Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (38 page)

By early 1926 he was talking openly of his plan. “I had a nice visit from Charles Peabody”—the brother of the principal owner—“and it looks as if I have bought Warm Springs,” he wrote Sara. He was deliberately trying to shock his mother; he hadn’t yet bought the place, but he was letting her know he intended to, regardless of the opposition he was sure she would raise. “I want you to take a great interest in it,” he continued, “for I feel you can help me with many suggestions, and the place properly run will not only do a great deal of good but will prove financially successful.”

Sara was indeed leery; so was Eleanor. Though Franklin and Eleanor’s activities and circles of friends continued to diverge, their finances remained intertwined. They had enough for daily expenses, but James was in college and the younger boys, if perhaps not the rebellious Elliott, would follow. Eleanor wasn’t sure where the money would come from. “I know how you love creative work,” she wrote Franklin. “My only feeling is that Georgia is somewhat distant for you to keep in touch with what is really a big undertaking. One cannot, it seems to me, have vital interests in widely divided places.” Yet she conceded that her caution might be excessive. “I’m old and rather overwhelmed by what there is to do in one place…. Don’t be discouraged by me; I have great confidence in your extraordinary interest and enthusiasm.”

She had reason to worry. Franklin was talking of sinking $200,000, or two-thirds of his net worth, into the property. Renovations would run through additional tens of thousands before the place began to attract the kind of clientele that might actually make it pay.

He went forward all the same. In April 1926 he announced his purchase of the resort; shortly thereafter he spelled out the improvements he planned and the results he anticipated. “The first thing to be done concerning the curative powers of the spring waters will be to conduct some experiments under able physicians,” he told reporters. “This summer we expect to bring a limited number of patients to Warm Springs who will receive treatment under the direction of a staff of physicians. The physicians then can tell definitely the value of the warm waters.” Roosevelt said he expected the experiments to be an “unqualified success,” which would justify the construction of a sanitarium.

Though polio rehabilitation would be the focus of the first phase of the resort’s redevelopment, Roosevelt’s broader plan was much more ambitious. He described for the reporters a year-round facility catering to persons with plenty of money to spend on rest and outdoor recreation. He said that he had already engaged Donald Ross, the St. Andrews–bred Scotsman who built the finest golf courses of his generation, to carve a championship facility out of the forest on Pine Mountain. A three-thousand-acre shooting preserve would entice visitors partial to the thrill of the hunt. Riding trails—safely distant from the shooting preserve—would allow guests to gallop, trot, or walk their steeds over hill and dale. A stocked lake would bring out the Izaak Walton in visitors.

Roosevelt discreetly but clearly explained that the polio sanitarium would be separate from the larger resort facilities. He didn’t say so explicitly, but it was also clear that he hoped the revenues from the larger facility would underwrite the polio portion. Roosevelt’s model for the larger facility was premised on the sale of memberships to the golf club and of home sites in what he called the “cottage colony” that would grow up around the golf course. Roosevelt expected the members and guests to be of two kinds: northerners who came south for the winter and returned home in the spring, and southerners who headed for the hills during the summer. Borrowing a page from experienced promoters, Roosevelt assured reporters that enthusiasm was high, without revealing details. The list of prospective members included “some of the best people in the South and some of the best people in the North,” he said. “When this list grows a little larger we will be ready to announce the names of the first members.”

As Roosevelt expected, the mere fact of his purchase of Warm Springs assured the resort much positive publicity. From Atlanta to New York articles and editorials recounted the sale, his plans, and the positive impact the new ownership would have on a region bedeviled by poverty and lack of opportunity. “The waters of Warm Springs have been pronounced equal in some respects to the most famous health waters of Germany and Austria,” the
Atlanta Constitution
declared. “There is good reason to believe, therefore, that this resort, under the direction of one so able financially to develop it, and whose heart is so closely wedded to it, will become one of the great attractions of Georgia, and of marked economic value to the state.”

In conjunction with the unveiling of his plans for the resort, Roosevelt organized the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, which was chartered in New York in January 1927. The foundation’s purpose was to institutionalize Roosevelt’s dream while capturing the tax advantages available to nonprofit organizations. In time the foundation would buy out Roosevelt’s ownership, repaying his investment—and thereby enabling Eleanor to breathe easier regarding the children’s education. In the shorter term it enabled Roosevelt to dun his friends on behalf of his cause, but in the foundation’s name rather than his own. Edsel Ford, the son of the automaker, on visiting Warm Springs became an early donor. “Mrs. Ford and I are deeply impressed with the wonderful work which is being carried out here at Warm Springs and we would like to do something towards the development,” Ford wrote. “I am sending herewith a check for twenty-five thousand dollars which I hope you will accept for the Foundation with our best wishes for its complete success.”

The evolution of Roosevelt from politician to entrepreneur and healer impressed observers all the more. Following the announcement of a program to bring cash-short polio victims, at foundation expense, to Warm Springs, the
Atlanta Constitution
hailed the moving spirit of the enterprise as “Roosevelt the Reliever.” Applauding his “sympathetic and splendid philanthropy,” the paper went on to predict, “It will be one of the superb blessings to humanity if Mr. Roosevelt and his associates shall succeed in demonstrating that our Georgia Warm Springs is the ‘pool of Siloam’ to many thousands of the sufferers from the dread affliction that so deadens the limbs, spines, and even the brains of human creatures.”

