Meanwhile, Roosevelt continued to pursue his own consuming vision of full recovery. While grudgingly he agreed to wear the cumbersome twenty-pound braces and practice using crutches, he never stopped searching for a cure that would allow him to regain the power of walking, the necessary condition, he believed, for him to fulfill his political ambitions. He continued the arduous task of experimentation to figure which treatments worked most effectively. He found that his “leg muscles responded more quickly” when he could sit outside in the summer sun; on cloudy days they would “freeze up from about 5 p.m. on.” In swimming he found the most promising therapy of all, one allowing him to exercise his legs without the weight of gravity.
Roosevelt held an almost mystical belief in the healing power of sun and water. He had been enraptured from early childhood by sea tales of his grandfather’s clipper ship days, thrilled at learning to sail with his father, and considered his model ships and naval prints among his most prized possessions. Not surprisingly, his relentless search for a cure led to the halcyon waters off Florida, where he spent the winter months cruising on the Larooco, a spacious houseboat, in the company of the third member of the team, twenty-five-year-old Missy LeHand. “Water got me into this fix,” he mystically quipped (referring to his dip in the ice-cold Bay of Fundy), “water will get me out again!”
Unexpectedly, Missy LeHand would play as vital a role in Franklin’s restoration as either Eleanor or Louis. Eleanor had accompanied Franklin on his first Florida cruise, but she detested the listless days occupied by fishing, entertaining guests, and simply relaxing. Far better for everyone, Eleanor believed (and, in some large part, rationalized) that Missy should remain with Franklin in Florida while she herself returned to New York to cultivate prospective political allies and pursue the network of new friendships that had grown central to her own social and intellectual existence. Thus, Missy became Franklin’s other “wife.” Over the next four years, Roosevelt spent a total of 116 weeks in the South. Of that total, Missy accompanied him for 110 weeks, Eleanor for four weeks, his mother, Sara, for two. Missy gave “Effdee,” as she called him, unconditional devotion. Like Louis, she was absorbed into the Roosevelt family and would live in both the Governor’s Mansion and the White House.
The early months spent on the Larooco allowed Franklin to evade the martial rigor of the exercise regime prescribed by his doctors, giving him time to explore his own idiosyncratic routines. Holding the boat’s tiller, he could feel the surge of control. He floated in the warm waters, lowered from the side of the boat by a contraption of his own contrivance, and bathed in the sun. Missy sat by his side as he fished from the deck, served as his hostess when guests regularly came aboard, and shared his “sense of nonsense” in a way Eleanor never could. Storytelling, fun, and humor were as central to Roosevelt’s well-being as to Lincoln’s. But even more important than the role Missy played in sustaining Franklin’s high spirits was the fact that he was able to reveal to her his darker fears. “There were days on the Larooco,” she later told his secretary of labor Frances Perkins, “when it was noon before he could pull himself out of depression and greet his guests wearing his light-hearted façade.” Slowly, but surely, those bad days began to dwindle.
Roosevelt would replicate the strengths of this inner circle in the years ahead, as he expanded his working team as governor and president. There was not a yes man/woman among this original triumvirate. They offered Roosevelt a range of opinions, delivered in widely different ways. From the earliest days of their relationship, Louis Howe had never hesitated to argue with Franklin. According to Rosenman, Howe “probably said No to Roosevelt more frequently and loudly than anyone else, and stuck to his position longer.” Missy handled dissent in a more fun-loving but equally effective manner. In addition to her various gifts as typist, companion, and hostess, she was an astute reader of Roosevelt’s moods and needs, “never hesitating to tell him unpleasant truths or express an unfavorable opinion about his work,” yet always with a deft sense of timing, and always in a way he could handle. During one of his campaigns, she was in the room while Roosevelt read aloud from the draft of a tedious speech on finance to be delivered at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. Before he reached the second page, Missy stood up: “By this time the bleachers are empty and the folks are beginning to walk out of the grandstand.” Everyone burst into laughter and the speechwriters started over from scratch.
Eleanor, of course, added the most essential dimension to the progressive strain and moral gravity of Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership. “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical,” she observed in her memoirs, adding, “That I was never able to be.” She was more uncompromising, more straightforward, more deeply involved with activists whose thoughts challenged conventional boundaries. His political timing and overall comprehension of public sentiment was far more astute than hers. If he balked at something she wanted, she would return to try again. If he would not meet with someone she thought it imperative for him to meet, she would take it upon herself to invite that person to dinner. “I sometimes acted as a spur even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcomed,” she later wrote. Her constant pressure and lack of humor made it difficult for him to relax. “We’re not going to do that now,” he would often cut her short. “I don’t want to hear about that anymore.” And yet, invariably, he would return to her unwanted suggestion, realizing before long that her persistence might well have been warranted.
