It would be the last photograph of him walking unassisted.
He returned to Campobello on August 7 aboard Van Lear Black’s imposing yacht, which he personally steered through the Bay of Fundy’s difficult waters. For the next three days, he vacationed in his customary mode of nonstop activity. On August 10, he, Eleanor, James, and Elliott got into his small craft, Vireo, to sail around the bay. They found a fire on a nearby island and spent an exhausting hour or so beating it out with evergreen boughs. Then, back on Campobello, he and the children got into swimwear, ran two miles across the island, and took a dip in a large pond, followed by a plunge into the icy bay. After that, he raced the boys back to the cottage. By dinnertime, he was extraordinarily tired and shivering. Unable to eat a decent meal, he went to bed early.7
The next morning, he was running a 102-degree fever; his left leg gave way under him. The island’s only doctor, a rural general practitioner, examined him and concluded that he had a bad cold. Roosevelt’s right leg quickly also became useless. An aged eminent physician brought up from his vacation in Maine guessed that a blood clot in the spinal area had temporarily blocked the nerves to Roosevelt’s lower limbs. He prescribed torturous daily massages of the patient’s tender legs. The paralysis spread. For a time, Roosevelt’s hands were partially immobilized. His bladder and bowel stopped functioning and had to be cleared with catheters and enemas. He found breathing difficult. His fever continued at dangerously high levels. Eleanor and Louis Howe, whose family had been visiting, gave him round-the-clock care that may have saved his life.
Howe, increasingly dubious of the physician’s advice, wrote a long letter describing Franklin’s symptoms to Sara Roosevelt’s younger brother, Frederic A. Delano, an esteemed business executive and public servant who had taken a close interest in his nephew’s career. Delano quickly arranged a visit from Dr. Robert W. Lovett, a leading Boston physician and an authority on paralytic diseases. Lovett visited Campobello on August 25 and quickly diagnosed polio. He ordered a stop to the massages at once—they were doing no good and might actually damage muscles. A quick first examination suggested that the lasting damage would be minor.
Roosevelt spent three more weeks at Campobello as an utter invalid in constant pain. Word got out that he had fallen ill. Howe developed a story line that attributed his indisposition to bathing in the cold waters surrounding the island, always ending with a reassuring refrain: the patient was recovering rapidly. Finally, on September 13, Franklin was put on a boat to Eastport, Maine, and there loaded into a private railroad car for New York. Reporters, kept at a distance, looked through the window and saw him propped up in a sleeping berth, appearing relaxed with a lighted cigarette at the end of a long holder, his Scottish terrier at his side. In fact, every jostle and bump between Campobello and New York was acutely painful.
The train arrived in New York early on the afternoon of September 15. Immediately transferred to an ambulance and taken to Presbyterian Hospital, Roosevelt came under the care of Dr. George Draper, a noted physician, a protégé of Lovett, and an old Grotonian acquainted with the patient since their school days. It was no longer possible to conceal the true character of Roosevelt’s illness, which, given his prominence, became a front-page news story. Draper, based on Lovett’s diagnosis, told the press, “You can say definitely that he will not be crippled.” After an examination, however, Draper could not promise that Roosevelt, whose back muscles were still weak and atrophied, would even be able to sit upright in a chair.8
Some years later, Roosevelt told Frances Perkins that he had experienced the darkest despair during the first few days of his illness and felt that God had deserted him. Then, knowing that he would live, he came to feel he had been spared for some purpose. Taking refuge in extreme denial, he convinced himself that intensive physical therapy would allow him to walk unassisted. Draper, in the mode of most physicians of the day, allowed him to be optimistic. It was important to maintain the patient’s spirits and make what progress one could: “He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism,” Draper wrote to Lovett, “that it will take all the skill which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.”9
Roosevelt spent six weeks at Presbyterian in quasi-isolation; most visitors outside his immediate family were turned away. His wife and children and the few close friends admitted to his room all remembered his gaiety and optimism. Most left feeling more cheerful than when they had arrived. The fever that had wracked his body for a month disappeared for good, and exercise began to reconstitute his lower back and hip muscles. He became able to pull himself up to a sitting position by a strap that hung down over his bed. On October 28, he left the hospital for the family house on Sixty-Fifth Street.
