by James Tobin
By the precedent set by George Washington but never written into law, presidents left office after two terms. Roosevelt’s two terms were nearly up.
But in the spring of 1940, the Nazi armies of Adolf Hitler swept across western Europe and threatened to invade Great Britain. The military leaders of Japan had conquered much of China and were demanding concessions from the United States and its allies in the western Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt was deeply wary of the threats these dictators posed to U.S. interests. But he had played his cards cautiously, knowing most Americans wanted to stay out of war.
With the Nazi armies’ blitzkrieg drive to the English Channel, the crisis seemed so grave that many Americans could not imagine proceeding without Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. He agreed to run for a third term, the only president to do so, and he won.
So he was in office on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, Germany, Japan’s ally, declared war on the United States as well.
Roosevelt said that “Doctor New Deal” must now become “Doctor Win-the-War.”
His most consequential decision as commander-in-chief was to declare Germany the primary enemy, despite the thirst for revenge that so many Americans felt in response to the Japanese “sneak attack.” Historians have judged the “Atlantic First” strategy to be the right call. If Germany had been allowed to conquer its remaining foes in Europe—the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union—then Hitler would have stood astride half the world. So Roosevelt directed the navy to hold off the Japanese threat while the United States armed the British and the Soviets, all the while building up armies and weapons for a great strike back at Germany. That came when Allied forces attacked the German occupiers of France on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day.
In both theaters of war, despite horrific losses, the United States and its allies made slow but steady progress against their enemies. By the fall of 1944, when Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term as president, there was little doubt about the eventual result. It was just a question of how long the war would last and how great the suffering would be.
Through those twelve dark years of pain and upheaval, Roosevelt’s leadership was the beacon in the darkness. Because he so evidently believed that all would be well in the end, people took hope. And it was no small thing that they knew he had come through a great personal ordeal, rising from near death to reclaim his life and his future. In the end, nobody much cared whether he could walk.
* * *
On April 12, 1945, in his white cottage at Warm Springs, he put his hand to head and said, “I have a terrific headache.” A blood vessel had burst in his brain. A few minutes later he was dead. He had been in poor health from high blood pressure and a bad heart for many months. Probably he should not have run for his fourth term. But he had beaten one disease. Perhaps he thought he could beat another as he had the first—by trying this and trying that, coming back again and again, keeping everlastingly at it until death itself might give up in the face of his smiling persistence.
One time he had tossed off an idea for some big project to an aide.
The man said, “Mr. President, you can’t do that.”
FDR replied, “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t do.”
* * *
The way Roosevelt portrayed his disability in the intense spotlight of the presidency has been called a “splendid deception.” That isn’t quite right.
Disability itself is the deception. It makes able-bodied people misunderstand how capable the disabled person actually is.
Of course there were things Roosevelt could not do. Those things did not include serving as president of the United States. He suffered more from the appearance of disability than from disability itself. Appearances, it is often said, are deceiving.
As president, FDR acted the part of the extraordinarily capable man he was. He knew the value of a great performance. Once, in a meeting with the movie actor and director Orson Welles, he is said to have remarked, “You know, Orson, there are two great actors in America. You are the other one.”
Certainly there was no conspiratorial cover-up, as many people believe. Anyone paying attention to public affairs knew the president had made a comeback from an attack of infantile paralysis. The fact was trumpeted every year on his birthday, when fundraising events called the President’s Birthday Balls raised money for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, an organization FDR had started at Warm Springs, as he was proud to say. (The foundation would change its name to the March of Dimes. It paid for most of the research that led to vaccines that would virtually eradicate polio around the world.) So his polio was hardly a secret.
It’s true that he did what he could to dampen public awareness of just how handicapped he was. His press aides discouraged reporters from referring to it—though they occasionally did—and asked photographers not to take his picture in physically awkward moments, a request they almost always granted. He never used his wheelchair in public. Since there was no television news, FDR’s movements were not constantly in the public eye, as they would be today. So the average person wound up thinking the president was simply lame.
Of course, his condition was worse than lameness. He never gained any greater ability to walk than he achieved with his physical therapists at Warm Springs in 1928.
He kept that fact on the down-low for the same old reasons. He didn’t want pity. He didn’t want to fall in public. (He did so as president at least once, during the 1936 campaign, though it attracted little attention.) He didn’t want people to feel uncomfortable in his presence. And undoubtedly he saw no reason to hand ammunition to his political enemies. He had learned they would use any evidence of his paralysis to their own advantage.
