Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  Quite plainly and firmly, FDR had said no to that plan.

  His energy and strength were quite all right, he told Bloch and the others. In fact, he intended to make the most vigorous and energetic campaign anyone in the state of New York had ever seen. “There will be a lot of handshaking and close contact with the voters if I have my way,” he had promised reporters.

  On the ferry that morning was a young lawyer named Samuel Rosenman. He had served five years in the state assembly, then taken a job drafting legislative proposals for the Democrats in Albany. Bloch had assigned him to accompany FDR on the campaign trip; he could bring the candidate up to speed on state issues, do research, and help with speechwriting. Bloch brought him over to meet Roosevelt.

  Rosenman had seen FDR only once before, from a distance, at the 1924 convention in Madison Square Garden. Now he saw him up close.

  As a member of Smith’s circle in Albany, Rosenman remembered later, “I had heard stories of his being something of a playboy and idler, of his weakness and ineffectiveness. That was the kind of man I had expected to meet.”

  On the Hudson River ferry, he saw someone quite different. “The broad jaw and upthrust chin, the piercing, flashing eyes, the firm hands—they did not fit the description.” And the remarks about FDR as a weakling “became a joke within a week after I met him … I never saw a man who worked harder.”

  That was the impression FDR intended to make on the voters of New York. In the recesses of his own mind, he might not have been sure he was ready to take on the physical challenge of the campaign. But he was going to do so, ready or not, and dare anyone who watched him to say he wasn’t up to it. And by doing so, he might just banish any doubts of his own.

  * * *

  His first public appearance was supposed to be that night in Binghamton. Instead, whenever the train pulled into a small-town station, he got up from his seat, walked to the platform of the last car, and talked to whoever showed up, starting with the depot at Port Jervis, the first town over the New Jersey line.

  He beamed out at the crowd and called, “How do you do, neighbors?” He introduced a couple of people. Then he said, “I think I look pretty healthy for a sick man, don’t you?”

  He heard appreciative laughter and applause. It was the right touch. In those few words he was acknowledging their curiosity about his condition, pushing away any thought of pity, and taking a crack at the Republican scuttlebutt about him.

  In the high school gym in Binghamton that night, he declared: “This was supposed to have been my first speech of the active campaign. That was the intention on the part of everybody until I left Jersey City this morning, and the whole thing was knocked into a cocked hat, first at [Port Jervis] and then at [Middletown], and then at Callicoon, and then at Hancock, and then Neponsit, and then at Susquehanna.”

  By now the crowd was laughing along with him.

  “So this is the seventh speech of the campaign.”

  He had spoken at every one of those small-town whistle-stops. As the train rolled up to a station, it was easy enough to lock his braces, stand up, and walk on Irvin McDuffie’s strong arm to the platform at the back of the rear car. There a little crowd would be gathered, notified by the morning paper and word of mouth that the nominee for governor was paying them a visit. In the 1920s, that was big news in a small town. They saw a tall, grinning, broad-shouldered, good-looking man emerge onto the platform and move to the railing to wave and then begin to speak. He was brimming with cheer and enthusiasm, able to stand and even to walk. People who saw him in person tossed out any image they had of Franklin Roosevelt as a pathetic man.

  * * *

  Westward to Owego … Elmira … Corning …

  “As all of you know, I am an upstate man, but I believe that the day has passed when there should be war and disputes of any kind between the great metropolitan district and us farmers of upstate.”

  He shifted from train to automobile, with a few cars for reporters and the other Democratic candidates trailing behind. Traveling by car was better; he could make more stops. He could bypass the awkward business of shifting from train to car for the short drive to a town square or a school to give a speech. Instead, the car could go straight to the spot where he was to meet people and speak, then take off again. One day he made fourteen speeches.

  To give a brief, informal talk in a town square or a public park, he would often just lock his braces and stand in the back of the car, speaking to a crowd without even getting out. Then he would sit back down to shake hands and exchange a few words with each man and woman who came up to say hello.

