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On August 10, 1921, FDR was stricken with a paralytic illness at summer home on Canadian island of Campobello. From the article:
"Smiling Through a Personal Apocalypse
FDR got polio, but polio didn’t get him
AS THE 20th CENTURY dawned, American summers stopped being times of fireflies, baseball, and beaches to become seasons of terror. Each year with warm weather came some new proscription for parents: Keep children away from crowds, ice cream parlors, public swimming places. Do not send kids to the movies or let them overexert, or get too hot, or too cold. Keep little ones away from dusty streets, swat their fingers away from their noses. Let no fly remain alive inside any house. Keep windows closed. No one could follow all those rules, but parents had no other way to try to safeguard children from the scourge of poliomyelitis, a viral disease then called infantile paralysis, and now known as polio.
Polio dates to prehistory, but not until 1894 did the disease break out on a large scale in the United States. That summer’s epidemic, in northern New England, sickened 123 children. Outbreaks multiplied and intensified as the three strains—one mild and flu-like, another
characterized by paralysis, and the most acute, bulbar polio, sometimes causing death—mutated. In summer 1916, all three strains converged in New York City, striking 8,900 people and killing 2,400 children, 80 percent age 4 or younger. Panicked city officials barred children from subways and trains, closed summer camps, and mandated screening of doors and windows in residences. Trying to contain the urban outbreak, health inspectors searched the suburbs for fleeing city children, placing polio refugees under house arrest. The virus spread to 26 other states, causing another 27,000 cases and 6,000 more deaths.
Polio hit quickly—youngsters at play one afternoon found themselves the next morning in ambulances. Polio ward staffs isolated suspected carriers from their families, stripped away and incinerated clothes and belongings assumed to be infected, and put terrified youngsters through excruciating spinal taps. Patients with confirmed diagnoses donned hospital-issue pajamas; a large red dot on the back advertised infectious status. In confinement, patients passed through a week or more of high fever, difficulty breathing, nausea, and muscle spasms. Some came away paralyzed. Paralysis could affect the limbs, but also the abdominal muscles, causing them to tighten so much some patients bent permanently at the waist, perhaps forced to walk on hands and knees. Cases could involve two years of rehabilitation—if a “crippled polio,” as patients were called, was lucky.
Bulbar polio struck the muscles employed to swallow and to breathe, killing by respiratory failure. A bout often began with severe headache, sweating, and vomiting. Soon the patient, unable to cough or to swallow, was gasping and turning blue from lack of oxygen. In an infant, the danger sign came when a baby suddenly stopped crying; doctors would rush to intubate the child, an emergency procedure often undertaken too late.
Adulthood conferred no immunity. As early as 1921, medical authorities were downplaying use of the adjective “infantile” because the disease overtook older children and even young adults, though only a few people in their thirties. But more virulent viral mutations broadened the age range. In 1916, 80 percent of New York City polio patients were 4 or younger, but by 1955, 25 percent would be 20 or older.
Adult onset polio was quite rare when, on August 10, 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell ill. The gregarious, cheerful politician was vacationing with wife Eleanor and their five children on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, when he experienced chills, a fever, and loss of feeling in his limbs.
At 39, Roosevelt stood just over six feet tall. A vigorous, athletic fellow in the prime of his life, he golfed, played tennis and field hockey, and ran cross-country. He chopped trees, sailed iceboats, and sledded with his young children. A scion of a wealthy old Hudson Valley family, Roosevelt had a law degree but, under the influence of energetic presidential cousin Theodore, he had gravitated to public service. In 1910, the younger man won election to the New York State Senate. During the world war, he served as assistant secretary of the Navy, and in 1920 had been the Democratic candidate for the vice presidency. He was looking forward to a bright future.
However, within 24 hours of taking to his bed at Campobello, Franklin Roosevelt could not even stand. Local doctors attended him. Nine days later, his paralysis had spread. He could feel nothing from the neck down.
