Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  FDR was delighted. He wrote immediately to a doctor he knew back home—Leroy Hubbard, the chief orthopedic surgeon in New York State’s Department of Public Health. Hubbard had been treating polio patients since 1917, and was nearly as well known in the field as Dr. Lovett had been. “I am confident that Warm Springs can be made useful,” FDR told Hubbard. “The need for it is so imperative. I want to get your ideas.”

  Hubbard soon agreed to set aside his work in New York and travel to Georgia, where he would supervise polio patients in a study of therapeutic treatments in the special water. If, as FDR expected, Hubbard could prove that warm-water therapy brought marked improvements, then FDR would turn over the evidence to his panel of experts. And then, as he told one of the doctors, “if you gentlemen are thoroughly and 100% convinced that it is worthwhile,” he would take the next step in his plan—to raise several hundred thousand dollars to construct new buildings and pools to treat one hundred patients by the summer of 1927.

  Until now, no one could say for sure whether FDR had been reporting real improvements in his legs or just a pleasant fantasy born of desperate optimism. Was the pool really just an agreeable place to take a bath? Or was it the means of changing lives?

  When Dr. Hubbard’s survey of patients was done, they would know.

  * * *

  He was now so busy at Warm Springs that he hardly had time to do what he had come there for in the first place.

  Every day he had bundles of mail to go through, letters to dictate to Missy, checks to write, contractors to see, long-distance calls to make, telegrams to send, sewer diagrams to study, building plans to approve, facts to check, townspeople to reassure, doctors to consult, patients to advise. To make sure the compound remained un-fancy and rustic, as he insisted it must be, he dictated every detail of the planning. Each cottage was to be painted white; no cottage would have more than two bedrooms; and not a single road was to be paved. He jotted his own list of the purchases needed to furnish the remodeled Meriwether Inn:

  Beds 26 @ $30 [per bed]

  Dressers 26 @ $28

  Writing tables 50 @ $3

  Bedroom Chairs 26 @ $6

  Dining Room Dishes, Silver, Glass $2,000

  Anna was watching her father closely, assessing his physical abilities. She noticed that since she’d last spent time with him at Christmas, he’d learned some new little tricks to “handle himself better,” such as shifting from a wheelchair to a chair more easily, and she saw him get up two steps without help—a significant improvement. But in spite of all his talk about how much the water at Warm Springs could help him, Anna didn’t see him get into it much.

  “Ma,” she wrote to Eleanor, “it’s awfully hard to tell whether father is walking better or not. He doesn’t walk very much, & doesn’t exercise overmuch.”

  He was simply too busy. He had sacrificed most of his money to buy the place, and now he was sacrificing most of his time to make the place work.

  And he had received bad news about his legs.

  One of the orthopedists he’d met in Atlanta was Dr. LeRoy Abbott, of St. Louis, Missouri. FDR told him about Billie McDonald’s belief that polio patients could recover faster and walk better if they performed strenuous exercises without braces.

  Dr. Abbott was appalled. Yes, FDR might well walk sooner if he followed McDonald’s advice, the doctor said—but in the process he might well ruin the bones of his legs. Damaged muscles must be carefully built back up before the bones and joints could stand up to strenuous exertion. “He is entirely ‘off’ Dr. McDonald now,” Anna told Eleanor.

  So much for FDR’s joyous shout at Dr. McDonald’s place in Massachusetts: “I can walk!”

  He couldn’t walk—not in the sense of hopping out of a car and setting off free and easy, with no braces, crutches, or canes, the way you’d expect any politician to do.

  He wasn’t even close.

  Chapter 11

  THREE STRATEGIES

  So why did he keep saying that soon he’d be walking on his own?

  No doctors were saying it, except maybe Dr. McDonald. Dr. Draper, Dr. Hubbard, and the others he had consulted certainly advised more exercise. But they knew by now his chances of walking without aid had essentially dropped to zero.

  Didn’t he know that himself?

  After all, FDR was a realist. His uncle Fred had told him years ago that wisdom lay in “taking things as they are, analyzing the facts, above all not fooling yourself.” The Roosevelts and the Delanos believed in the power of perseverance, but they didn’t believe in miracles.

  Yet month after month, FDR kept telling friends and associates he expected soon to discard his braces, his crutches, possibly even his cane—when the plain fact after five years was that his legs were still far too weak to hold him.

  We can never be sure why he promised himself and others what could never be. But we can make some educated guesses.

  First, he seems to have told people he would walk again simply because he believed it had to be true. He could not concede that he was stuck in those braces. To say that would be to give up the way he had thought of himself since college—as a man like Uncle Ted, bound for the White House.

  As he saw it, a successful politician not only was healthy (as FDR was in every sense except his mobility) but looked and seemed healthy. Yet his body shouted to observers that he was “crippled.” To get up or down stairs he still had to be carried. When he walked in the only way he could, the observer saw a man in an awkward struggle with his own body. When he got in or out of a car, others found it hard to watch. For some people it was even hard to watch him get up from a chair. No one was rude enough to say so. But it was true, and FDR knew it better than anyone. He was the one who saw people’s expressions change when he moved around, or look away entirely, unable to suppress their embarrassment and discomfort.

