by FDR
To prepare for the political wilderness, FDR set about to restore his finances. After ten years of public service his coffers were bare. And with five children attending fashionable boarding schools, plus extensive social commitments, membership in a half-dozen elite clubs, first-class travel, and a household of ten servants, the need to make a substantial living could no longer be ignored. The answer was Wall Street. And the opportunity came when Van Lear Black, a wealthy Democratic contributor who owned the Baltimore Sun, asked FDR to become vice president of his Fidelity & Deposit Company of Maryland, the fourth largest surety bonding company in the United States. Roosevelt’s responsibilities would be to oversee the firm’s operations in New York and New England and to serve as rainmaker, bringing in new clients through his connections in government, labor, and industry.
FDR would be the firm’s front man on Wall Street, for which Black agreed to pay him $25,000 a year, five times his salary at the Navy Department. It was an arrangement from which both stood to profit. The hemorrhaging of Roosevelt’s finances would be stanched, and Black would benefit from Franklin’s name on the masthead. Even more important—which both men understood implicitly—the position was a holding pattern for FDR, much as the presidency of Columbia University would be for Dwight D. Eisenhower thirty years later. It was agreed that Franklin would spend only half a day at the office, leaving him free to develop his law practice and remain active in party politics.
On January 7, 1921, Black announced FDR’s appointment with a lavish black-tie dinner at Delmonico’s, the favorite watering hole of the Wall Street establishment. Among the dignitaries who welcomed Roosevelt to the business world were Owen D. Young of General Electric, Edward R. Stettinius of United States Steel, Daniel Willard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Adolph S. Ochs of The New York Times, all valued clients of F & D. Within little more than a month Roosevelt mastered the business routine. He glad-handed old friends like the boxing promoter Tex Rickard and called in his chits from the days in Washington. Unions that had been recognized by the Navy Department were invited to consider having their officers bonded by Fidelity & Deposit, as were the industries contracting with the service. When Harding took office in March, FDR added Louis Howe to his staff. Like Franklin, Howe worked at both Fidelity’s business and Democratic politics. As his personal secretary, FDR engaged Marguerite LeHand, a pert twenty-three-year-old who had worked during the campaign in Roosevelt’s New York headquarters. Known as “Missy” because the younger Roosevelt children had difficulty saying “Miss LeHand,” she too would become a permanent fixture in FDR’s entourage.
As Franklin jumped into New York social life, Eleanor enrolled in business school to learn typing and shorthand. She found a housewife to teach her to cook and became active in the League of Women Voters. Her task was to keep tabs on the League’s legislative agenda in both Washington and Albany, a job that brought her into contact with many of the nation’s leading feminists: Carrie Chapman Catt, Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Narcissa Vanderlip, Elizabeth F. Read, and Esther Lape. Eleanor took her responsibilities with the League seriously and began to address women’s groups on her own, bringing them up to date on legislative matters. She enjoyed the work, but, as she wrote Franklin from the League’s national convention in Cleveland in April, “I prefer doing my politics with you.”87
With Louis Howe’s help, FDR began to stitch together an upstate organization to contest the 1922 election. This time he was careful to stress party unity. Already mentioned as a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, Roosevelt recognized the importance of a full-blown organization effort under Charles Murphy rather than another divisive split. William Calder, the Republican incumbent, was vulnerable, but to beat him the Democrats needed a united front.*
Speaking engagements carried Roosevelt throughout the state. He also undertook a wide range of charitable and philanthropic activities. In addition to the Harvard Board of Overseers, he became a member of the executive committee of the National Civic Federation, the Near East Relief Committee, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Seamen’s Church Institute. He headed a $2 million fund drive for Lighthouses for the Blind and accepted the chairmanship of the Greater New York Committee of the Boy Scouts of America. It was as chairman of the Scouts that on Thursday, July 28, 1921, FDR set sail up the Hudson for Bear Mountain and the annual Boy Scout Jamboree.
It was the type of occasion Franklin liked best. There were parades and speeches and solemn demonstrations of scouting activities. FDR posed for the newspapers surrounded by cheering boys and their scoutmasters. He served as master of ceremonies at a campfire before sailing back to the city that evening. Little did he realize that at some point during the day he had ingested a mysterious virus, incubated among the Boy Scouts, that would change his life forever.
* Hancock proved so adept at contract liquidation that soon after resigning from the Navy he joined the New York investment house of Lehman Brothers, rising to become one of its managing partners. In 1933, FDR called him to Washington to help organize the National Recovery Administration (NRA). During World War II Hancock returned to Washington to head an interdepartmental board to handle contract settlement, and he drafted the 1943 legislation on contract renegotiation.
* On the day before FDR’s inauguration in 1933, Eleanor asked her friend Lorena Hickok to pick her up at the Mayflower Hotel, where she and the president-elect were staying. Mrs. Roosevelt instructed the cab driver to take them to Rock Creek Cemetery so that she might gaze upon the statue once again. “In the old days when we lived here,” said Eleanor, “I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage, I’d come here alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.” Lorena A. Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady 92 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980).