Jimmy, in his second year at Groton, returned home for Christmas vacation, apprehensive about meeting a sick father he had not seen since September. He found him propped up in a bed over which hung “trapezes and rings”; Franklin had already strengthened his upper body considerably with them. “Come here, old man!” his parent commanded. As soon as the boy was within reach, Roosevelt administered a bear hug, slapped him on the back, and led him into a conversation about dear old Groton and the doings of its immortal headmaster. Jimmy quickly learned that his father was still immobile below the waist but able to wrestle and roughhouse with the younger children. Franklin made it easy for them to believe they were playing a happy game.10
Still, the overcrowded household was not happy. The large family had already filled the home’s available space to the limit. Louis Howe, who tended to Franklin’s correspondence and other duties at F&D, had taken over Anna’s spacious third-floor bedroom and private bath. (Franklin’s day nurse used Howe’s room as a sitting area while Howe was at the office.) Anna and Elliott had bedrooms on the fourth floor. The two younger boys and their round-the-clock nurse used connected fourth-floor rooms in Sara’s house next door. As for Eleanor: “I slept on a bed in one of the little boys’ rooms. I dressed in my husband’s bathroom. In the daytime I was too busy to need a room.”11
Anna, who had turned fifteen in May, was at a difficult time of life for any girl. The boys were boisterous, resistant to structured learning, and cared for by a series of severe nurses straight out of Grimm’s fairy tales. Sara, who wanted to stay close to her son and manage his future, was often on the scene. She lobbied single-mindedly for Franklin to abandon his political career, remove to Hyde Park, and live the life of a country squire. Wanting to get rid of Howe, she relentlessly fed Anna’s resentment at being evicted from her former quarters.
Roosevelt himself must have had doubts. His recovery was slow and erratic. In January 1922, his hamstring muscles began to contract, causing his legs to double up. They had to be put in casts and straightened with wedges over several excruciating weeks. In the end, however, denial and determination prevailed. That summer Franklin and his family went up to Hyde Park, not to stay but to redouble his efforts at recovery. His nurse also came along, as did the first in a series of sturdy valets on whom he would rely from that point forward to assist him in all the routine tasks of life. He exercised intensively. Using rings hung over his bed and parallel bars set up on the lawn, he developed the arms and upper body of an athlete. A physical therapist came up from New York three times a week to supervise routines for his hips and legs; they may have had some effect in restoring the hips, but the legs remained numb and atrophied.
By now, he was wearing steel braces that belted on at the waist, locked at the knees, and fully encased his legs. They weighed fourteen pounds. Slowly he mastered the use of crutches. The task required strength, stamina, and a sure sense of balance. That summer and through the fall, he worked hard, usually in vain, to make it unassisted from the house down the quarter-mile driveway to the Albany Post Road. On perhaps the only occasion that he managed the distance, he was so worn down that he w
as unable to exercise for four days.
Dr. Lovett, who continued to monitor his progress, had long since lost his early optimism; he now believed that his patient would never regain the use of his legs. Roosevelt, maintaining the stubborn denial that allowed him to retain a sense of purpose and destiny, was convinced that exercise could rebuild his withered limbs and make them functional again. The buoyancy of water, the warmer the better, allowed movement. Two or three times a week, he took advantage of the heated “swimming tank” on the Rhinebeck estate of his wealthy cousin and admirer Vincent Astor. The illusion that he was actually using his legs strengthened his determination and kept alive the hope that some day he might again walk unassisted. Recalling his last enervating swim in the Bay of Fundy, he told his chauffeur, “Water got me into this fix, water will get me out again!”12
Roosevelt stayed at Hyde Park well into the fall. On October 22, 1922, he was driven down to New York on his first trip back to F&D since he had left for Campobello fifteen months earlier. His car stopped right at the door. With his driver’s assistance, he easily negotiated the one step up to the front door of the building, but halfway to the elevator, one of his crutches slipped on the slick marble floor, and he fell backward. On the floor, surrounded by a curious and concerned crowd, he quickly erased whatever anger or disappointment might have flitted across his face, smiled, joked, and asked a couple of solid-looking younger men to assist the chauffeur in getting him up. He proceeded to his office, spent the afternoon there, went back to Hyde Park, and did not return for two months.
