Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  In FDR’s case, that might mean walking—without crutches, canes, or braces. It was the goal Dr. Lovett had never endorsed. Unlike Lovett, who had thought no patient could hope to walk again after two years of paralysis, McDonald had “no hard and fast opinions about the restoring of function in polio cases.” Here was a doctor who believed!

  McDonald gave FDR a stern warning: The exercise program would demand every bit of his stamina. But that only made it more appealing to FDR, especially when McDonald said he had “certainly succeeded in dozens of cases.” The doctor recounted the case of a young woman who had been paralyzed below the waist for years, yet after two months in McDonald’s care, she could stand and walk with a crutch on one side and an assistant on the other. As for FDR’s own case, “he swears he can put me on my feet,” FDR told Dr. Draper, “and it’s worth trying.”

  So he asked McDonald to take him on as a patient right away. The doctor already had his full slate of four patients, but he agreed. FDR would come back in a few days and stay for four weeks. It was “a grand plan,” he wrote his mother.

  It wouldn’t be cheap, and Eleanor may have objected to the cost. Or Franklin may have felt it would be wrong to ask her to approve spending still more on doctors’ bills. In any case, he told Louis Howe to gather some of his valuable nautical prints and books and send them down to New York to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. FDR treasured his collections. But if selling them could help him walk, he was perfectly willing to let them go.

  He had been paralyzed for four years now. Even at Warm Springs, further recovery of his muscles was bound to be slow. He was desperate to try something that might work fast.

  * * *

  He arrived in the old whaling village of Marion at the end of August with three assistants—Missy, LeRoy Jones, and a young man he had brought up from Warm Springs. They moved into a cottage lent by the relative of an old friend.

  To FDR, Marion looked much like Fairhaven, Massachusetts, just ten miles away, where his mother’s ancestors had made their fortune in shipping a century earlier. FDR had spent many pleasant days in the old Delano homestead there, now owned by his uncle Fred. In that house on Thanksgiving Day in 1903, he had told his mother of his engagement to Eleanor. Like Fairhaven, Marion was a cozy village of narrow streets and saltbox houses weathered by decades of sea breezes. At 99 Water Street, Dr. McDonald’s Cape Cod house backed right up to the calm waters of a secluded harbor. Wavelets lapped at an old stone pier. The sound of flapping sails came across the water. It was the sort of place where FDR felt most at home.

  He quickly settled into McDonald’s daily routine. In the morning, he did ninety minutes of swimming exercises like the ones at Warm Springs; in the afternoon, exercises on parallel bars under McDonald’s direct supervision; then workouts of thirty minutes or more on the doctor’s walking board. With no braces on his legs, he would grip the rails and haul himself back and forth, demanding that his legs share the burden of his weight with his muscular arms and shoulders.

  At the end of four weeks FDR wrote Dr. Draper: “I don’t hesitate to say that this treatment has done wonders—so much so that I can now get within a very few pounds of bearing my whole weight on my legs without braces.”

  That was just his own rough estimate, of course. It was hard to say just how many pounds he still had to go before he could stand and walk without braces—and without leaning on the heavy rails of the walking board.

  But he was so sure he was making real progress that he decided to spend two more months with McDonald.

  “This time I think I have hit it,” he wrote Van Lear Black. “Dr. McDonald has gone one step further than the others and his exercises are doing such wonders that I expect in the course of another 10 days to be able to stand up without braces. What I did before in the way of swimming at Warm Springs was all to the good, but now I begin to see actual daylight ahead.”

  Day after day he kept at it. The breezes off the bay turned too cold for him to get in the water, but he worked and worked on the walking board.

  He welcomed all the company he could get. Missy and Louis Howe came and went. Eleanor visited. So did his mother. They would sit nearby as he did his rounds of exercises, talking the days away.