On August 25, a physician summoned from Boston diagnosed polio. In time Roosevelt’s arms worked again, but not his legs. Even so, through sheer will he resumed his political career to extraordinary result. Never denying that he had polio—and never identifying as its victim—Roosevelt held himself up as having defeated the disease and its paralysis, and, with the same vigor, worked to help his country defeat polio as well. In the words of biographer Roger Daniels, the story of FDR and infantile paralysis is “not what polio did to Roosevelt, but what Roosevelt did for polio.”
A vacationing Franklin Roosevelt was celebrity enough that bad news involving him intrigued the press. Interest built among local reporters when Roosevelt delayed his departure from Campobello until after Labor Day, ostensibly to avoid traveling in hot weather. Political manager Louis Howe announced that FDR would be leaving his family home by boat and landing on the docks at Eastport, Maine. While newshounds milled around the wrong end of town, Howe was having the stretcher-bound Roosevelt transported by launch to a different dock and delivered to the railway depot, where handlers loaded him onto a baggage cart and trundled him into his private car. By the time reporters found the correct platform and rail car, the object of their attention was seated happily at an open window, smiling and joking. Roosevelt, his doctors, and his family rolled back to Manhattan. Only then did the world learn he had polio.
If his mother had had her way, Roosevelt would have retreated to the family estate at Hyde Park, New York, and lived as an invalid, but FDR responded to his condition with resilience and determination. He needed round-the-clock help—someone to carry him up and down stairs, maneuver him into and out of bed, wash him, help him empty his bowels, lift him into and out of chairs and vehicles. Yet Roosevelt managed his life so successfully that his “disability was of little interest to the voters,” wrote historian David Oshinsky.
“The doctors are most encouraging,” Roosevelt claimed in September 1921, declaring he had “been given every reason to expect” that he would overcome paralysis. In addition to his family’s status and considerable fortune, he had the support of George Draper, his personal physician and a childhood friend.
Draper, who harbored grave doubts about whether his pal would walk again, kept quiet about how he was “much concerned at the very slow recovery” FDR was making. Draper wrote later that he hesitated to quash his friend’s hope of reversing paralysis through hard work “because the psychological factor in his management is paramount.”
Roosevelt’s optimism extended to his political career, which for now had to defer to his recovery. Even so, almost from the moment his employer fell ill, Howe was mounting a cheerfully optimistic—or willfully deceptive—line of reasoning in the press. A day after physicians at Presbyterian Hospital confirmed the polio diagnosis, The New York Times was reporting that Roosevelt was “seriously ill” but “improving.” The article did not mention polio.
“His physician is confident of his ultimate recovery,” the New York World wrote.
Roosevelt “will not be crippled,” Draper had told the Times. “No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.” Newspapers across the United States reproduced the
statement. The Washington Post reported the increasingly famous patient to be “nearing recovery.”
Six weeks into his stay at Presbyterian, Roosevelt still could not stand. But the fact that he could wrestle himself into a wheelchair persuaded doctors to discharge him. He returned to his East 65th Street townhouse, three blocks from Central Park. He and his medical staff developed an exercise regime meant to restore the use of his legs and help him cope. Hoisting himself on straps dangling above his bed, he did sets of pull-ups. To keep his abdominal muscles from shortening and distorting his posture, doctors encased him for weeks in a full body cast—a circumstance Eleanor Roosevelt described as “torture” that her husband bore “without the slightest complaint, just as he bore his illness from the very beginning.” Stamina revived, Roosevelt donned leg braces. These contraptions let him practice standing on his own—until he fell. Someone would pick him up, and he would fall again. He imitated the act of walking by gripping parallel bars and using his increasing upper body strength to drag his inert lower frame forward. He rehearsed rescuing himself in a fire by throwing himself from bed or chair to the floor and with hands and elbows dragging himself to an exit. Seeing her husband demonstrate this hard-learned technique, Eleanor ran from the room crying.