The Roosevelts moved back into their New York house in early December. Franklin hoped to spend at least two days a week at the office. Reality was dispiriting; bad weather made it nearly impossible for him to go out. He felt cold temperatures more keenly than in the past and must have found exercise more difficult. The household remained crowded and hectic. Deciding to get away to warmer climes, he traveled to Florida, rented a houseboat, the Weona II, and for three weeks cruised around the tip of the peninsula with old friends indulgent of his fun-loving streak. Eleanor spent only a few days with him.13
Appointing himself “admiral,” he kept a log that documented a carefree vacation of skimpy dress, skinny-dipping, fresh-caught fish dinners, and abundant bootleg booze. He produced a versification, entitled “Community Life,” for the boat’s log. One stanza captured the tone of the journey:
When they first come on board they think it’s so nice—
With staterooms and bathtubs and comforts sans price—
Till they suddenly realize that every partition
Sounds intimate echoes of each guest’s condition
Of mind and of body—For whispers of details
The wall in its wisdom with great gusto retails.
He returned to New York at the end of March, deeply tanned, feeling fit and happy, and sporting long, well-developed sideburns that his mother found eerily similar to his father’s.14
For the next three years, late-winter excursions to Florida and aimless cruises on a happy houseboat were an annual event. Roosevelt and a good friend, John Lawrence, a semi-invalid with weak legs, jointly purchased a beat-up Florida-based houseboat and renamed it the Larooco (Lawrence, Roosevelt & Co.). Its temperamental engines, peeling paint, and leaky deck did little to discourage the low-level bacchanal atmosphere in which he gloried.15
On each of these voyages, which lasted from two to three months, Roosevelt brought along Missy LeHand. Far more than a scheduler of appointments, taker of dictation, and handler of his personal finances, she had become his closest female companion. Eleanor cared little for Franklin’s diversions and found his cocktail hours especially off-putting. Missy was always at his side, adding gaiety to every social occasion and increasingly becoming a frank, valued confidential adviser on political matters. Roosevelt needed her. His efforts at madcap amusement were reactions to bouts of dark depression. Years later, Missy told Frances Perkins that on some days he stayed in bed until nearly noon before he managed to pull together the buoyant manner to which his guests had become accustomed.16
Eleanor accepted Franklin’s relationship with Missy without complaint, possibly because she thought they did not have a sexual relationship. On the surface, her attitude toward her husband’s secretary would always be one of unreserved warmth. Sara displayed the same attitude.
If the Larooco provided a lot of pleasure, it was not without its frustrations. Maintenance was expensive, and the waters off Florida provided minimal opportunities for the exercise Roosevelt needed in his quest for further recovery. By the spring of 1925, he wanted to get rid of the boat. When he and Lawrence could find no takers, he used it again in 1926. That fall, a major hurricane ravaged South Florida. Larooco was swept far inland and deposited in a pine forest. After a vain attempt to market it as a hunting lodge, the owners sold it for scrap. By then, Roosevelt had turned his attention for recovery and psychic fulfillment elsewhere.
