Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (33 page)

W
ith Howe and Farley at the Chicago convention, 1932

Yet his moment of self-pity passed—at least as far as Roosevelt let others see. The mindset of the Victorian era in which Roosevelt grew up had its quirks and foibles, but one of its virtues was its employment of outward denial as a coping strategy. Males of Roosevelt’s generation—and to some extent the females too—were expected to meet misfortune with a stiff upper lip and a sturdy smile, to deny that anything serious was wrong and to soldier forward. Doubtless for certain persons in particular circumstances this approach was counterproductive, but in many other cases it was a perfectly reasonable response to conditions beyond the ability of the sufferer to control. Fate was more capricious then, or so it seemed. Disease struck unexpectedly, often inexplicably, in that era of relative medical ignorance. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards ravaged unprepared populations in the days before scientific forecasting. Financial panics plunged nations into chaos at a time when neither economists nor policy makers understood how industrial economies really worked. When everyone was a victim at one point or another, no one won sympathy by wearing victimhood as a badge. Get over it, get on with life, might have been the motto of the era.

It became Roosevelt’s modus operandi. It didn’t keep him from thinking about what he had lost; it didn’t prevent his cursing his luck when the pain in his legs left him lying awake at night. Never had his future been so darkly unknowable. Would he be a cripple for life? What would people think of him? Could he ever be intimate with a woman again? How could he run for office if he couldn’t even walk?

But when morning came he pushed back the demons of despair. The Roosevelts refused to be weak in public. The Delanos refused even more adamantly. By the time Sara reached his bedside, her son had mastered his emotions sufficiently to treat his illness almost as a lark. Dr. Bennett and Eleanor were in the room when Sara entered. “I am glad you are back, Mummy,” he said with a smile. “I got up this party for you!” Sara afterward wrote to her sister of the “happy, cheerful attitude” Franklin maintained. During one examination by Bennett, Sara noted from outside the door of Franklin’s room: “I can hear them all laughing.”

R
OOSEVELT’S ILLNESS
extended his stay at Campobello much longer than he had expected, and by mid-September he was eager to get off the island and back to civilization. This was no easy matter. The isolation of Campobello had enabled Louis Howe to hold the press at a distance, but it also complicated Roosevelt’s returning to New York without alerting the world to his condition. Walking or riding from the dock at Easton to the train station was typically a public act, conducted in full view of whoever happened to be around. Because Roosevelt—still considered one of the most eligible Democrats in the country—had been out of sight for more than a month, the local stringers for the major papers mounted a stakeout as the summer season drew to a close.

Howe weighed various tricks for distracting the newsmen, before resorting to simple prevarication. He announced that Roosevelt’s boat would be arriving at a certain hour and invited reporters to be present. Then he whisked Roosevelt—carried to and from the boat on a stretcher by several islanders well paid to keep their mouths shut—into the dock ahead of schedule and onto a private railcar before the reporters realized they had been fooled.

The ruse bought Howe time, but only a little. The reporters immediately realized that Roosevelt had something to hide, and the stakeout shifted down the line to New York. On September 16 the city’s papers had the story. “F. D. Roosevelt Ill of Poliomyelitis,” the front page of the
New York Times
declared. Yet Howe still managed to control the story and put it in the most favorable light. The regular Roosevelt family physician, George Draper, declared, on the basis of Howe’s testimony and his own cursory examination of Roosevelt at the Presbyterian Hospital, that the patient was much improved. “I cannot say how long Mr. Roosevelt will be kept in the hospital,” Draper told reporters. “But you can say definitely that he will not be crippled. No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.” Roosevelt himself—which was to say, Howe—declared through the hospital’s superintendent that he had had a “comfortable trip” and was feeling “very well.”

The news that one of the most prominent men in the country had contracted polio triggered an outbreak of concern in New York and elsewhere regarding the disease. Authorities immediately sought to put the Roosevelt case in perspective. The director of New York City’s infectious disease bureau, Dr. Louis Harris, reported that the city had experienced 269 cases in the previous year, of which slightly less than one-fifth had been fatal. The cases were more numerous than in recent years, but not so much more, Harris hastened to explain, as to constitute an epidemic. Additionally, although the late summer and early fall—the current period—was the time when the incidence of polio peaked, it always declined with the onset of cool weather. Folk wisdom asserted that the countryside was safer than the city; Harris said this was not true. In fact, in a substantial fraction of the reported cases, the infection seemed to have occurred outside the city. Residents were advised to remain calm, conduct themselves sensibly, and avoid crowds. How this last bit of advice was to be followed in the nation’s largest city, Harris declined to say.