  Hornell … Wellsville … Olean …

  “You know, some of my Republican friends around New York are talking about the kind of sympathy the people of the state ought to have for this unfortunate invalid who is running for governor! [Applause] I don’t think that any of us need worry about that, and I am mighty glad that the convention in Rochester was good enough and kind enough to draft me for the job!”

  A man who couldn’t walk on his own might be expected to stay away from crowds. In fact, Roosevelt loved the travel and talk that made up a political campaign. “He enjoyed the freedom and getting out among the people,” said Frances Perkins. “He used to … describe individuals in the crowd—a woman with a baby, an old fellow, small boys scampering in the throng. He associated them sometimes with the town … in which he had seen them. His personal relationship with crowds was on a warm, simple level of a friendly, neighborly exchange of affection.”

  Campaigning meant private meetings with local mayors, council members, judges, sheriffs. He knew that these people, like the crowds of curious voters, weren’t sure what to expect. To put them at ease, he developed subtle ways of pulling their attention away from his legs. FDR’s face had always been unusually animated, but now he made the most of that trait. His features were constantly in motion. His eyebrows arched high in surprise or scrunched low in serious attention. One moment he might spread his grin to his ears, then thrust out his lower lip in an actor’s puzzled pout. Anyone introduced to him met “a big friendly smile,” one observer said, “and the glint of intense interest in his sparkling eyes.” There were “little laughs, and goads, and urgings, such as ‘Really? Tell me more!’ … ‘Well, what do you know?’ … ‘Same thing’s happened to me dozens of times!’ … ‘Oh, that’s fascinating!’” Perkins said “the heads of little county and local committees pulled up a seat and whispered their deepest hopes to him.” In earlier years he might have turned away from these small fry. But in the campaign of 1928, “he sat and nodded and smiled and said, ‘That’s fine,’ when they reported some small progress.”

  Person by person, he was changing minds, erasing the stigma. A man inclined to write him off as weak, like Samuel Rosenman, came away with an impression of vigor. A woman who first saw him through tears of pathos, like Grace Tully, came away inspired. Among those who saw him every day—his aides and the reporters following the campaign—he was so casual about his legs that after a while they simply forgot he was disabled, as he had seemed to forget it himself.

  Jamestown … Dunkirk … Buffalo …

  “We have had six outdoor meetings today. I hope you will forgive me if my voice is a little frayed tonight. That is the only part of me, except a couple of weak knees—physically, not morally!”

  On October 22, five days out from New York, the campaign came to Rochester, the scene of his nomination. Here he would discuss his disability with more than a passing laugh line.

  There was discussion about just how to do this. It was delicate. If he referred to his condition every day, there would be hell to pay. He’d be seen as playing for votes on the basis of pity. He might seem to be preoccupied with his own troubles—hardly what people wanted to see in their governor. “There was an implicit limit on how much [able-bodied people] wanted to hear about our successes and failings,” wrote one survivor of polio. “Gradually the lesson was learned that no one including myself rea
lly wanted to hear the mundane details of being sick or handicapped, not the triumphs or the hardships.”

  Still, the question of FDR’s strength, as the New York Times noted, was “the greatest under-cover issue of his campaign.” He wanted to put it out on the table.

  He could do so just once, he decided, but no more.

  So what should he say?

  In the papers of Roosevelt’s 1928 campaign there is a single sheet of paper containing some drafted remarks about his disability. It was more than he’d said so far, but not much. It was framed as another jibe at the Republican charges that he’d been “dragooned” to run, and as a rebuttal to the scuttlebutt about his poor health. The draft remarks repeated that he hadn’t been “dragooned,” that his health was excellent, and that a governor’s work was not physical. “Let me assure them [Republican critics] that my only physical disability, which is a certain clumsiness in locomotion and which I trust will eventually disappear, has interfered in no way with my power to think. Possibly because I find it more convenient to sit at my desk than to move around, I pride myself that during the past four years, I have done rather more than the average man’s daily stint [of thinking].”

