Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  The two men were deadlocked.

  FDR decided he had learned all he could from Lovett. If he couldn’t find a doctor with new advice, he would have to be his own doctor.

  PART 3

  GETTING READY

  FALL 1924– SUMMER 1928

  Chapter 9

  SOMETHING IN THE WATER

  One day during the endless infighting at the Democratic convention in 1924, FDR fell into conversation with a friend from his Washington days, a wealthy banker named George Foster Peabody. When Roosevelt mentioned that he was looking for new ways to restore life to his legs, Peabody told him a story.

  Some years earlier, Peabody had helped fix up the old resort of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. It was a spa with mineral springs, like the ones in Germany that FDR had visited as a boy with his mother and father. Soaking in the Saratoga waters, Peabody had thought back to a much smaller resort in rural Georgia, his home state, that he had visited often as a boy. When he went south to see what had become of the old place—it was called the Meriwether Inn—he found it worn and all but deserted. But the water was the same as ever, gushing up from the depths of nearby Pine Mountain at a steady temperature of 89 degrees, suffused with minerals that made the water fizzy with tiny bubbles. It flowed into a broad outdoor swimming pool.

  For as long as anyone could remember, people had been attracted to the spot by the water’s restorative powers. First it had been Muscogee (Creek) people who said the water healed their wounds, then American tourists who made the place a popular resort for the well-to-do in the late 1800s. The nearby village was called Bullochville, otherwise known in the region as Warm Springs.

  Peabody thought the resort might be brought back to its former stature and success, like Saratoga Springs. So he bought the rights to purchase the place, thinking he could pass it along to a new owner who would devote full time to it—perhaps the state of Georgia itself. In the meantime he worked with the man who had been running it, a retired and sickly newspaper editor named Tom Loyless.

  It was Loyless who told Peabody the remarkable story that Peabody now relayed to Franklin Roosevelt. It was about what had happened to a young man with polio who ventured into the swimming pool.

  His name was Louis Joseph. He was an engineer in his twenties. While working in the West Indies, he had caught the poliovirus and lost the use of his legs. He had to quit his job and moved back to his parents’ home in Columbus, Georgia, the city nearest to Bullochville. For a vacation in 1921, the family spent some time at the Meriwether Inn. Every day, Louis got into the swimming pool and moved around. He came back the next summer and the next.

  After three summers of exercise in the foamy water, Louis Joseph could walk with a cane.

  FDR listened, interested but not terribly impressed. He had heard many tales of miraculous treatments for polio, and he knew that most were exaggerations, if not pure hype.

  But Peabody wasn’t through. When the Democratic convention was over, he wrote letters to Louis Joseph and Tom Loyless, asking them to send detailed accounts of Louis’s recovery.

  FDR now read these words in Louis Joseph’s letter:

  I was almost completely paralyzed with the exception of my arms. Discovering that I could swim in the warm water here, after someone helped me into the pool, I returned. This is my third summer. I use a cane while walking in the street, and can get about well.

  A third-hand story had been one thing. But here in this letter was an amazing testament written by hand in Louis Joseph’s own words.

  FDR already knew that water made it easier for him to exercise. What if the natural minerals in the warm Georgia water could do something more?

  A new plan bloomed in his mind. To a New York doctor who had built him some new leg braces he wrote: “I am planning to go to Warm Springs, Georgia on October 3rd to try out a remarkable swimming pool of natural highly mineralized water … I have had such success with sunlight and swimming that I believe that in such a pool I could actually walk around at the shallow end with the water up to my shoulders, and thereby get the normal walking motion better than any other way. I can stand up without support in water just below my shoulders and I am going to take a couple of canes into the pool with me …

  “There is nothing like trying it out.”

  He rearranged his business affairs to guarantee the time he would need. Van Lear Black would tolerate his long absences indefinitely, but he had to quit his law firm, where his partners were about out of patience. He formed a new firm with a very bright young lawyer he had met, Basil O’Connor—and this time Roosevelt’s name came first on the door.

  Then he packed his bags.

  * * *

  Franklin, Eleanor, Missy LeHand, and LeRoy Jones arrived at the Warm Springs train station in early October 1924. The scent of pine woods and a view of soft green hills greeted them. By an odd coincidence, the village, population 470, had originally been named for the family of Eleanor’s grandmother, a southern belle named Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt. But neither Franklin nor Eleanor had ever been near the place. Even for the rural South, it was isolated. In the day’s fading light, the Roosevelts caught glimpses of a broken-down hotel with peeling paint, a collection of sagging white cottages, and a slumping dance pavilion. Eleanor thought the whole place was depressing. But FDR insisted it was “delightful and very comfortable.”

  The next morning, he was eager to get straight to the swimming pool. But first he opened the door to welcome Louis Joseph himself, standing and walking with only the help of a cane. With him was a local doctor named James Johnson, who had witnessed Louis’s progress. Roosevelt questioned them closely. They said the water held no miracles. It would take time to see any improvement. But the water made it easy to exercise. There was no doubt about that.

  FDR got into his swimming trunks. With LeRoy Jones at his side, he made his way to the pool’s edge. An artificial waterfall spilled into the pool at one end. The water reflected the painted ocean-blue of the concrete sides. Soft white sand lay across the bottom.

