The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Credit 4.19

  Doing Things on My Own

  Three weeks after election day, Eleanor lunched with her mother-in-law and two of Sara’s sisters in Manhattan. It did not go well. “They all, in their serene assurance and absolute judgment on people and affairs … , make me want to squirm and turn Bolshevik,” she told Franklin.

  The discovery in 1918 that he had been unfaithful to her with Lucy Mercer had nearly destroyed Eleanor’s self-confidence. In marrying Franklin Roosevelt, she had hoped to find in him a confidant and to find in his mother something like the loving mother she had never had. She had found neither. Her husband was self-absorbed and harbored secrets. Her mother-in-law’s first loyalty would always be to her son and her grandchildren.

  “In my early married years,” Eleanor remembered, “the pattern of my life had been largely my mother-in-law’s pattern. Later, it was the children and Franklin who made the pattern.… [But] I began to want to do things on my own, to use my own mind and abilities for my own aims.”

  Working for the Red Cross during the war had been her salvation. When peace came, Sara had urged her to give it up and return home. She refused. The war, she said, had made a life of “nothing but teas and luncheons and dinners … impossible.” She had resolved to find “real work.”

  Now, back in New York, she learned typing and shorthand, joined the board of a brand-new organization, the League of Women Voters, and began to oversee its legislative program. It was, she herself said, the beginning of “the intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  She began to make new friends—veterans of the suffrage movement like the activist Esther Lape and her partner, the lawyer Elizabeth Read—who were not only committed to one another but to a host of causes.

  “The rest of us were inclined to do a good deal of theorizing,” Lape remembered. “[Eleanor] would look puzzled and ask why we didn’t [just] do whatever we had in mind and get it out of the way.” Like her uncle Theodore, Eleanor Roosevelt would always crave action.

  During a visit to the Delano family homestead at Fairhaven, Eleanor poses uneasily with three of her mother-in-law’s siblings: (left to right) Warren Delano III; Mrs. Dora Delano Forbes; and Mrs. Annie Delano Hitch. Warren III was personally fond of his Democratic nephew, but deplored his politics and always lamented “the day that my sister [Sara] broke away from the family traditions and stood on the other side.”

  Credit 4.20

  Eleanor at Springwood with two pioneers of the suffrage movement, Mary Garrett Hay, chair of the League of Women Voters, and the League’s founder, Carrie Chapman Catt. Eleanor had initially been lukewarm about votes for women. She had taken it for granted, she wrote, “that men were superior creatures and … knew more about politics,” but when her husband came out for the vote as a state senator she had changed her mind.

  Credit 4.21

  A 1920 League of Women Voters poster urges women to go to the polls. The League did not confine itself to getting out the vote. It called for national health insurance, an end to child labor, civil service reform, and other legislation that had been championed by Eleanor’s uncle Theodore—and membership in the League of Nations, which he had opposed.

  Credit 4.22

  Franklin Has Been Quite Ill

  Sara Delano Roosevelt had been abroad during the summer of 1921. When she returned to New York on August 31, she expected to be met by Franklin. Instead, she was startled to see his half brother, Rosy, there at the dock. He handed her a letter from her daughter-in-law.

  Dearest Mama,

  Franklin has been quite ill and so can’t get down to meet you … to his great regret.… We are all so happy to have you home again dear.… We are having such lovely weather, the island is really at its loveliest.

  Franklin sends all his love and we are both so sorry we cannot meet you.

  Ever devotedly,

  Eleanor

  Sara hurried north to Campobello as fast as she could go.

  The trouble had begun there twenty days earlier.

  Wednesday afternoon, August 10, 1921, had been filled with the kind of activity for which the Roosevelts were famous. Franklin took Eleanor, James, and Elliott for a long sail aboard the family sailboat Vireo, spotted a forest fire on one of the rocky islands, and led everyone ashore to put it out. Then he sailed home again, took everyone swimming at the family’s favorite pond two miles away—and insisted on racing his sons back to their cottage.

  Afterward, as he sorted through his mail, he complained of a chill, of nausea, of pain in his lower back. He decided to skip dinner and go to bed.

  “The next morning,” FDR recalled, “when I swung out of bed my left leg lagged.… 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.… By the end of the third day practically all muscles from the chest down were involved.” He was in agony, too, and terrified.

  Louis Howe rushed to the island and bedded down on a cot just outside his boss’s sickroom. He would never again leave Franklin’s side for more than a few days, largely ignoring his own family, the first of many people who over the coming years would sacrifice their own lives in the interests of one or the other of the Roosevelts.

  At first, no one, including baffled local doctors, knew what was wrong with Franklin. He shook with fever and suffered severe pain. His thumbs refused to work for a time and he could not so much as sign his name. Eleanor did all she could to nurse him, even administering a catheter when his bladder failed. She and Howe took turns massaging his limbs, too, despite the severe pain it caused. One doctor worried that she was trying to do too much. “You have been a rare wife and have borne your heavy burden most bravely,” he told her. “You will surely break down if you … do not have immediate relief.”