  On several October afternoons he had the company of a friend he had known since childhood, when she had been Bertie Pruyn, the daughter of a friend of his father’s from Albany. Now she was Bertie Hamlin, a journalist who had married another member of Woodrow Wilson’s White House circle. The Hamlins owned a summer place nearby. Like Daisy Suckley, Bertie was someone with whom FDR could reminisce about their Dutch ancestors in the Hudson Valley, and they could trade news of politics, too.

  She had clear memories of Franklin in the years before polio, first as a friendly boy who had been more daring than she and her brother at sledding on snowy slopes; then as “a most attractive young man” at Harvard; and finally as a neighbor in Washington, D.C. She had an especially clear recollection of a moment when she had seen FDR running up a long slope to catch a train, “a splendid, athletic young man in his prime.”

  Now she saw her friend in his new condition, “very broad-shouldered and heavy” above the waist, but with legs altogether different from what she remembered.

  FDR told the Hamlins he had been overdoing his exercises, and as a result one of his knees had locked up, so now he was doing additional exercises to get it working properly again. They sat and talked as he worked on the walking board. “For two or three hours … he talked and laughed and dragged his legs after him … never a word of regret or complaint from him.”

  * * *

  Early in December 1925, FDR began to pack for the trip home to New York. He had been with Dr. McDonald at Marion for more than three months.

  Slowly, cautiously, he had been practicing walking with crutches and a brace on only his left leg, and no assistants. Now, as a final test, he set off down Water Street to see how far he could go on his own.

  One house.… two houses … three houses …

  He kept going.

  Dr. McDonald, LeRoy Jones, and Mrs. McDonald trailed just behind, ready to catch him if he started to fall.

  Finally he made it to the edge of the wharf, nearly a block from McDonald’s house. He lifted his head and cried: “I can walk!”

  He called for a photograph. He slung his arms around the shoulders of Jones and McDonald. As Mrs. McDonald prepared to snap the shutter of her camera, FDR’s face broke into as broad a grin as he had shown the roaring crowds at Madison Square Garden, where his hope of returning to politics had been reborn.

  * * *

  In December 1925, all the Roosevelts came together at Hyde Park. No snow had fallen since the first day of the month, but inside the house, Christmas was blooming. FDR could no longer forage in the woods to find the family’s Christmas tree, as he had done every December before polio. But he supervised the placement of the tree in the long, high-ceilinged library and the affixing of candles in its branches. (A pail of water was always kept nearby in case the tree caught fire.)

  On Christmas Eve, snow began to fall, and by the next night a two-inch blanket covered the house, the lawn, and the woods. People who worked for Sara on the estate brought their children to come inside the house and see the towering tree. Later FDR performed his annual reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, “soaring into the higher registers for … Tiny Tim,” Elliott remembered, “then shifting into a snarly imitation of mean old Scrooge.” (“You know,” he once told a friend, “I like to read aloud—I would almost rather read to somebody than read to myself.”)

  The members of the family had been scattered for months. FDR had spent much more of 1925 in Florida, Georgia, and Massachusetts than he had in New York. Eleanor was mixing her teaching role at the girls’ school she had helped start in New York City with her travels as an important figure in state politics and women’s affairs. Anna had been away at Cornell University for part of the year. During the school terms, Jam
es and Elliott had been at Groton School; then they’d spent the summer at a ranch in Wyoming. They’d barely seen their father in a year.

  In late October, FDR arranged to be driven from Dr. McDonald’s place up to Groton to watch Jimmy play in a football game. But he allowed no time to sit and talk with Jimmy and Elliott. He couldn’t even join the other parents on the sidelines. “Will arrive about 2 p.m. & have to go back right afterwards,” he wrote Jimmy. “Also please tell the Police Force to let me have a parking space where I can see from the car!”

  Supervised by more governesses, the youngest boys were often lonesome, as a forlorn string of notes written by Franklin Jr. shows.

  Dear Father,

  I hope you are well. I hope you are coming up here soon … John wants mother to come next week with you.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I hope you are well. The night that John came here he cried for you. I hope that you are coming soon.

