Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (37 page)

Not that Anna wasn’t complicit in certain of Sara’s schemes. After an unsuccessful attempt at college—as Harvard didn’t admit women, she chose Cornell—Anna found love, or something approximating it. Her brother Elliott detected a secondary agenda. “Sis was in a hurry to marry, to escape the cold war which promised no armistice between Granny and Mother, Mother and Father,” Elliott wrote (amid the real Cold War of the 1970s). Anna brought her beau to Hyde Park for Christmas. Curtis Dall was a stockbroker and a Princeton grad, twenty-nine years old and excessively proud, in the estimation of Elliott and James. The Roosevelt boys invited him to a pickup game of hockey—“to knock some of the starch out,” Elliott said. “We tripped him. Blood was streaming from a cut made by a skate slicing into his chin, when Sis took him into the house, raging at us for damaging her beloved.” The blood had dried but Anna’s anger toward the whole family still burned when she and Dall were married in 1926. Sara insinuated herself into the affair by buying a lavish apartment for the newlyweds—behind Eleanor and Franklin’s back. When her gift was discovered, Sara pleaded the best intentions. “Eleanor dear, I am very sorry that I hurt you,” she wrote. “I did not think I could be nasty or mean, and I fear I had too good an opinion of myself.” She had simply wanted to surprise Eleanor and Franklin, who of course couldn’t afford to give the newlyweds such a useful present. “I love you, dear, too much to ever want to hurt you,” Sara said. If she had made them angry—“well, I must just bear it.”

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had less to do with Eleanor and more with Franklin, albeit not much more. “In the summer of 1926 Father, for the first and only time in his life, took a major, positive, forceful action to guide and prepare me for the sort of rude world in which I eventually would have to live,” James recalled. As the eldest son, James had been the first to leave home for boarding school—Groton, of course. He had lived away during the whole period since his father contracted polio. He joined the family for summers at Hyde Park, but as his final year at Groton concluded, Franklin decreed that he should take a job outside the family circle. Franklin inquired among his associates and found James a job at a paper mill in a frontier region of Quebec, near the town of Desbiens. He sent instructions ahead that the son of Franklin Roosevelt was not to be shown any special consideration. These proved unnecessary, as James discovered on arrival. “None of the lumberjacks in Desbiens…had the faintest idea who Franklin Roosevelt was,” James recalled. “And if they had, they could not have cared less.”

James learned to appreciate that summer’s experience but only after the fact. The long days of muscle-straining work—sorting logs, shoveling chips, heaving pulp, stacking paper—wore him down and toughened him up, and convinced him that his father was a heartless brute. “I remember staying mad at Father almost every moment of the summer.” He nursed his anger in silence. “I wrote no letters at all to either of my parents.” The one merit he detected in his exile was that it was so far out of the way that there was nothing on which to spend his minimal wages—eighteen cents per hour and keep. By the time he returned to civilization he’d amassed enough to purchase a car. And when he did return, he went to see not his father at Hyde Park but his grandmother at Campobello. “Granny made much over me, as she never had approved of sending me up to that awful place.” Eventually, just before heading to Harvard, James visited Franklin at Hyde Park. Like his siblings, James craved his father’s approval, and he kept his dissatisfaction over his summer experience to himself. “I was too proud to tell him how much I had disliked it.” But Franklin figured it out, and he never sent the younger boys to such a rigorous finishing school.

Elliott, the second (surviving) son, rebelled more openly, as second sons often do. He couldn’t stand Groton, after he got there, and at every opportunity told his parents so. As graduation approached he vowed he would never go to Harvard, no matter what anyone said or did. Franklin decided that a western trip would do the boy good, and he arranged for him to spend the summer on a ranch in Wyoming. But Elliott disappeared en route, and for two months no one in the family heard a word of his whereabouts. Franklin appeared unconcerned, but Eleanor grew more and more worried. For weeks she suffered in silence, until her maternal fears got the better of her stoicism. “Franklin, we must do something about finding this boy,” she said. Roosevelt called the New York state police, who wired their counterparts in Wyoming, who located Elliott on a different ranch than the one Franklin had made the arrangements with. The foreman who had agreed to hire Elliott had taken a new job on a neighboring ranch, and Elliott required some time to find him. With the calculating thoughtlessness of the teenage rebel, he neglected to inform his parents of the switch. Their letters to him gathered dust for months at the old ranch; when Elliott finally wrote back, his chief concern was that Franklin and Eleanor might have made him look bad to his friends. “I suppose you told everybody how terrible I was…. I suppose there is no use in asking you to keep my defects and faults quiet.”

Yet there were moments of filial satisfaction. James and Elliott took turns keeping their father company in Florida. James enjoyed the visits, in part because his father treated him as one of the gang. James fished with Franklin and his friends, talked politics with Franklin and friends, and probably drank with Franklin and friends. (Both were subsequently silent on this point. James did say he sat out the poker games Franklin and friends played daily.) On one occasion James joined Franklin for lunch with William Jennings Bryan, who currently devoted his persuasive powers to promoting Florida real estate to northern tourists.

