Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  Then one day he sat down too hard in a chair and hurt his back, leaving him in considerable pain.

  When Plastridge appeared at his door the next morning, he grumbled: “What are you here for? Didn’t you know I hurt my back?”

  She had heard many such excuses from other patients.

  “I thought maybe I could do a little work with you,” she replied. “Will it hurt your back to move your toes?”

  “Yes!” he shot back.

  “Then you’re not doing it right.”

  “Prove it!”

  She did.

  For the first time ever, FDR learned how to exert control over one isolated set of muscles at a time. With practice, he got so he could move just his toes without moving his whole foot, and he could move his foot without moving his entire leg. Control over isolated muscle groups meant greater control over his balance and coordination, which in turn might mean moving around with less risk of a fall and less awkwardness in his motions.

  They spent another week on these new techniques. FDR listened as Plastridge reminded him of the principles of long-term physical rehabilitation, how the combination of practice and perseverance might lead, even after all this time, to substantial improvements in his ability to manage his movements. Each skill demanded concerted, deliberate practice. “It is like an athlete going into training,” she remarked. “He must work long and hard to develop and perfect himself in his specialty.”

  It was a new start. FDR sensed possibilities he had not seen before. He was re-imagining the task before him, and it looked far more feasible than the impossible challenge of complete recovery.

  Just before Christmas, as Plastridge was about to return to Chicago, she sat down to dinner with members of the family. A gift-wrapped box sat before her on the table. She looked at FDR.

  “Open it!” he ordered.

  Inside she found a gold ring with a lapis stone. It was engraved: FOR ALICE LOU PLASTRIDGE, WITH WARM REGARDS FROM HER OLD FRIEND, F.D. ROOSEVELT.

  * * *

  On January 30, 1927, FDR turned forty-five years old. Two weeks later, he got himself off the train in Warm Springs and went back to work on all fronts.

  Now that his panel of expert orthopedists had endorsed the idea of a polio treatment center at Warm Springs, he supervised the legal and financial work of organizing the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, the nonprofit corporation that would own and operate the center. He made phone calls and held meetings to make sure the construction of his own cottage would be done soon. He met with contractors about the rehabilitation of the Meriwether Inn. He bought more land, including a lovely wooded promontory called Dowdell’s Knob, where he loved to take people for picnics. He gave speeches to church groups and civic groups. Politics intruded when his new friends among the Democrats of Georgia “boomed” him for president, meaning they spread talk in the party and the press that he would make a better nominee in 1928 than Al Smith, whom the southerners feared. Once again FDR had to shut them down, insisting he could and would not be a candidate. When Missy LeHand became seriously ill, he had to make sure she received care, then arranged for her to go home for an extended rest.

  Yet from February to May, he made time to practice walking with Helena Mahoney. Never since the beginning of his recovery in 1921 had he been so disciplined, and he began to see real results. In pursuit of his new and realistic goal—to walk with help while drawing as little attention as possible to his handicap—he made more concrete progress in three months than in all the years since 1921.

  Mahoney studied his movements. She was interested in more than just the latest tricks in how he could best get in or out of a chair or up or down a step. She was focused on the connections between the brain’s nervous system and the body—how they changed with prolonged paralysis, and how they could be restored bit by bit. “Most of us have experienced instability in walking after even a short illness,” she would write. “We called it weakness, but a major part was lack of coordination and balance. [They] are elusive qualities. They must be reeducated if unused for any length of time.” For the patient who has only some muscles in working order, walking is an entirely new skill. “He needs help to train unaccustomed muscles to function smoothly and spontaneously. Normal people experience some of this difficulty when learning a new game; a beginner at golf or tennis, or even at a new dance, is usually slow and awkward and only practice gives us a smooth performance.

  “Just as there are what athletes call ‘naturals’ in sport, there are some patients who will instinctively know how to use their muscles to obtain a certain function. Others must be patiently taught to do the same thing.”

  FDR was one who had to be taught, and now that Mahoney understood what he could and couldn’t do, she delivered. She showed him a way of moving that would attract the least possible attention to his disability while allowing him to say, as he so much wanted to, “I can walk.”

  We don’t know exactly how she taught him the technique, but it probably started with her simply saying: “Watch this.”

  In her right hand she held a cane, planting the tip firmly on the floor just ahead of her. On her left side she placed an assistant, then grasped his arm just above the elbow. She kept both of her legs locked at the knees, like FDR in his braces. Then she began to rock her weight slightly to the left, then slightly to the right, just enough to pull each foot off the floor. As she rocked to the right, her left foot rose. When she rocked to the left, her right foot rose … just a bit, half an inch or so, enough to clear the floor. Right … left … right … left again … and this time, as she leaned left, she twisted her upper body slightly to the left and swung her right foot forward a few inches … rock to the right, twist to the right, and she swung the left foot forward. She was doing it with the strength of her upper body, swinging the legs like two stiff pendulums. Next to her, the assistant swayed in rhythm with her. The only difference was that he was bending his legs slightly at the knee and using the muscles below his waist to move his legs forward. But if you looked at the two of them moving together, more or less identically, they both seemed to be, well, walking.