By May 1922, Roosevelt’s condition had improved enough to permit him to travel to Boston. At Massachusetts General Hospital, technicians fitted him with new braces and taught him a new exercise and movement regime. He began using crutches, which sufficed until October. One day that month, as he was traversing a Manhattan building lobby with a chauffeur’s aid, the crutch tips slipped. Roosevelt came to spectacular grief, tumbling to the polished floor—in front of a crowd.
Realizing scenes like that would doom him politically no less than the sight of him in a wheelchair, Roosevelt determined to walk—or at least appear to. Standing arm in arm with someone large and strong enough to ballast him—often adolescent son James—he rehearsed holding a cane and executing a shoulder-powered shuffle that shifted his weight from side to side, moving his useless, braced legs. The process was arduous and Roosevelt struggled to maintain an even emotional keel.
The real test came in June 1924—less than three years after he was stricken—when Roosevelt’s party invited him to address its quadrennial national convention in Manhattan. On the appointed afternoon, the man of the hour summoned his resources and labored to the podium at Madison Square Garden. Beaming at the cheering horde with a wide smile, Roosevelt entered New York Governor Al Smith’s name into contention for the Democratic presidential nod.
For the next three years, however, Roosevelt retreated from public life. In October 1924, he first visited Warm Springs, Georgia, a resort town south of Atlanta. Word was that upon exercising in the 88o mineral-rich pools there, several crippled polios had found they could walk. Immersed, Roosevelt found he could stand upright unassisted, move his legs, even walk and swim. He happily relayed to Eleanor that “the walking and general exercising in the water is fine and I have worked out some special exercises.” The Atlanta Journal reported on the benefits Roosevelt experienced in the waters at Warm Springs, adding that he planned to build a cottage of his own and “spend a portion of each year there until he is completely cured.” By 1926, Roosevelt so believed in Warm Springs that he stretched his strained personal finances to buy the property. In 1927 he established the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, a non-profit that could receive tax-free gifts and grants that would allow the facility to help others in his situation.
Accustomed to seeing Roosevelt use only two canes, ambulating with his tortured shuffle, advisors and pundits began to tout him as the Democrats’ man for the presidency in 1928.
Impossible, Roosevelt said; he barely was able to walk with with the assistance of braces, crutches, and canes, and often had to be carried. He continued his rehabilitation—and the publicity campaign positing his inevitable recovery.
To maintain his upper body, Roosevelt doggedly worked out, sometimes spending three hours a day on the parallel bars. By September 1928, in the privacy of his Warm Springs cottage, he had managed several steps without cane or crutch. That autumn, he sought and won New York’s governorship.
“I just figured it was now or never,” he told one of his sons.
Throughout the gubernatorial campaign and Roosevelt’s tenure as governor, Louis Howe continued to ballyhoo his boss’s physical fitness, taking care to douse rumors that Roosevelt’s health problems came from untreated syphilis and that physical disability had sapped his mind.
The highlight of the effort to sell FDR’s strength and vigor was a grandiose declaration that “every rumor of Franklin Roosevelt’s physical incapacity can be unqualifiedly defined as false.” This assertion appeared in the July 25, 1931, edition of Liberty magazine. The popular weekly’s article began with journalist Earle Looker challenging Roosevelt to prove his health and suitability for the nation’s highest office.
The theoretical candidate responded head on, submitting to a thorough examination. Three medical specialists unequivocally declared him “physically fit,” with healthy organs, an aligned spine, and no known disease. Liberty left out the detail that Looker, a Roosevelt family acquaintance, had confected the whole thing. In 1932, Looker published a biography, This Man Roosevelt, a fluffier version of the article.
Better conditioned, more seasoned in his adaptive strategies, and blessed with an opponent, Herbert Hoover, who had the Depression draped across his shoulders, Roosevelt easily won the 1932 election. In his March 4, 1933, inaugural address he reassured a fretful nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Less well known is his next sentence, in which he defined fear as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That double entendre invited listeners to take heart from FDR’s determination to apply the rigor he had shown in overcoming paralysis and taking the White House to the task of restarting a ravaged economy and uplifting a demoralized populace.
