The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  These investments were conservative compared with some of Roosevelt’s other speculations, however. He bought two thousand shares of stock in a company that unsuccessfully wildcatted for oil in Wyoming. He lost over $25,000 in a scheme to buy lobsters and hold them off the market until prices rose; lobster prices failed to rise. With Owen D. Young and others he started an enterprise to run dirigibles between New York and Chicago, but this soon proved to be, technologically, a misguided enthusiasm. A chain of resort hotels, the harnessing by General Electric of tidal power at Passamaquoddy Bay, vending machines, commercial forestry, selling advertising space in taxicabs—these and other schemes Roosevelt conceived with the enthusiasm and imagination of an old-time investment plunger.

  A plunger Roosevelt was. To some at the time, this behavior seemed entirely out of character, yet it showed a side of the man that came into view many times in his career. As war administrator, as businessman, as President, he liked to try new things, to take a dare, to bring something off with a flourish. Taking a plunge, moreover, was easy for him. He had the security—his and Eleanor’s inherited income and the availability of Sara’s help in case of need—that allowed it. There was an interesting parallel between his business and his intellectual ventures. He could speculate with money because he had a financial heritage; he could speculate with ideas because he had a vague but deep-rooted ideological heritage to fall back on.

  Even so, many of his business activities had more of a political than a commercial tinge. If he exhibited the daring of the speculator, he displayed, too, the cautiousness of a politician who refuses to gamble all on one election. Roosevelt in the end neither lost nor gained heavily because he seldom invested very much at a time. The political atmosphere was thickest at Roosevelt’s Fidelity and Deposit Company office. The bonding business was a key part of the company’s activities, and city and state politicians controlled a good deal of bonding. Roosevelt not only boasted of how he got business through his political connections in Albany and Washington but criticized associates for failing to cultivate the “big men” who had contracts to give out. He could later contend quite rightly that he had made a success of this business.

  The most curious of Roosevelt’s business activities was a post he took early in the ‘20’s as a “czar” of the building industry. During the war and postwar years builders had lost the confidence of the public as a result of profiteering, shoddy work, and high prices. Their aim in setting up the American Construction Council was to form an organization embracing 250 national organizations, including architects and engineers as well as contractors and building trades laborers, and capable of policing itself. The builders wanted, also, to head off further demands for forthright prosecution of building trades associations under the antitrust laws. Roosevelt served as a respectable figurehead; more than that, he took a keen interest in gathering data and in long-range planning to iron out sharp seasonal fluctuations in the industry.

  To some extent Roosevelt absorbed the political attitudes of the businessmen and promoters who surrounded him in the 1920’s. Just before taking his building industry post he struck out at government regulation: it was too unwieldy and expensive, he said. Education, rather than protective legislation, he asserted on another occasion, was the only way to stop investors from losing money on securities. When he denounced governmental subsidies to the merchant marine as being too costly, he was probably reflecting the antagonism that other small shippers like himself had toward the big shippers who were getting most of the favors from Washington.

  On the other hand, Roosevelt did not adopt all the root postulates that governed the business approach. He never accepted the idea that the businessman should make the essential decisions in society, or that government should pursue a strictly hands-off policy toward business, or that popular government was dangerous. Even as a businessman he was still something of a Wilsonian. He did accept, especially in his building-industry job, the doctrines of a basic harmony of interests among economic groups and of a measure of self-regulation by business. These ideas would crop up again after he became President.

  One reason that Roosevelt spurned business doctrine was his aversion to any kind of sweeping theory; he thought and acted in terms of immediate problems, not of eternal absolutes. Another reason was his distaste for the cardinal goal of most of his business friends: money-making. He was more absorbed in the game of speculation itself than the financial outcome. Above all, even as a businessman he was keeping his eye on the main chance, which to him was politics.

  And well he might, for no one fades from the limelight faster than a defeated vice-presidential candidate. Roosevelt’s situation could have been especially vexing, since now another Roosevelt—Theodore, Jr.—was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was inspecting navy yards and receiving salutes. But Franklin had no intention of fading away. He became president of the Navy Club, chairman of the New York organization of Boy Scouts, and a trustee of Vassar; he raised money for the American Legion and for the (Episcopal) Cathedral of St. John the Divine; he remained active in Harvard affairs, and he took a leading part in organizing the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, to help commemorate his old chief’s ideals.

  This period was to be but an interlude in his political career. He would lie low for a while until “this bunch in Washington show either that they can make good or that they are hopeless failures,” he wrote to a friend. He told Stephen Early that he looked to him for many things in the days to come—“Thank the Lord we are both comparatively youthful!” But his prospects were suddenly changed.

