Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  After his final cruise on the Larooco, Roosevelt returned to Warm Springs and closed the purchase. The transfer, concluded on April 29, 1926, for $195,000, conveyed to him the resort grounds, the Meriwether Inn, the guest cottages, the springs, and approximately 1,200 adjoining acres. Roosevelt gave Peabody a mortgage with no fixed payment schedule to cover the purchase price. It alone obligated about two-thirds of Roosevelt’s net worth. Development of the property would cost tens of thousands more. The deed done, Eleanor gamely told him, “I’m old and rather overwhelmed by what there is to do in one place and it wearies me to think of even undertaking to make new ties. Don’t be discouraged by me; I have great confidence in your extraordinary interest and enthusiasm. It is just that I couldn’t do it.”22

  In January 1927, Roosevelt established the nonprofit Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, to which he assigned the property. The foundation was to manage it, pay off the mortgage, raise money for its operations, and return Roosevelt’s personal investment to him. It gave him a note for the full amount of the mortgage, by then more than $201,000, and made periodic payments on it for the rest of his life. He served as the foundation’s president and de facto chief fund-raiser. His new law partner, Basil O’Connor, became its primary legal counsel and secretary-treasurer with day-to-day administrative duties. Peabody, a loyal political supporter as well as a philanthropist willing to back a good cause, seems never to have pressed for the money owed him.

  Roosevelt had initially hoped to combine a luxury resort with a polio treatment center. It soon became clear, however, that affluent guests who wanted a relaxing vacation found the sight of the crippled depressing; some even worried about contracting polio themselves. The Warm Springs complex became solely a hydrotherapy facility for polios. Its new owner, moreover, was determined that it should be made available, regardless of ability to pay, to all comers. Roosevelt encouraged service or fraternal organizations to underwrite the costs of indigent clients. From time to time, he personally covered their expenses.23 Rosy Roosevelt died in May 1927, leaving Franklin a welcome financial cushion with a bequest of $100,000.24

  Warm Springs became a remarkably successful philanthropic enterprise. The improvisational, chaotic atmosphere over which Old Doctor Roosevelt had presided in the spring of 1925 gave way to a thoroughly professional routine staffed by skilled physiotherapists and lubricated by Rooseveltian joviality. During its first year of operation, the foundation treated eighty polios. Only a few would be able to throw their crutches away after extended stays there, but the waters allowed for concentrated exercises to restore muscles not rendered totally useless. The staff trained patients to cope with their handicap. Most left better able to function in society and more confident of their powers.25

  Roosevelt’s return to politics in 1928 would greatly increase his visibility and give him fund-raising leverage with constituents who hoped to gain favor or simply to bask in his goodwill. The clientele, staff, and facilities grew rapidly. In 1928, one large pool was enclosed in glass for year-round use, courtesy of a $25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. Even after the Great Depression set in, Roosevelt managed to raise approximately $1.25 million. The ramshackle inn was demolished after new purpose-designed buildings had been erected. In 1934, 267 individuals received therapy. By then, the White House had given the Old Doc a unique platform for his dearest cause. Money flowed in freely.

  The foundation, appropriately recognizing Roosevelt as its greatest asset, insured his life for $500,000 for its own protection and to compensate his survivors for any unreimbursed investment he had made in it. It managed the polio center and expanded its work to treatments other than hydrotherapy. During his years as governor of New York, Roosevelt forgave $18,500 of the principal. As president, he would give the foundation a cottage his mother had built there (valued at $3,000) and just over $9,500 in royalties from his published personal papers. At his death, the foundation still owed him $93,341.68 in principal and $44,621.73 in interest, all of it covered by the insurance on his life.26

  In 1938, Roosevelt would establish the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—the March of Dimes—to fund the increasingly large and complex operations of Warm Springs and also to undertake the mission of finding a cure for what remained a dreaded disease that annually blighted the lives of tens of thousands of children. The payoff, the eventual eradication of polio in America, would come a little more than a decade after his death. If Franklin Roosevelt had done nothing more with his life, this alone would have established him as a historical figure.

