by FDR
Dr. Lovett arrived at Campobello August 25 and found Franklin paralyzed from the waist down, running a temperature of 100 degrees. His back muscles and arms were weak and the leg muscles even weaker. He could not sit up without assistance. Lovett pronounced the verdict crisply: It was “perfectly clear” that FDR had poliomyelitis.15
Eleanor was stunned. Were the children in any danger? she asked. Lovett thought not. If any were going to be ill, it would have happened already. As for Franklin, he ordered the massages discontinued immediately, believing that overtiring the weak muscles might damage them further. A complete recovery was possible, said Lovett. There was nothing to do but wait. “I told them frankly that no one could tell where they stood, that the case was evidently not of the severest type.… [I]t looked to me as if some of the important muscles might be on the edge where they could be influenced either way—toward recovery, or turn into completely paralyzed muscles.”16
Franklin appeared relieved to know the worst. “He looked very strained and very tired,” said Eleanor. “But he was completely calm. His reaction to any great event was always to be completely calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show.”17
As the days wore on, FDR’s composure deteriorated. His condition was not improving, and he worried that stopping the massages had been a mistake. At the end of August, Dr. Bennett wired Lovett for help: “Atrophy increasing, power lessening, causing patient much anxiety. Attributed by him to discontinuance of massage. Can you recommend anything to keep up his courage?”18
Dr. Lovett replied instantly. “There is nothing that can be added to the treatment,” he wrote. “This is one of the hardest things to make the family understand.”
Drugs I believe are of little or no value.… Bromide for sleeplessness may be useful. Massage will prolong hyperesthesia and tenderness.… The use of hot baths should I think now be considered again, as it is really helpful and will encourage the patient, as he can do so much more under water with his legs.… I should have him sit up in a chair as soon as it can be done without discomfort.19
In mid-September it was decided to take Franklin back to New York, where he could be treated at Presbyterian Hospital by Dr. George Draper, a Harvard classmate who was a protégé of Dr. Lovett. Uncle Fred arranged for a private railroad car to be dispatched to Eastport, and Howe ensured that FDR was smuggled aboard out of range of inquisitive reporters. Thus far the press had reported only that Roosevelt was ill and was recovering. Polio had not been mentioned.
The news of Franklin’s malady first appeared on the front page of The New York Times the morning of September 16:
F.D. ROOSEVELT ILL OF POLIOMYELITIS
BROUGHT ON SPECIAL CAR FROM CAMPOBELLO, BAY OF FUNDY, TO HOSPITAL HERE
The accompanying article quoted Dr. Draper to the effect that although Franklin had lost the use of both legs below the knee, “he definitely will not be crippled. No one need have any fear of any permanent injury from this attack.”20
FDR’s hopes soared. That afternoon he dictated a note to his friend Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the Times:
While the doctors were unanimous in telling me that the attack was very mild and that I was not going to suffer any permanent effects from it, I had, of course, the usual dark suspicion that they were just saying nice things to make me feel good. But now that I have seen the same statement officially made in The New York Times I feel immensely relieved because I know of course it must be true.21
Wishful thinking. The fact was, FDR was not improving. His fever refused to abate, and his legs continued to atrophy. “There is a marked falling away of the muscle masses on either side of the spine in the lower lumbar region,” Draper warned Dr. Lovett in late September. “The lower extremities present a most depressing picture. There is little motion in the long extensors of the toes of each foot.” Draper believed the psychological factor would be decisive. “He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism, that it will take all the skill we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without utterly crushing him.”22
Slowly Franklin improved. By early October he was well enough for Missy LeHand to be admitted an hour or so each morning to take dictation. Eleanor and Louis Howe kept up with his affairs, and the brief dictation sessions worked wonders on FDR’s morale. But what Roosevelt craved most was personal contact. Close friends were now allowed into his hospital room for brief visits. Interviewed by the journalist Ernest K. Lindley ten years later, many still recalled their visits with awe. “Roosevelt gaily brushed aside every hint of condolence and sent them away more cheerful than when they arrived. None of them has ever heard him utter a complaint or a regret or even acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of bad luck.”23