  A nurse was hired to help ease Eleanor’s burdens. Physicians continued to be mystified. Franklin’s fever rose still higher. He became delirious, cried out, and momentarily lost his religious faith—he could not understand why God, who had favored him for so long, now seemed to have turned away.

  A specialist from Boston was finally sent for. He made the right diagnosis: it was infantile paralysis—polio, a mysterious virus that attacked the central nervous system, randomly destroying muscles. It was an annual scourge. Little understood, greatly feared, polio killed or crippled tens of thousands of people every summer, most of them children. FDR was thirty-nine years old.

  No one could predict how badly affected he would be or what his future would hold. But at least he knew now what had happened to him. His fever subsided. His mood changed.

  When Sara finally reached her son’s bedside, he was already back in command of himself. “He and Eleanor at once decided to be cheerful and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness,” she wrote, “so I have fallen in and follow their glorious example.… Below his waist he cannot move at all. His legs that I have always been proud of have to be moved often as they ache when long in one position.”

  On September 13, six men lifted Roosevelt onto a stretcher for the long journey to New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. His frightened children watched as he was carried downstairs, across the veranda, and, backward, his feet higher than his head, down the steep slope that led to the sea, where a dory was waiting to take him across the choppy waters to the railroad depot at Eastport, Maine.

  When he saw the children’s worried faces he did his best to smile and wave.

  “Don’t worry, chicks,” he said. “I will be all right.”

  Every wave that hit the dory, every jolt of the railroad car, caused him pain. Roosevelt did not complain. When the train finally reached Grand Central Station his car was pulled into a siding well away from crowds and reporters so that he could be transferred quickly to an ambulance and driven to the hospital without being seen.

  From the first, Howe and Roosevelt’s doctors sought to minimize the seriousness of his paralysis in order to keep his politic
al hopes alive—and also out of concern for Franklin’s own psychological well-being.

  “He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism,” one of his physicians wrote, “that it will … take all the skill … we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.”

  It was five weeks before his doctors dared try to sit him up. When they finally allowed him to be carried the seven blocks to his home under cover of darkness in late October, his chart still read “Not Improving.”

  He was put to bed on the third floor. His fever returned. His vision blurred, and he feared for a time that he might go blind. He began daily exercises to stretch his muscles, and evidently overdid it. His hamstrings tightened, drawing his knees up toward his chest. To straighten his legs again, the doctors encased them in plaster. Each day wedges were hammered in behind his knees. It was agony.

  “Mother, how does he stand the pain?” Franklin Jr. asked.

  “He does,” was all his mother could say. “He does.”

  His family suffered, too. James was away at Groton, but four children still lived at home, and all of them were frightened by what had happened to their father. Louis Howe took over fifteen-year-old Anna’s room—and she angrily resented it. Eleanor lost her own bed to Franklin’s round-the-clock nurse and had to snatch sleep on a cot.

  That winter, Eleanor remembered, was “the most trying … of my life.” One evening, while reading to her youngest boys, she began to weep and could not stop. It was, she said, “the only time I ever remember in my entire life going to pieces in this particular manner.”

  For Franklin’s mother, all the exhausting exercises, all the visits from friends and business associates, politicians and well-wishers, all the tensions in the crowded household, were bad for her boy. As soon as it could be arranged, she believed, he should return to the quiet of Hyde Park, where she could care for him, at least for a time, just as she and Franklin had once cared for his ailing father.

  “My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet which made our discussions … somewhat acrimonious,” Eleanor remembered. “She always thought she understood what was best, particularly where her child was concerned, regardless of what any doctor might say.”

  Eleanor was sure she knew what was best for Franklin, too. She was a stern taskmaster, reminding him to do his painful exercises on time and for as long as his doctors decreed. He resented her intrusion and found himself again trapped between the two most important women in his life: his wife urging him to greater effort; his mother urging him to rest and relax. His doctors eventually insisted that he had to get away from what one of them called “the intense and devastating influence of the interplay of these high-voltage personalities.”

  In late spring he went home to Hyde Park.

  From the moment FDR arrived on Campobello Island for a family vacation, his eldest son remembered, “we began having a wild, whooping, romping, running, sailing, picnicking time with him.”

  Franklin leads picnickers on a perilous “cliff walk.”

  Credit 4.23a

  Franklin expertly guides his family’s sailboat through the tricky waters of Passamaquoddy Bay.

  Credit 4.23b

  Franklin plays with baby Elliott.

  Credit 4.23c

  Franklin tees off on the golf club course where, as a young man, he had often won tournaments against older players.

  Credit 4.23d

  On July 28, 1921, Franklin leads a parade at a Boy Scout rally at Bear Mountain, New York. This photograph and several others made that day are the last to show Franklin Roosevelt walking under his own power.

  Credit 4.24

  FDR takes his wife and children sailing aboard the Vireo, the family’s twenty-foot single-masted sailboat, the summer before disaster struck.