  It is far easier to trace the course of Roosevelt’s reaction to polio than to gauge its impact on his life. The surface manifestations were clear enough to those close to him. The avid golfer would never walk the links again. The fine young horseman was now very occasionally put up on a placid mount for a publicity photo, but his paralyzed legs were incapable of controlling a steed at a normal canter.

  Only his intimate companions knew that he spent much of his time in a wheelchair, that he had to be lifted out of it into a bed or a chair, carried up steps or around other obstacles, and assisted in dressing or undressing, that he was in fact utterly dependent on the round-the-clock assistance of his valets. After years of effort, he managed to create the illusion of walking over short distances. Actually, he was swinging rigidly braced legs with his hip muscles, grasping a sturdy companion’s right arm with his left hand, and steadying his right leg with a cane. As he increasingly regained a sense of balance, he made it look relatively easy.

  In the beginning, concealment of his true condition from the larger world was a product of the widely perceived unseemliness of displaying a handicap in public, firmly reinforced by his deep denial that the condition was permanent. By the beginning of the 1930s, denial had become deception. As he prepared to run for president during his second term as governor of New York, his office would baldly assert that he did not use a wheelchair and claim that horseback riding was a regular recreation for him.

  Polio produced far more than denial. Years later Eleanor thought that the long, hard struggle, especially the need to commit to a course of treatment and stay with it over the long haul, had given her husband deep reserves of self-control and patience. He had developed, she said, an understanding that “once you make a decision you must not worry about it.”27

  Polio increased the range of Roosevelt’s experiences and the depth of his emotions; it may well have transformed his own sense of class identity by bringing him into contact with a wide range of fellow sufferers. Earlier in his life, he had caught only fleeting glimpses of how most Americans lived. At Warm Springs, he found himself sharing a common physical disability with ordinary people who had no experience of privilege and little money. He made himself their benefactor and leader, and he seems to have felt vividly that they all shared a common experience and a common humanity. He genuinely enjoyed splashing in the pool with them and gloried in providing whatever amateur therapy he could. Wheeled to the edge of the pool, commanding the attention of his charges, he would ask at the top of his lungs, “Have you been good boys and girls while Papa was away?” Most of all, he enjoyed his role as chief turkey carver at the Warm Springs Thanksgiving dinner, which he missed only twice between 1927 and 1939.

  Warm Springs also provided close contact with the deep poverty and backwardness of the rural South. He first visited the town only sixty years after Sherman’s march through Georgia and less than fifty years after the end of Reconstruction. Sharecropping, hardscrabble farming, a one-crop economy based on the chronic overproduction of cotton, industrial underdevelopment, dirt roads, lack of electricity—all characterized a rural world at least half a century behind that of the Northeast.

  Roosevelt frequently drove himself through the countryside in a modified Ford with hand controls that operated accelerator, clutch, and brake. Talking with local farmers and townspeople along the way, he got a keen sense of how hard their lives were. Years later he recall
ed discovering the limitations of the rural education systems when a young man he took to be eighteen or nineteen invited him to be the graduation speaker at a nearby high school. Asked if he was president of the senior class, the visitor replied, “No, I am the principal of the school.” He had completed only his freshman year at the University of Georgia and was being paid $300 a year.28

  In addition to the Meriwether Inn property, Roosevelt purchased 1,700 acres of his own, hired local help to farm it, and prohibited the cultivation of cotton. He took a local country squire’s interest in the community and its people. In 1932 he built a new cottage to the south of the polio center on a slope that afforded a beautiful view of the countryside. A modest bungalow with a tiny kitchen, three small bedrooms, and a living-dining area with a fine stone fireplace, it would later become famous as the “little White House.”