R
OOSEVELT GREW AT
Warm Springs in ways he couldn’t have anticipated. Besides being Dr. Roosevelt to the patients, whose numbers expanded with each passing month, he was “the Boss” to the hundreds of men and women who worked on the grounds, built the golf course and the cottages, dug the pools, and tended the cows and chickens and corn and soybeans on the farm he purchased adjoining the resort. (But not cotton. “We’ll grow no cotton,” he declared, convinced that cotton contributed to the exhaustion of soil and the cycle of debt that trapped so many southern farmers). He was the dynamo of the Warm Springs Foundation, the phone caller and letter writer who hit up everyone he could think of for contributions to the worthiest cause he knew. He was the irresistible embodiment of polio, who hurried to Atlanta when he learned the American Orthopedic Association was meeting there and, against the scientifically skeptical inclinations of the distinguished doctors, persuaded them to send a team to Warm Springs to examine the facility and the therapeutic powers of the water.

He was also the face of the outside world to many of his Georgia neighbors. Tom Bradshaw, the Warm Springs village blacksmith, explained that he could rig a Model T with pulleys and levers to let a person drive with his hands and arms alone. Roosevelt laughed with pleasure at the thought, and laughed even louder each time he got in the car and tooled along the roads of Meriwether County. He shouted and waved at the men, women, and children he passed; he stopped to chat, to commiserate regarding the woeful price of crops, and to share a jar of moonshine when the revenuers weren’t looking. Some of those he encountered had never seen a Northerner; almost none had ever met a wealthy Yankee who treated them with such honest good cheer.

He charmed them all. He put the “polios”—as he and they called themselves—at ease with his matter-of-factness toward his disability. He led them in jokes, sometimes at the expense of the able-bodied guests. The young male assistants who propelled the wheelchairs about the grounds he dubbed “push boys” he struggled to suppress his mirth when some of the push boys, pretending paralysis, lowered themselves into the waters of a fountain that graced the front lawn of the resort and leaped out, proclaiming a miraculous cure, to the astonishment of gullible visitors. He played poker with all comers, taking the money of polios and able-bodies alike.

He held court in a cottage built to his specifications. Shortly after unveiling his master plan for the resort, he contracted for the construction of one of the first new cottages, for himself. Ground was broken in the autumn of 1926; the house was ready for occupation by the following February. Eleanor and Missy traveled to Atlanta to purchase a stove and refrigerator for the place; they collaborated on other touches to lend the feel of home. (Rarely did the two spend much time together, especially without Roosevelt. One wonders what they talked about on their Atlanta trip; neither ever said.)

Missy, who served as Roosevelt’s hostess, became more indispensable with each passing year. Her cottage was one of the next ones built. The full nature of Roosevelt’s relationship to Missy inspired quiet conjecture then and somewhat less-guarded guesses since. Elliott Roosevelt assumed they were lovers and had been at least since their days in Florida. Elliott contended that their intimacy “was treated as a simple fact of life aboard the
Larooco.
” He continued: “Everyone in the closely knit inner circle of Father’s friends accepted it as a matter of course.” As for his own reaction: “I remember being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat in a brown wicker chair in the main stateroom, holding her in his sun-browned arms, whose clasp we children knew so well. When Sis and Jimmy on occasion witnessed much the same scene, they had a similar reaction, as I learned when we spoke afterward. It was not in Father to be secretive or devious in his dealings with us. He made no attempt to conceal his feelings about Missy.”

Elliott explained that during this period his father regained feeling in his legs, with positive consequences for his overall mental and physical state. “Except for the braces,” Roosevelt declared, in a letter Elliott quoted, “I have never been in better health in my life.” Elliott elaborated: “There was an additional reason, besides the return of sensation in his legs, for his mood of exhilaration. One of the innumerable medical reports on his general well-being stated explicitly: ‘No symptoms of
impotentia coeundi.
’” The obvious implication, to Elliott at least, was that Missy made Roosevelt feel like a man again.

T
HE
W
ARM
S
PRINGS
experience broadened Roosevelt as nothing else could have. For years afterward he credited his experience in Georgia with providing insight into this aspect or that of politics, economics, or the American dream. “It was way back in 1924 that I began to learn economics at Warm Springs,” he recalled on a visit to Georgia as president, to dedicate a schoolhouse.

Here is how it happened. One day while I was sitting on the porch of the little cottage in which I lived, a very young man came up to the porch and said, “May I speak with you, Mr. Roosevelt?” And I said, “Yes.”

He came up to the porch, and he asked if I would come over to such and such a town not very far away from here and deliver the diplomas at the commencement exercises of the school.

I said, “Yes,” and then I asked, “Are you the president of the graduating class?” He said, “No, I am principal of the school.”

I said, “How old are you?” He said, “Nineteen years.”

I said, “Have you been to college?” He answered, “I had my freshman year at the University of Georgia.”

I said, “Do you figure on going through and getting a degree?” He said, “Yes, sir, I will be teaching school every other year and going to college every other year on the proceeds.”

I said, “How much are they paying you?” And the principal of that school said, “They are very generous. They are paying me three hundred dollars a year.”

Well, that started me thinking. Three hundred dollars a year for the principal of the school. That meant that the three ladies who were teaching under him were getting less than three hundred dollars a year. I said to myself, “Why do they have to pay that low scale of wages?”

At that particular time one of the banks in Warm Springs closed its doors. At the same time one of the stores in Warm Springs folded up. I began realizing that the community didn’t have any purchasing power. There were a good many reasons for that. One reason was five cent cotton. You know what five cent cotton, six cent cotton, seven cent cotton meant to the South. Here was a very large part of the nation that was completely at the mercy of people outside of the South, who were dependent on national conditions and on world conditions over which they had absolutely no control. The South was starving on five and six and seven cent cotton. It could not build schools and it could not pay teachers.