  So he would not surrender to the limp muscles of his legs. If he was going to be president, he simply must not look crippled. He had to walk, so he would.

  He also thought that saying he would walk again—and believing it—could help make it so. “It’s the mind that matters, anyhow,” he’d told a reporter. He followed the advice he had given his own “patients” at Warm Springs: “You’ve got to know you’re going to improve.” He once told a doctor that to help any polio patient, he must encourage “belief on the patient’s part that the muscles are coming back.” The smallest improvement in a knee, a calf, or an ankle might prove to the mind of that patient that he would come all the way back, given enough time. He assured the same doctor that “there are cases known in Norway where adults have taken the disease and not been able to walk until after a lapse of 10 or even 12 years.” If those Norwegians could do it, why couldn’t he? He’d been trying for only five years! He was young! He had time!

  That leads to the final, and maybe the most important, reason he told people he would soon be “back on his feet.” It had to do with calculations of timing.

  FDR and Louis Howe were playing a cautious game of chess with the politicians of the state of New York, and in this game, timing was everything.

  The king at the center of the chessboard was Al Smith. He had lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1924, but now he was running far ahead in the race to snatch that prize in 1928. This was partly because his voice was the strongest in opposition to Prohibition, the national ban on all sales of liquor, beer, and wine. After half a decade of that “noble experiment,” as its supporters called it, most people thought its “noble” days were over and the experiment had failed. It seemed to have done little more than spawn a gigantic campaign of crime waged by gangsters who were selling liquor illegally. The great immigrant neighborhoods in the nation’s big cities, heavily Catholic, were beginning to outnumber the Protestant farm belts and small towns in population. Governor Smith was the hero of those immigrant masses. The Democratic Party was swinging their way, and his. No other Democrat looked strong enough to challenge him. The party saw 192
8 as Al’s turn for the nomination.

  FDR knew all this and had signed on as a loyal Smith man for 1928. But that was for public consumption. His private calculations were a little more complicated.

  When FDR and Howe studied the chessboard in 1926, they considered three possible strategies:

  Strategy #1: FDR could run for president right away, in 1928, leaping over the stepping-stone of statewide office. After all, a lot of Democrats back in 1924 had told Roosevelt they would back him the next time around.

  But this strategy would be terribly risky. Since 1920, FDR had built a reputation as a Smith man. If he challenged Smith for the 1928 nomination, not only would he be likely to lose, but also he would brand himself as a turncoat against the party’s leader.

  (Actually, there was one narrow path to the 1928 nomination. If the Democrats got locked in a civil war like the one they’d fought in 1924, with the “wet” forces, who wanted to get rid of Prohibition, against the “dry” forces, who wanted to keep it, Smith might be pushed out of the running. If that happened, Louis Howe wrote in a confidential note, then FDR stood an “excellent chance … of being at least one of—if not the one—among the leaders who all turned to.” But in 1926 Smith looked so strong that this was only a long shot—very long.)

  Strategy #2: FDR could run for the U.S. Senate in 1926, challenging the Republican who then held the seat, James Walcott Wadsworth. If FDR won, the statewide victory would boost his prestige and his national profile, and he could bide his time in the Senate, waiting for the best year to run for president.

  But the Senate strategy had its dangers, too. New Yorkers had already elected Senator Wadsworth twice. If FDR challenged him and lost, how could he run for president after that? Then there was this: A seat in the U.S. Senate offered prestige, yes, but for a politician whose ultimate aim was the White House, it was a place of peril. This is why: As a senator, FDR would have to vote on major national policies. The Democrats were split between progressives in the cities and conservatives in the countryside. On any major measure, a “yes” vote would make enemies in one faction, while a “no” vote would make enemies in the other. FDR wanted as few enemies as possible. Anyway, it was hard for a newcomer to make a mark in the Senate, with only one vote out of 96 and no seniority.

  And, of course, if he ran for office now, in 1926, there was the problem of campaigning with braces, canes, and crutches. His legs weren’t ready.

  Strategy #3: Prepare for the right year to run for governor of New York.

  This strategy had many advantages.

  FDR loved the state of New York and liked the idea of being its leader.

  He was a born executive, not a legislator. He wanted to be the one in charge.

  He knew the governorship could be a stepping-stone to the White House, as it had been for Uncle Ted.

  And FDR wanted not just to be president but to be a great president. He needed experience, and he knew it.

  You could look at it as a simple matter of odds—of statistical probabilities—which Louis Howe had been calculating since his days around the horse-racing tracks of Saratoga Springs.

  These were the numbers:

  Since the Civil War, the Democratic Party had nominated thirteen men for president. Of those thirteen, seven had been New Yorkers, and three of those men had been governor. One, his father’s friend Grover Cleveland, had been elected president in two different years, 1884 and 1892. The Republicans had nominated two New York governors for president, and one of them—Uncle Ted—had reached the White House. (He’d succeeded to the presidency when President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, but he’d been elected in his own right in 1904.)