  Credit 4.25

  An early snapshot by FDR himself shows the steep slope and the long wharf below the Roosevelt cottage down which he had to be carried on the first leg of his arduous journey from Campobello.

  Credit 4.26

  At the little depot at Eastport, Maine, he had to be lifted through a window into the private railroad car that was to take him to New York.

  Credit 4.27

  The first overoptimistic report of FDR’s illness appeared in the New York Times on September 16, 1921, the day after he was hospitalized in New York.

  The Roosevelt home on East Sixty-fifth Street where FDR occupied a back bedroom on the third floor. Turmoil within the household would eventually drive Franklin to take refuge at Springwood.

  Credit 4.29

  Anna at fifteen, the age at which she was witness to a rare display of her father’s frustrated anger at being paralyzed. To keep his mind occupied, he decided to catalog all his books from his wheelchair. She agreed to help, but when she stumbled and dropped a pile of them, she remembered, “I saw father start, [and] an expression of pain passed swiftly over his face.” She apologized, but he told her she was “too careless for words” and “no help at all.” She fled in tears.

  Credit 4.30

  Sara Delano Roosevelt in her New York City living room. When a book about her son suggested she had sought to make a permanent invalid of him by taking him to Springwood in the spring of 1922, she indignantly denied it in a private letter to him: “All I did was say that if the doctors thought it best for you to have for some months a quiet life, I would keep Hyde Park open & live there for a time.”

  Credit 4.31

  FDR’s first pair of braces, fitted out with a pelvic band that provided enough extra strength and stability to allow him finally to stand. Later, enough strength would return to the muscles of his stomach and lower back to allow him to use shorter and less cumbersome braces.

  Credit 4.32

  My God, He Was Brave

  In Hyde Park, without his wife and children present, the constant stress eased, but the routine set by his solicitous mother was as rigid as it had been when he was a little boy: breakfast on a bed tray, up and dressed by ten, lunch with his mother at one, followed by a nap, tea at four, dinner at seven, put to bed by eleven—with physical therapy and sedentary hobbies like building toy boats and stamp collecting to fill the long hours in between.

  One day that spring, Sara made a telephone call to Wilderstein, the home of the Suckley family, distant cousins of the Roosevelts, just up the Hudson in Rhinebeck. She asked to speak to Margaret, known to friends and family as “Daisy.” Her son was lonely, she said, and needed company. Would Miss Suckley come to tea?

  She would. Ten years younger than Franklin and unmarried, she had been dazzled by him ever since she’d seen him at a party, laughing as he whirled one partner after another around the dance floor.

  Now, she found him immobilized. Daisy felt privileged to sit with him several times that spring and summer on the Springwood lawn as he pulled himself around a set of exercise bars telling extravagant stories about himself to keep her entertained and as unaware as possible of his helplessness. “I’m not going to be conquered by a childish disease,” he told her again and again.

  “My God, he was brave,” she remembered.

  He’d been fitted out with steel braces. They weighed fourteen pounds and ran from above his waist all the way to his heels. Once the catches at his knees were locked to keep his legs from buckling, it took two people to haul him to his feet and a third to slide crutches under his arms.

  At first, he simply hung from his crutches, then managed to drag his legs across a room, and finally began to try to make his painful way alone down the drive that led from Springwood to the Albany Post Road. It was a perilous, exhausting business, swinging his rigid braced legs through the crutches with each step, trying not to topple forward.

  He made it only once and never tried again.

  Daisy Suckley’s signed Christmas portrait, 1921, the year before she was first called to Frankli
n’s side

  Credit 4.33

  In order to achieve this apparently relaxed pose on the south porch at Springwood in the late spring of 1922, FDR had to lift his unbraced right leg into place with his hands.

  Credit 4.34

  The quarter-mile-long driveway between Springwood and the Albany Post Road down which FDR struggled on crutches. “It’s a bit traumatic when you’re fifteen,” Anna remembered, “to see your father, whom you’ve regarded as a wonderful playmate, who took long walks with you, … could out-jump you, … walking on crutches … struggling in heavy steel braces. And you see the sweat pouring down his face, and you hear him saying, ‘I must get down the driveway today—all the way down the driveway.’ ”

  Credit 4.35

  Becoming an Individual

  One day that June, Eleanor received a phone call from a stranger, a lively sounding woman named Nancy Cook who said she was the executive secretary of the new Women’s Division of the state Democratic Party. Would Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt be willing to speak at a fund-raising luncheon? Eleanor hesitated; she dreaded speaking in public. But Louis Howe and her husband insisted she do it. It would help her to resume the independent life that meant so much to her—and it would keep the Roosevelt name before the public, something Howe and his boss were always eager to do.

  The speech went well, and she got to know Nancy Cook and Cook’s partner, Marion Dickerman, a reformer and educator who in 1919 had been the first woman ever to run for the New York State Legislature. For some fifteen years they would be among Eleanor’s closest friends.