Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (34 page)

Draper, who directed the day-to-day treatment, and Lovett, who consulted from Boston, handled Roosevelt gently, indulging his optimism to a greater degree than they might have with patients less determined or less famous. They knew that Roosevelt’s chances of walking again were very small. But little was to be gained by sharing this knowledge with the patient, as long as his ignorance didn’t cause him to injure himself further. So they quietly kept watch and let him dream about getting back on his feet.

14.

T
HE AUTUMN OF 1921 AND THE FOLLOWING WINTER PASSED SLOWLY
but swiftly, in the paradoxical manner that clocks creep but calendar pages fall away for the under-occupied ill. Roosevelt remained in Manhattan to be close to Dr. Draper and his therapists and to the children, who attended school in the city, except for James, who had graduated to Groton. Friends and former associates dropped by to visit; Roosevelt greeted them with a hearty good cheer that often took them aback. Josephus Daniels wasn’t sure what to expect of his old assistant, who had once skipped across the decks of rolling ships with a nonchalance that worried even the tars. Daniels’s uncertainty showed as he approached Roosevelt’s bed, and it prompted a characteristic reaction. “He hauled off and gave me a blow that caused me nearly to lose my balance,” Daniels remembered. “He said, ‘You thought you were coming to see an invalid, but I can knock you out in any bout.’” Roosevelt wasn’t always so physical with guests, but with those who had known him in public life and whose opinion mattered to his future in politics, he took pains—sometimes literally—to prove that he was no less forceful, no less able to stand up for friends and against enemies, than he had ever been.

He kept touch with the outside world to the extent he could. By personal conferences at his home and by telephone, telegraph, and letter, he conducted various business of the New York office of Fidelity & Deposit. By similar means he communicated with leaders of the state and national Democratic party, consulting on policies, on personnel, on past and future campaigns. In every case his object was to reclaim as much of his old life as possible.

In February 1922 he was fitted for leg braces. These heavy steel traps clamped about his shins and thighs and connected to leather belts that encased his hips and torso; when the hinges at his knees were locked into place, the devices could support his weight in an upright posture—once he learned how to balance himself. This task, for one who hadn’t stood at all for six months and who lacked the stabilizing forces supplied to most people by the muscles of their feet and legs was tricky and arduous. Yet Roosevelt, with the help of his therapists and the encouragement of Eleanor, Louis Howe, the children, and Sara, eventually mastered it.

Far more daunting was learning to walk in the braces, or rather to lurch forward, step by ungainly step. Because his hip and thigh muscles didn’t have the strength and coordination to swing the braces, he had to employ the muscles of his abdomen and lower back. He would prop himself on two crutches and one leg while, with a lean and a twisting heave of his pelvis, he threw the other leg forward. After months of strenuous practice he managed to develop a kind of rhythm, which made his gait resemble a walk in tempo if in little else. Yet he never became really stable, and he kept to his wheelchair except when something extraordinary dictated that he stand.

S
ARA WAS RIGHT
in one thing about her son’s affliction: he would be more comfortable physically at Hyde Park than he was in the house on East Sixty-fifth Street. The Manhattan residence had easily accommodated the Roosevelt family when the children were younger and smaller, but as they grew they needed more space. And now the house had to accommodate Franklin’s live-in nurse, in addition to the regular staff of servants.

Louis Howe also required a room, having decided to move in with his boss. Two years earlier Eleanor wouldn’t have tolerated Howe’s permanent presence under her roof. But the bond that had developed between them during the 1920 campaign grew stronger under the strain of Franklin’s illness. Eleanor, moreover, understood the importance of a positive outlook in her husband’s recuperation, and she appreciated that the hours he spent with Howe, re-fighting old political battles and plotting new ones, did him more good than any medication or physical therapy.

Unfortunately, neither Howe’s hygiene nor his manners had improved. He smoked constantly and ubiquitously—at breakfast, in the parlor, on the stairs—till every room reeked of smoke and ashes covered the carpets and the furniture. Franklin smoked, too, but at least he was housebroken. Howe wore the same suit day after day till Eleanor insisted that he change it. He puzzled and irritated the children, who wondered how this interloper had horned his way into the family and what kind of person abandoned his own wife and children—who lived in Poughkeepsie, where Howe visited them on weekends—to take up residence with another family.