  Now you do it, she said.

  Slowly, through trial and error, he began to get the hang of it. He would never be able to do it swiftly. He would never be able to jump up from a chair and hurry off across the room. He would always need at least one helper to lift him to the standing position, then walk along with him. And he would never do this without the danger that something would go wrong and he would fall, as he still did from time to time. But with a strong and well-trained aide at his side, he began to see that he could perform this athletic feat whenever he needed to show that he was not “confined to a wheelchair.” He might be lame, but he could “walk like a man”—across a stage or into a room—and “without scaring everyone to death.”

  In later years some would say this was nothing more than a clever deception, a parlor act—that FDR could not “really walk.” No, not by himself. But doctors define the act of walking with the two words bipedal ambulation, which means “traveling across a surface while standing upright on two feet.” That’s what he was doing. He just needed a little help. Thanks to Alice Lou Plastridge, Helena Mahoney, and his new willingness to bend his goals to what was truly possible, he could move about in public without a wheelchair or crutches, the symbols of being “crippled.”

  The more he practiced, the more graceful his sway-walking became. His natural athletic skill reasserted itself. During his exercises he could even manage to walk with just two canes, holding no one’s arm, though that was too risky to do as a regular thing.

  With so much exercise his muscles grew stronger. Better coordination and greater strength began to feed off each other.

  As March turned to April and the warm Georgia spring came on, Mahoney, who was not easily impressed, was delighted with her patient’s accomplishment. But she began to worry that he might once again squander the progress he was making once he returned home. So she wrote to Ele
anor to ask for her help:

  “Mr. Roosevelt is doing so very well I want you to know it. He is walking with two canes at exercise and also with my arm and a cane. His muscles are greatly improved, his knees especially are much stronger. He has never shown such interest and attention to this work since I have been here. I do dread having it interrupted and do hope he will stay just as long as possible for we always have to go back some each time he goes away. Even two weeks or so longer will help to establish what we have. We hope you will persuade Mr. Roosevelt to stay a bit longer.”

  Eleanor likely knew her own persuasive powers with her husband were seldom a match for Louis Howe’s. So she showed the letter to Howe, who quickly urged FDR to stay on in Georgia. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am, old man, at the details she gives of the way you have come back,” Howe wrote. “I have always felt you would.” (Here Howe may have been picturing something more like the complete recovery that FDR had wished for earlier.) “Now I’m not going to advise one way or the other because I concluded long ago that you know more about your case and what to do for it than the doctors did.”

  FDR did stay two weeks longer, and after a short trip home, he returned to Warm Springs for three more weeks.

  Mahoney wrote again to tell Eleanor of his progress. “We are very happy to have Mr. Roosevelt back with us,” she said. “I did not realize how much we needed him until I saw him and slipped the burden back to his shoulders … He gets his exercise every day and it is good to see him walk around the house with a crutch and cane and stand up to the table and do and get what he wants. His balance improves. I am sure you will find him doing more and more on his feet.”

  * * *

  Late in the evening of April 6, 1927, Paul Hasbrouck, a young man with polio, arrived in Warm Springs for a visit of several weeks. He was from Poughkeepsie, New York, just a few miles from Hyde Park. He and FDR had struck up a friendship. Hasbrouck, an army veteran of World War I, had been paralyzed below the waist in his mid-twenties when he was a member of the U.S. Senate’s staff. He went home to live with his parents in Poughkeepsie and work on his recovery. He arranged to study for a master’s degree in political science and economics from his alma mater, Hamilton College, then a Ph.D. from Columbia University—in that era, an extraordinary achievement for a person with a disability. In the spring of 1927, he had just submitted the manuscript of his first book, a study of political parties in the U.S. House of Representatives, to a major publisher. Short and very thin, he could walk haltingly with braces and canes but hoped to do much better. He and FDR had been corresponding about polio treatments off and on for several years, and FDR had urged him to come and try Warm Springs. Now, at the age of thirty-one, with his studies complete, he was ready to do so.

  Hasbrouck was dropped off at one of the compound’s new, long bungalow-style cottages. In back there was a screen porch with rocking chairs under a canopy of shade trees. His spacious room, plain but cheerful, had the pleasant scent of clean, fresh lumber, with brand-new linens on the bed and a new dresser and table. He went across the road to the dining room and was served a hot supper. He was eager to look the whole place over, but it was already dark, so he had to wait for morning.

  He had hardly awakened when he heard the noise of trees being felled nearby, and when he got outside, he saw a tractor pushing away the logs, making way for new construction. Then carpenters began tearing the old siding off his cottage to replace it with new. Just before 10:00 A.M., Hasbrouck was picked up by car and driven with a few other patients down a sloping dirt road to the two pools—a slightly smaller one just for the polio guests, a larger one for members of the public and visitors. He met Mahoney, who struck him as “an excellent executive.”