FDR saw it as his duty not only to appear in the best of spirits but to bolster the spirits of those about him. Despite the grim reality of his condition, he persisted in seeing the bright side. “I am sure you will be glad to learn that the doctors are most encouraging,” he disingenuously wrote Josephus Daniels in mid-October. “Your surmise regarding the stern determination of my ‘missus’ not to let me proceed too rapidly is absolutely correct. In fact, I already suspect that she has entered into an alliance with the doctors to keep me in the idle class long after it is really necessary.”24
Franklin’s arms and back muscles recovered first. “I was delighted to find that he had much more power in the back muscles than I had thought,” said Draper in early October.25 Dr. Lovett came down from Boston to see the patient on October 15. FDR was now able to sit up. “He is cheerful and doing an hour or so of business each day. He has been in a chair once and I recommended pushing him around, and letting him go home when he wanted to.”26
On October 28, 1921, Roosevelt was discharged from hospital and taken home to East Sixty-fifth Street. He was now able to pull himself up by a strap and, with some assistance, swing himself into a wheelchair. “The patient is doing very well,” Dr. Draper noted on November 19. “He navigates about successfully in a wheel chair. He is exceedingly ambitious and anxious to get to the point where he can try the crutches, but I am not encouraging him.”27
In December, FDR began a carefully constructed exercise regimen with Mrs. Kathleen Lake, a trained physiotherapist. The tendons behind his knees had tightened to the point that it was terribly painful to stretch his legs. Mrs. Lake had him exercise on a board. Some paralytics found this so stressful they could endure it just three days a week. FDR insisted that Mrs. Lake come every day. “Mrs. Lake works so long now every a.m.,” Eleanor reported to Sara, “that F. does not get up till after noon at least, except on Sundays when she doesn’t come.”28
Progress was slow. In mid-December Mrs. Lake reported to Dr. Lovett that Franklin
feels his legs growing stronger all the time. He is perfectly satisfied to remain as he is now and not get up on crutches as he says he has plenty of occupations for his mind, everything is going well in the city, and he would rather strengthen his legs this way than try to get up too soon.
He is a wonderful patient, very cheerful, and works awfully hard and tries every suggestion one makes. He has certainly improved since he started the board which he insists on calling “the morgue!”29
FDR did his utmost to reassure his children, displaying his withered legs and reciting the anatomical names of the muscles affected. “How we loved to talk about Pa’s gluteus maximus,” James recalled.30 When Christmas came, Franklin presided as always, carving the turkey and reading Dickens’s Christmas Carol. He could no longer trim the tree himself but supervised every detail. “Father was a perfectionist,” said one of the children. “Though fear of fire was his only phobia, [he] insisted on decorating the tree with candles rather than electric bulbs.… I still don’t know how he did it, but Father kept us completely at ease. He cushioned the shock for us. He ma
de it possible to participate in various festivities that Christmas without feeling any depression or guilt.”31
As was usually the case with the Roosevelts, the double town house on East Sixty-fifth Street was jammed to capacity. Franklin was ensconced in the large back bedroom on the second floor, the quietest in the house. Louis Howe, who had committed himself irrevocably to FDR’s fortunes, took the big front room, while the children filled the fourth floor and spilled over into Sara’s adjoining house. Live-in servants occupied the rooms on the fifth and sixth floors under the roof. Eleanor slept on a cot in young Elliott’s room and dressed in her husband’s bathroom. “In the daytime I was too busy to need a room for myself,” she recalled.32
By this time, Eleanor had become fiercely attached to Louis Howe. “She had called for help and Louis came,” said Frances Perkins. “I know that Mrs. Roosevelt loved Louis Howe. She loved him the way you love a person who has stood by you in the midst of the valley of the shadow and not been afraid of anything.”33
Howe was downtown at Fidelity & Deposit most of the day attending to Franklin’s business. But he took breakfast with the family and spent most of his time at the table reading the dozen or so newspapers he consumed daily. “He read more newspapers than any human being I’ve ever known,” Eleanor said.34
From the beginning, ER and Howe agreed that insofar as possible Franklin should not be treated as an invalid. Louis maintained that FDR’s political future was bright and downplayed the seriousness of his illness. He planted optimistic stories with the press and wrote cheery letters to Roosevelt’s wide circle of correspondents.
