The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  With their encouragement, Eleanor began organizing the Democratic women of Dutchess County and got her first real taste of raw politics on election day. Some of the Democrats she drove to the polls in Poughkeepsie had been paid for their votes. She was appalled by the bribery—but delighted by the outcome: Al Smith, Franklin’s old political ally and sometime critic, easily beat his Republican opponent for governor.

  Over the months that followed, she would join the Women’s City Club of New York and the Women’s Trade Union League, making more new friends, and taking on new causes and responsibilities.

  None meant more to her than serving under her friend Esther Lape on the committee to choose the winner of the American Peace Award. It offered $100,000 to the author of the “best practicable plan by which the United States may co-operate with other nations for … world peace.” More than 22,000 submissions were received, including one from Franklin. The winner called for adherence to the Permanent Court of International Justice and cooperation with—but not membership in—the League of Nations.

  Senate isolationists charged that the prize was secretly sponsored by foreign interests seeking to undermine U.S. sovereignty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation looked into the matter and found no evidence to back the senators’ charge, but during the probe Eleanor Roosevelt’s name made the first of countless appearances in its files.

  She had no regrets. “I was thinking things out,” she remembered of those days, “and becoming an individual. Had I never done this, perhaps I might have been saved some difficult experiences, but I have never regretted even my mistakes. They all added to my understanding of other human beings.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt (right) and Esther Lape stride into the U.S. Capitol Building, where Lape would defend their work on the American Peace Award before the Senate Special Committee on Propaganda, 1924.

  Credit 4.36

  Eleanor Roosevelt, 1924

  Credit 4.37

  Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Eleanor during a summer visit to Campobello in 1926. To some on the Oyster Bay side of the family, Eleanor’s new friends were “she-males,” “female impersonators.” But Franklin saw how important they were to his wife—and to the work he and Eleanor hoped would keep his political hopes alive. The women, in turn, admired his courage and appreciated his shrewd political counsel. He called them part of “our gang.”

  Credit 4.38

  Louis Howe, who was nearly as important to Eleanor Roosevelt’s development as he was to Franklin’s. He worked with her to overcome a nervous tendency to giggle while speaking to an audience. “Have something to say,” he told her, “say it, and sit down.” He also sometimes acted as a sounding board, encouraged her to become a public figure in her own right, and, much later, would tell her he would like to make her president of the United States.

  Credit 4.39

  The Grand and Glorious Occasion

  On the morning of October 9, 1922, a little over a year after FDR was stricken, he determined to make an appearance at his Fidelity & Deposit office in the Equitable Building. His secretary, Missy LeHand, had planned a welcome-back banquet.

  The Roosevelt family Buick pulled up in front of 120 Broadway. The chauffeur opened the back door. Franklin heaved himself onto the jump seat and extended his legs so that the chauffeur could pull them straight and lock his braces in place. An impatient driver began honking. The chauffeur left Roosevelt with his stiff legs protruding in the air to have words with him. A crowd gathered to see how the big cripple in the shiny car would manage to get out.

  The chauffeur returned, hauled his employer to his feet, and placed his crutches beneath his arms. FDR’s hat fell off. A stranger picked it up and put it back on his head. Roosevelt laughed and thanked him, then started, slowly, cautiously for the door, trying not to notice the gawkers standing nearby. Someone held the door open for him and he stumped inside and started for the elevators.

  The gleaming lobby floor was slippery. The chauffeur was supposed to wedge his foot against the tip of the left crutch to keep him from falling. Somehow, his foot failed to hold, and Roosevelt went down.

  Men and women watched, not sure what to do.

  Franklin pulled himself up to a sitting position, his legs straight out in front of him. His chauffeur alone wasn’t able to get him to his feet. Laughing and acting as if his fall had been the funniest thing in the world, that it happened all the time and needn’t worry anyone, Roosevelt asked two young men in the crowd to help him up.

  He finally reached the elevators and attended the luncheon.

  Afterward, he told friends he’d had “a Grand Reception,” and that it had been a “grand & glorious occasion.” But he did not return for two more months.

  The gleaming, polished lobby floor of the Equitable Building, onto which FDR fell in full view of a crowd of curious office-goers

  Credit 4.40

  On June 1, 1922, Dr. Robert Lovett of Harvard—the leading American authority on infantile paralysis, who had first diagnosed Roosevelt roughly nine months earlier—examined FDR and then drew up this muscle chart, delineating in horizontal red lines all the muscles that had suffered damage.

  Credit 4.41

  The battered crutches that betrayed FDR

  Credit 4.42

  Sunburned and in Fine Shape

  In February of 1923, Franklin and Eleanor, Franklin’s valet, LeRoy Jones, and his secretary, Missy LeHand, all traveled south to the Florida Keys, where he and a friend named John Lawrence had bought a dilapidated seventy-one-foot houseboat, hoping that several weeks at sea in the sun might help rebuild his legs. They christened her the Larooco, a combination of their last names.