  By 1928, Franklin Roosevelt had established himself as a philanthropist of national reputation, and he remained a prominent Democratic Party leader. He was also a person of importance in Georgia, a benefactor of the Warm Springs area, and an honorary southerner. Without ever rejecting his attachment to the Hudson Valley, he now gloried in a second identity. Warm Springs had brought him great personal satisfaction and established an important base for his future political career.

  Chapter 9

  The Young Prince Returns

  1922–1928

  At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke not only to the delegates but also to a huge radio audience. Suddenly, the felled young prince of the Democratic Party was back, sounding strong and fit. He also was in the company of a wife who was making herself an independent force in American politics. The destinies of the man and his party were converging.

  Before polio struck, Roosevelt had established a game plan of calculated public prominence by way of civic activities and policy pronouncements, cultivation of state and local party leaders across the country, an eventual successful run for governor of New York, and finally a campaign for the White House. His courage and guile made the disease that had crippled him seem insignificant. Almost from the day he came home from the hospital, he created an illusion of constant and varied activity to convey the impression that he remained busy and concerned with the public good. He was especially visible in the New York Boy Scouts organization and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and in fund-raising for St. John the Divine Cathedral.1

  In 1923, he accepted, without pay, the presidency of the American Construction Council, a trade association for which he functioned as external spokesman and internal mediator but not day-to-day manager. Like Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, he became a vocal advocate of voluntary, long-range business planning. The poorly funded organization achieved little authority over the fragmented construction industry, but it left Roosevelt with a concept of government-fostered industrial self-regulation that would prove attractive in the crisis days of his early presidency.2

  He was about as obvious an heir-apparent for a Democratic presidential nomination as anyone else. The party’s 1920 nominee, James Cox, had withdrawn from politics. Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury and son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo, moved from New York to California, aligning himself with the southern and western wings of the party. New York’s Al Smith was the major northeastern urban Democrat.

  Roosevelt surely understood that he had outshone Cox in 1920 and transcended the regional appeals of McAdoo and Smith. Many boosters already saw him as the party’s ultimate hope. He probably also realized that with the economy making a strong recovery from the postwar recession, the Democrats were unlikely to prevail in the 1924 presidential election. His task was to bide his time, appear to overcome polio, and promote himself as the party’s hope.

  The Democratic Party, from its inception in the 1790s, had been a tenuous coalition of southern agrarian forces allied with northern big-city machines. From 1860 through 1920, it had won only four of sixteen presidential elections, two with Grover Cleveland and two with Woodrow Wilson. During the 1920s, its regional split was especially intense. Southern and western Democrats were mostly old-stock, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, pro-Prohibition, anti-immigrant, and tolerant of a strong and revived Ku Klux Klan. The northeastern faction was predominantly urban, dominated by bosses who drew their support from newer immigrant groups, heavily Catholic and Jewish, vehemently anti-Prohibition, and hostile to the Klan. The regional division created a political minefield for aspirants to national leadership.

  Polio gave Roosevelt an excuse to avoid a premature run for office while involving himself deeply in party affairs. Hardly home from the hospital at the beginning of November 1921, he had written to the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Tennessee congressman Cordell Hull. The letter extravagantly (although not necessarily insincerely) praised the DNC for selecting a leader with Hull’s “soundness of judgment and ability to get results,” asserted the need to reorganize the committee into a more effective political force, advocated a “yearly get-together conference” (at which Roosevelt would doubtless figure prominently), and offered his services. It was the work of a man not simply willing, but expecting, to lead his party out of the wilderness.3

  In New York politics, Roosevelt possessed a special status as an upstate Protestant Democrat who had made a strong reputation in Washington, run on a national ticket, and established tolerable relations with Tammany while keeping the machine at arm’s length. His old acquaintance from the legislature, Al Smith, was the state’s leading Democrat. Elected governor in 1918, Smith had served with distinction, only to be swept under in the Republican landslide of 1920. Roosevelt and numerous other party leaders wanted him to make another run in 1922. Smith, heading a trucking company and making more money than ever before in his life, was genuinely reluctant, but the most likely alternative was a bitter enemy, the wealthy and demagogic publisher William Randolph Hearst.