This remarkable team, locked together in a complicated dance around the same center, succeeded so well in keeping Roosevelt’s spirits up and his political name alive that in 1924, three years after the onset of polio, Governor Al Smith proffered Franklin Roosevelt the New York chairmanship of his pre-convention campaign for the presidency. Roosevelt hesitated at first, feeling far too vulnerable to appear in public, but when told they simply needed his name, not his body, he agreed to become titular head of the campaign. Two months later, Governor Smith presented Roosevelt with a far more unnerving and challenging proposition: Would he consent to place Smith’s name in nomination at the Democratic National Convention to be held at Madison Square Garden in late June?
* * *
If ever there were an example of political courage, of an enormous risk taken, of great personal and public stakes wagered, it was Roosevelt’s acceptance of Al Smith’s offer—given the looming prospect of a pratfall in front of twelve thousand delegates.
That Franklin had not yet mastered the technique of walking with braces and crutches had been made clear months earlier when he ventured forth for the first time since the polio attack to meet with business colleagues at a private luncheon on Wall Street. An elevator would carry him upstairs; but first, he had to cross a slippery marble lobby to reach the elevator bank. With his chauffeur’s assistance, he had reached the halfway mark when a crutch skidded out from under him. He collapsed in a heap, his hat rolling off to the side. Appalled spectators gathered round as he tried to prop himself into a seated position. “Nothing to worry about,” Franklin announced to placate the onlookers, bursting into a sudden peal of laughter. “We’ll get out of this all right.” He then called for help from two young men who eventually pulled him to a standing position. “Let’s go,” he said to his chauffeur. Someone put his hat on his head. Cheerfully, he acknowledged the crowd, and made his way toward the elevator.
The convention speech was to be his first public appearance in three years. It was one thing to fall in a lobby, quite another to risk humiliation and jeopardize one’s political ambitions at a national party convention that would be broadcast nationwide for the first time on radio. To minimize the immense risk, he carefully rehearsed and trained. “Nobody knows how that man worked,” Eleanor’s suffragist friend Marion Dickerman recalled. “They measured off in the library at the 65th Street house just what the distance was and he struggled, and struggled and struggled.” With the support of his sixteen-year-old son, James, he alternately shifted his weight from
his son’s arm on the left to the crutch under his right arm. James remembered how his father’s fingers dug painfully into his arm “like pincers” as he hoisted and dragged his legs, locked in heavy steel braces, along the narrow line between potential pity and awe toward the imaginary podium.
On the night of the actual performance, Franklin directed a friend to shake the rostrum in order to assure him of its weight-bearing stability. When his moment of introduction came, he replaced his son’s arm with another crutch and approached the lectern alone. “There was a hush and everybody was holding their breath,” Frances Perkins recalled. After what seemed a long-drawn moment of tension, he reached the rostrum, handed off his crutches, gripped the lectern edges with his powerful, viselike grip, tilted back his head, and “across his face there flashed a vast, world-encompassing smile.” Twelve thousand voices exploded with admiration for the courage he epitomized even before his speech had begun. This was a far cry from the “unfortunate habit” of throwing his head back when he was in the state legislature, a gesture that had seemed condescending to Perkins, the unconscious mannerism of a handsome and entitled youth. Now, by contrast, his stiffened legs and strained shoulders supported a head thrown back with hard-earned pride and perhaps a touch of theatrical confidence; rather than vanity, this was the confidence of having overcome fear of humiliation, a confidence born of making a great effort, of taking a great risk—and overcoming.
His rich tenor voice had a musical quality as he asked delegates “from the great cities of the East and the plains and hills of the West, from the slopes of the Pacific and from the homes and fields of the southlands” to close divisions between city and country, wet and dry, Catholic and Protestant, and unite behind Governor Al Smith, “the ‘Happy Warrior’ of the political battlefield.” This epithet, drawn from a Wordsworth poem about how one confronts life’s difficulties, how one “doomed to go in company with pain/turns his necessity to glorious gain,” would from that moment forever affix itself to Al Smith; with striking force, however, it succinctly described Franklin Roosevelt himself. Seated in a front row, Perkins observed that he was “trembling” and “shaking” from the “extreme pain and tenseness with which he held himself up to make that speech,” but his delivery “was strong and true and vigorous.” He stood as the living emblem of a man who had truly transformed his own pain and necessity into glorious gain.
When he finished, according to Eleanor’s friend Marion Dickerman, the crowd “just went crazy,” igniting an hour-long demonstration. “They howled, yelled, screamed and sang from densely crowded galleries,” the Hagerstown, Maryland Morning Herald reported. “I have witnessed many heroic deeds in my lifetime,” the reporter for the Syracuse Herald wrote, “but I never was present at so fine a display of mental courage.” It little matters, the New York World editorialized, if Governor Smith gains the nomination (he would lose on the 103rd ballot), for “the real hero” of the convention is Franklin Roosevelt. “Adversity has lifted him above the bickering, conflicting personal ambitions and petty sectional prejudices.” Indeed, the hard-boiled Kansas City boss, Tom Pendergast, opined that if Roosevelt had “been physically able to withstand the campaign, he would have been named by acclamation . . . he has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met.” Later that evening, Eleanor hosted a reception at their New York house. Exhausted but exhilarated, Franklin kept to his room. When Marion Dickerman went to see him, “he held out his arms and he said, ‘Marion, I did it!’ ”
Though four years would pass before Franklin returned in earnest to his political vocation, this speech was a vital way station. That he had made great progress was evident by this trial balloon, but his greatest growth as a man and as a leader lay ahead—on a road that led through Warm Springs, Georgia.
