The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Calvin Coolidge was now in the White House; President Harding had died in office. Harding’s administration had been rocked by a bribery scandal involving the illegal lease of government oil fields in Wyoming at a place called Teapot Dome. Ted and Archie Roosevelt had both been accused of involvement and called upon to testify before Congress. Neither had actually been guilty of wrongdoing.

  But Eleanor, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman followed Ted around the state anyway, in a car topped with a giant papier-mâché teapot, steam pouring from its spout. Eleanor denounced her cousin at every stop as “a personally nice young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.”

  One evening, her tricked-out car turned up unannounced at the Farmington, Connecticut, home of Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Bamie, whom Eleanor called “Auntie Bye.” Eleanor asked if she and her friends could spend the night. Bamie took them all in, even though they were maligning her nephew. She loved her niece, she said.

  Eleanor would later admit her Teapot tour had been “a rough stunt.” Ted Roosevelt would never forgive her.

  On election day, Calvin Coolidge swept the country, including New York State. The unregulated orgy of easy credit, inflated real estate values, and wild Wall Street speculation would continue without letup. But Al Smith was reelected governor, beating Theodore Roosevelt Jr. badly.

  Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis Howe preside over a Democratic strategy dinner at the Roosevelts’ New York home in the fall of 1924.

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  A Democratic novelty from the 1924 New York race for governor, an unfair but effective symbol of the supposed role Theodore Roosevelt Jr. had played in the Teapot Dome scandal that had embarrassed the Harding administration.

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  Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Eleanor’s beloved “Auntie Bye,” and her butler greet visitors at the door of her Connecticut home. “Alas and alack!” she wrote after her favorite niece and her friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman had come and gone. “Since politics have become [Eleanor’s] choice of interest all her charm has disappeared, and the fact is emphasized by the companions she chooses to bring with her.”

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  Old Doctor Roosevelt

  While Eleanor was campaigning against her cousin Ted, Franklin had traveled south to rural Georgia, where he’d been told that bathing in mineralized waters at a ramshackle resort near the tiny town of Bullochville might help strengthen his legs.

  He loved the warm buoyant water that allowed him to stand with unbraced legs for the first time since 1921—so long as he held on tightly to a rope or the edge of the pool. “I feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis could well be established here,” he wrote to his mother.

  He decided to buy the place. The price for the battered inn, a cluster of tumble-down cottages, two pools, and twelve hundred acres of piney woods was $195,000. Eleanor objected: all five children were still in private school; Franklin was risking nearly two-thirds of his inheritance; she thought he would inevitably lose interest.

  He bought it, nonetheless, officiated at a ceremony renaming the little town Warm Springs (because it was thought more salable than Bullochville), and hoped both to attract wealthy guests to the old hotel and to provide aftercare for fellow polios.

  As word of his presence spread, other polio patients, desperate for help, began to turn up on the train, some simply shipped south by families who had been unable to do anything for them at home.

  There, among his fellow patients and away from the press, with Missy LeHand to act as his hostess and handle his correspondence with the Democrats he continued to cultivate all across the country, he could be himself. He didn’t need to be self-conscious about his withered legs, and could exercise as he wanted, at his own pace.

  The hotel never did work out: prospective guests were scared off by the presence of polio patients. Roosevelt would never make any money and eventually turned Warm Springs into a foundation. But Eleanor was wrong; he never lost interest, never backed away.

  Warm Springs was the first project Roosevelt had ever undertaken that was meant largely to benefit others, and the only one he’d run entirely on his own. He began to call himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt.”

  He devised pioneering water exercises, hired physiotherapists to work with him and his fellow patients in the pool, paid local “push boys” to wheel them to and from the water, and spent hours in the sun after his exercises were over, chatting with anyone who happened by.

  It is unlikely that Franklin Roosevelt ever considered himself just one more member of a crowd, but he came as close to it as he ever did during his early time in Georgia. “You would howl with glee,” he wrote a friend, “if you could see the clinic in operation at the side of the pool and the patients doing various exercises in the water under my leadership—they are male and female of all ages and weights. In addition to all this I am consulting architect and landscape engineer—am giving free advice on the moving of buildings, the building of roads, setting out trees and remodeling the hotel.”

  Doctor Roosevelt’s prescription called for sunshine, swimming, gentle exercise and massage, and, above all, “belief on the patient’s part that the muscles are coming back.” The physical progress he and the others made may often have been minimal, but their psychological progress was beyond measure. Most of them, at least during the early years, went to Warm Springs out of despair rather than hope; there was simply nowhere else to go. They often seemed “addled” on arrival, one of the first physiotherapists recalled. The disease’s impact had been so devastating, both for them and their families, that “they no longer knew who they were or what they were. At Warm Springs they found out.” Roosevelt’s mere presence was a tonic. To see so celebrated a man in apparently perpetual high spirits while struggling to overcome the same obstacles that faced them helped restore their faith in the future.