  It wasn’t quite the right note, and somebody realized it, probably FDR himself. The note not used is scribbled in pencil across the top of the sheet.

  He and Sam Rosenman traded drafts back and forth, developing something new.

  * * *

  At a reception at Rochester’s Seneca Hotel, FDR shook hands with more than eight hundred people. The big event at the city’s Convention Hall was scheduled for unusually late in the evening, since people wanted to hear Herbert Hoover give a scheduled address by radio. By the time FDR was driven over to the hall through the October evening, passing sidewalks crammed with onlookers, there were four thousand people in the seats.

  As other Democrats made opening remarks, they saw his big-shouldered figure move across the stage in his slow, swaying gait, smiling all the way, then drop into a big armchair. Those watching closely noticed that he reached to one knee, then the other, to unlock his braces so he could bend his legs. When his moment to speak came, he relocked his braces, stood up (with a quick bit of help from an aide), and walked slowly to the lectern. Then he thrust his chin toward the upper gallery and smiled.

  “I have been trying to focus in these great night meetings on one topic at a time,” he began, “especially because nowadays one talks not just to the fine audience in front of one but also to thousands of people scattered all over the state who are listening in by radio.”

  Tonight, the topic would be “what I call the human being function of our state government.” He promised to build upon the great increase in state spending on education under Governor Smith and to raise standards for teachers.

  Then there was the matter of children’s health. Infant mortality in New York had declined under Smith, “but we have only just begun the task, for much remains to be done.”

  This brought him by quiet steps to his main subject.

  “I may be pardoned,” he said, “if I refer to my own intense interest in the care of crippled children and, indeed, of cripples of every kind.” Not only polio but tuberculosis, industrial accidents, and other misfortunes had disabled some one hundred thousand New Yorkers, children and adults, he said. For practical reasons alone, more must be done to restore these people to productive lives, since “a wheelchair cripple is not only a dead load on the earning power of the community, but in most cases requires also the attention and care of some able-bodied person as well.”

  Then there was “the great humanitarian side of the subject.” As governor, Al Smith had proposed more aid for disabled people, but the Republicans in Albany had shot him down. Why, the state didn’t even know how many crippled children there really were—a public nurse had told him so.

  “We need an expansion of medical service to every out-of-the-way corner in the cities and on the farms.”

  Then he got to it.

  “I suppose that people readily will recognize that I myself furnish a perfectly good example of what can be done by the right kind of care.”

  Applause began to rustle through the hall.

  “I dislike to use this personal example, but it happens to fit. Seven years ago … I came down with infantile paralysis … and I was completely—for the moment—put out of any useful activities.”

  People were rising to clap and cheer. Tears were welling.

  “By personal good fortune I was able to get the very best kind of care, and the result of having the right kind of care is that today I am on my feet.”

  By then it was hard to hear him.

  “And while I won’t vouch for the mental side of it, I am quite certain that from the physical point of view, I am quite capable of going to Albany and staying there two years!”

  It was a clever twist of the topic, even a brilliant one. He had turned his own personal disaster into a plea for humanitarian government. He had defied the whispered rumors. He had turned himself from a man to pity into a man to cheer.

  It was a long speech full of proposals, but he ended on a simple note.

  He said he detected a surge in the state for “government by common sense and not by statistics.” (This was a dig at Herbert Hoover, known as the Great Engineer, a politician inclined to reduce human problems to columns of figures.) “The people want the national government run by a human being and not a machine. Yes, that is a perfectly natural difference. You and I and Al Smith—human beings.

  “And so, my friends, as I was coming over this afternoon from Batavia, I thought of a little verse that was taught to me when I was pretty small, and I thought it was a pretty good motto for me in this campaign, a motto that will apply to what we are trying to do in this state … and it is this: ‘Look outward and not in; look forward and not back; look upward and not down; and lend a hand.”

