were doing better, even much better, but they were never going to walk normally. To get better meant a lot. But as the doctor said, it was the most they could hope for.

  Finally that lesson sank in, or so it seems from what happened next.

  * * *

  Dr. Hubbard had recruited a physical therapist from New York to direct the exercise program at Warm Springs. She was Helena T. Mahoney, a woman who was devoted to her calling and very good at it. In the 1910s, in Boston, she had moved from nursing into the new profession of physiotherapy (soon to be called, simply, physical therapy), working under Dr. Lovett and Wilhelmine Wright. She began to work with polio patients soon after the great epidemic of 1916. By now she was an expert. Lately she’d been treating patients in New York with Dr. Hubbard. So it was natural for Hubbard to ask her to come down and help with his summer experiment at Warm Springs.

  She made the long trip from New York by automobile, then promptly took command of the patients. She had the manner of a savvy classroom teacher, likable but strict. She was not called “Miss Mahoney” at Warm Springs, just “Mahoney.”

  We have only one report of the conversations Mahoney had with FDR in the last days of the summer of 1926, and we can’t entirely trust it.

  The account appears in a book called Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story, written in the early 1950s by a writer named Turnley Walker. He was a polio survivor who had spent time at Warm Springs as a
youngster. For his book, he spoke with many of the people who had worked with FDR in the early years, including Helena Mahoney.

  According to Turnley Walker, Mahoney and FDR had long talks about Mahoney’s experience with polio patients, including her difficult efforts simply to find those who’d been hidden away by their families in back bedrooms. They sketched plans for physical therapy at Warm Springs. Then they discussed FDR’s own condition. Here’s how the writer described the key part of that conversation:

  MAHONEY: “What about your own legs, Mr. Roosevelt?”

  ROOSEVELT: “I’ll find my improvement with the others. I’m not a man to accomplish much of anything alone.”

  MAHONEY: “Of course I know nothing about your muscle setup. How much improvement do you expect?”

  ROOSEVELT: “I’ll walk without crutches. I’ll walk into a room without scaring everybody half to death. I’ll stand easily enough in front of people so that they’ll forget that I’m a cripple.”

  Now, that represents a significant change in FDR’s mindset. He had always said he intended one day to walk on his own. With Mahoney, he was describing quite a different goal. He seemed less concerned with his ability to walk and more concerned with the effect of his appearance on others. He apparently was thinking now that perhaps he could reach the White House without making a full recovery, if only he could dispel the feelings of embarrassment and revulsion that many people felt when they encountered the disabled.

  But we can’t be sure that conversation really happened, at least not in those exact words.

  Turnley Walker was writing at a time when many authors believed it was all right to describe historical events as if every episode, every scrap of conversation, could be re-created just as it occurred, even though that’s impossible unless the events have been recorded with cameras and microphones.

  Still, unless Walker made up the entire conversation between Mahoney and FDR—and that’s very unlikely, since many details in Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story can be corroborated by reliable documents—then it’s quite possible, even probable, that a conversation much like the one Walker reported really did happen.

  There are other possibilities, too.

  As Helena Mahoney spoke with Turnley Walker, she may have blended memories of several conversations with FDR—or her impressions of what FDR was thinking—into the memory of a single conversation. Possibly Mahoney’s memory of the conversation was shaped by her own beliefs about what Roosevelt should have been aiming for in his therapy—since all her professional training and values lay along those lines.

  In any case, we’re left with the likelihood that something like that conversation happened.

  What we know for sure is that in the fall of 1926 and the spring of 1927, FDR acted very much as if his thinking had taken the turn Mahoney described.

  He took his place with the other polio patients in the pool. He was no longer “Old Dr. Roosevelt,” giving instructions. He was obeying orders from Mahoney, who began to re-introduce him to Wilhelmine Wright’s teachings, all of them aimed at making the maximum possible use out of the working muscles that remained to him.

  * * *

  At Warm Springs that fall there was a patient in her mid-twenties named Margaret Pope. A few years earlier she’d been a student at the University of Wisconsin and a state champion in golf. Then, at about the same time as FDR, she contracted polio and lost the use of her legs.

  Margaret’s father, Henry Pope, was a wealthy manufacturer of stockings in Chicago. He had joined his daughter’s search for the best possible treatment. When the braces prescribed for Margaret were awkward and uncomfortable, Henry Pope assigned one of his engineers to devise new ones out of lightweight materials used in airplanes. When the Popes heard about Warm Springs, father and daughter visited early in 1926, and they, too, fell in love with the place. Pope wrote FDR afterward to say he was “regretting I cannot be with you in that beautiful pool, instead of in Chicago with a foot of snow and more falling.”

  People like Henry Pope—with lots of money, a personal stake in polio treatments, and even wealthier friends like Edsel Ford, son of the automotive pioneer Henry Ford—were just the sort FDR hoped to enlist as supporters of Warm Springs. So he made it a point to stay in touch. When the Popes returned to Georgia in the fall of 1926, the friendship continued, and Pope began to take an interest in FDR’s own case. He considered what was immediately ahead of FDR—another cold New York winter indoors, without steady access to a heated pool and without an expert like Mahoney to coach him.