* Wilson’s exclusion of the Senate placed him at odds with American practice. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley sent a five-man delegation to Paris to negotiate the peace treaty and among the five included three senators from the Foreign Relations Committee: William Pierce Frye (R., Maine), Cushman Kellogg Davis (R., Wisconsin), and George Gray (D., Delaware). McKinley’s foresight was rewarded when the Senate narrowly consented to the treaty 57–27, just three votes more than the required two thirds.
* Eleanor was startled by Wilson’s revelation. “This is too much to leave to any man,” she noted of Tumulty’s task in her diary. A president has a responsibility to keep himself informed. Later she wrote, “It was … a problem of allotting time. Franklin reserved certain periods for his study of the press, particularly the opposition press, and, at least while Louis Howe was with him, he was always closely informed on all shades of opinion in the country. This firsthand awareness of what people are doing and thinking and saying is essential to a president. When this information is filtered through other people, or selected with a view to what a few individuals think the president should know, the inevitable result is that this source of information is dangerously curtailed or misleadingly slanted. This is fatal in the formulation of far-reaching decisions.” Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 101–102 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
* The Senate’s constitutional responsibility is to give its “advice and consent” to treaties by two-thirds vote. It does not “ratify” treaties. Ratification is a technical diplomatic term that applies when the president formally signs the treaty bringing it into effect, subsequent to the Senate’s advice and consent.
* Newspapers sanitized Garner’s comment, and “warm piss” has come down through generations as “warm spit”: admittedly a four-letter word but scarcely as pungent as Cactus Jack’s characterization. Garner’s political insight is treated perceptively in a series of interviews with Bascom N. Timmons published in four installments by Collier’s, February 21, March 6, 16, and 20, 1948.
&nb
sp; † Next to the League of Nations, Prohibition was the burning political issue of 1920. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, went into effect on January 15, 1920, a date widely celebrated by the drys and perhaps even more widely deplored by the nation’s wets. As a young legislator in Albany, FDR had backed the prohibitionist cause, reflecting the sentiments of his upstate district. Thus he had a record the drys could embrace. In his personal life, Roosevelt enjoyed a drink as much as anyone. He paid no attention to Prohibition and never believed in it for an instant.
* In his frequent retelling of the episode, FDR invariably escalated the event: “I grabbed the standard. About half a dozen men grabbed me and we had a jolly good fight, but I got the standard and it was paraded.” But Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, the Tammany stalwart who held the standard, reported that “FDR couldn’t budge it until Mr. Murphy sort of bowed to let it go and we let it go. The whole thing probably took less than four seconds. There wasn’t even an angry gesture.” Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 63 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954); Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
* The GOP had always taken a more forceful stand on women’s suffrage than the Democrats, who were still captive to their southern, traditionalist base. On October 1, 1920, Harding held a special day for suffragists and then a Social Justice Day in which he called for equal pay for equal work, an end to child labor, a minimum wage, national health care, and a department of social justice—virtually the entire program of the League of Women Voters. Cox and Roosevelt let the opportunity slip by. Stanley J. Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s 87–101 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
* In 1922, the Democrats roared back under Murphy’s leadership. Al Smith was overwhelmingly returned to the governor’s office, and Dr. Royal S. Copeland, president of the New York Board of Health, easily defeated Calder for the Senate: 1,276,667 to 995,421. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Service, 1975).
TEN
POLIO
This is the happy Warrior;
this is he,
That every man in arms
should wish to be.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
AFTER EIGHT YEARS in Washington, FDR looked forward to spending the summer of 1921 at Campobello. Eleanor and the children left New York for the island as soon as school was over in June.* Franklin, who was detained by business, embarked on Friday, August 5, traveling the distance aboard Van Lear Black’s oceangoing yacht Sabalo. “I thought he looked tired when he left,” Missy LeHand wrote Eleanor. Both women hoped the brief sea voyage would revive him.1
FDR arrived at Campobello Sunday evening and found their eighteen-bedroom “cottage” overflowing with guests. In addition to five children and the normal complement of servants, tutors, and governesses, Louis Howe and his family were visiting, as were several friends from Washington, including Romanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of former British prime minister Herbert Asquith.
For the first time in years, Sara was not in her house next door. At sixty-seven she had resumed her prewar practice of an annual trip to Europe and on the spur of the moment had flown from London to Paris in an early twin-engine airplane. “It was five hours,” she wrote Eleanor. “I had been told four hours, but I would not have missed it. If I do it again I shall take an open plane as one sees more and it is more like flying.”2
As soon as he arrived, FDR threw himself into a frantic round of island activity: deep-sea fishing in the Bay of Fundy, afternoon sails, swimming, tennis, baseball, whatever else the children expected. On August 10, while the family was sailing, they spotted a small forest fire on one of the lesser islands. Franklin worked the boat in as close as he could—“almost on the beach,” James recalled—and led Eleanor and the children ashore. They fought the blaze with pine boughs for several hours until it was extinguished. “Our eyes were bleary with smoke,” said Franklin. “We were begrimed, smarting with spark-burns, exhausted.”3
It was about four o’clock when they returned home. FDR admitted to feeling logy and decided the remedy would be a quick swim in the relatively warm waters of Lake Glen Severn, a shallow freshwater pond on the other side of the island. He and the children jogged two miles to the lake, splashed around in the tepid water, and topped it off with an icy dip in the Bay of Fundy. Franklin was disappointed that he did not get “the glow I’d expected.” They trotted back to the cottage, and by then FDR was totally exhausted. The mail had arrived, and he sat down in his wet bathing suit to read it, “too tired even to dress. I’d never quite felt that way before.”4
About an hour later Roosevelt felt a sudden chill. He told Eleanor he thought he was catching a cold and had better not risk infecting the children. He would go straight to bed. Eleanor sent up a tray of food, but he was not hungry. He had trouble sleeping that night and continued to tremble despite two heavy woolen blankets.