  ORDEAL

  The summer of 1921 was an unpleasant one for Roosevelt. In line with American political tradition, Republicans were raking through the ashes of the preceding administration in a search for political ammunition. They felt they had a good case in a situation at Newport, Rhode Island, where after the war immoral practices involving liquor, drugs, and homosexuality had sprung up. Roosevelt had looked into the situation and appointed an investigating squad to get evidence. The investigators themselves, however, had used improper and revolting methods; when he discovered this Roosevelt had ordered them to stop. Republican members of a Senate investigating committee accused him of direct responsibility for the improper methods, which he denied. Roosevelt went to Washington in July 1921 to present his case, only to find that the committee majority was publishing its report unchanged before he could present his testimony. He was galled by what he felt was a breach of faith. He looked tired when he finally left New York for his vacation at Campobello.

  Then on a sunny day in mid-August Roosevelt slipped and fell overboard while cruising off Campobello. He suffered a slight chill, but the next day resumed his usual vigorous vacation life. That day, spying a forest fire from their small boat, he and his family landed and spent several hours beating out the flames. Then in rapid succession Roosevelt went for a swim in a nearby lake, dogtrotted a mile and a half, took a dip in the piercingly cold waters of the Bay of Fundy, and sat in a wet bathing suit for half an hour reading some mail.

  Suddenly feeling chill, he went to bed. The next day he had severe pain in his back and legs and a high fever. Mrs. Roosevelt sent for a doctor, who diagnosed simply a cold. One more day and Roosevelt could not walk or move his legs. Another doctor—an “expert diagnostician” who happened to be in the vicinity—thought it was a blood clot that had settled in the lower spinal cord, and then changed his mind and decided it was a lesion in the spinal cord. Only after two weeks of illness did another specialist make a correct diagnosis—poliomyelitis.

  During much of the time Roosevelt was in agony. His bladder and the rectal sphincter were paralyzed and he had to be catheterized. At one time his arms and back were paralyzed. His temperature varied from very high to subnormal. He suffered also from acute mental depression, heightened by the indecision of the doctors and his failure to improve. All this time—and for weeks afterward—he was flat on his back.

  Sleeping on a couch in her husband’s roo
m, Mrs. Roosevelt nursed him night and day during the first month of illness. “The jagged alternations between hope and despair; the necessity of giving blind trust to a physician even when the physician, cruelly pressed, could scarcely trust himself; the fearsome responsibility involved; above all the unpredictable oscillations of mood in the patient himself, which had to be ministered to with the utmost firmness, subtlety, and tenderness” were part of the ordeal she went through, as described by John Gunther. Sara Roosevelt had been in Europe and arrived home at the end of August to get a carefully written letter from Eleanor: “Franklin has been quite ill and so can’t go down to meet you on Tuesday to his great regret.…”

  Howe had gone to Campobello earlier in the summer and was fortunately still there when Roosevelt was stricken. His first instinct was to keep the public from knowing the extent of the attack. He issued vague announcements to the press, and he and Eleanor told the less immediate members of the family that Roosevelt was ill from the effects of a chill and was recovering. Howe finally let out the dread word poliomyelitis only when he could quote doctors as saying that there definitely would be no permanent effect. When Roosevelt was finally able to be taken to New York in mid-September, Howe managed to get him moved in his stretcher from a launch onto a luggage dray and then into a private railway car while the hopeful onlookers, by a ruse, were gathered elsewhere.

  Roosevelt spent six weeks in Presbyterian Hospital in New York. After the first week there his specialist, Dr. George Draper, reported that he was “much concerned at the very slow recovery both as regards the disappearance of pain, which is very generally present, and as to the recovery of even slight power to twitch the muscles.” The lower extremities, he found, presented a depressing picture. There was a little motion in the toes of each foot, but the patient could not extend his feet. Roosevelt could not sit up; only by pulling himself up by a strap over his head could he even turn in bed. When he was discharged from the hospital at the end of October the medical record reported, “Not improving.”

  Dr. Draper was most concerned about Roosevelt’s psychological condition. “He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism,” he reported, “that it will take all the skill which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.” Partly because of careful handling by Eleanor and the doctors, partly because of some inner strength and stability, he became cheerful once the initial period of nervous collapse was over.

  It took Roosevelt years to realize that he would never walk again. He was eternally hopeful. In the hospital he was convinced that he would leave in two or three weeks on crutches. Soon he was stating in cheery letters that he would completely recover. Repeatedly during the following years he told friends that he would soon walk independently on crutches, and eventually with nothing more than canes. Almost six years after his attack he wrote to one of his doctors: “My own legs continue to improve,” but “I cannot get rid of the brace on that left leg yet. It is still a mystery as to why that left knee declines to lock.…”

  Roosevelt spent seven years searching for a cure. He found a doctor in Marion, Massachusetts, who taught him some exercises. He spent parts of four winters on a houseboat off Florida; sometimes he swam and crawled around lonely beaches for hours. His great discovery was Warm Springs, Georgia, where warm waters heavy with mineral salts allowed extended exercise without over-tiring or enervating the patients. He went there winter after winter and from a rather seedy resort developed it into a leading hydro-therapeutic center.

