Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  * * *

  Why didn’t he try harder to follow Dr. Lovett’s orders?

  The most likely answer is that the project of mastering crutch-walking simply didn’t appeal to him, since crutches could never take him where he wanted to go.

  FDR had been thinking hard about how to resume his quest for the presidency. Just as before his illness, he intended to start by running for a statewide office in New York. But in his mind’s eye, he simply could not imagine making such a campaign without the ability to stand and walk on his own.

  In our time we’ve forgotten how important the simple act of standing up used to be for a man who considered himself a “gentleman,” a term that was taken very seriously in the 1920s, especially in the Roosevelts’ social class. In 1922, a writer named Emily Post was just launching her fabulously successful career as an expert on good manners with the publication of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. The book was full of advice about all the times when a well-behaved man must stand up. For example:

  “A gentleman always rises when a lady comes into a room.”

  “In a restaurant, when a lady bows to him, a gentleman merely makes the gesture of rising by getting up half way from his chair and at the same time bowing. Then he sits down again.”

  “Every American citizen stands with his hat off at the passing of the ‘colors’ [the U.S. flag] and when the national anthem is played.”

  “If he gets on a street car … [h]e must not take a seat if there are ladies standing.”

  Yes, FDR could now be helped to a standing position. But it required something like what a football player requires to score a touchdown—hard physical effort, heavy equipment, and a lot of help from other people.

  Then he would have to walk. To run for governor or senator, he would have to visit cities and towns all across the state of New York. Consider the movements necessary for him to deliver just one speech in some other city.

  First, from his home on East Sixty-Fifth Street, he would need to get to a railroad platform at Grand Central Terminal. That would require an automobile. He couldn’t possibly drive a car himself, so he would have to be chauffeured by a private car or a taxicab. He’d have to climb into the car, then out again. Then he would walk through jostling crowds, up and down staircases and finally up the steep steps to the railroad car. To get to his seat, he would have to squeeze past people in narrow corridors and step across the gaps between railcars. At his destination, he would find more staircases and more curbs, another taxicab or private car to enter and exit, and then more stairs at the hotel or church or school where he would give his speech, with people reaching to shake his hand. Finally there would be another set of steps up to the stage.

  How could he navigate all that on crutches? Even if he could manage it for a day or two, how could he possibly perform the feat day after day and week after week in a hard campaign?

  And once he reached the stage, there he would be, on crutches. Just to be seen standing with crutches was to shout to the world, There’s something wrong with me!

  So why not make the campaign in a wheelchair?

  By the late twentieth century, sophisticated wheelchairs would make it possible—though never easy—for someone with a disability like FDR’s to do one’s job and get on with life. This would include politicians. In 1996, the state of Georgia would elect to the U.S. Senate a man named Max Cleland, whose legs and part of one arm had been amputated after a severe injury in the war in Vietnam. He used a wheelchair. In 2014, the people of Texas would elect Greg Abbott as their governor, though Abbott’s back had been broken in an accident twenty years earlier and he had relied on a wheelchair ever since.

  But in the 1920s, wheelchairs were big, clumsy contraptions seldom seen outside hospitals. More important, city landscapes and buildings had none of the accommodations for wheelchairs that we have now, such as ramps from streets to sidewalks and from sidewalks to building entrances, broad elevators in multistory buildings, and doorways wide enough for wheelchairs.

  Besides, anyone in a wheelchair was assumed to be incapable of an active life. FDR must have held a memory of the ungainly wheelchair that his grandfather, Warren Delano Jr., once a vigorous and powerful man, was forced to use at the end of his life. It was hardly the image of a person who could lead and command others.

  For use at home, FDR had a couple of narrow kitchen chairs converted to wheelchairs so that servants, nurses, and family members could push him easily from one room to another.

  But campaigning in a wheelchair, not to mention holding an important position in government, was unthinkable.

  So reliance on a wheelchair was out, and crutches were hardly any better.