  This gave Pope an idea. In Chicago, he told FDR, his daughter had been seeing a fine physical therapist named Alice Lou Plastridge, another student of Wilhelmine Wright’s. Wouldn’t it make sense for FDR to continue this sort of treatment over the winter in New York, perhaps with Miss Plastridge herself? He must not lose the progress he was making through another long spell of inactivity. In fact, Pope offered to pay Plastridge’s fee as a token of gratitude for what FDR had already done for Margaret by establishing the center at Warm Springs.

  So it was that Alice Lou Plastridge, suitcase in hand, found herself face-to-face with Sara Delano Roosevelt, who opened the big front door in Hyde Park on the day after Thanksgiving.

  * * *

  Miss Plastridge had grown up in a small town in the Green Mountains of Vermont, about two hundred miles north of the Roosevelt estate. At Mount Holyoke College she was trained as a teacher in physical education and gymnastics, but in 1914 she took a summer course at Harvard in the treatment of scoliosis, an inherited condition that causes painful curvature of the spine. The man in charge was none other than Dr. Robert Lovett, who soon hired Plastridge to work in his clinic, where she learned physical therapy. In 1917, with many young polio patients in need of treatment, Lovett urged her to open her own practice in Chicago. Though she was only in her twenties, she became one of the first physical therapists in the city. She held to the no-nonsense tenets that she and Helena Mahoney had learned at the Lovett clinic. “It is rarely if ever too late to do constructive work, for improvement will continue for a period of years if proper treatment is given—and continued,” she wrote. But “it is extremely discouraging because improvement is so slow.”

  When Henry Pope proposed that she spend a month with the Roosevelts in New York, she said later, “I knew at the end of five years [since the onset of FDR’s paralysis] one month was a drop in the bucket.” But Pope was so keen on the idea that she agreed to spend Thanksgiving through Christmas with the Roosevelts.

  * * *

  Lovett, Wright, Mahoney, and Plastridge believed polio survivors enjoyed the right to live full, rich, independent lives to the greatest extent possible. As they plotted therapeutic strategies and tactics, the first physical therapists operated with a deeply practical understanding of everything patients were up against. It wasn’t just the paralysis or weakness of a damaged muscle. It was the way people looked at them when they moved their arms or legs awkwardly, and the false conclusions people drew about those awkward movements—that polio survivors were best shut away in back rooms and sanitariums, where “normal” people wouldn’t have to see them. These notions about people with disabilities were summed up by the word stigma, which in medieval times referred to a burn made on the skin with a hot iron, something like a tattoo, signifying disgrace. Stigma was worse than muscular weakness. It was not too far from a criminal’s sentence to banishment from society.

  The physical therapists knew the stigma of disability was deeply unjust, but they also knew it was powerful. They could not dispel it by themselves, and certainly not overnight, perhaps not ever. So to fight the stigma, they taught their patients how to make their movements as normal as possible.

  Many years later, disabled people would start to ask: If the stigma lies in the minds of the able-bodied, why are we the ones who have to change? Why don’t they change the way they think? But not in the 1920s. For the early physical therapists, learning to walk “like normal” was partly for
safety and partly for speed, but it was also, as Plastridge put it, so that “limps and distorted positions shall not become conspicuous.” A key aim of “corrective walking,” she advised, must be “moving quietly and steadily without needless body, leg or arm motions which would attract attention to the disability.”

  This was Plastridge’s mindset as she prepared to work with Franklin Roosevelt. It was perfectly suited to the new goal FDR had described to Helena Mahoney in Warm Springs—to “walk into a room without scaring everybody half to death.”

  * * *

  Many years later, Plastridge remembered being received at Hyde Park as graciously as if she had been the queen of Spain. First Sara greeted her warmly, then Eleanor, then Anna. As the women moved into the spacious library, chatting as they walked, Plastridge heard a man’s rich tenor voice calling from the far end of the room: “Well, aren’t you ever going to come and speak to me?”

  At Plastridge’s orders, the Roosevelts once again had a long wooden slab laid across sawhorses in FDR’s bedroom, and again he was helped to stretch out on the slab for daily exercises, just as he had done with Kathleen Lake five years earlier. When Plastridge got him up on his crutches, she immediately saw just how little he had learned about how to use them. In his long sessions with Dr. McDonald in Massachusetts, when the focus had been strengthening the muscles, he had all but abandoned his efforts at smoother, steadier walking with crutches and canes. He would swing the crutches far out ahead of his body and bring them crashing down with such force that she thought the floor would give way, then drag his limp legs forward by the strength of his arms and upper body alone.

  After two weeks of workouts she could see no gain in strength and no improvement in his crutch-walking. “I knew we weren’t getting anywhere because there wasn’t any motion in his legs,” she said later. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”