“Do you really believe that Franklin has a political future?” asked Eleanor.
“I believe someday Franklin will be President,” Howe replied.35
Eleanor supported Howe in every way. She ushered a continuous stream of visitors in to see Franklin and soon undertook speaking engagements on his behalf. She joined Howe in urging FDR to persevere in his exercises—perhaps a little more sternly than Roosevelt might have desired. Howe was better at cajoling Franklin because he had a lighter touch, interspersing gossipy anecdotes among his exhortations to get on with the job.
Sara took a different view. Instead of resuming public life, she felt Franklin should retire to the pastoral comfort of Hyde Park and settle into the graceful life of an invalid country squire, much as Mr. James had done. There was no need to earn a living—Sara’s share of the Delano fortune ensured that—and Franklin could pursue the hobbies and bucolic interests of which he was so fond.
A struggle of wills ensued. “This was the most trying winter of my entire life,” Eleanor remembered.36 She and Howe worked to keep Franklin focused on recovery; Sara just as resolutely decried their efforts and sought to convince her son to follow the path his father had chosen. “My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet. This made the discussions about his care somewhat acrimonious on occasion.”37
Dr. Draper sided with Eleanor and Howe and thought it best for FDR to make every effort to resume a normal life.* Most important, so too did Franklin. As Sara noted laconically, “Franklin had no intention of conforming to my quiet ideas for his future existence.”38 Out of courtesy he offered to resign as vice president of Fidelity & Deposit, but Van Lear Black refused to consider it. Howe kept on top of the work for FDR, and Black was far more interested in retaining the Roosevelt name and the connections associated with it than in Franklin’s physical presence at the office. FDR retained his position on the boards of various charitable organizations, including the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and the Boy Scouts, and with the help of Howe and Missy LeHand kept up a constant correspondence with Democratic leaders about the party’s future.
In March FDR was fitted with steel braces that weighed fourteen pounds and ran from his heels to above his hips. After seven months in bed, Franklin’s ability to balance had vanished, and it required the assistance of all hands just to get him to his feet. Since his hips were paralyzed, he was incapable of moving his legs individually and was taught to pivot forward on his crutches, using his head and upper body for leverage. Despite the constant danger of falling, FDR rejoiced at being on his feet and able to move under his own power. “I am indeed delighted to hear you are getting well so fast and so confidently,” Woodrow Wilson wrote on April 30. “I shall try and be generous enough not to envy you,” said the former president, now confined to a wheelchair at his S Street home in Washington.39
Dr. Draper’s progress report to Dr. Lovett was guarded. Franklin “was walking quite successfully and seems to be gaining power in the hip muscles. The quadriceps are coming back a little, but they are nothing to brag of yet. Below the knee I must say it looks rather hopeless.” When Dr. Draper said FDR was walking, he simply meant he was capable of moving forward on crutches wearing his braces. There was no suggestion that he would ever walk normally.40
When summer came, Franklin was moved to Hyde Park, where it was cooler and he would have easier access to the outdoors. Sara installed ramps (“inclined planes,” she called them) and removed all the thresholds so her son’s wheelchair could roll smoothly.* The old trunk elevator, operated by rope pulleys and designed to move heavy trunks to the attic, made it possible for FDR to move easily from floor to floor. He resisted having it electrified, believing a power failure would leave him trapped, whereas he could always manipulate the ropes manually. “Mr. Roosevelt seems to be cheerful and I should say that he has gained considerably in the tricks of handling himself,” Dr. Draper reported. “There is no question but that the change of scene has had a very beneficial effect … and I look forward to the continued stretch of quiet at Hyde Park with great hopefulness.”41
