Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (35 page)

At first her name meant more than her talents to the organizations she joined. In the early 1920s, following Theodore’s death and Franklin’s national race, the Roosevelt name was the most valuable political property in America. And with the enfranchisement of women, a woman bearing the Roosevelt name was doubly useful to political and other organizations that hoped to catch the public eye. In the spring of 1922, the executive secretary of the women’s division of the New York Democratic party, Nancy Cook, called to ask Eleanor to speak at a party fund-raiser. Eleanor initially demurred, disliking to speak before audiences and in any event wondering what she would say. But Franklin urged her to reconsider, doubtless thinking the experience would both broaden her horizons and defend the trademark on the family name. Louis Howe seconded the urging, from similar mixed motives, and he offered to help with the speechwriting and with tips on delivery. Eleanor let herself be persuaded, for Franklin’s sake and her own.

She spoke briefly at first, and poorly. “I had a very bad habit, because I was nervous, of laughing when there was nothing to laugh at,” she remembered. Howe, who sat in the back of her audiences, recorded her titters and pointed them out to her afterward. He gave her a rule for speaking she never forgot: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down.” She followed his advice and gradually got better.

T
HE FIRST ANNIVERSARY
of the onset of Franklin’s illness found him at Hyde Park, stubbornly optimistic regarding his long-term prognosis but increasingly impatient with his lack of short-term progress. The paralysis had settled into his legs, leaving his hands, arms, and shoulders free and mobile. His arms and shoulders were growing stronger than they had been before his attack, as they now carried much of the weight his legs had borne. On his crutches they provided both support and locomotion; in his bed they pulled him up and about via bars and straps above his mattress; around the house they propelled him by wheelchair and, on occasion, across the floor on his rear end. His arms and shoulders grew stronger still from an exercise designed for his legs. On the Springwood lawn, at the suggestion of another polio sufferer, he had a set of parallel bars constructed waist-high, just far enough off the ground that his feet could touch while his arms held most of his weight. He would move along the bars, willing his unbraced legs to walk, while his arms and shoulders did the actual work against gravity.

He took up swimming as therapy. At first he merely sat in the pond by the spring house, for the hydraulic massage its waters provided. But the water was cold, and to ward off its chill he would paddle around. In time a neighbor, one of the Astors, offered use of his heated indoor pool, which allowed Roosevelt to linger in the water. “The legs work wonderfully in the water, and I need nothing to keep myself afloat,” he informed Dr. Draper.

Yet all the therapy and all his determination failed to produce what he really wanted: stronger legs. His legs weren’t getting worse, but after a year they weren’t getting better. His mobility was improving, but that was compensation—stronger arms, greater skill with his braces and crutches—rather than recovery. And even his mobility improved in distressingly small increments. He set for himself the goal of walking, on braces and crutches, from the house down the two-hundred-yard driveway to the road. Each day he struggled a bit farther before his arms gave out and he sank, exhausted, to the ground.

F
OR A MAN
of affairs, a world traveler since birth, Springwood soon seemed a prison. Another reason Eleanor didn’t bother fighting Sara’s plan to reclaim her son was that she knew Franklin would never consent to the confined life his mother intended for him. After a long summer in Hyde Park, he returned to Manhattan. He remained a vice president of Fidelity & Deposit, although he hadn’t been to the office in more than a year. He decided to pay his employer a call.

In that era, paraplegics weren’t expected to venture into the world, and the world made little accommodation for them or anyone else who couldn’t walk, climb stairs, step up and down curbs, mount train platforms, and get in and out of automobiles. The mere sight of a cripple—the common term and conception—who wasn’t begging for coins could often draw crowds. Roosevelt attracted a curious audience upon his return to the Fidelity & Deposit office on lower Broadway. The ride downtown was no problem; a chauffeur guided the family Buick. This driver had been chosen, as well, for his strength of limb, for after the car pulled up to the door of the building, he had to manhandle Roosevelt from the back seat to a standing position and lock his braces straight. They had rehearsed the routine at home, but any opening performance is always fraught with uncertainty, and in this case a gust of autumn wind flipped Roosevelt’s hat to the street. The driver couldn’t retrieve it without dropping Roosevelt; while they debated what to do, a helpful passerby picked it up and put it back on Roosevelt’s head. Roosevelt laughed his thanks to the stranger, even as the sweat that soaked his shirt and coat betrayed his anxiety.

Inside the building, the marble floor, polished to a gleaming smoothness that made transit easy for everyone else, challenged Roosevelt’s advance. He had never practiced with crutches on such a surface, and their rubber tips struggled for a grip. With a grim smile and the driver’s help he got almost to the elevator before the crutches slipped and he tumbled heavily to the stone floor.

