by James Tobin
The audience was invited to stand as Judge Finch read Coolidge’s brief message, and they did—all except FDR, who could not stand up at a moment’s notice. So he remained in his chair.
It was a trivial incident, and FDR probably would have forgotten it but for a poison-pen letter he received a day or two later. It came from a New York businessman named D. Lawson Corbett. Apparently Corbett had read a report of the meeting in the New York Times, which noted that “the vast audience arose and remained standing in respectful attention” for Coolidge’s message.
Corbett asked FDR: “I am wondering if you, among the vast audience, rose to your feet when Justice Finch, before reading a telegram from our Beloved President, Coolidge, said: ‘It gives me great pleasure to read to you the telegram which I have received from the man who more than anyone else has called us back to the faith of our fathers and reminded us that the well-being of our country, ourselves and our children must rest upon morality and religion.’”
Corbett was asking this question, he explained, because during the 1924 presidential campaign he had read a news report that said FDR had declared, “If you want to encourage crime, vote for Coolidge.”
Corbett wrote: “Until that time I had always held you in very high esteem.” But he believed FDR’s remark about crime was so unfair that it must have turned votes to Coolidge.
It’s clear that Corbett was aware of FDR’s paralysis, since he finished his letter by saying, “I am happy to know that you are recovering, and hope that you will be entirely restored to health.”
This time FDR put his blistering response in the mail.
He began by saying he had never made such a remark about Coolidge and crime. Then, in crystal-clear language, he let Corbett know just how vicious his question had been:
“In regard to the mass meeting in Madison Square Garden I regret to say that I was unable to rise with the rest of the audience either during the hymns or the benediction or on the occasion of the reading of the president’s telegram; as I wear steel braces on both legs and use crutches it is impossible for me to rise or sit down without the help of two people. After presiding at the opening of the meeting and turning it over to Bishop Manning I returned to my seat, sat down and remained seated during the rest of the evening. This is, of course, not exactly pleasant for me to have to remain seated during the playing of the National Anthem and on other occasions when the audiences rise, but I am presented with the alternative of doing that or of not taking part in any community enterprises whatsoever.”
It was a rare expression of his inner rage at the disease that had stolen his ability to stand up and walk on his own, and at anyone who failed to see he was no less a man than he had ever been.
That deep anger rose once more in the spring of 1932, in the midst of Roosevelt’s race for the presidential nomination, and this time it was more consequential.
FDR and Herbert Hoover had been casually friendly back in World War I, when both were based in Washington. FDR had even suggested that Hoover, who had not yet declared himself a Republican, might one day run for president. Lately, watching his old acquaintance in the White House, FDR thought him a failure as a leader, but he bore the president no ill will—not until the evening when Hoover hosted a dinner for the nation’s governors and their wives at the White House.
FDR and Eleanor arrived a little early, knowing they would have to walk slowly into position as the governors lined up to stand and greet the Hoovers. They reached their place in line, Eleanor remembered, “and then we stood and waited. Twenty minutes passed and the president and Mrs. Hoover did not appear. Every kind of rumor flew about the room. It was said we were waiting for some of the governors, two of whom never appeared. My husband was twice offered a chair, but he evidently thought that if he showed any weakness someone might make an adverse political story out of it, so he refused each time. It seemed as though he were being deliberately put through an endurance test, but he stood the whole evening very well, though the one-half hour before President and Mrs. Hoover appeared was an ordeal. This idea may seem preposterous but in political life you grow suspicious.”
In situations, certainly, and in others when he was not simply angry but resolute, Roosevelt would say “my Dutch is up,” a proud reference to the stubborn Netherlanders of his family tree. Now, with the national campaign about to start, he was about to say it again.
* * *
He was the nominee of his party. But he was beginning the national campaign in the shadow of a doubt.
Powerful Democrats were beginning to hope for a landslide victory. Why should Roosevelt take a chance on a full-tilt campaign that might leave him exhausted? He could stay in New York, give a few national speeches on the radio, and win walking away. Many in the party’s upper tiers thought he should cancel the plans for a big western campaign trip, and they sent Jim Farley to Albany to deliver that message to the governor.
“Big Jim” and Roosevelt were both well aware the whispering campaign was still thriving out in the country. They knew that when FDR had visited Warm Springs a few weeks earlier, rumormongers had spread tales that he had been carried to his quarters on a stretcher and that he had stayed there in seclusion to be treated for a mysterious illness. They knew all about what one reporter called “the cleverly managed propaganda which depicted Mr. Roosevelt as a weak man.” They may well have heard that Herbert Hoover and his aides were saying, behind closed doors in the White House, that Roosevelt would be the best possible Democratic nominee if only the public could see his “helplessness.”
When New York Republicans had talked like that in 1928, FDR had taken a fierce pride in showing voters how much physical stamina he really had. The whispers about his health had gone on ever since. Even many of his true friends and allies couldn’t quite believe he had the strength for a national campaign. He had stood and stood on aching legs while President Hoover made him wait. He had listened to friends urge him to take it easy, save his energy, and coast to the finish line.