Organizing what disability advocate Hugh Gallagher called a “splendid deception,” FDR mobilized all available resources to maintain the optimism-cum-pretense that had carried him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. He ordered leg braces in an unobtrusive black finish. He had his touring car fitted with a bar he could grip while standing to address crowds. He expanded the Secret Service’s role; besides keeping the chief executive safe, agents searched for alternate entrances so the president could get into buildings away from the public eye. Roosevelt’s guardians installed ramps, made bathrooms accessible, and bolted down podiums. When FDR moved on foot in public, he did so at the center of a knot of Secret Service men, some of the men supporting him by the elbows.
The press helped maintain appearances, adhering to FDR’s wish that he not be photographed or filmed in awkward or vulnerable positions, such as exiting a vehicle or struggling from chair to chair. When Roosevelt did submit to photo sessions, he stage-managed them, as often as possible in the form of press conferences he conducted in the Oval Office. Seated at his cluttered desk with an air of informal industry, he—and his interlocutors—all could overlook his paralysis.
Polio remains incurable, but in 1930, Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw of Harvard University invented the iron lung. These ponderous metal cylinders, big enough to hold a person, forced air in and out of the lungs of patients lying within, keeping some alive—but also immobilizing them, separating them from human touch, and reducing their field of vision to what they were able to see reflected in a mirror.
And those were the fortunate few. In 1939, a year of hospitalization for polio cost around $900, a tad more than the average American’s annual income. No federal agency funded treatment or rehabilitation, and less than 10 percent of American families had health insurance.
Against the backdrop of polio’s seasonal terror and the specter of lives spent in iron lungs, President Roosevelt threw his clout into fundraising and research. In 1934, he hosted a “Birthday Ball” to benefit the Warm Springs Foundation. That first January 29, more than 6,000 parties took place nationwide, with the premier event, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, featuring a 28-foot-wide cake that fed 5,000 guests. That year’s balls raised more than $1 million, and became an institution. In 1938, Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, focused on finding a cure for polio and assisting patients. The foundation’s efforts kicked off with the March of Dimes—entertainer Eddie Cantor’s pun on the popular “March of Time” newsreels—as mothers went house to house around the country asking neighbors to contribute ten cents to help advance polio research. That first campaign raised $2,680,000.
Reelected three times, beloved by millions—and pilloried by other millions—overseer of the economy’s recovery, pillar of the war against the Axis, Franklin Roosevelt in the execution of his duties as wartime commander-in-chief was “a marvel,” Winston Churchill commented. Even Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was observed to respond to FDR’s fortitude, affectionately patting his ally’s shoulder during meetings. Gas mask draped on his wheelchair, Roosevelt in wartime left Washington more than he ever had. On some visits with wounded troops, he allowed GIs to see him in his wheelchair. However, his schedule forced him to give up his exercise routine, and in early 1944 his health entered into rapid decline.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in his cottage at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage. The following year, the U.S. Treasury Department fittingly memorialized his support for polio research by putting his face on the ten-cent piece.
By the 1950s, thanks to the March of Dimes, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and heightened public support, more than 80 percent of American polio patients were receiving significant financial and medical aid.
Donations to these entities helped fund Dr. Jonas Salk’s research into the vaccine named for him. First made available in 1955, the Salk vaccine was outstandingly effective: in the early 1950s, the U.S. averaged over 45,000 polio cases per year. By 1962, fewer than 1,000 cases were presenting annually.
As generations unfamiliar with polio or President Roosevelt have come of age, an impression has arisen that FDR was “hiding” what polio had done to his body. This is not true. Americans may not have always recognized or remembered that their president was a paraplegic, but Roosevelt’s limitations were popular knowledge, as was his dedication to polio research and treatment. FDR’s legacy is not that he conned fellow Americans, but that he overcame polio’s limitations to become one of the greatest advocates on behalf of fellow patients. In her autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for her husband polio was 'a blessing in disguise, for it 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.'”