  So much for the medical story. What effect did polio have on Roosevelt the politician?

  A vast legend has grown up on this subject—namely, that his illness converted Roosevelt from a rather supercilious young socialite and amateur politico into a political leader of ambition and power and democratic convictions. The reason for this legend is clear. Roosevelt’s battle with polio has all the drama and plot of a modern folk saga. The young man who had strode down convention aisles “looking like a Greek God” now had to be carried around like a baby, or pushed in a wheel chair. The man of only forty who had struck everyone with his animation and vitality spent hours crawling on the floor as he tried to learn to walk again. People jumped from the fact of physical change to the fiction of personality transformation.

  The evidence is that Roosevelt’s illness did not alter but strengthened already existent or latent tendencies in his personality.

  Polio, for example, did not teach him patience. He had already shown this trait to a marked degree in his lengthy maneuverings in state politics, in his dealings with local politicians, in his handling of the endless trivia of patronage and position. Nor did his illness give him a sudden new confidence in himself. His confidence in his capacity to win battles, political or otherwise—“cockiness,” his political rivals called it—had steadily expanded as his public activities broadened.

  There was no basic change in his political ideas. Those who see a new humanitarian rising from the sickbed ignore Roosevelt’s decade of immersion in Wilsonian progressivism. Actually, he showed himself after his illness, just as he did before it, as a shrewd politician who kept his eye on the main chance and who was willing to bend his own views in adjusting to political realities. His position on the political spectrum remained the same—a little left of center. While insisting that he was a good liberal or progressive—he used the terms interchangeably—he insisted, too, that his position was one of “constructive progress” between conservative Republicanism and the “radicalism” of La Follette and the Progressives. On matters like the League of Nations and prohibition, too, he took a politician’s straddling position.

  Doubtless his illness gave him opportunity for thinking out some of his ideas, but he took little advantage of this opportunity. He started two rather ambitious intellectual and creative projects—a history of the United States and an analysis of the practical workings of American government. In each case he wrote a dozen or so pages and then dropped the project. Neither fragment reflects any new or original ideas, although the few pages of the history reveal a marked socio-economic interpretation, as against the “great man” theory of history. He did a good deal of reading during his long convalescence—some biography and history, practically no economics, poetry, or philosophy, but both before and after his illness he liked books of travel and adventure best.

  He was a man of many thoughts, not a man of trenchant ideas. A talk he gave at Milton Academy—a talk he considered of some importance and which was published in 1926 as a book with the pretentious title Whither Bound?—shows a wide-ranging mind in action but only a grab bag of thoughts. He skipped along, touching dexterously on the revolution of science, the need to accept change, the importance of equality of opportunity, the tendency of the majority to be progressive in outlook but divided over means. Utterly lacking was a central idea or unifying thread. Columns he wrote later for newspapers in Georgia and New York show the same tendencies.

  Was there ever a time during this period when Roosevelt’s future as a politician trembled in the balance? Clearly a conflict rose between Eleanor and Sara Roosevelt as to whether Franklin should carry on an active political career, as his wife hoped, or retire to the ease of Hyde Park, as his mother wanted. However intense the struggle between wife and mother, it was of little long-run significance. There was never the slightest chance of Roosevelt’s retiring from politics. If anything, his illness made him want to be more active, more involved. “You are built a bit like me,” he wrote to a close friend within a year of the attack, “you need something physically more active, with constant contact with all kinds of people in many kinds of places.” In 1924 he left the law firm of Emmet, Marvin and Roosevelt, which he had helped form in 1920, mainly because estates and wills and the like “bored him to death,” for a new firm of Roosevelt and O’Connor, where he would be working with “live people” directly involved in more active ventures.r />
  All this does not mean that polio had no major consequences for Roosevelt and his political career. Physically he went through a transformation; as if compensating for his crippled legs, he developed heavy, muscular shoulders and chest which, he exclaimed delightedly, “would make Jack Dempsey envious.” His disablement meant that he could move about only in a wheel chair or on people’s arms—Howe ruled that he must never be carried in public—but his attendants became adept in these arrangements. His legs became, actually, something of a political asset. They won him sympathy—something he might never have had otherwise. Millions of Americans were electrified in later years by Roosevelt’s public appearances—the tense, painfully awkward approach to the center of the stage, the bustle of aides and politicians around him, climaxed with Roosevelt’s radiant smiles and vigorous gestures.

  His handicap was also a convenience. Since he was perfectly natural about the state of his legs, he was able again and again to use his disability as an excuse for not taking part in political activities he wished to avoid. It was an excuse no one could contradict, until Al Smith did so successfully in pressuring him to run for governor in 1928. His illness also had the highly advantageous effect of bringing Eleanor Roosevelt more actively into politics than might otherwise have been the case. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League and became a leader in Democratic women’s organizations in the state. She often brought her Democratic and trade-union “girls” to see her husband. Howe, too, who had planned to go into business in 1921, stayed on with his chief during and after the crisis.