  Grasping a cane in either hand, he slipped in.

  At home in New York, unless he was sitting in direct sunlight or a hot bath, his legs were always cold.

  But now he felt a delicious warmth seep up through his feet into his calves, thighs, and abdomen. The sparkling sensation of a million carbonated bubbles ran up and down his skin, as if he had plunged into a pool of warm ginger ale.

  His arms and hands bobbed upward as if propelled by hands below the surface. He had the sudden sense of shedding twenty or thirty pounds.

  A chemist might have told him the minerals made the water denser than ordinary water, so anything floating in the pool at Warm Springs would rise higher and faster than it would in ordinary water. But whatever the chemistry, the sensations were akin to magic.

  Squeezing the handles of his canes, FDR eased away from Roy. Then he was standing alone on his own two feet. He began to move around. After three years of struggling to accomplish his exercise routine, this seemed so amazingly easy.

  He shouted, “I don’t think I will ever get out!”

  Day after day through the rest of October 1924, he became more convinced that, as he wrote to a disabled friend back in New York, “it is a really remarkable cure. The swimming pool is splendid and I walk around in water 4 [feet] deep without braces or crutches almost as well as if I had nothing the matter with my legs.”

  Riding in Tom Loyless’s car, exercising in the pool, sitting on the porch of the Meriwether Inn, he began to imagine what the water at Warm Springs might mean to other people struggling in the aftermath of polio.

  Eleanor said that since the diagnosis at Campobello, she had never heard her husband mention golf, the sport he loved most. But now, at Warm Springs, he allowed himself to dream about it. Before long, he wrote an old friend, “I hope … I shall try my hand at golf again.”

  To his mother he wrote: “When I get back I am going to have a long talk with Mr. George Foster Peabody … I
feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could well be established here.”

  He revised his calendar for the coming months—late 1924 and early 1925. After Christmas and New Year’s at home, he would return to Florida for two months of cruising the Keys aboard the Larooco and exercising in the warm Caribbean. Then, when spring reached central Georgia, he would come back to the water at Warm Springs.

  * * *

  Missy LeHand was proving to be not just an excellent secretary but an all-around assistant. She had learned to read her boss superbly, knew his moods, spotted what he needed before he knew it himself. Shrewd and practical, she had learned which people he wanted to cultivate and which he wanted to avoid. She learned his writing style so well that she could draft many of his letters for him. She worked hard and was utterly dependable and efficient, but she knew how to relax and have fun, too—a skill that Eleanor, for all her remarkable qualities, never learned.

  Gradually the professional relationship between boss and secretary turned into an affectionate friendship, then a mutual dependence that would lead many to say that Missy was FDR’s “office wife.” Was it more than affection? No one ever knew. When Eleanor had learned of her husband’s romantic affair during World War I, she had insisted that Franklin break if off. She realized now that FDR, in his long absences from home, enjoyed his “times with Missy.” But she treated Missy like a member of the family, even as a daughter, and never suggested that Missy and her husband were inappropriately close.

  Quite possibly she realized that Missy, by tending to the details of Franklin’s busy life, freed Eleanor to pursue her own increasingly crowded schedule. She was becoming a power in New York politics in her own right, a leading voice for the role of women in the Democratic Party. She cared for her husband’s welfare, but she had no desire to trail along in his wake and serve his every need from New York to Florida to Georgia and back again.

  What mattered most about Missy LeHand were her sharp intelligence and her cool good judgment. She had come up by her own wits, leaving a working-class Catholic family in Boston to make her own living in Washington and New York. She was one more person, like Louis Howe and Basil O’Connor, who helped FDR see the world through the eyes of people who hadn’t grown up on a landed estate and gone to Harvard.

  * * *

  As a veteran of the news business, Tom Loyless, the manager of Warm Springs, knew what a single well-placed story could mean to the fortunes of a struggling business. So he got in touch with editors at Georgia’s biggest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

  He said, Why not send someone to write up a story about Franklin Roosevelt’s quest to recover from infantile paralysis in a forgotten little resort in west Georgia? It would be a good story for a Georgia paper, especially with FDR back in the public eye after his performance at Madison Square Garden.

  So the newspaper sent a young writer named Cleburne Gregory, who spent most of one day chatting and rambling around with FDR. Roosevelt could hardly stop talking about the wonders of the place. Gregory went back to Atlanta captivated by the man’s enthusiasm and charm.

  He wrote:

  “Mr. Roosevelt does not know how he contracted the dread disease … All he does know is that he was hit, and hit hard, with the result that both of his legs were immovable for many months. Gradually he acquired the skill necessary to drag himself around on crutches …

  “The distinguished visitor has the large swimming pool all to himself for two hours or more each day. He swims, dives, uses the swinging rings and horizontal bar over the water, and finally crawls out on the concrete pier for a sun bath that lasts another hour. Then he dresses, has lunch, rests a bit on a delightfully shady porch, and spends the afternoon driving over the surrounding country, in which he is intensely interested …

  “‘I am deriving wonderful benefit from my stay here,’ Mr. Roosevelt said. ‘This place is great. See that right leg? It’s the first time I have been able to move it at all in three years.’