"Smiling Through a Personal Apocalypse
FDR got polio, but polio didn’t get him
AS THE 20th CENTURY dawned, American summers stopped being times of fireflies, baseball, and beaches to become seasons of terror. Each year with warm weather came some new proscription for parents: Keep children away from crowds, ice cream parlors, public swimming places. Do not send kids to the movies or let them overexert, or get too hot, or too cold. Keep little ones away from dusty streets, swat their fingers away from their noses. Let no fly remain alive inside any house. Keep windows closed. No one could follow all those rules, but parents had no other way to try to safeguard children from the scourge of poliomyelitis, a viral disease then called infantile paralysis, and now known as polio.
Polio dates to prehistory, but not until 1894 did the disease break out on a large scale in the United States. That summer’s epidemic, in northern New England, sickened 123 children. Outbreaks multiplied and intensified as the three strains—one mild and flu-like, another
characterized by paralysis, and the most acute, bulbar polio, sometimes causing death—mutated. In summer 1916, all three strains converged in New York City, striking 8,900 people and killing 2,400 children, 80 percent age 4 or younger. Panicked city officials barred children from subways and trains, closed summer camps, and mandated screening of doors and windows in residences. Trying to contain the urban outbreak, health inspectors searched the suburbs for fleeing city children, placing polio refugees under house arrest. The virus spread to 26 other states, causing another 27,000 cases and 6,000 more deaths.
Polio hit quickly—youngsters at play one afternoon found themselves the next morning in ambulances. Polio ward staffs isolated suspected carriers from their families, stripped away and incinerated clothes and belongings assumed to be infected, and put terrified youngsters through excruciating spinal taps. Patients with confirmed diagnoses donned hospital-issue pajamas; a large red dot on the back advertised infectious status. In confinement, patients passed through a week or more of high fever, difficulty breathing, nausea, and muscle spasms. Some came away paralyzed. Paralysis could affect the limbs, but also the abdominal muscles, causing them to tighten so much some patients bent permanently at the waist, perhaps forced to walk on hands and knees. Cases could involve two years of rehabilitation—if a “crippled polio,” as patients were called, was lucky.
Bulbar polio struck the muscles employed to swallow and to breathe, killing by respiratory failure. A bout often began with severe headache, sweating, and vomiting. Soon the patient, unable to cough or to swallow, was gasping and turning blue from lack of oxygen. In an infant, the danger sign came when a baby suddenly stopped crying; doctors would rush to intubate the child, an emergency procedure often undertaken too late.
Adulthood conferred no immunity. As early as 1921, medical authorities were downplaying use of the adjective “infantile” because the disease overtook older children and even young adults, though only a few people in their thirties. But more virulent viral mutations broadened the age range. In 1916, 80 percent of New York City polio patients were 4 or younger, but by 1955, 25 percent would be 20 or older.
Adult onset polio was quite rare when, on August 10, 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell ill. The gregarious, cheerful politician was vacationing with wife Eleanor and their five children on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, when he experienced chills, a fever, and loss of feeling in his limbs.
At 39, Roosevelt stood just over six feet tall. A vigorous, athletic fellow in the prime of his life, he golfed, played tennis and field hockey, and ran cross-country. He chopped trees, sailed iceboats, and sledded with his young children. A scion of a wealthy old Hudson Valley family, Roosevelt had a law degree but, under the influence of energetic presidential cousin Theodore, he had gravitated to public service. In 1910, the younger man won election to the New York State Senate. During the world war, he served as assistant secretary of the Navy, and in 1920 had been the Democratic candidate for the vice presidency. He was looking forward to a bright future.
However, within 24 hours of taking to his bed at Campobello, Franklin Roosevelt could not even stand. Local doctors attended him. Nine days later, his paralysis had spread. He could feel nothing from the neck down.