  Tacitly admitting that no other New York Democrat possessed Roosevelt’s appeal and visibility, Smith asked him for a public letter urging another gubernatorial candidacy. Upon receiving it, he responded with a “Dear Frank” missive announcing his availability. Sara congratulated her son for taking an action that “will save us from Hearst.” She was hardly the only Democrat to give him exaggerated credit. Nominated that fall, Smith went on to a resounding victory in November.4

  Unable to campaign, Roosevelt was a bystander; still, he had given Smith a real boost. It was easy to believe at the time that the two men were partners who strongly admired each other. In fact, they were simply allies of convenience. Smith had never much liked Roosevelt from their first meeting in Albany and never quite got past the idea that Roosevelt was a dilettante, but he understood that a Roosevelt endorsement mattered upstate.

  Roosevelt conversely needed Smith as a vital link to Tammany in a relationship that remained uneasy even after the sudden death of Boss Charles Murphy in March 1924. Respecting Smith’s accomplishments as governor and appreciating his political skills in the context of New York politics, he also surely realized that Smith was a hard sell nationally. He unquestionably knew that Smith was the one New York Democrat standing between him and a presidential nomination.

  Thus the two began a wary pas de deux that would last for a decade.

  Smith, back in Albany and emerging as a possibility for the 1924 Democratic nomination, asked Roosevelt to serve as his campaign manager. Roosevelt accepted with alacrity. After the death of Bourke Cockran, a grand old orator who had placed Smith’s name in nomination on other occasions, Smith asked Roosevelt to perform the task at the national convention. Once again, he received hearty agreement. Working honestly for Smith, Roosevelt displayed himself to party notables around the country as an attractive personality back in the fight.

  Ultimately a drama that played out at Madison Square Garden for two weeks in late June and early July told the nation as a whole of Roosevelt’s return. The Dem
ocratic convention of 1924 became an epic battle between the Smith and McAdoo wings of the party. Tempers flared inside the sweltering arena as the delegates fought over the platform. A plank that refrained from condemning the Klan by name carried by a single vote out of more than 1,000 cast. McAdoo led in the balloting but could not come close to the two-thirds majority he needed. Smith trailed hopelessly but was determined to deny McAdoo a victory. Finally both men withdrew, and on the 103rd ballot, the nomination went to John W. Davis, the eminent attorney and former ambassador to Great Britain who had been an outside possibility in 1920. Davis was especially esteemed by Sara and liked by Franklin, but realists understood he had no chance of victory in November. Franklin wished him well but surely knew that defeat was likely, leaving him with a clearer path to the presidency.

  The 1924 national party conventions were the first broadcast to much of the nation by radio. Twenty-one stations from Boston in the North to Atlanta in the South and Kansas City in the West, many with powerful transmitters, carried the proceedings. The nation’s first great national radio announcer, Graham McNamee, described the event to audiences ranging from families in their living rooms to crowds listening to loudspeakers at storefronts or in public parks. Radio could be an enormous asset for personalities who possessed good voices and shrewd instincts about its use.5

  Roosevelt’s role at the convention is mostly remembered for his speech nominating Smith, but every day, before and after his time on the podium, he made the walk to his seat in the New York delegation from which he operated as Smith’s floor manager. He drew on his son Jimmy, tall and strong at age sixteen, to act as his aide and human prop. For two weeks, he got out of his car and into a wheelchair; he was then pushed to the arena floor entrance closest to his seat and helped to a standing position, legs locked, crutch under his right shoulder, left hand gripping Jimmy’s arm. Slowly, wearing smiles that belied the difficulty of the task, they made their way toward the New York standard.