Noted philanthropist and banker George Foster Peabody interested Franklin in a thermal pool at Bullochville, Georgia, eighty miles south of Atlanta. A native Georgian who affected a large mustache and a goatee, Peabody was an enormously successful businessman and financier who generously supported the development of the post-Reconstruction South and promoted better race relations. He had acquired a run-down Victorian-era resort hotel, the Meriwether Inn, which a Georgia state historian has described as “a large, rambling building with gingerbread on its roofline, curlicues in its woodwork to shame an old-fashioned penman, gables galore and contours unclassifiable in architecture.” Fourteen freestanding cottages, also in need of rehabilitation, flanked the inn. A hot thermal spring fed its swimming pools. Peabody had initially hoped to redevelop the battered old resort into a health spa, but by 1924 he was mostly interested in selling it to someone who might preserve it.17
Franklin and Eleanor arrived for a visit on the evening of October 3, 1924. In hopes of luring more visitors, Bullochville was about to change its name to Warm Springs, but there was little to attract outsiders. The town was tiny (population 470) and shabby. The surrounding countryside reflected the general poverty of rural pine country Georgia. Roosevelt was long acquainted with the straitened circumstances of Hudson Valley farmers; some of his own tenants lived in substandard housing. What he found in Georgia was worse. On their first morning there, he and Eleanor awoke to sunlight shining in through cracks in the walls of their cottage. They quickly learned that, as Eleanor later put it, “for many, many people life in the South was hard and poor and ugly.”18
Eleanor, who would never much care for Warm Springs, spent only a day there before heading back to New York and John W. Davis’s futile Democratic presidential bid against Calvin Coolidge. In a dramatic role reversal, she devoted more time to the campaign than her husband. Franklin tarried with Missy for more than three weeks. The inn was closed for the season, and he had the pool all to himself. The eighty-eight degree water made long stretches of invigorating exercise possible two or three times a day. The locals, seeing him as a potential patron who could bring money and business to the community, went out of their way to be hospitable. Democrats from around the state extended speaking invitations.
A reporter from the Atlanta Journal came down to interview him and penned a widely disseminated article titled “Franklin D. Roosevelt Will Swim to Health.” A photo pictured Roosevelt in a swimsuit at poolside, displaying matchstick legs without a hint of self-consciousness. The article quoted him as saying he was contemplating a complete cure and observed that he had “made a great hit with the people of Warm Springs.” Writing to his mother, Roosevelt said, “I feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could well be established here.”19
Returning to Warm Springs at the beginning of April 1925, he found that stories about his enthusiasm for the thermal waters had attracted numerous “polios” (as victims of the disease preferred to be called) fro
m around the country. Some left after learning that the inn had no physicians, therapists, or treatment plan. Others insisted on staying. Roosevelt had a nearby doctor give them a cursory examination to ensure they were healthy enough for vigorous exercise. Then he improvised: “I undertook to be doctor and physiotherapist, all rolled into one. . . . I taught them all at least to play around in the water.” Soon he was glorying in his role as “Old Doctor Roosevelt,” examining the muscles of his new charges, exercising with them, and taking them on picnics. He moved easily between leadership and comradeship, always maintaining a gay and happy facade. Involving himself in the efforts to restore the resort, he became, he wrote to a friend, “consulting architect and landscape engineer . . . giving free advice on the moving of buildings, the building of roads, setting out of trees and remodeling the hotel.”20
Still, he hesitated to invest financially, probably because neither his wife nor his mother thought his pocket could sustain the burden of his transformational vision. He spent more than three months, from late August through early December 1925, in Marion, Massachusetts, under the care of Dr. William McDonald, a neurologist who subjected his patients to rigorous exercise and advised them to work without their braces as much as possible. In early December, wearing a brace on only one leg and using crutches, he managed to “walk” about a block. He spent the summer of 1926 under McDonald’s care, but he also plunged ahead with his plans for Warm Springs.
Like his father, Franklin Roosevelt was willing to take financial gambles—so long as the stakes were relatively small and the risks carefully contained. During the 1920s, he got involved in a number of speculative business ventures, the most daring being an investment company formed to trade against fluctuations in the German mark. As Eleanor recalled it, he lost money in almost every such enterprise, but never very much. Now he was preparing to bet most of his modest fortune on Warm Springs. His wife made a final argument with him, expressing her worry that the project might make it impossible to educate the children. He responded, no doubt accurately, “Ma will always see the children through.”21
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 14