  FDR also declared himself “Vice President in Charge of Picnics.” His favorite spot was a rocky overhang called Dowdell’s Knob not far from town. Whenever a patient seemed about to give in to despair, he once told a friend, he or she should be brought to the Knob right away: one look at the glorious view, he believed, would provide anyone with the will to go on.

  FDR at the Warm Springs pool in October 1924, the damage done to his legs by infantile paralysis clearly visible. Within days of his first dip he was already making plans to turn the old resort into a center for the treatment of polios like himself.

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  The ramshackle Warm Springs Inn as FDR first saw it

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  A postcard hinting at the wonders that its spring-fed pool could allegedly perform

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Candid snapshots of FDR and fellow patients at Warm Springs struggling to walk in the summer of 1925, the kind of pictures that were rarely taken (and never published) once Roosevelt had returned to politics. The nearly skeletal man gripping the rails behind him in the image at top is Fred Botts, who arrived in a mail car, seated inside a wooden box his brother had built for him so that he wouldn’t be hurled about by the jarring train. Roosevelt eventually made him the Warm Springs registrar.

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  Roosevelt enjoys a sunny afternoon picnic at Dowdell’s Knob. Among friends and fellow polios he could wear his braces outside his trousers without being stared at. The woman at the far left is Missy LeHand.

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  In a frame from a home movie made at Warm Springs, a physiotherapist exercises the muscle in Roosevelt’s left hip.

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  The Peace of It Is Divine

  Eleanor now had a place of her own as well, a symbol of her growing autonomy. Back in the summer of 1924, Franklin, Eleanor, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman had spread a picnic blanket on the shore of a stream on Roosevelt land two miles east of Springwood.

  Springwood was always closed for the winter, and they’
d all agreed it was a shame Hyde Park wasn’t available to them all year round.

  Franklin volunteered to build Eleanor and her friends a stone cottage of their own. “My missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods,” he wrote a local contractor. It took a little over a year and a half to complete and would eventually include a small furniture factory in an adjacent building, employing local craftsmen and overseen by Nancy Cook.

  For a time, all three women lived in a single dormitory-like bedroom in an atmosphere reminiscent of Allenswood, the English boarding school that had meant so much to Eleanor as a girl. “The peace of it,” she said, “is divine.” Once the Val-Kill cottage was completed Eleanor rarely slept at Springwood again unless Franklin happened to be there and there was to be some sort of formal occasion.

  The stone cottage at Val-Kill in 1926, the year it was completed

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  The artificially created pond in front of it that FDR likened to “an old-fashioned swimming hole”

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  Eleanor and Nancy Cook, pondside. A childhood visit to Oyster Bay during which she had nearly drowned while her uncle Theodore tried to teach her to swim instilled in Eleanor a lifelong fear of water. She dutifully learned to swim in 1922 so that she could safely watch over her children while they swam. She did not learn to dive till 1939 and never learned to enjoy it, but every day, whenever the weather was warm enough, she plunged into the pond anyway, because, she said, “it is good for my character.”

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  Val-Kill was emphatically a woman’s world, but Franklin, shown here with two family dogs, was a frequent visitor.

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  Talking the Language of Men

  If women believe they have a right and duty in political life today,” Eleanor wrote, “they must learn to talk the language of men.… Against the men bosses there must be women bosses who can talk as equals.”

  In the mid-1920s, Eleanor became something of a boss herself and used her clout on behalf of progressive causes on which most of her male counterparts preferred to waffle—the League of Nations, the five-day workweek, an amendment to end child labor. She even walked a picket line in support of striking box workers. And because of the tragedies caused by alcohol within her own family, she also publicly supported Prohibition—even though her husband maintained a discreet silence on the subject and kept ready supplies of gin and rum and Scotch at Warm Springs and in an upstairs closet in their New York home.

  Eleanor’s new and independent life meant that she had less time for her children. They were alternately ignored and indulged. One by one, she would dutifully escort James and Elliott, Franklin Jr. and John to Groton, and she continued to clash again and again with her mother-in-law, who spoiled all her grandchildren and sometimes murmured to them that she was their real mother; Eleanor had only borne them.

  Anna, the eldest, may have suffered most from the ongoing tensions within her family. She adored her often-absent father but also sympathized with her mother, who, while Anna was still in her teens, confirmed to her the rumors she had heard about her father’s romance with Lucy Mercer.

  She was forced by her mother and grandmother into making a formal debut at eighteen and did not go to college, in part because her grandmother believed that overeducated women—“bookworms,” she called them—scared off suitors. Barely twenty, Anna married Curtis Dall, a former naval aviator and Wall Street broker, nine years older than she.

  Her grandmother was so pleased that Anna had found a suitable husband that she gave the couple a handsomely furnished Manhattan apartment—and then told her granddaughter she needn’t tell her mother if she thought she’d be displeased. Eleanor was livid. “I am so angry at her for offering something to a child of mine without speaking to me … & for telling her not to tell me that it is all I can do to be decent,” she told Franklin.

  Years later, after the couple had divorced, Anna tried to explain her early marriage by saying she’d simply “wanted to get out,” away from the complications that continued to divide her family.