FDR’s routine rarely varied. He slept late, breakfasted on a tray sent to his room, and worked out on a set of rings mounted over his bed. Three days a week Mrs. Lake came to oversee his exercises, after which he went downstairs and was pushed out onto the porch, where he read and worked on his stamp collection. He swam in Vincent Astor’s heated pool in Rhinebeck and exercised with parallel bars on the lawn. Progress remained slow. “I think it is very important for you to do all the walking that you can within your limit of fatigue,” wrote Dr. Lovett on August 14. “Walking on crutches is not a gift, but an art, acquired by constant practice just as any other game, and you will have to put in quite a little time before you get about satisfactorily.”42 Franklin devoted his afternoons to struggling up the gravel driveway to the Albany Post Road, awkwardly pushing his braces, his hips swiveling, his crutches working, as he inched ahead, a little farther each day until he reached the brownstone gateposts a quarter mile away. At the end of the summer he reported to Dr. Lovett, “I have faithfully followed out the walking and am really getting so that both legs take it quite naturally, and I can stay on my feet for an hour without feeling tired.”43
Franklin saw the bright side. His daughter, Anna, back from a summer in Europe, was aghast at the effort FDR put in. “It’s a bit traumatic,” she noted, “to see your father, who took long walks with you, sailed with you, could out-jump you, and suddenly you look up and you see him walking on crutches—trying, struggling in heavy steel braces. And you see the sweat pouring down his face, and you hear him saying, ‘I must get down the driveway today—all the way down the driveway.’ ”44
As FDR convalesced, the New York Democratic party once again found itself in disarray. The GOP occupied the governor’s mansion, and all bets for the November election were off. William Randolph Hearst, the flamboyant publisher of the New York American and Evening Journal, had begun corralling delegates for the Democratic nomination and appeared to have a clear track unless Al Smith could be coaxed back from private life. Following his defeat in 1920, Smith had found safe haven as chairman of the United States Trucking Corporation, a largely symbolic position that paid the princely salary of $50,000 a year. That, plus the sizable fees he earned as a director of other firms, made Smith reluctant to r
un again. But Smith loathed Hearst. He soon agreed with party leaders that the maverick publisher did not have a chance of prevailing in the general election and would likely pull the entire ticket down with him. To save the party, Smith privately agreed to run. And to get the ball rolling he asked Franklin, as the most prominent upstate Democrat, to issue a public appeal for him to do so.
Delighted to be called on, if only to play a symbolic role, FDR wrote a “Dear Al” open letter on August 13. “The Democratic party must put its best foot forward,” he told Smith. “I am taking it upon myself to appeal to you in the name of countless citizens of upstate New York. You represent the type of citizen the voters of this state want to vote for for Governor. We realize that years of public service make it most desirable that you think now of your family’s needs. I am in the same boat myself—yet this call for further service must come first.”45
The letter was front-page news throughout the state. So too was Smith’s “Dear Frank” reply. The former governor agreed to accept the party’s call. Hearst saw the handwriting on the wall and immediately withdrew.46
AL NOMINATED WITH GREAT ENTHUSIASM, Howe wired FDR from the Democratic convention in Syracuse. MORGENTHAU [Henry Morgenthau, Jr.] AND YOUR MISSUS LED THE DUTCHESS DELEGATION WITH THE BANNER THREE TIMES AROUND THE HALL.47
Smith shared Howe’s elation. “Everything went along first rate,” he wrote Franklin. “I had quite a session with our lady politicians as Mrs. Roosevelt no doubt told you. I was delighted to see her taking an active part and I am really sorry that you could not be there, but take care of yourself—there is another day coming.”48
Eleanor was now committed to the Democratic party. At Louis Howe’s urging, she had broadened her nonpartisan attachment to the League of Women Voters to include active participation in mainstream politics. As Howe put it, Eleanor “had to become actively involved in Democratic politics in order to keep alive Franklin’s interest in the party and the party’s interest in him.”49 In June 1922, when Nancy Cook of the New York State Democratic Committee asked her to address a fund-raising luncheon, she dutifully accepted despite her terror of speaking in public. “I trembled so that I did not know whether I could stand up,” Eleanor wrote later. “I am quite sure my voice could not be heard.”50 Evidently ER exceeded her expectations: she was immediately asked to chair the finance committee of the Women’s Division of the party and later edited the Women’s Democratic News.