  New York, with 10 percent of the U.S. population and 17 percent of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency, was the biggest state in the Union by far. If you could run the government of New York, with its gigantic metropolis and its sprawling reaches of upstate farm country, it was pretty clear you could run the government of the whole country.

  Anyone who hopes to be president faces long odds. But a smart gambler would look favorably upon any governor of New York.

  When to run? The next election year, 1928, looked promising. If Smith won the White House in that year and FDR became governor, FDR could build a strong record as chief executive of the Empire State and run for president in 1932 or 1936.

  And if Smith lost in 1928, he would likely be finished as a national candidate and out of FDR’s way for good.

  So at this point, Strategy #3 looked like the right one.

  If he could walk.

  * * *

  A friend in the Democratic Party—a wealthy upstate New York brewer named Louis B. Wehle—had recently written to FDR about the political outlook in strictest confidence.

  Wehle said he knew FDR would be supporting Governor Smith for the nomination in 1928. But he asked FDR to permit “your friends … to organize the situation in your behalf in the event that Smith should not receive the nomination.”

  Between the lines, FDR could read Wehle’s intentions. His friend wanted to spread the word—very quietly—that FDR was ready to step in if Smith’s momentum toward the nomination could be blocked.

  But FDR wrote back and said no, he couldn’t allow it—or rather, his legs wouldn’t allow it.

  “I must give principal consideration for at least 2 years more to getting back the use of my legs,” he told Wehle. “Up to now I have been able to walk only with great difficulty with steel braces and crutches, having to be carried up and down steps, in and out of cars, etc., etc. Such a situation is, of course, impossible in a candidate.

  “I am, however, gaining greatly and hope, within a year, to be walking without the braces, with the further hope of then discarding the crutches in favor of canes and eventually possibly getting rid of the latter also. The above are necessarily only hopes, as no human being can tell whether the steady improvement will keep up.”

  Those few sentences perfectly summed up the strategy that FDR and Louis appear to have chosen—the best strategy to secure a position of strength on that complicated chessboard.

  In one sense, FDR meant just what he said. He hoped before too long to be walking with only a cane, and if he accomplished that, he could run for office. He wasn’t ready now, but he could be soon.

  This was the plain truth. But the truth served his deeper purposes, too.

  He hoped that this not-now-but-later strategy would prevent Democratic friends like Wehle from pressuring him to mount a direct challenge to Smith for the party’s next presidential nomination. It would also repel any pressure to run for the U.S. Senate. Howe reminded him of that on the eve of the New York Democratic Party’s 1926 convention. FDR had agreed to nominate Smith for another two-year term as governor. Then the party would choose its Senate nominee.

  “I hope your spine is still sufficiently strong to assure them that you are still nigh to death’s door for the next two years,” Howe warned FDR. “Please try and look pallid and worn and weary when you address the convention so it will not be too exceedingly difficult to get by with the statement that your health will not permit you to run for anything for 2 years more.”

  But it was risky to look too “worn and weary.” If that was how he appeared, Democratic leaders in New York might just write Roosevelt off for good. That was why he had to hold out the tantalizing promise of a full comeback.

  FDR and Howe were saying to each other: Just stay in the game … Don’t let their attention wander too far, or other men may pass you by … Meanwhile, pursue recovery by every available method.

  That consideration—the delicate business of timing his return to politics at just the right moment—seems to be the final reason he kept telling people that he expected to be so much better … soon.

  Did he mean it? Good question.

  Of course, sometimes he didn’t tell the truth at all.

  “I honestly have no desire either to run for the presidency or to be president,” he remark
ed to a reporter about this time. “I have seen much of presidents and administrations. Even though it may sound selfish, I would rather do my bit as a private in the ranks.”

  * * *

  On an overcast day in June 1926, Anna Roosevelt, who had just turned twenty, was married to Curtis Dall, her senior by nine years, at St. James Episcopal Church, a lovely stone sanctuary under Hyde Park’s towering trees.

  She was not a very happy bride. “I got married when I did because I wanted to get out,” she admitted later—out of the tense circle of her family, that is, where there was seldom a thaw in the cold war between her mother and grandmother.

  Sara Roosevelt had been offering her usual disapproving remarks and adding new ones—about Eleanor’s political activities; about Franklin’s long absences from New York; and about Eleanor’s recent decision, with FDR’s approval and help, to build a stone cottage, called Val-Kill, two miles from the “big house,” where she and two close women friends would stay whenever they were in Hyde Park. Eleanor steamed. If she wrote Franklin about his mother’s latest needling, he would return support and sympathy, then remind Eleanor that after all, she knew what Sara was like.

  Still, on the wedding day, the family went through all the motions of a big, happy family celebration. They offered smiling welcomes to guests arriving from New York City on special train cars—associates of Franklin’s from politics, the business world, and Harvard; friends of Eleanor’s from her private school in New York and her comrades in feminist circles; people like Sara from upper-crust families in the wealthy enclaves of Newport, Rhode Island, Tuxedo Park, New York, and Manhattan’s Upper East Side.