  In a 1928 article for Redbook, Eleanor Roosevelt spelled out the practical lessons she had learned from four years of trying to work with party politicians: “Beneath the veneer of courtesy and outward show of consideration universally accorded women, there is a wide-spread male hostility—age-old perhaps—against sharing with them any actual control.” The only answer was for women to become engaged in politics at every level.

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  Curtis Dall, Anna Roosevelt, and the father of the bride pose for the press on the Springwood lawn, June 5, 1926. There were 480 wedding gifts given by the guests, who were brought up from New York by special train.

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  You’ve Got to Play the Game

  In the spring of 1928, Al Smith was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president and asked Franklin to nominate him again at the upcoming convention in Houston. “I’m telling everyone you are going to Houston without crutches,” Eleanor wrote Franklin at Warm Springs, “so mind you stick at it.”

  This time he needed no urging. To demonstrate to the delegates that he was making progress toward becoming a potential candidate in his own right, he knew he had to be able to walk—or seem to walk—on his own. For weeks at Warm Springs, he labored at mastering what his physiotherapists called a “two-point walk”—the slow, rocking gait he would employ in public for the rest of his life. Gripping the arm of a powerful companion, he heaved himself forward from the hip, one stiff braced leg after the other. “One, two, one, two,” the physiotherapist who taught him how to do it remembered. “Right cane forward and left foot forward together. Lift right leg and left arm comes down with pressure.” It was a precarious business; uneven ground, a jostling crowd, a momentarily inattentive companion—even a strong wind—could topple him to the ground.

  At the Houston convention, he used the new technique to make his way to the podium. Thousands of onlookers stood again to cheer his progress—and now he was stable enough to use one hand to acknowledge their applause.

  Head held high, braced legs spread wide apart for balance, he delivered a ringing endorsement of his candidate: “America needs a pathfinder, a blazer of the trail to the high road … one who has the will to win—who not only deserves success, but commands it. Victory is his habit—the Happy Warrior, Alfred E. Smith!”

  The delegates roared their approval. Smith won the nomination—and then to Roosevelt’s astonishment insisted that he run for governor of New York in his place.

  Louis Howe thought it madness. “MESS IS NO NAME FOR IT,” he wired his boss. “FOR ONCE I HAVE NO ADVICE TO GIVE.” The Republicans, and their presidential nominee Herbert Hoover, were riding a tide of prosperity in 1928. Smith’s Catholicism and open opposition to Prohibition made a Democratic victory still more unlikely. Eleanor—already committed to heading Democratic women’s work for Smith’s candidacy—felt that if her husband ran and somehow won it might mean for her the loss of the separate and fulfilling life she’d worked so hard to build. And Missy LeHand told Franklin, “Don’t you dare run.” She didn’t want to give him up to public life.

  Roosevelt himself was torn—and even ducked Smith’s calls for a time. But in the end, he gave in and agreed to run for governor. “When you’re in politics,” he told a friend, “you’ve got to play the game.”

  Republican newspapers denounced Smith for persuading what they called a “crippled” man to run. It was a “pathetic and pitiless act,” one said. Privately, Smith thought Franklin was little more than an invalid: “He won’t live a year,” he told a friend. But he assured the press, “a governor doesn’t have to be an acrobat. We do not elect him for his ability to do a double back-flip.”

  To demonstrate that he was up to the job, Roosevelt campaigned through every one of New York’s sixty-two counties—something no candidate for governor had ever done before. He did all he could to mi
nimize the impact of his disability on the voters: “No movies of me getting out of the machine, boys,” he’d shout to the newsreel cameramen as he arrived for a speech, and they obliged.

  On election night, Franklin, Eleanor, and Sara waited for the returns at Democratic headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan. It was quickly clear that Al Smith and the Democrats had suffered a terrible defeat. Smith carried only seven states; even his own state of New York went to Herbert Hoover. Franklin and Eleanor left for home well before midnight, convinced Franklin’s candidacy had also failed, even though all the returns were not yet in.

  But Sara Delano Roosevelt stayed put. By four o’clock in the morning, it became clear that Franklin was going to win a narrow victory. A friend called room service and—because of Prohibition—ordered milk, not champagne, with which to toast her son’s surprising triumph.

  FDR would occupy still another of the offices his cousin Theodore had held on his way to the presidency.

  Al Smith had assumed that Franklin would be a mostly absent governor, consumed with rebuilding his legs, allowing Smith to retain power through the men and women he’d appointed to state office. He was quickly disabused of that notion. FDR fired Smith’s two closest aides. “I’ve got to be the governor of the State of New York,” he told a friend, “and I have got to be it myself.” Al Smith would never forgive him.

  Four rare frames from a 1933 home movie shot on the Vassar College campus by a Poughkeepsie physician show the labored “two-point walk”—employing a cane and the right arm of a sturdy companion—that FDR mastered at Warm Springs in the spring of 1928 so that he could appear to be walking normally at the Democratic national convention in Houston.