  Dear Father,

  I hope you are having a good time down south.

  [To Anna:]

  Chief [Anna’s dog] is very well but seems to grow more and more lonesome just like me and Johny. The house seems just like an emty waistbasket. Now that father has left, mother seems allways to be on the go.

  * * *

  All through the busy days and nights of the holidays, FDR pondered a deeply important decision. He had told George Foster Peabody he was considering whether to buy the entire compound at Warm Springs. Now Peabody was waiting for his friend’s decision.

  Down in Georgia, Tom Loyless was in the last stages of cancer. Soon the resort would lose the guiding spirit who had kept the place going.

  That was one good reason not to buy Warm Springs. Without Loyless, who would run the place day to day and all year round?

  There were other good reasons not to buy.

  The purchase price, to start with. FDR would have to hand over roughly $200,000, the equivalent of two-thirds of all his holdings in stocks, bonds, and cash, most of it inherited from his father. He lived as if he were a rich man, but that was because his mother supplied the homes where he and his family resided. He had nothing like the resources of such truly wealthy friends as Van Lear Black or Vincent Astor. Buying Warm Springs would be an enormous financial risk.

  Then would come the huge and difficult job of turning the resort into a full-fledged treatment center. New buildings and roads would be needed. Doctors and physical therapists would have to be hired. That would be long-term work. But polio patients were asking for treatment immediately. Even Loyless, who cared deeply about the place, was depressed by the people begging for help. “We have nothing to offer them,” he wrote FDR at one low point, “nothing to give them in the way of proper treatment—just groping blindly in the dark and trusting to luck.” How could they help these people while turning the place upside down to rebuild it?

  FDR certainly didn’t need to buy Warm Springs just to do his exercises there. He knew that Peabody could probably keep the place going without FDR as owner. He could visit as often as he wanted. He would have more time for exercise if he didn’t buy the place.

  But the more FDR thought about the compound, the bigger it grew in his mind’s eye—bigger in what it might mean for people with polio, bigger in what it might mean for himself, too.

  He wanted to run things, to be in charge. He had never been able to run something entirely on his own—not in the state legislature or the Navy Department or Fidelity & Deposit or his law firms. Warm Springs would be just his. He could rebuild the place and shape the programs exactly as he wanted.

  He understood the financial risk, but he believed the place could make money. He had spent plenty of time in Florida by now, and he had seen well-to-do northerners flocking south to follow the sun as the state’s economy boomed and long-distance travel beckoned to those who could afford it. Why couldn’t Warm Springs become a famous way-station for some of those travelers, he wondered. He was thinking it might appeal to two different sorts of visitors—people who had polio, who would come for physical therapy, plus vacationers coming for golf, hiking, and relaxation. He could do good for the cause of fighting polio and do well at the bank, too. He cared very little for amassing money for its own sake, but he longed for the freedom money could give him. Quietly he wished he could be free of his mother’s financial support and the power it gave her to interfere in his life. Warm Springs might just break him loose.

  Then there was politics.

  He had not been in Georgia long before he was arranging casual get-togethers with the state’s most powerful Democrats. In the 1920s the southern states were the party’s foundation, the so-called Solid South. Southern voters had gone for the Democrats in every presidential election since the Civil War. Any Democrat running for president had to earn the affections of that southern base. So wouldn’t it be fine if this aristocratic Yankee—not the sort of politician who naturally appealed to rural southerners—could say he’d made a second home in the heart of Dixie, and developed a fine humanitarian enterprise to help poor invalids rise up and walk? It might not be the main reason to buy Warm Springs, but it was certainly another good one.

  So Warm Springs was not just a place where he might get his legs in better shape. It was also a place where the terrible blow he had suffered in 1921 might be transformed into something wonderful. Perhaps thousands of people would get a second chance they would never have had if he had never been stricken. By rebuilding Warm Springs, he could show the world what a paralyzed person could do.