In the privacy of the White House he had himself pushed around in a wheelchair, by far his preferred means of mobility. For meetings and receptions he followed the same routines he had established as governor in Albany. He preferred to have his personal helpers or the Secret Service get him in position with as few people seeing his movements as possible. If there was no other way—at his inaugurations, for instance, with many thousands watching—he put on his damnable braces and walked.
If he had to be carried where people could see, he dispelled the awkwardness with a quick remark and a smile. After the death in 1938 of an old friend, Dr. Cary Grayson, Woodrow Wilson’s personal physician, FDR paid a private visit to Grayson’s widow at her home in Washington. When his car pulled up in front, Grayson’s sons came out to greet him. There was a sidewalk twenty yards long from the curb to the porch. The Graysons watched as two Secret Service agents opened the rear door. Then, one of the sons recalled, “they cradled the president between them, his strong arms and hands over their shoulders and his legs lifelessly dangling from their firmly locked hands. With a jaunty smile, he said to my brothers and me, ‘Boys, you’ll have to excuse me, but it’s a relief not to have to wear pounds of steel on my legs today.’”
People who saw him helped into or out of an automobile or a train car were startled. It was the same when people watched him up close as he did his walking-with-braces performance. Afterward they would say they’d never known how bad off he was. Yet as FDR surely realized, he never paid a political price for these small revelations. If anything, people came away more impressed than they had been before.
The great newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle, who would go on to fame as an overseas correspondent in World War II, noticed this effect once during the 1936 campaign.
Pyle happened to be in Rapid City, South Dakota, when Roosevelt’s entourage came to town. They had rooms in the same hotel. On a Sunday morning, Pyle watched from his window as the president returned from church. A crowd was on the sidewalk, waiting to see him. Pyle wrote about the moment from memory a few weeks later:
“Now there have been, out of what I have always felt to be a fine sense of consideration, few mentions in print or in picture of the president’s partial par
alysis. But it seems to me there can be no violation of good taste in relating anything as beautiful as what happened at Rapid City that day.
“The crowd stopped clapping, and stood silently watching, as the car stopped at the hotel entrance. It was a 7-passenger touring car, with the top down. The president’s two sons and his daughter-in-law got out ahead of him.
“Then, while everybody waited, the president … with his powerful arms slid himself forward onto the spare seat. Then he turned a little and put his legs out the door and over the running board, with his feet almost to the curb. Gus Gennerich, the president’s bodyguard and personal assistant, stood ready to help. But he was not needed. You could almost have heard a pin drop. The president put both hands on one leg and pushed downward, locking the jointed steel brace at his knee. He slowly did the same with the other leg.
“Then he put his hands on the side of the car, and with his arms lifted his body out and up and onto his legs. He straightened up. I have never seen a man so straight.
“And at that moment the tenseness broke, and the crowd applauded. The president’s back was to the crowd, and he did not look around. It was brief and restrained applause.
“I don’t know, but I doubt that that has ever happened to the president before. It was the tenderest, most admiring tribute to courage I have ever seen. It was such a poignant thing, so surprising, so spontaneous. It was as though they were saying with their hands, ‘We know we shouldn’t, but we’ve got to.’
“When I turned from the window there was a lump in my throat, and there would have been in yours, too.”
Franklin as a teenager, posing with his father and mother, James and Sara Delano Roosevelt. He was close to both parents, but James, who was 26 years older than his wife, died when FDR was in his first year of college at Harvard.
FDR holds his second-eldest son, Elliott, at Campobello Island around 1912.
A portrait of the Roosevelt family in 1919. Seated, from left, are Franklin Jr. (on his father’s lap), FDR, Eleanor, John (on Eleanor’s lap), and James. Standing, from left, are Anna and Elliott.
FDR waves to supporters during his 1920 campaign for vice president. He was a golfer, sailor, and tennis player. Friends recalled that he jogged from one meeting to the next as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy.
Eleanor Roosevelt sat for this portrait not long before poliomyelitis struck her husband. She was just beginning her own work as an activist in the Democratic Party.
FDR in 1924, the year he reentered the public arena as chair of Al Smith’s campaign for president. Even under a suit coat, the expansion of his upper body is evident.
Before the Democratic National Convention, FDR practiced for days to be sure he could walk on crutches to the podium at Madison Square Garden in New York.
His speech nominating Al Smith for president electrified the delegates, resurrecting his own chances to run for office. But the enthusiastic response of his fellow Democrats doubled the pressure he felt to regain the ability to walk unaided.
After the convention, FDR, on crutches, greets John W. Davis, the Democrats’ nominee for president (center), and New York governor Al Smith (right) at the Roosevelts’ home in Hyde Park.
Louis Howe, a cantankerous newspaperman turned behind-the-scenes political operative, saw FDR’s early promise and stuck with him through his greatest ordeal.