  Eleanor did not stay aboard for long. She found the days boring and the nights along the coast “eerie and menacing.” With Eleanor away, Missy LeHand served as Franklin’s hostess and companion, setting a pattern they would follow for the next twenty years. She was Catholic, unmarried, half his age, and more than half in love with the boss she called “FD”—“EffDee” in her letters.

  He was fond of her, as well, and some who knew them would always wonder about the nature of their relationship.

  Missy seemed to understand his slightest shift of mood. “She knows when he is bored before he realizes it himself,” one visitor remembered. “She can tell when he is really listening and when he is merely being polite—which no one else can.” Her devotion was complete. Suitors would come and go over the years, some genuinely interested in her, some hoping to gain access to her boss through her. None could compare with him in her eyes. Sara called her son’s secretary “nice little ‘Missy,’ ” but worried that people would talk about his spending so much time alone with a woman not his wife. Eleanor seems never to have objected, even to have been grateful to know that her husband had the sort of admiring companionship he always craved and which she could not provide. Her friend Marion Dickerman believed that she avoided the “belittling emotion of jealousy” when it came to Missy largely because she could not bring herself to believe that any woman—and especially any secretary—could replace Lucy Mercer in her husband’s affections.

  Franklin loved everything about life aboard the houseboat: fishing, crawling from deck to deck out of sight of curious strangers, defying Prohibition by sharing rum drinks in the evenings with old friends who found the time to come down and be with him, and being lifted in and out of the water with a pulley arrangement of his own devising. “The West Coast [of Florida] is wholly wild and tropical,” he wrote his mother that spring. “I have been in swimming … and it goes better and better. I’m sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good.… I am sunburned and in fine shape.”

  He was still hoping somehow to walk on what one physician called “flail legs.” But no real progress could be discerned. “I am very much disheartened about [Mr. Roosevelt’s] ultimate recovery,” one physician wrote. “I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limits of his possibilities. I only hope I may be wrong in this.”
Roosevelt was sometimes privately disheartened, too; Missy LeHand remembered days when it was noon before he could bring himself to leave his cabin and “greet his guest wearing his lighthearted façade.”

  When his doctors finally told him that further progress was unlikely he refused to accept their verdict. Rules that applied to others did not apply to him. He was certain he would walk again. One after another, he would try and abandon supposed “cures”—sun lamps, a special electrified belt called the “I-on-a-co,” an oversized motorized tricycle. There were two more cruises on the Larooco, as well, and he spent several weeks working at Marion, Massachusetts, with an eccentric neurosurgeon named William McDonald who promised Roosevelt he would soon be able to walk without braces provided he underwent strenuous exercise in the bay followed by still more arduous workouts on land.

  Nothing worked. “Polio was a storm,” one of Roosevelt’s physiotherapists taught her patients. “You were what remained when [the storm] had passed.”

  It was once part of the Roosevelt legend that polio somehow brought the Roosevelts closer together. It did not. Between 1925 and 1928, Franklin would spend more than half his time—116 of 208 weeks—away from home, struggling to find a way to regain his feet. Eleanor was with him just 4 of those 116 weeks, and his mother was with him for only 2. His children hardly saw him.

  “Those were the lonely years,” James remembered. “For a long while during this time of illness … we had no tangible father, no father-in-being, whom we could touch and talk to at will—only an abstract symbol, a cheery letter written from off somewhere on a houseboat.… Neither Anna, nor I, nor my brothers had the guidance and training that I think Father would have given us had he not been involved in his own struggle to re-establish a useful life for himself.”

  FDR aboard the houseboat Larooco with (left to right) his valet, LeRoy Jones, sailing master Robert S. Morris and his wife, Dora, who did the cooking, a young mechanic who kept the ancient motor running—and a prize grouper. The ship’s name was a combination of “Roosevelt” and “Lawrence,” for its co-owner, John Lawrence.

  Credit 4.43

  Franklin, an old friend Frances De Rahm, and Missy LeHand with their lines in the water, somewhere off the Florida coast. When his mother saw this photograph and noticed the sideburns her son had grown she burst into tears because it reminded her so much of his late father.

  Credit 4.44

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES On May 31, 1923, just a day short of a year after Dr. Robert Lovett first diagrammed Roosevelt’s muscle loss, he did it again and made detailed notes: of the forty-four muscles whose strength he had measured in 1921, seven showed very slight improvement but seven had deteriorated. Twelve months of lonely work had yielded no measurable overall improvement at all.

  Credit 4.45

  In this photograph, taken at the home of Dr. William McDonald at Marion, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1925, Roosevelt appears to be standing without braces. But LeRoy Jones and Dr. McDonald are actually holding him upright and the wheelchair into which he will shortly sink is just behind him.

  Credit 4.46

  After a swim, FDR and Missy LeHand huddle together in a dinghy, photographed from the deck of the Larooco drifting somewhere off the coast of Florida.