  Around the pool Hasbrouck found clean, new changing rooms where each guest was presented with two fresh towels every morning, just as in a fine resort. In the air he caught a faint whiff of something like sulfur wafting up from the sparkling water. He learned the pools were emptied each evening, then scrubbed, whereupon the pipes were reopened to allow fresh water to gush in. When he lifted a handful to his mouth, it tasted not of chemicals, exactly, but decidedly “soft.”

  He slid into the pool and soon understood what Roosevelt had been telling him about its unusual qualities. The experience was “just splendid in every way,” he said in a letter to his father. “Its temperature is mildly warm to the touch, and the whole pool stays so mild that today I stayed in for what seemed a very long time without having any desire to get out. I walk freely all over the pool.” When he finally got out, he rested for a while, as patients were instructed, but “I felt so refreshed from the swimming that I had little need of rest.”

  Back at his cottage after lunch, Hasbrouck heard the whirring clatter of a Ford Model T pulling up outside. He looked out to see Franklin Roosevelt at the wheel, smiling his giant smile.

  Hasbrouck said later it was he who had given FDR the idea of rigging up an automobile with hand controls for disabled drivers. Whether it had been his idea or someone else’s—possibly FDR’s own—FDR had jumped on it. During his summer visit to Warm Springs in 1926, he’d picked up an old Model T for fifty dollars and put a local mechanic to work on it. Using FDR’s sketch, the mechanic attached metal rods to the foot pedals, then brought the rods up through the dashboard and capped them with handles, which FDR could push or pull to accelerate or put on the brakes. He tried it out and pronounced it a spectacular innovation. It was the first time since 1921 that he had achieved fully independent mobility, and from then on he seized every chance to drive himself and his passengers up and down the village roads and out into the countryside. At both Warm Springs and the estate at Hyde Park, he would never again be without a car he could drive.

  FDR waved Hasbrouck into the car and took off down the lane to give his young friend a full tour. There was much to see—far more than when FDR first saw the property in 1924. Bulldozers were carving new roads in the red earth. From deep inside the old Meriwether Inn came the racket of carpenters. The “push boys”—local youths hired for the purpose—were taking patients in wheelchairs down to the pools, where Helena Mahoney’s “physios,” as the physical therapists were called, were putting patients through their demanding exercise routines and walking practice. Turf was being seeded on the golf course. In every building, whether remodeled or new, ramps were being built in place of steps and stairs.

  What Hasbrouck and other newcomers saw was the construction of a place seldom seen before—a center devoted entirely to the physical and emotional well-being of people who were pitied or shunned wherever else they went. It was not a forbidding sanitarium, all white starch and somber silence, but a lively sanctuary from stigma where the patients grew accustomed to the same respect, social engagement, and just plain fun that people without disabilities could take for granted wherever they went.

  “When we finished with the work at hand, we’d have what we called water polo,” recalled a Georgian who served as one of the push boys. “It really wasn’t water polo; it was ‘try to get the ball away from Mr. Roosevelt.’ He would sit in the middle of the pool … From the waist down he was skin and bones, but from the waist up, he was a powerful man. He’d hold that rubber ball high above his head in the air and just dare you to come and get it. Every time I’d get close, he’d take his powerful hands and push me down. When he pushed, you went straight to the bottom of the pool.”

  At night, people who had been pointed at with pity, even fear, on the streets of their hometowns found fresh flowers on tables set for dinner, with free-wheeling evenings of poker and bridge to follow. They competed in parlor games—how many words could be made from the letters in C-o-n-s-t-a-n-t-i-n-o-p-l-e?—and watched movies. There was to be a school for the younger patients, plus a clinic, a library, and shops. On cool evenings there were blazing logs in the fireplaces. Every week, auto caravans carried everyone out through the peach orchards to picnic spots. On special nights the big pool was lit for moonlit swims. Soon, engage
ment announcements would be seen on the big bulletin board.

  It was a summer colony infused with the informal spirit of outdoor fun that Franklin Roosevelt believed in like a creed and charged with a special sense of purpose. Stronger muscles and better coordination were only part of it. The spirit of the place drew upon FDR’s determination to restore hope and dignity to people who thought those essential qualities of life had been lost for good.

  In 1926, he had committed his money to Warm Springs. In 1927 he gave his heart to it. It was an enterprise large enough to absorb all his attention and prodigious energy, and its people—staff and patients alike—now depended on him. He was in very deep.

  But now, unlike in 1926, when Anna had watched her father doing everything but much exercise, he stuck to his walking practice.

  In the spring of 1928, he worked a lot with a physio named Mary Hudson.

  “He came every day,” Hudson told the historian Geoffrey Ward many years later, “and always on time. You knew he was getting ready for something.”

  Hudson’s examinations showed how very little muscle mass had been restored below the waist by all of Roosevelt’s exercising. But with the fingers of his left hand gripping Hudson’s arm and his right hand squeezing the handle of his cane, he walked and walked.

  How did he do it? Geoffrey Ward asked Hudson.

  She tapped her forehead.

  “It’s all up here,” she said. “He just decided to do it. He walked on sheer determination. He was ready. It was time.”

  PART 4

  “A TOUCH OF DESTINY”

  (FALL 1928–FALL 1932)

  Chapter 13