On August 25, a physician summoned from Boston diagnosed polio. In time Roosevelt’s arms worked again, but not his legs. Even so, through sheer will he resumed his political career to extraordinary result. Never denying that he had polio—and never identifying as its victim—Roosevelt held himself up as having defeated the disease and its paralysis, and, with the same vigor, worked to help his country defeat polio as well. In the words of biographer Roger Daniels, the story of FDR and infantile paralysis is “not what polio did to Roosevelt, but what Roosevelt did for polio.”
A vacationing Franklin Roosevelt was celebrity enough that bad news involving him intrigued the press. Interest built among local reporters when Roosevelt delayed his departure from Campobello until after Labor Day, ostensibly to avoid traveling in hot weather. Political manager Louis Howe announced that FDR would be leaving his family home by boat and landing on the docks at Eastport, Maine. While newshounds milled around the wrong end of town, Howe was having the stretcher-bound Roosevelt transported by launch to a different dock and delivered to the railway depot, where handlers loaded him onto a baggage cart and trundled him into his private car. By the time reporters found the correct platform and rail car, the object of their attention was seated happily at an open window, smiling and joking. Roosevelt, his doctors, and his family rolled back to Manhattan. Only then did the world learn he had polio.
If his mother had had her way, Roosevelt would have retreated to the family estate at Hyde Park, New York, and lived as an invalid, but FDR responded to his condition with resilience and determination. He needed round-the-clock help—someone to carry him up and down stairs, maneuver him into and out of bed, wash him, help him empty his bowels, lift him into and out of chairs and vehicles. Yet Roosevelt managed his life so successfully that his “disability was of little interest to the voters,” wrote historian David Oshinsky.
“The doctors are most encouraging,” Roosevelt claimed in September 1921, declaring he had “been given every reason to expect” that he would overcome paralysis. In addition to his family’s status and considerable fortune, he had the support of George Draper, his personal physician and a childhood friend.
Draper, who harbored grave doubts about whether his pal would walk again, kept quiet about how he was “much concerned at the very slow recovery” FDR was making. Draper wrote later that he hesitated to quash his friend’s hope of reversing paralysis through hard work “because the psychological factor in his management is paramount.”
Roosevelt’s optimism extended to his political career, which for now had to defer to his recovery. Even so, almost from the moment his employer fell ill, Howe was mounting a cheerfully optimistic—or willfully deceptive—line of reasoning in the press. A day after physicians at Presbyterian Hospital confirmed the polio diagnosis, The New York Times was reporting that Roosevelt was “seriously ill” but “improving.” The article did not mention polio.
“His physician is confident of his ultimate recovery,” the New York World wrote.
Roosevelt “will not be crippled,” Draper had told the Times. “No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.” Newspapers across the United States reproduced the
statement. The Washington Post reported the increasingly famous patient to be “nearing recovery.”
Six weeks into his stay at Presbyterian, Roosevelt still could not stand. But the fact that he could wrestle himself into a wheelchair persuaded doctors to discharge him. He returned to his East 65th Street townhouse, three blocks from Central Park. He and his medical staff developed an exercise regime meant to restore the use of his legs and help him cope. Hoisting himself on straps dangling above his bed, he did sets of pull-ups. To keep his abdominal muscles from shortening and distorting his posture, doctors encased him for weeks in a full body cast—a circumstance Eleanor Roosevelt described as “torture” that her husband bore “without the slightest complaint, just as he bore his illness from the very beginning.” Stamina revived, Roosevelt donned leg braces. These contraptions let him practice standing on his own—until he fell. Someone would pick him up, and he would fall again. He imitated the act of walking by gripping parallel bars and using his increasing upper body strength to drag his inert lower frame forward. He rehearsed rescuing himself in a fire by throwing himself from bed or chair to the floor and with hands and elbows dragging himself to an exit. Seeing her husband demonstrate this hard-learned technique, Eleanor ran from the room crying.