  To reach his goal, FDR simply had to find some new treatment, some new exercise, some way of transforming his condition so that he might finally bring his legs back to life.

  He talked it over with Dr. Lovett. He knew the orthopedist had no miracle medicines to offer. Still, there had to be something else he could do.

  Well, Lovett said, some of his patients had made commendable progress by exercising in tanks of water, even in the Atlantic Ocean.

  The foundation of Lovett’s whole approach to helping polio patients was exercise. But as FDR knew by now, working out with damaged muscles led quickly to exhaustion. Even a determined patient couldn’t keep it up for long. So improvement over time was agonizingly slow. But water helps to support one’s weight, making it easier to exercise for long periods.

  The logic struck FDR immediately, and he decided to try it out.

  Chapter 7

  “I AM INTERESTED IN TOO MANY THINGS”

  Deep in FDR’s memory, well-being was linked to water.

  In 1890, when Franklin was eight years old, his father had suffered a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. To recover his health, James Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic with his wife and son to visit a town in Germany called Bad Nauheim. Here, people with heart trouble and other ailments soaked in warm pools fed by mineral-rich springs that foamed out of the earth. Many people of the late 1800s, including a number of doctors, believed the bubbling waters brought benefits to people with heart trouble. Maybe they did, or maybe they didn’t—even then many other doctors doubted it—but it was certainly soothing to soak in the warm, salty pools. The treatment went on day after day, often for several weeks. The Roosevelts returned to Bad Nauheim for several summers, and they believed the mineral waters did James a great deal of good, since he lived for ten more years.

  So when Dr. Lovett recommended exercising in water, FDR’s enthusiasm may have drawn upon those pleasant memories of his father’s experience with the “water cure” in Germany.

  When the spring weather of 1922 turned warm enough, FDR asked the men who worked on the Roosevelt estate to lower him into a narrow pond where a dam blocked the creek that ran through the woods. He had splashed and swum there as a boy. Now, as long as he could stand the cold, he could enjoy the benefits of exercising in water not far from his back door.

  And he had another idea. A friend of his, Vincent Astor, one of the richest men in America, owned an estate in Rhinebeck, New York, just fifteen miles up the Hudson from Hyde Park. One of its remarkable features was an indoor swimming pool, perhaps the first of its kind in a private residence in the United States. When FDR told Astor about Dr. Lovett’s suggestion, Astor invited him to drive up and use the pool, which Roosevelt found to be even better for his exercises than the pond, since the water was warmer. “The legs work wonderfully in the water,” he told Dr. Draper, “and I need nothing to keep myself afloat.”

  “All is going well,” he wrote a friend in July, “and I am getting more muscular control every day.”

  “Swimming is our great sport,” he wrote to one of Eleanor’s aunts, “either in Vincent Astor’s tank or our own pond!”

  One day at the pond, a man who worked for the Roosevelts, Louis DePew, heard FDR call out: “Well, the water got me where I am, and the water has to
bring me back!”

  Now, what did he mean by that?

  Was he thinking of Bear Mountain, where the poliovirus may have tainted the lakes at the Boy Scout camp?

  That’s possible. There’s no record of FDR saying he believed he’d picked up the virus from the water at Bear Mountain. Then again, as a leader of the Boy Scouts, he might have kept any such suspicion to himself.

  Or was he blaming his accidental dunking in the Bay of Fundy, where the water had felt “so cold it seemed paralyzing”? That’s unlikely, since he knew that polio was caused by an infectious virus, not by immersion in cold water.

  Either way, that stray remark reveals that when FDR’s mind wandered to the origins of his paralysis, he thought of water. Then, it seems, he drew an imaginary line between the water that had carried the virus and the water here in his own pond. And for just that moment, he conceived a little game of magical make-believe: In the summer of 1921, water had left him paralyzed. Now, a year later, he imagined that he might be immersed in water and come back out on the strength of his own legs.