Elliott, being younger and more resentful, fit less readily into Franklin’s crowd. But Elliott liked to fish, and one day’s exploit furnished the stuff of family legend. “Last night we caught the record fish of all time!” Franklin recorded in the ship’s log.

Elliott had put out a shark hook baited with half a ladyfish, and about 8 o’clock we noticed the line was out in the middle of the creek. It seemed caught on a rock and we got the rowboat and cleared it. It then ran under
Larooco,
and with E. and Roy and John and the Capt. pulling on it, we finally brought a perfectly enormous Jewfish along side. We could just get his mouth out of the water and put in two other hooks and a gaff. Then Roy shot him about eight times through the head with my revolver. As he seemed fairly dead we hoisted him on the davit, which threatened to snap off at any moment. He was over seven feet long, over five feet around, and his jaw opened eighteen inches. We put him on the hand scale this morning, which registers up to 400 pounds. He weighed more than this, as he was only two-thirds out of water, so we figure his weight at between 450 and 500 lbs.

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first visit to Warm Springs, two reporters from Atlanta caught wind of his presence there and wrote an article entitled “Swimming Back to Health,” which was picked up by papers around the country. The article piqued interest in the curative powers of the Warm Springs waters, and in April 1925, during Roosevelt’s second visit, a steady trickle of polio patients began arriving. The owners of the Meriwether Inn eyed the visitors skeptically. It wasn’t obvious they could pay their way, and they had an unsettling effect on the other guests. As the cause and mode of transmission of polio remained a mystery, fathers and mothers didn’t have to be paranoid or callous to fear that their children might be harmed by swimming with persons who obviously had contracted the disease. When these guests began cutting their vacations short, the management understandably grew concerned.

Roosevelt unexpectedly found himself the advocate for his fellow sufferers. The owners might contemplate putting the other polio victims back on the train and sending them away, but they couldn’t do so to one of Roosevelt’s stature—and with him on the premises they couldn’t do it to the others either. Roosevelt resolved the problem, for the time being, by persuading the management to dig a separate pool, some distance below the main pool. Here he took his own exercise, and he encouraged the others to join him. And lest the regular guests have to meet the polio victims in the halls of the hotel, Roosevelt arranged for them to stay in some of the abandoned cottages about the resort.

They quickly came to appreciate him, and then to love him, for his efforts on their behalf. He reciprocated the fond feeling. He was delighted to hear them call him “Dr. Roosevelt” and flattered by the attention they paid as he showed them exercises that had worked for him. Some of these he had learned from Dr. Lovett; others he invented himself. One man didn’t know how to swim when he arrived; Roosevelt taught him the basic arm strokes, and soon the fellow was bobbing about with the rest of the group. Two ladies were quite rotund and consequently buoyant; Roosevelt had to struggle to get their feet to the bottom of the pool, so that they could practice walking in the water. He would push one knee down till the foot hit bottom, then reach for the other knee—only to watch the first knee shoot back to the surface. Great effort on his part and intense concentration on theirs were required to succeed in planting both feet on the pool bottom at once.

The resort had no resident physician, and certainly no polio specialist. None of the new guests had Roosevelt’s advantage of advanced—for that era—polio care, and they were eager to hear what he could tell them of the disease they shared. He had Missy LeHand help him prepare a series of charts showing the human musculature and indicating which muscles were affected by polio and therefore needed special exercise. He answered their questions, assisted them in locating specialists near their homes, and charmed them with his natural optimism.

The experience boosted Roosevelt’s spirits as much as theirs, and as much as anything he had done since contracting the disease. To some degree his positive attitude reflected his comparative physical advantage over several of the others; self-pity appeared particularly out of place when others were much worse off. To some degree it reflected the actual improvement he felt in his condition. His half brother, Rosy, now in his late sixties, had suffered a knee injury; Franklin wrote him a letter of concern and appended a status report: “My own knees are really gaining a lot of strength. This exercising in warm water seems to be far and away the best thing, and I think you will be delighted with the progress I have made.”

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the exercises in the pool, as he answered the questions at the water’s edge, as he felt the spirits of the group rise on the mutual encouragement each offered to all, an unexpected vision took shape in his mind’s eye. His conversations with the resort’s management and his observations of the other guests convinced him that Warm Springs would never become a satisfactory facility for polio victims unless it was owned and operated by someone sympathetic to their plight. Roosevelts and especially Delanos had invested in less worthy ventures; Franklin now determined to put his money where his heart lay, and purchase the resort. As owner he would have the freedom to implement what he had learned in his own rehabilitation and to assist others—doctors and patients, working together—in devising new treatments.