  * * *

  Seneca Falls … Syracuse … Watertown … Rome … Utica … Herkimer … Albany …

  The Roosevelt caravan turned south on Route 9 and headed down through the Hudson Valley toward New York City, where religious loyalties were fueling ugly charges on both sides of the campaign. The powerful publisher William Randolph Hearst, still a sworn enemy of Al Smith and no friend of FDR, charged that Roosevelt had been “trying to drag a religious question into politics” by defending Smith against anti-Catholic attacks. Samuel Untermyer, a prominent Jewish Democrat, praised Herbert Lehman, FDR’s running mate, as “a better Jew” than Attorney General Ottinger. But it appeared that the mudslinging over religion might actually be bringing votes to FDR.

  A reporter for the New York Sun saw evidence that “independent Democrats who are against Smith because he is a Catholic are for Roosevelt. Independent Republicans who are against Ottinger because he is a Jew are for Roosevelt. Ottinger does not seem to be able to profit in this strange division along the lines of intolerance.”

  In the city the press swarmed around the campaign. There were many newspapers in and around the great city, and some competed for customers by running big photographs to catch the eyes of commuters dashing for the subway. They also kept a sharp eye out for what were called sob stories—articles that catered to the public’s enjoyment of sentimentalizing over the fate of people less fortunate than themselves.

  These practices in the press posed a new risk. FDR and Howe knew that from certain angles at certain vulnerable moments, the candidate’s body in motion could appear, as he had said himself, “clumsy,” or worse, difficult to look at. There was a comparable risk in print: Stories of his fight against polio could be told to provoke the maximum output of readers’ pity. In both cases, attention would be attracted to FDR’s legs.

  For all of Howe’s tricks in orchestrating press coverage, neither he nor FDR could control it entirely. But they did what they could.

  When reporters asked about polio, he would answer, but mostly by describing the programs he had developed at Warm Springs. �
�I don’t want any sob stuff in the relation of my own experience,” he would say.

  He and Howe worried more about photos and newsreel footage of FDR getting in or out of an automobile. Worst of all would be a chance film clip that showed him taking a fall. At least once he gave newsreel camera operators an explicit directive: “No movies of me getting out of the machine [automobile], boys.” In that particular case, an observer said, “the motion picture machines and cameras were turned away until he had gotten out of his car and taken a pose before the photographic apparatus.” Whether he asked or not, newspapers generally did not publish photos highlighting his disability.

  Such pleas to the press—and the journalists’ own reluctance to put the spotlight on a disability in a man they liked and admired—helped to muffle the glaring fact that he could walk in only a very limited way, and that there were many times each day when other people had to lift him, lower him, and carry him. As a man now living much of each day in public, however carefully he calculated his movements, he could not escape the fact that some people were going to witness just how dependent he was on others.

  So along with all his efforts to persuade people that a “crippled” man could be governor, for all his vigor on the campaign trail and the ingenious tactics he used to divert people’s attention away from his legs, he needed to do one last thing, perhaps the hardest of all. In certain situations there was simply no way to deflect attention from his legs, so he had to summon the courage to endure the stares.

  Frances Perkins saw this quality in him on the evening of October 31 in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. FDR was scheduled to speak in a ballroom at a big community center called the Yorkville Casino. The main doors stood at the top of a broad stone staircase leading up from the sidewalk. There was no railing, which made it impossible for him to climb the stairs on his own. Inside the ballroom, hundreds of milling people were waiting—another obstacle course. The only alternative was to go up the fire escape at the rear of the building, which led to the back of the ballroom. Jimmy Roosevelt and another man linked hands to make a seat for FDR. He lowered himself into that seat and put his arms around the men’s shoulders. Then the men slowly and carefully carried him up the stairs.