  * * *

  As the fall of 1922 gave way to winter, the Roosevelts were back in New York City, where there was no place for FDR to continue his water exercises. Soon he went to Eleanor with a new idea.

  He was thinking, he told her, of renting a houseboat for a long cruise through the Florida Keys, the string of low, semitropical islands that stretch for 120 miles into the Caribbean Sea. He could invite a few friends along and try some fishing, and he could get into the warm waters of the Caribbean for more exercise. What did she think? Would she come along?

  She hesitated. She had the children to manage. She didn’t like vacations in the wintertime. And she wasn’t sure they should spend the money. (For six weeks of cruising, the cost of a boat and crew would be about $1,500—no small expense even for the well-off Roosevelts.)

  “Well,” he said, “I think I might as well do as much as possible in order to improve as much as I can, because I shouldn’t be any greater burden than is necessary.”

  Eleanor later said this was the only time she ever heard him speak so bluntly about the trouble his condition caused his family. It reminded her “that much of his gallant joking was merely a way of forcing himself to accept cheerfully what he could not help.”

  For that reason, or simply because her husband wanted so much to take this trip, she said yes.

  * * *

  He found a comfortable houseboat to rent called Weona II, fifty-eight feet from bow to stern, with two decks and a motorboat for fishing. Carrying FDR, a small crew, a few friends, Missy LeHand, and Eleanor (who came along for just the first few days), the vessel sailed out of Miami in mid-February 1923, then turned southwest toward the Keys. Soon broad-winged herons and frigate birds were passing overhead. The sun washed over the passengers. The pace was slow and easy.

  The deck of a boat presented FDR with entirely new problems in moving around. Two strong men could carry him aboard, but then he had to navigate Weona’s narrow passageways and steep staircases on his own. The passageways were too narrow for him to be carried. His wheelchair would be impractical.

  But somehow he managed.

  He discovered he could take the narrow stairs between decks just as he did at home seated on the stairs and hauling himself up and backward. He told Dr. Lovett that he maneuvered through narrow passageways “by reaching up to the deck beams above, this gave me enough balance and support to move the legs forward in walking.” (If he meant that he did that regularly, the claim is hard to credit, given the difficulty of standing with braces on a moving boat. Perhaps he managed it once as an experiment. He may have stretched the facts to impress Lovett.)

  Of course the point of the trip was the warm ocean water. But how to get in and out? The deck was ten feet above the waves, and he couldn’t just jump in.

  He studied the boat’s architecture and equipment, then rigged a solution. He described it later in a letter to Dr. Lovett:

  On the top deck where we sat most of the time I had a section of the side rail cut out and hinged. The forward davit [a small crane for hoisting heavy objects] swung around to a position just off this opening. From this davit I suspended a plain board, like the board of a swing. I then sat on the deck, put my feet through the swing, pulled it under me. The davit was then swung out and I was lowered into the motor boat or, in going in swimming, into the water. It was perfectly simple once in the water to slide out of the swing and to get back into it.

  It was an ingenious solution, and FDR was delighted with himself for thinking of it. But then a new obstacle arose, one that he might have anticipated. The waters around the Keys are home to up to a dozen species of sharks. Typically the sharks keep their distance from humans, but even so, Weona’s crew apparently advised the passengers not to spend as much time in the water as FDR had been planning.

  With that, some people might have concluded that the whole trip was a waste. But FDR just turned his attention to things he could do while safely above the water’s surface.

  On the deck of the Weona were low, comfortable rocking chairs without armrests. They were designed for lazy lounging on sunny afternoons, but FDR now saw them as devices to exercise his legs. At first he had to fight the temptation to rock the chair by the motions of his head and upper body. But with concentration and practice, he told Dr. Lovett, “within a few days I could rock back and forth by using only the knee and the lower leg and foot muscles.”