The next morning he was worse. When he swung his legs out of bed and attempted to stand, his left leg buckled beneath him. He managed to get up and shave and assumed the problem would pass. “I tried to persuade myself that the trouble with my leg was muscular, that it would disappear as I used it. But presently it refused to work, and then the other collapsed as well.”5 FDR dragged himself back to bed, and when Eleanor took his temperature it was 102.
There was no telephone in the house, so Eleanor dispatched a runner to fetch their family physician, Dr. E. H. Bennett, from Lubec. Dr. Bennett was an elderly country doctor, well suited to delivering babies and setting broken bones but not especially qualified for complex diagnoses. He examined Franklin and thought he was suffering from a bad cold; he said he would return in the morning to see how his patient was doing.
Roosevelt knew he did not have a cold. The next morning, Friday, August 12, he could not stand, and by evening he had lost the power to move his legs. They were numb, yet extremely sensitive. He ached all over and was paralyzed from the chest down. His thumb muscles had become so weak he could not write.6
On Saturday Eleanor and Dr. Bennett decided to seek a second opinion. Louis Howe canvassed the nearby resorts and discovered that the eminent Philadelphia surgeon Dr. William Keen was staying at Bar Harbor. Keen had once operated secretly on President Grover Cleveland and had successfully removed a cancer from the roof of the president’s mouth.7 He was a man of discretion, which Howe appreciated, but he was now eighty-four and his experience had been in surgery, not orthopedics. Dr. Keen examined Franklin thoroughly and decided his paralysis was due to a blood clot in the lower spinal cord. He prescribed heavy massages and predicted that Roosevelt would recover, “but it may take some months.”8
Dr. Keen was as far off target as Dr. Bennett, and his prescription of vigorous massages exacerbated the problem.* FDR’s condition worsened daily. Soon his hands and arms were paralyzed as well as his legs. His fever soared, and he lost control of his bodily functions. For a short time his eyesight seemed threatened. Eleanor slept on a couch in Franklin’s room and with the help of Louis Howe managed to move him, bathe him, and turn him over at regular intervals. She administered catheters and enemas, massaged his legs, brushed his teeth, and waited on his every need. “It required a certain amount of skilled nursing,” Eleanor remembered, “and I was very thankful for every bit of training which Miss Spring [the children’s nurse] had given me.”9
Slowly, Roosevelt’s temperature subsided. He was still in constant pain, but the feeling of panic diminished. “I think he is getting back his grip and a better mental attitude,” Eleanor wrote Franklin’s half brother, Rosy, on August 18. “We thought yesterday he moved his toes on one foot a little better which is encouraging.”10
Dr. Keen, for his part, marveled at Eleanor’s devotion. “You have been a rare wife and have borne your heavy burden most bravely,” he wrote in late August. “You will surely break down if you
do not have immediate relief. Even when the catheter has to be used your sleep must be broken at least once a night. I hope that by having his urine drawn the last thing at night, he will be able to wait until morning.”11
It was Louis Howe who first suspected Franklin had been misdiagnosed. A confirmed cynic and partial hypochondriac, Howe was skeptical of expert opinion in general and the medical profession in particular. He wrote detailed letters to Sara’s brother Frederic A. Delano (Uncle Fred), the head of the family in New York, describing Franklin’s symptoms and requesting that the information be relayed to orthopedic specialists for their opinion. Uncle Fred saw the point immediately. “All doctors seem to know Dr. Keen,” he wrote Eleanor. “He is a fine old chap, but he is a surgeon and not a connoisseur of this malady. I think it would be very unwise to trust his opinion.”12 After making soundings in New York, Uncle Fred went to Boston to consult “the great Dr. Lovett”—Dr. Robert Williamson Lovett, professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard and the nation’s leading authority on infantile paralysis.13 Lovett was summering in Newport, but his associates at the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission agreed that FDR’s symptoms were unquestionably those of infantile paralysis.
“On Uncle Fred’s urgent advice,” Eleanor wrote Rosy, “which I feel I must follow on Mama’s account, I have asked Dr. Keen to try to get Dr. Lovett here for a consultation to determine if it is I.P. or not. Dr. Keen thinks not but the treatment at this stage differs in one particular and no matter what it costs I feel and I am sure Mama would feel we must leave no stone unturned to accomplish the best results.”14*