O
THER REACTIONS TO
the news of Roosevelt’s illness were more personal. Within days Roosevelt began receiving letters from polio victims relating their own stories, offering encouragement, and generally expressing solidarity with a famous man who shared, at least in this one respect, their fate. “Fellow Sufferer,” wrote a Minneapolis woman. “Through the enclosed clipping”—a piece about Roosevelt—“I have just learned the pretty and truthful name of that which I have suffered for eleven years.” (The news accounts popularized, in many locales for the first time, the label poliomyelitis in place of infantile paralysis.) This woman explained that she walked with a cane, although she allowed this was common enough for one of her age: “only 87
¹
/2 years old.”

Roosevelt was touched by the woman’s sympathy and good humor. He thanked her for her kind thoughts and added that he hoped to be as lucky as she. “If I could feel assured that time could treat me so lightly as to leave me at eighty-seven and half years with all my vigor, powers, and only a cane required,” he wrote, “I would consider that my future was very bright indeed.”

Additional letters arrived from old friends and associates. Walter Camp picked up on the positive tone of the press coverage. “This is just a line to assure you how glad all your old friends were to get reports that you are coming along all right,” Camp wrote Roosevelt. He recalled the exercise sessions during the war and said he hoped “to repeat the old days when Delano, McAdoo, Davis, and you formed my ‘Flying Squadron’ and we ‘double-quicked’ in Potomac Park!”

Answering Camp required all the appearance of optimism Roosevelt could summon. The mere mention of those days when he had been Camp’s prize physical specimen drove home yet again how much he had lost. And though Roosevelt encouraged Howe and his doctors to portray his condition in the most positive light, he knew they were stretching the truth shamelessly. Yet he set his jaw, clamped the smile on his face, and dictated a reply—since his hands remained too weak to manipulate a pen. He told Camp how well he remembered the sessions in Potomac Park. He added, “I can assure you that if I could get up this afternoon and join with Messrs. McAdoo, Davis, and Delano in a sprint for the record, I would consider it the greatest joy in the world. However, the doctors are most encouraging, and I have been given every reason to expect that my somewhat rebellious legs will permit me to join in another course of training sometime in the future.”

D
ID HE BELIEVE IT
? This was a critical question as his recovery began. To display optimism to the world was one thing; to actually expect improvement was something else. Patient histories showed that polio victims benefited from physical therapy: from moving their legs under their own remaining power, often in water; from having their legs moved by nurses, therapists, and anyone else willing to lend a hand; and from walking as best they could on crutches, braces, and supporting arms. The cause of their paraplegia was neurological—damage to the nerves that initiated and controlled muscle movement—but the consequences were muscular, as the leg muscles atrophied from lack of use; circulatory, from the lack of assistance those muscles had supplied to the heart in pumping blood about the body; and skeletal, when the large bones of the legs and hips lost calcium from lack of weight-bearing stress. Sometimes, or so experience suggested, the damaged nerves recovered to a certain degree, and the physical therapy contributed to the recovery, with the patients regaining partial or in rare cases nearly full use of their legs. But even where the nerves were permanently affected, the physical therapy helped forestall the secondary symptoms, which complicated the paralysis, leading to general decline and sometimes premature death.

The secret to consistent physical therapy was hope. To every person who contracted the disease—very young infants perhaps excluded—the disability came as a severe psychological blow. Dr. Lovett had encountered this often enough to consider the depression he had predicted for Roosevelt part of the disease itself. Most patients regained their emotional equilibrium sooner or later, but those who managed to view their altered circumstances with hope were more likely to stick to the regimen of therapy required to make any substantial degree of physical recovery possible.

Roosevelt gave every outward impression of hope. He spoke consistently of believing that he would get better, and he frequently pointed to improvements in this or that measure of muscular control. Yet the improvements were often less than he claimed, which suggests some degree of deception—perhaps deception of himself as much as of others.

Whatever his true feelings, he certainly
acted
as though he expected to improve. Rarely had a patient exhibited greater diligence toward recovery than Roosevelt. He undertook his therapy, after Lovett gave his approval, with a zeal that shortly worried the doctor. Lovett had discovered that certain patients overdid their therapy, from denial of the extent of their injuries or impatience at the slowness of their recovery. Roosevelt’s overwork probably reflected a bit of both, and Lovett and George Draper, the New York doctor, felt obliged to slow him down. Yet caution entailed hazards of its own, for it might convey discouragement. Finding the balance was extremely difficult—and tremendously important. “The psychological factor in his management is paramount,” Draper wrote. “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 which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.”