Anna Roosevelt, now fifteen, felt Howe’s presence most acutely. He displaced her from the large bedroom on the third floor she thought should be hers. She carried her complaints to Sara, whose negative opinion of Howe—that “dirty, ugly little man,” she called him—was no secret to anyone in the family. Sara naturally sided with Anna. “Granny, with a good insight into my adolescent nature, started telling me that it was inexcusable that I, the only daughter of the family, should have a tiny bedroom in the back of the house while Louis enjoyed a large, sunny front bedroom with his own private bath,” Anna recalled. “Granny’s needling finally took root. At her instigation, I went to Mother one evening and demanded a switch in rooms.”

Eleanor later remembered this period as the “most trying winter of my life.” She told Anna that the whole family had to make sacrifices. She herself didn’t have a bedroom at all but slept in one of the younger boy’s rooms and dressed in Franklin’s bathroom. Yet she understood that more was involved than living arrangements—and that Sara was using Anna for her own purposes. “Because of constant outside influences,” Eleanor recalled, “the situation grew in her”—Anna’s—“mind to a point where she felt that I did not care for her and was not giving her any consideration.” Franklin’s patience on the subject was understandably limited, which didn’t help matters. “There were times at the dinner table when she would annoy her father so much that he would be severe with her and a scene would ensue. Then she would burst into tears and retire sobbing to her room.”

Eleanor held things together as long as she could. But one day, not especially more trying than most others of that period, she suddenly found herself weeping uncontrollably. “I could not think why I was sobbing, nor could I stop,” she wrote. Elliott arrived home from school, saw his mother in a state in which he had never observed her, and fled in alarm. Franklin Jr. and John, to whom she had been reading, wandered away mystified. Louis Howe heard her sobs and gallantly tried to console her; failing, he too abandoned the field. “I sat on the sofa in the sitting room and sobbed and sobbed.” After a long while she crossed through one of the passageways connecting the house to Sara’s, which was empty following Sara’s move to Hyde Park for the season. She splashed herself with cold water and eventually calmed down. “That is the one and only time I ever remember in my entire life having gone to pieces,” she recollected decades later.

T
HE STRESSES CHANGED
but didn’t noticeably diminish during the spring of 1922, when the family followed Sara to Hyde Park. Sara had readied the house for Franklin’s arrival, adding ramps where a step or two would have stymied him, retuning the elevator added during her husband’s final illness, and instructing the servants on the care of an invalid—which was how she viewed her son. Beyond the concern of any mother for her child, she hoped to show Franklin how much more pleasant life could be at Hyde Park, away from the noise and dirt of the city, in a house large enough to accommodate his shrunken world, among people who respected him for what he was rather than what he did.

At Hyde Park, Sara reclaimed some of the primacy in Franklin’s life she had lost to Eleanor. Springwood was
her
home; she would have a hand in all that happened there. Eleanor might be Franklin’s wife, but at Springwood she would be Sara’s guest. And guests had certain duties, among them deference to their hosts.

For the most part Eleanor didn’t challenge Sara’s claims. She appreciated that Sara—and Sara’s servants—shouldered much of the burden of Franklin’s physical care. She had never liked to manage a house; at Springwood she didn’t have to. The children, besides, were making ever greater demands of her, especially now that Franklin could no longer do much of what he had done before. “I became conscious of the fact that I had two young boys who had to learn to do the things that boys must do—swim and ride and camp,” she wrote. Because her own experience out of doors was quite limited, she had to teach herself as she taught them. It wasn’t easy. “I had no confidence in my ability to do physical things at this time. I could go into the water with the boys, but I could not swim. It began to dawn upon me that if these two youngest boys were going to have a normal existence without a father to do these things with them, I would have to become a good deal more companionable and more of an all-around person than I had ever been before.”

Her renaissance began behind the wheel of one of Sara’s cars. After a minor mishap some years earlier, Eleanor had left the driving to others. But camping trips and kindred adventures required the personal mobility cars increasingly provided, and she determined to master the motor arts. Early outings went poorly. She smacked a stone gatepost, and later, en route to a picnic, rolled the car, with children aboard, backward off the road, down a sharp decline, and into a tree. “It was pure luck I did not overturn the car and seriously injure someone,” she confessed. But gradually she tamed the unruly vehicle, and the family drives grew less exciting, to general relief.

S
OMETHING ELSE
discouraged Eleanor from competing with Sara. Since discovering Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor had self-consciously cultivated interests of her own. The needs of the children initially limited the time she could devote to her interests, but as they grew older she found herself freer. The campaign of 1920 had attuned her to politics in a way that came naturally to most Roosevelts but heretofore not to her. She joined the League of Women Voters and the Women’s City Club of New York, and met women who provided role models for the person she increasingly wanted to be: confident, independent, useful. She learned to type and write shorthand. She studied cooking—not actually to put food on her family’s table but for the satisfaction of knowing she
could
do so if the supply of servants ever failed.