Again he put on a brave face. He laughed as though he were romping with his children on the floor of his bedroom, and he nonchalantly accepted the offer of two sturdy young fellows who, together with the driver, stood him up again and deposited him bodily in the elevator. The rest of the outing passed unremarkably. “A grand and glorious occasion,” was how he described the luncheon his boss, Van Lear Black, hosted for him that day. But not for months did he return to the office, and rarely during the rest of his life would he allow himself to be placed in a position to suffer such an embarrassing pratfall.

H
EALTH RESORTS IN
America had never developed the following their European counterparts enjoyed, which was why James Roosevelt, Franklin’s father, had traveled to Germany every year. Part of their failure to catch on was the underdeveloped state of American medicine, compared with that of Europe. It was the doctors as much as the waters that drew the infirm to Bad Nauheim in Germany, Baden in Switzerland, and Spa in Belgium (which gave its name to the species). Another part of the failure resulted from the underdeveloped state of the American economy. Medical tourism was expensive, and the number of Americans who could afford to travel and spend weeks or months to regain or improve their health was comparatively small.

Yet a few places earned names for themselves and profits for their proprietors. Saratoga Springs had attracted the infirm for decades before Louis Howe’s parents took him there in the 1870s. Stafford Springs, Connecticut, and Berkeley Springs, Virginia, boasted longer histories; Blue Licks, Kentucky, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, made do with shorter résumés.

A warm springs near Pine Mountain, Georgia, had enticed human visitors for centuries, perhaps millennia. The indigenous peoples and later the first white settlers ascribed healing powers to the soothing, mineral-laden waters. As early as the 1830s the springs were being touted as a destination for cure seekers; by the late nineteenth century the traffic to the area had grown large enough to cause one Charles Davis to build a three-hundred-room hotel, the Meriwether Inn. The resort included tennis and bowling facilities, a dance hall, and a shooting range, in addition to the swimming pool that captured the healing waters for the convenience of the guests. But it was Davis’s misfortune to open the resort in time for the depression of the 1890s, which cut deeply into discretionary spending on such items as health vacations. Davis lacked the money to maintain the place through the hard times, and as the nineteenth century ended it was falling into disrepair.

Franklin Roosevelt paid no attention to Warm Springs until he contracted polio, but as his rehabilitation stalled he became intrigued by reports of the Georgia spa. He and Eleanor traveled south to investigate. “The old hotel with its piazzas called to mind the southern belles of Civil War days,” Eleanor related. “The outdoor swimming pool was the one really fine thing about the place.” The pool was all Franklin saw, and at the first opportunity he shed his clothes and lowered himself in. “I spent over an hour in the pool this a.m.,” he wrote Sara. “It is really wonderful and will I think do great good.”

The water’s secret was its warmth and unusual density. Like most warm springs, this one drew its heat from deep below the surface. The rains that fell on Pine Mountain, above the resort, filtered through crevices in the granite down to depths where the crust retained some of the heat of its magmatic origin. Reaching an impervious layer, the warm water ran along this layer till the layer breached the surface several miles from Pine Mountain and water gushed forth at the rate of several hundreds of gallons a minute—more after unusually rainy seasons, less following drought. Besides transferring heat from the depths to the surface, the water transported large quantities of dissolved minerals. Water laced with minerals is denser than fresh water and supports with unusual force whatever is immersed in it. Swimmers discover they can’t sink even if they try; persons who walk and otherwise exercise in the water can do so almost effortlessly.

Between the warmth and the buoyancy of the Warm Springs waters, Roosevelt found he could pad and paddle about the pool there for hours. Most of the initial positive effect was psychological; not surprisingly for one eager to be cured, he attributed his new stamina to improvement in his leg muscles rather than to the lighter load they were carrying. But even after he discounted for the water’s effect, he could hope that the extended exercise it allowed would, in time, rebuild his withered muscles. “The doctor says it takes three weeks to show effects,” Roosevelt told Sara. Even if it took three months, or three years, he felt, it would be time and effort well spent.

Almost immediately Roosevelt adopted Warm Springs as his second home. “The cottage is delightful and very comfortable, and with Roy and Mary”—staff on loan from the proprietors—“we shall be most comfortable,” he informed Sara. Roosevelt made friends with the neighbors at once. Thomas Loyless had edited the
Atlanta Constitution
till the Ku Klux Klan, experiencing a revival in the 1920s, forced him and his liberal voice from the paper; he retreated to the mountains near Warm Springs, where Roosevelt got to know him and his wife. “We have gone motoring with Mr. and Mrs. Loyless and have seen the country pretty thoroughly,” Roosevelt informed Eleanor after she had returned to New York. “I like him ever so much, and she is nice but not broad in her interests. But she chatters away to Missy”—Missy LeHand, who had come south with Franklin and Eleanor to handle Franklin’s correspondence—“on the back seat, and I hear an occasional yes or no from Missy to prove she is not sleeping.”