Frances Perkins—the labor advocate who was Roosevelt’s friend, aide, and close observer throughout his career—said the core of his character was “a capacity for living and growing that remained to his dying day. It accounts for his rise from a rather unpromising young man to a great man—not merely a President but a man who so impressed himself upon his time that he can never be forgotten.”
Roosevelt poses at Warm Springs with two boys on bicycles.
The mineralized water in the Warm Springs pool felt so good that FDR cried: “I don’t think I will ever get out!”
Roosevelt’s rave reviews attracted other polio survivors to Warm Springs from across the U.S. Soon he was calling himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt” and directing their exercises.
In the company of others who had been paralyzed, FDR lost his self-consciousness about his atrophied legs.
These leg braces were one of several sets made for FDR. Leather straps with buckles at the waist, buttocks, hips, knees, and thighs were attached to frames made of aluminum or steel. Locks at the knees kept the braces rigid when FDR was standing.
Roosevelt struggled to find braces that suited him but was never satisfied. This receipt includes his note to the maker of a new set: “Braces don’t fit. Will have to alter them when I get back in Sept. FDR.”
Roosevelt cried, “I can walk!” then was held up for a photo by his assistant, LeRoy Jones (left), and Dr. William McDonald. (His wheelchair is just behind him.) The doctor had urged FDR to pursue a new exercise program without wearing braces, but the workouts damaged his legs.
FDR developed strength and coordination by endless back-and-forth practice on a long set of planks with handrails. Here he practices at Warm Springs with two other polio survivors, including his friend, the popular Fred Botts, who had trained to be an opera singer.
On a hot day at Warm Springs, a photographer captured FDR fishing alone. He had traded long trousers for shorts, revealing his leg braces.
Roosevelt was delighted with his design of hand controls for a used Ford. The contraption worked, and from then on, he often drove around his properties in Georgia and Hyde Park—his only means of movement entirely within his own control.
Marguerite LeHand, nicknamed “Missy” by the Roosevelt children, rose from a working-class background to become not only FDR’s personal secretary but his close political adviser and friend. “Missy is my conscience,” he often said.
Early in his 1928 campaign for governor of New York, FDR shifted from a railroad car to the back seat of an automobile, where he could greet voters and even give a speech without leaving the car.
Just elected governor, FDR poses with his political ally Al Smith, who soon came to resent FDR’s determination to run his own show in the state capital of Albany. (Note the leg braces exposed at FDR’s feet—a rejoinder to those who claimed he shielded all signs of his disability from public view.)
FDR’s victory in the 1928 governor’s race had been razor-thin. But in 1930 he won reelection in a landslide, as the next day’s New York Journal reported. His victory made Roosevelt the leading Democrat in the race to challenge President Herbert Hoover, whose popularity had plummeted in the onset of the Great Depression.
As the economic crisis deepened in 1931-32, homeless people were forced to build makeshift villages of scrap metal and wood. Soon they were known as “Hoovervilles.”
A banner on Franklin Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, promotes Roosevelt’s first campaign for president.
FDR’s thousand-watt smile was a powerful political tool. Here he exhibits it in an outdoor speech during the 1932 presidential campaign.
The leaders of the Allies in World War II, meeting at Tehran, Iran, in 1943—Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, FDR, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom.
The original statue of FDR at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt National Memorial in Washington, D.C., shrouded his disability. After disability advocates said his wheelchair should be plainly displayed, this statue, by the sculptor Robert Graham, was added in 2001. The inscription on the wall, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, reads: “Franklin’s illness … gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This story draws on many of the same sources I used when writing The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency (2013). But this is a wholly new book, written for younger readers.
By far the most important sources for understanding Franklin Roosevelt’s experience of po
lio are what historians call original sources—the letters, memos, diaries, and other writings that come directly from those who took part in these events or observed them from up close. Most of the original sources I used are housed in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York. They are kept in many different collections that make up the papers of the Roosevelt family—FDR’s personal and official papers, Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers, a set of family papers donated by the Roosevelts’ children, Louis Howe’s papers, and many more. There is one slim folder titled “Infantile Paralysis,” but the great majority of references to polio are scattered in myriad other folders. Finding them, I like to say, was like looking for a hundred needles in a thousand haystacks, but the search was always fun. The FDR Library also contains a comprehensive collection of Roosevelt’s speeches, all of them available online. The library’s enormous collection of photographs is another important source of information—showing, to take one small example, that FDR as governor of New York often allowed himself to be photographed with his braces showing at the ankles, which tends to deflate the notion of a conspiratorial cover-up of his condition.