  That was calm, quiet work, but he wanted adventure, too. Using his makeshift swing, he had himself lowered into the motorboat. Then he and his friends sped across the blue water for some deep-sea fishing. The big fish they were going after can be brought up only with heavy-duty tackle, and you have to be strapped into special chairs to haul up the heavy lines. When they reached a good place to drop their lines, FDR got himself ready. “At first I tied a strap round my chest and around the back of the revolving fishing chair,” he wrote. “This gave the necessary purchase. [He meant that the strap would hold him tight to the chair so that he could exert his strength on the fishing line.] After a little practice I … was able to hold heavy fish on a large rod without much difficulty.” He reeled in one big fish after another, some weighing forty pounds—not bad for a man who couldn’t walk. He must have felt a quiet thrill in discovering that he still could perform difficult feats of coordination and strength.

  He was having a ball and getting plenty of exercise, if not quite the type he had planned. And he thought there was another good force at work. He wrote about it later to another man with polio. “I have … found for myself one interesting fact which I believe to be a real discovery,” he said, “and that is that my muscles have improved with greater rapidity when I could give them sunlight.” On his Florida cruise, he said, he had been “much in the open air under the direct rays of the sun with very few clothes on, and there is no doubt that the leg muscles responded more quickly at that time than when I am at home [and] more in the house.”

  He didn’t tell Dr. Lovett about his sunlight theory. The orthopedist probably would have thought it was silly. But now sunlight, like water, was giving FDR another reason to hope for a breakthrough.

  Later on, as medical scientists learned more, they would discredit the idea that sunlight could have any good effects on nerves and muscles damaged by polio.

  But what science-minded doctors like Dr. Lovett sometimes overlooked was the powerful effect of hope on the mind of a desperate patient.

  Dr. Draper, on the other hand, respected what he called “the imponderables” in a patient’s recovery. He believed that disease was more complicated than simple infection by a germ; it was a “quarrel” between the germ and its human host, a relationship between “the seed and the soil,” as doctors of his school of thought put it. In that quarrel, Draper believed, the patient’s mind played its own mysterious role. Dr. Lovett, as an orthopedist, focused on the physical structures of bones and muscles. Dr. Draper considered everything
that made up the life of a particular patient—not just the parts of his body that could be seen and touched but the traits he had inherited from his ancestors, his emotional and psychological makeup, the environment he lived in, and the complex interactions among all these factors. In the face of that complexity, who could say for sure that regular exposure to sunlight was not helping Franklin Roosevelt—if Roosevelt had developed a powerful belief that it did?

  * * *

  Nurse Lake could hardly believe her eyes. After his time in Florida, her patient now could “set” his right knee, meaning he could hold it firmly in the unbent position. This was a big advance toward the goal of walking by himself. And with only a bit of help, he could sit up from a lying-down position. Perhaps because of his rocking-chair exercises, he had gained power in his quadriceps, the packs of muscle in the front of the thighs. And he could move his feet better than he had before his trip.

  “He came back immensely improved from his trip south,” Mrs. Lake told Dr. Lovett. He was “looking at least ten years younger.”

  But then, even more quickly than he had improved, he declined again.

  He was feeling so confident that he neglected his exercises, took on a pile of new projects, and stayed up late night after night. Within two weeks of his return, he caught a severe cold and “looked a perfect wreck,” according to Nurse Lake. She all but ordered him to Hyde Park for ten days of solid rest. But once he got there, she told Dr. Lovett, he “sat out in the damp” and steadily lost the power he had gained in his quadriceps. Soon he could no longer set his knee or move his feet as he had just a few weeks earlier.

  In her private letters to Dr. Lovett, Nurse Lake blamed Eleanor for FDR’s setback. Mrs. Roosevelt was always urging Franklin to do this or that during the day, the nurse reported, and then bringing in guests for dinner. The guests would stay too late, FDR would get too little sleep, and the next day he would be exhausted. Mrs. Lake insisted that FDR could make progress only if he kept a single-minded focus on the proper care of his body.