FDR asked Farley, “Jim, what do you think yourself?”
“I think you ought to go,” Farley said, breaking into a grin. “And I know you are going anyway.”
“That’s right,” Roosevelt said. “My Dutch is up.”
* * *
In mid-September a six-car train called the Roosevelt Special crossed the Mississippi River at St. Louis just as news was coming in that Maine, a rock-solid Republican state, had elected a Democrat as governor—a good omen for FDR’s national campaign.
In the crowds that came out to see the Democratic nominee for president, many people were in the grip of a quiet desperation.
Since 1930, month by month, things had gone steadily from bad to worse to disastrous. The value of companies had been rising all through the prosperous 1920s. People had thought the American economy might never stop growing. Now solid companies large and small were going under. In the great industrial cities, factories closed one assembly line, then another, leaving millions of workers unable to buy food or pay rent. Mines closed. Stores closed. The tonnage of goods hauled over the nation’s railroads dropped and dropped and dropped. As the wages of people in the cities fell, farmers in the countryside had to cut the prices they charged for their grain, milk, meat, and eggs—down and down and down—and by 1932, many farmers were so desperate there was talk of revolution. People hanging on to their jobs lived in fear of the next round of closings. Dozens of banks shut their doors, then hundreds. The entire banking system teetered on the edge of a general collapse.
President Hoover’s halting half measures had failed. When destitute veterans of World War I gathered in Washington to ask for early payment of the bonuses they’d earned for their war service, Hoover sent armed soldiers to drive them away. The Roosevelts were appalled when they read about it. FDR wondered how he had ever thought Hoover could be a good president. He’d concluded “there is nothing inside the man but jelly.” He thought of the veterans pushed out of the capital, bringing nothing ho
me to their families. “They’re probably camping on the roads leading out of Washington,” he said. “They must be in terrible shape.” In and around cities and towns, families who had lost their homes hammered up shacks with scrap lumber and sheet metal. They called these makeshift settlements Hoovervilles.
* * *
In big cities FDR delivered speeches to convention-sized crowds. He spoke about the farm crisis to twelve thousand in Topeka, Kansas. He spoke about the railroad crisis to ten thousand at the great Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. He spoke about the crisis in international trade to sixteen thousand at the Civic Auditorium in Seattle. He spoke on harnessing rivers for electrical power in a packed arena in Portland.
These were huge audiences. But he could have stayed home and given the same speeches by radio to audiences numbering in the millions. The point of the trip had more to do with the stops he made in small towns along his route. As he said to a thousand people who came to see him at the railroad station in Goodland, Kansas (population: 3,626), “We are going through the country doing a very simple thing: We are showing ourselves to you.”
What did that mean? Simply what it said—he was showing people that, contrary to what they might have heard, he had all the strength and stamina needed for a demanding cross-country journey with speeches and meetings all along the way. If he could do that, could anyone say he wasn’t strong enough to be president?
During his first campaign for governor, in 1928, he had spoken often about his comeback from polio. Not in 1932. He never mentioned it. He let his performance make the case. He expected the reporters on the campaign train to make the point to their readers, and they did.
“The governor appears in the best of trim,” remarked a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, “in high spirits and having lost none of the vigorous delivery which marks all his speeches.”
He was showing “that he is not a wheelchair invalid incapable of meeting the physical ordeals of the Presidential Office,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and indeed, “the governor gives the impression of a man in excellent physical condition, capable of meeting as strenuous campaigning as anyone else.”
* * *
As the people watched FDR, he was watching them. Shortly after the trip, at the townhouse in New York, he chatted with a small circle of family and associates over dinner. He was thinking about the faces he had seen in the West.
“They are the faces of people in want,” he said. “I don’t mean the unemployed alone. Of course, they would take anything. I mean those who still have jobs and don’t know how long they’ll last. They have the frightened look of lost children. And I don’t mean physical want alone. There is something more … a kind of yearning—‘We’re caught in something we don’t understand; perhaps this fellow can help us out.’”
* * *
He won, of course, and in the terrible winter that followed, he prepared to assume the presidency.
He had been courageous, but as with anyone, his courage was not the absence of fear. On the night before his inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 1933, he told his son Jimmy that he needed Jimmy’s prayers, since he wasn’t sure he was strong enough for the job.
Then, the next day, under lowering clouds at the U.S. Capitol, before one hundred thousand spectators, he walked to the rostrum, took the constitutional oath of office, and said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
EPILOGUE
On May 2, 1997, a national memorial to Franklin Roosevelt was unveiled on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It covered seven and a half acres not far from the memorials to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
The visitors saw not a towering obelisk, like Washington’s, or a temple, like Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s. It was a granite park that led them through a series of tableaux in which running water was the central element, from a stream to a roaring waterfall. There were statues of ordinary people waiting in a Great Depression breadline. There was a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, in tribute to the world-sized role she played as First Lady of the United States, political activist, and advocate for peace.