* * *
The story of Warm Springs, the pioneering rehabilitation center Roosevelt built from a ramshackle resort, begins with his “discovery of a place” where he believed he would learn to walk again. Instead, he experienced a different kind of recovery, developed a more profound level of humility, and provided inspiration for (and was inspired by) the vibrant community he created with his fellow polios.
Told about a spa in Georgia where a young man had restored strength to his legs by swimming in a giant pool fed by mineral water that gushed from the hillside at a soothing 86 degrees, Roosevelt journeyed to the Meriwether Inn to find out for himself. His initial impression of the once popular resort was not heartening. “Almost everything was falling to pieces,” Roosevelt later recalled, the turreted wooden hotel dilapidated and the roofs of the surrounding cottages leaking. But the buoyant water of the T-shaped thermal pool delivered on its promise, allowing him to exercise his muscles for an extended period of time without throbbing fatigue. “Every morning I spend two hours in the most wonderful pool in the world,” he told a friend. “There is no question this place does more good than all the rest of the exercising put together.”
Within a matter of weeks, he had “a hunch” that “a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could well be established here.” He envisioned a renovated hotel with bright, sunny rooms, spruced-up cottages, a medical staff of doctors, nurses, and physical therapists, along with a host of recreational and social activities designed to let the patients “live normal lives and at the same time receive the best treatment known to science at the time.” Furthermore, the place he imagined held out the curative promise of the great European spas he had known so well as a child without the trappings of wealth—here was therapy within a rustic and democratic simplicity. Meditating years afterward on Roosevelt’s leadership strengths, Frances Perkins marveled that “there were times when he could truly see it all,” when he instinctively understood how one decision or one undertaking related to another. Warm Springs was such a time.
That he was able to turn his initial vision into a combined resort and treatment center that would accommodate hundreds of patients and their families revealed a surprising entrepreneurial flair. Against the advice of his wife, mother, and friends, he decided to invest $200,000 (roughly two-thirds of his fortune) to buy the hotel, the springs, and the cottages along with twelve hundred acres of land. This would be the first major project he administered completely on his own.
Deploying a hands-on, dogged leadership, he worked with architects to build a completely accessible campus, dispensing advice on remodeling the hotel and the surrounding buildings. In addition to his role as “consulting architect,” Roosevelt served as “landscape engineer,” provided suggestions for manicured lawns, oversaw the planting of trees and flowering garden arrangements. He designed the layout of golf courses, riding trails, a dance hall, and a movie theater. During the construction phase, he drove around encouraging the crew with a contagious zeal, just as he had made the rounds with his father surveying the various construction projects at Springwood. He staffed the facility with great care. Recognizing the importance of support from the medical establishment, he persuaded the American Orthopedic Association to create “a research protocol” to measure outcomes and deliver a report. When the report proved positive, he placed the entire enterprise into a nonprofit foundation. This allocation allowed him to raise additional funds to carry out improvements and to make provisions for those who could not afford the full fare, making a reality of his initial democratic impulse.
He became known as old Doc Roosevelt, head counselor, spiritual director, “Vice-President in charge of picnics,” and therapy pioneer “all rolled into one.” He directed morning exercises in the therapy pool and then led patients to a separate pool, where they laughed and shouted as they engaged in swimming contests, played tag and water polo. During the afternoons and evenings, “there were bridge tournaments and poker games, classes, movies, excursions, amateur theatricals,” as well as festive cocktail parties and dinners. He aimed not merely to restore the bodies of the patients but to return the possibility of joy and pleasure to their lives. “We mustn’t l
et the fun go out of our program,” he insisted. “We’ve got to make these patients more alive every day.” He took pride, he told a reporter, in having created “a remarkable spirit of cooperation and competition among the patients to see who can improve the most,” adding that “the spirit of the place has an extraordinary effect on the progress they make. Here they find people just like themselves. They get over their self-consciousness.”
While micromanaging this grand scheme for almost four years, Roosevelt underwent what Perkins has called a “spiritual transformation.” An “old priest” had once told her that “humility is the first and greatest of virtues. If we don’t learn it on our own, the Lord will surely teach it to us by humiliation.” The humility Roosevelt learned at Warm Springs was of a different order than merely accepting one’s limitations. By sharing those limitations with his fellow polios, by listening and learning from them, he had, Perkins believed, “purged” the elitist aura that had once surrounded him. He emerged from the experience “completely warmhearted, with humility of spirit and with a deeper philosophy.”
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