  Credit 4.47

  Not a Thing to Lose

  Eleanor, not Franklin, went to political war that spring—against Charles Murphy, the Tammany Hall boss who had outmaneuvered her husband during his first term as a state senator thirteen years before.

  “I have wanted you home the last few days,” she wrote Franklin, “to advise me on the fight I’m putting up.… Mr. Murphy and I disagree.… I imagine it is just a question of what he dislikes most, giving me my way or having me give the papers a grand chance for a story.… There’s one thing I’m thankful for. I haven’t a thing to lose and for the moment you haven’t, either.”

  She and her new friends had already driven all over the state, organizing Democratic women. The issue now was who would pick two woman delegates and two delegates-at-large to the national convention in July—men like Murphy, who had always run things, or the growing number of women Eleanor had been recruiting for the party.

  When Murphy insisted on remaining in charge, she publicly warned him at a Democratic women’s dinner of what would happen if he failed to share power fairly. “It is always disagreeable to take stands,” she said. “It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feeling, but I have come to the conclusion this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes.”

  When Murphy still refused to change his ways, Eleanor appealed directly to Governor Al Smith. He overruled Murphy. Thanks to Eleanor, the women, not the boss, would pick their own delegates-at-large.

  Franklin wrote her to tell her how proud he was.

  “You need not be proud of me dear,” she answered. “I’m only being active till you can be again—it isn’t such a great desire on my part to serve the world and I’ll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily. Hurry up, for as you know, my ever-present sense of the uselessness of things will overwhelm me sooner or later.”

  Tammany Hall, hung with flags and bunting in readiness for the Democratic national convention in July 1924

  Credit 4.49

  Eleanor Roosevelt demonstrates a new voting machine. It was important for women to go to the polls, she wrote in 1924, but “if they expect to gain the ends for which they fought they must [also] gain for themselves a place of real equality and the respect of the men.”

  Credit 4.50

  The Foremost Figure on the Platform

  Governor Al Smith and Franklin had not much liked each other while in the New York State Senate. But they had since become allies of a kind and as the 1924 presidential race drew closer the governor asked Roosevelt to serve as chairman of Citizens for Smith.

  FDR agreed. It was a chance to get back into politics, at least behind the scenes. When the man who was going to put Smith’s name into nomination died, Smith asked who should replace him. “Roosevelt,” an aide answered, because “you’re a Bowery mick and he’s a Protestant patrician and he’ll take some of the curse off you.”

  Roosevelt agreed, even though it meant that he would run the risk of appearing on crutches in front of thousands of people. If he so much as stumbled, their pleasure at seeing him again would turn instantly to pity.

  In the library of the house on East Sixty-fifth Street, he and his eldest son, James, measured off fifteen feet—the distance between the rear of the platform and the podium—and practiced covering it over and over again on two crutches.

  As he waited for his introduction at noon on June 26, 1924, at Madison Square Garden, he gripped James’s arm so hard it was all his son could do to keep from crying out. Then, as twelve thousand people held their breath, James handed him his second crutch and he began his slow, careful movement toward the microphones.

  When he got there, everyone in the Garden stood to cheer. He did not dare lift either hand to wave for fear of falling, but he remained on his feet for half an hour and made a memorable speech, calling Smith the “ ‘Happy Warrior’ of the political battlefield.”

  The next day, Marion Dickerman dropped in to see FDR. He was sitting up in bed, exhausted but elated. “Marion,” he said, “I did it!”

  In the end, Al Smith failed to get the nomination. After 103 ballots, the weary delegates settled upon a colorless Wall Street lawyer, John W. Davis. But Franklin Roosevelt had made an indelible impression. “From the time Roosevelt made his speech,” the New York Herald Tribune reported, “he has easily been the foremost figure on the … platform. That is not because of his name. There are many Roosevelts. It is because, without the slightest intention or desire to do anything of the sort, he has done for himself what he could not do for his candidate.”


  Covering the convention for the New York Times, the Dutch-born writer Hendrik Willem van Loon was overcome by FDR’s courage: “If he would run [for president] himself, I would go and stand on the corner of every street between Washington Square and 349th Street to tell the people what I had seen.”

  Credit 4.51

  Leaning on both crutches and taking a deep breath, FDR prepares to begin his lonely walk to the lectern at Madison Square Garden.

  Credit 4.52

  Roosevelt waits for the ovation to die down so that he can begin his nominating speech for Al Smith. “He was literally trembling,” a close friend who was seated close behind him remembered. “The hand that was on the paper was … shaking, because of the extreme pain and tenseness with which he held himself up to make that speech.” He managed to endure the pain and tension for fully half an hour.

  Credit 4.53

  Photographers crowd the Springwood portico to get a picture of FDR on his crutches with John W. Davis, the presidential nominee who was making a courtesy call on the man who had been the vice presidential candidate four years earlier.

  Credit 4.54

  A Rough Stunt

  Meanwhile, Eleanor remained in the thick of things. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was running against Al Smith for governor, and she had neither forgotten nor forgiven her cousin’s attacks on her husband four years earlier.