  And it might just help him become president.

  So, shortly after New Year’s Day 1926, he met with George Peabody and talked over the terms of a sale. Then FDR composed a telegram to Tom Loyless, now in the final days of his life:

  HAVE TALKED TO PEABODY AND AM ENCOURAGED TO THINK THAT AT LAST YOU AND I WILL SEE OUR DREAM CARRIED OUT.

  * * *

  Sara Roosevelt was against it. Basil O’Connor was against it. Eleanor was touched to see how deeply her husband wanted to own Warm Springs. But she, too, resisted the decision. Surely it would be wiser and easier, they all thought, to devise some way of doing warm-water therapy close to home, and without risking so much money.

  “I know how you love creative work,” Eleanor wrote to him. “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, but that may be because I’m old and rather overwhelmed by what there is to do in one place and it wearies me to think of even undertaking to make new ties.” (That was ironic coming from Eleanor, who juggled as many ties and responsibilities as FDR did.)

  Her objections hurt his feelings, and she didn’t hold out for long.

  “He feels … that he’s trying to do a big thing which may be a financial success & a medical and philanthropic opportunity for infantile,” she wrote to a close friend, “& that all of us have raised our eyebrows & thrown cold water on it. There is nothing to do but to make him feel one is interested.”

  Loyless died in March. By then FDR had made an irrevocable promise to purchase Warm Springs.

  It was an enormous commitment, both financial and moral. People who came to the resort for help would now depend on his ability to keep the place alive. From this point on, he would have to consider his obligations for Warm Springs—and to those deeply hopeful people—in every decision he made.

  * * *

  In his first seven days as owner, he started at least seven major projects.

  He drew up a plan for moving buildings.

  He bought trees to fill the compound with greenery.

  He gave orders to refurbish the Meriwether Inn.

  He called contractors to see about a new water and sewage system.

  He sketched a map of new roads and an artificial fishing pond.

  He worked up a campaign to raise money for new buildings.

  He organized a committee to plan sports and rec
reation indoors and outdoors.

  And he saw to it that a certain rowdy contingent of locals known for “unseemly conduct at weekly dances, drinking, and carousing” were invited to “save themselves trouble by remaining away from Warm Springs.”

  Anna, now nineteen and about to be married, came down to get a look at her father’s new domain. His enthusiasm amused and delighted her. “The one & only topic of conversation” at Warm Springs, she wrote her mother, “is Warm Springs!”

  To attract polio patients over the long term, he would have to prove the water was special. Claims for miraculous water cures were a dime a dozen, and he was a politician, not a scientist. He needed doctors to back up his claims.

  So it was something of a miracle when he learned that just then, in nearby Atlanta, the American Orthopedic Association was about to hold its spring 1926 convention. Bone doctors from all over the country would be there—he could get their backing! So he dashed off a telegram asking if he could speak to the group. Wouldn’t they jump at the chance to support an extraordinary new treatment for polio?

  The answer came back: No, thank you. The schedule was full, and it was for experts only.

  Quite undaunted, FDR raced over to Atlanta. Within a couple of hours, a roomful of startled doctors found themselves shaking hands with the recent Democratic nominee for vice president, who was being pushed around the room in a wheelchair and telling them about all the extraordinary things he was doing for polio patients at a backwoods village they’d never heard of.

  The president of the orthopedists’ group was plainly irritated. He wrote to a friend: “I thought it was pretty clear that Mr. Roosevelt was more interested in the advertisement of his property in Georgia … than he was in idealism and philanthropy.”

  But now came another stroke of luck. At the conference there was a doctor named Robert Osgood, who had replaced Robert Lovett as head of orthopedics at Children’s Hospital in Boston. (Lovett had died suddenly on a trip to Europe.) Dr. Osgood knew all about Roosevelt’s case, and he urged his colleagues to join him in calling for a scientific study of FDR’s claims. Three orthopedists agreed to review any evidence that might be gathered.