  “Mr. Roosevelt does not attribute any medicinal effects to the Warm Springs waters, but he gives the water credit for his ability to remain in it for two hours or more, without tiring in the least, and the rest of the credit for his improvement is given to Georgia’s sunshine … With him everything in Warm Springs is ‘great’ or ‘fine’ or ‘wonderful.’ That is the spirit that has carried him to remarkable heights for a man just past his fortieth year, and it is the spirit that is going to restore him to his pristine health and vigor.”

  FDR was happy to help generate a little regional publicity for Warm Springs. He did not know the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would sell Cleburne Gregory’s feature story to other newspapers. In the next few weeks, the story appeared in big-city dailies and small-town weeklies from New York to California, with headlines like FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WILL SWIM TO HEALTH, accompanied by photos of a grinning FDR at the edge of the pool at Warm Springs.

  Important Democrats spotted the story and read it.

  So did people who had polio, desperate people who had spent months and years shut away from the pitying eyes of “normal” people, losing any hope of leading full and happy lives.

  And now they were reading the words of the paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, talking of a return to “pristine health and vigor.”

  * * *

  Back aboard his houseboat in January 1925, FDR soon realized he would have to drop his idea of using the Caribbean as an exercise pool. It just wasn’t practical—not around the Florida Keys. He enjoyed life aboard the houseboat, but there were simply too many sharks cruising the shallows for him to spend much time in the water.

  Then one day in the Larooco’s launch boat he had an accident. Muscles in his right knee were torn. His leg turned black and blue. Complete rest was essential. He would not be able to exercise again until he got back to Warm Springs—three months of waiting to do anything at all to help his legs. Missy LeHand said there were days aboard the boat when he could not get out of bed and face the day until noon.

  It was the worst injury from a fall he had suffered so far, but it was hardly the only time he had fallen. Indeed, one of his main reasons for wanting greater strength and balance was to reduce the danger of falls. They were not only frightening and painful. If he fell hard enough, he could wind up worse off than he was already, not to mention humiliated if a fall occurred in public.

  He was always at risk. When standing with his braces, he could easily lean a bit too far to one side and find it impossible to recover his balance. When walking with crutches, he could move one foot just an inch too far, and down he would go. A helper might lose his grip on FDR for a second, and down he would go. The muscles of his lower abdomen, thighs, and buttocks were so weak that if he wasn’t careful, he could fall out of a chair.

  Basil O’Connor, Roosevelt’s new law partner, had seen it happen. In fact, he had seen FDR fall the first time he ever set eyes on him.

  One morning O’Connor had arrived for work at his office building in lower Manhattan to find a little group of people watching as a tall man on crutches moved slowly through the front door into the lobby. He was being assisted by another man; O’Connor guessed he was a servant or a chauffeur.

  O’Connor recognized the man with crutches as Franklin Roosevelt. He had seen his picture in the newspapers. Now he watched as FDR struggled toward the elevator across the polished stone floor of the lobby. His legs were stiffly straight from his waist to his feet. The chauffeur stood just to his left, watching closely. Roosevelt’s progress was slow. Each movement required a series of smaller movements. First he would lean heavily on the crutches. Then he would toss his head back to pull his weight off the crutches for a second. In that instant, he thrust the crutches ahead, aiming the tip of the left crutch (on his weaker side) to a point on the slick floor where the chauffeur had planted his foot to keep the crutch from slipping. Then FDR would lean forward on the crutches and haul his lower body along.

  O’Connor co
uld see that the muscles of his neck were tight with the strain.

  FDR had gone a short distance when the tip of the left crutch landed with a little too much force against his helper’s shoe. Suddenly he was falling. The chauffeur leaped to catch him, but it was too late. Down FDR crashed, crutches clattering, hat skittering across the floor. The chauffeur tried to pull him up by his armpits, but he was too heavy. Watchers rushed to help.

  “Nothing to worry about!” FDR called. O’Connor said his voice sounded “pleasant and strong,” with “a ring in it.”

  Lying on the floor, trying to twist up to a sitting position, FDR looked up at O’Connor and called, “Give me a hand there.”

  To another man he said the same thing, then: “All right, now, all together!”

  In a moment he was up on his crutches again.

  He nodded to the chauffeur and said, “Let’s go.”

  Later he was paid a visit at Hyde Park by a distant cousin named Nicholas Roosevelt. FDR suggested a drive around the estate. As Nicholas Roosevelt watched, two helpers carried FDR down the steps from the front door to the waiting auto. They got him into his seat, but “as they turned and left him he lost his balance … and he fell over on the car seat. I doubt if one man in a thousand as disabled and dependent on others would have refrained from some sort of reproach, however mild, to those whose carelessness had thus left him in the lurch. But Franklin merely lay on his back, waved his strong arms in the air, and laughed. At once they came back and helped him to his seat … and he called me to join him. For a moment I had seen the true spirit of the man. He was not putting on an act. Rather it was the instinctive reaction of a brave and gallant gentleman—as illuminating as it was moving and inspiring.”