And there was, of course, a statue of FDR. The figure was seated with a cape swirled around his legs and chair, gazing with a hero’s vision at the far horizon.
There was a lot of arguing about that statue.
Unlike in FDR’s own time, the disabled people of the United States—who in the 1990s numbered nearly fifty million—had found their voices and organized to claim their rights, many of which had been guaranteed by federal law in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. They were certainly not of a single mind about the statue of FDR. But many of them believed it was wrong to shroud the truth—that he had depended on crutches, braces, and a wheelchair—under a flowing cape.
An advocate for disability rights named Yvonne Duffy, who had been struck by polio when she was two years old, spoke for many when she wrote: “I remember my mother telling me, straightening her back proudly as she spoke, that polio had never stopped Franklin Roosevelt from becoming president. Her message was clear: Even a child with a disability like mine could aspire to be president … Times have changed in the 50 years since FDR’s death … No longer is a physical impairment viewed as something shameful, something to be hidden. But you wouldn’t know this from the actions of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission … They would make my mother’s inspirational story to a disabled child a pathetic lie.”
Duffy and many others demanded a change. Roosevelt must be depicted as an obviously disabled man, they said.
On the other side of the argument were people thinking about what FDR himself would have wanted. David B. Roosevelt, one of Elliott’s children, said those who argued for a visible wheelchair were trying to rewrite history. “My grandfather guarded his condition closely,” Roosevelt wrote. “FDR was most certainly not shamed by his condition. He realized, however, that the difficult decisions he made surrounding the Great Depression, World War II and other events of the times required a vigorous leader who inspired faith in the people he served. Unfortunately, during the 1930s and ’40s this nation was not as enlightened concerning people with disabilities as it is today.” (Not all Roosevelts agreed. Anne Roosevelt, a daughter of John’s, remarked, “We should portray him as he was, and as he was, he wore braces.”)
The advocates’ reply to David Roosevelt was that FDR, had he lived in the 1990s, would have embraced the modern disabilities movement and endorsed the inclusion of a wheelchair in his memorial. (Not many remembered that when Roosevelt, as president, was asked about any future monument to his memory, he said he would like there to be a simple stone block the size of his desk, engraved with his name and installed by the National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. His wish was granted in 1965.)
In the end, the disability advocates got their way—mostly. The original statue of FDR in the concealing cape remained. But in 2001 a second statue was added to the memorial, this one showing him in glasses and his favorite slouch hat, casually seated in his simple wheelchair.
* * *
These heated discussions had to do with how FDR was portrayed. They tended to overlook the larger matter of why he had been portrayed in a national memorial in the first place, and on a scale that placed him at the level of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln in the nation’s memory.
The memorial was built because Roosevelt was beyond a doubt the most influential president of his century.
In the early months of his first term in office, known ever after simply as the “Hundred Days,” he won Congress’s agreement to a blizzard of innovative programs designed to heal the worst ills of the Great Depression—emergency measures to put the jobless to work, to save the banking system from collapse, to restore businesses and farms to productivity. In the first of his great environmental programs, he brought thousands of young men into a Civilian Conservation Corps and put them to work planting trees and fighting forest fires. In one of the hardest-hit regions of the country,
he established the sprawling Tennessee Valley Authority, a regional plan to generate badly needed electric power while preventing disastrous floods and soil erosion.
The country gasped at the audacity of his program, then largely embraced it. Roosevelt was a tonic for sick souls.
More enormous reforms followed in the wake of the Hundred Days, both before and after FDR’s reelection in a landslide in 1936. There were programs to help young people get jobs and go to college, to provide Social Security pensions to old people, to help workers organize in labor unions. In a gigantic construction campaign to give jobs to the unemployed and stimulate the economy, his administration built dams, bridges, and tunnels; civic auditoriums and schools; highways and post offices and airports. There was even a program to put unemployed artists, writers, and musicians to work, practicing their crafts in the public interest.
All these laws, programs, and projects became known by the term FDR had introduced in the 1932 campaign—the New Deal. He wasn’t talking about a business deal. He was talking about quitting an old game, shuffling the cards, and starting over.
Month by month, year by year, the country began to climb out of the crisis. It was slow. High unemployment continued; people were still hungry. Critics on the left said FDR’s activist program wasn’t enough, that more radical measures were needed. On the right, conservatives began to call him a “traitor to his class” and warned of a slide into socialism. But even they had to concede that his strong show of action may have headed off a revolution.
In 1937 the rising economy took another downward lurch. The president’s critics called it the “Roosevelt recession.” But by 1940, the nation, though still scared and certainly scarred, was looking backward at the Great Depression. That was due in part to the New Deal. But it was also due to a new crisis, this one across the oceans. American factories were roaring again, making materials for war.