By May 1922, Roosevelt’s condition had improved enough to permit him to travel to Boston. At Massachusetts General Hospital, technicians fitted him with new braces and taught him a new exercise and movement regime. He began using crutches, which sufficed until October. One day that month, as he was traversing a Manhattan building lobby with a chauffeur’s aid, the crutch tips slipped. Roosevelt came to spectacular grief, tumbling to the polished floor—in front of a crowd.
Realizing scenes like that would doom him politically no less than the sight of him in a wheelchair, Roosevelt determined to walk—or at least appear to. Standing arm in arm with someone large and strong enough to ballast him—often adolescent son James—he rehearsed holding a cane and executing a shoulder-powered shuffle that shifted his weight from side to side, moving his useless, braced legs. The process was arduous and Roosevelt struggled to maintain an even emotional keel.
The real test came in June 1924—less than three years after he was stricken—when Roosevelt’s party invited him to address its quadrennial national convention in Manhattan. On the appointed afternoon, the man of the hour summoned his resources and labored to the podium at Madison Square Garden. Beaming at the cheering horde with a wide smile, Roosevelt entered New York Governor Al Smith’s name into contention for the Democratic presidential nod.
For the next three years, however, Roosevelt retreated from public life. In October 1924, he first visited Warm Springs, Georgia, a resort town south of Atlanta. Word was that upon exercising in the 88o mineral-rich pools there, several crippled polios had found they could walk. Immersed, Roosevelt found he could stand upright unassisted, move his legs, even walk and swim. He happily relayed to Eleanor that “the walking and general exercising in the water is fine and I have worked out some special exercises.” The Atlanta Journal reported on the benefits Roosevelt experienced in the waters at Warm Springs, adding that he planned to build a cottage of his own and “spend a portion of each year there until he is completely cured.” By 1926, Roosevelt so believed in Warm Springs that he stretched his strained personal finances to buy the property. In 1927 he established the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, a non-profit that could receive tax-free gifts and grants that would allow the facility to help others in his situation.
Accustomed to seeing Roosevelt use only two canes, ambulating with his tortured shuffle, advisors and pundits began to tout him as the Democrats’ man for the presidency in 1928.
Impossible, Roosevelt said; he barely was able to walk with with the assistance of braces, crutches, and canes, and often had to be carried. He continued his rehabilitation—and the publicity campaign positing his inevitable recovery.
To maintain his upper body, Roosevelt doggedly worked out, sometimes spending three hours a day on the parallel bars. By September 1928, in the privacy of his Warm Springs cottage, he had managed several steps without cane or crutch. That autumn, he sought and won New York’s governorship.
“I just figured it was now or never,” he told one of his sons.
Throughout the gubernatorial campaign and Roosevelt’s tenure as governor, Louis Howe continued to ballyhoo his boss’s physical fitness, taking care to douse rumors that Roosevelt’s health problems came from untreated syphilis and that physical disability had sapped his mind.
The highlight of the effort to sell FDR’s strength and vigor was a grandiose declaration that “every rumor of Franklin Roosevelt’s physical incapacity can be unqualifiedly defined as false.” This assertion appeared in the July 25, 1931, edition of Liberty magazine. The popular weekly’s article began with journalist Earle Looker challenging Roosevelt to prove his health and suitability for the nation’s highest office.
The theoretical candidate responded head on, submitting to a thorough examination. Three medical specialists unequivocally declared him “physically fit,” with healthy organs, an aligned spine, and no known disease. Liberty left out the detail that Looker, a Roosevelt family acquaintance, had confected the whole thing. In 1932, Looker published a biography, This Man Roosevelt, a fluffier version of the article.
Better conditioned, more seasoned in his adaptive strategies, and blessed with an opponent, Herbert Hoover, who had the Depression draped across his shoulders, Roosevelt easily won the 1932 election. In his March 4, 1933, inaugural address he reassured a fretful nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Less well known is his next sentence, in which he defined fear as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That double entendre invited listeners to take heart from FDR’s determination to apply the rigor he had shown in overcoming paralysis and taking the White House to the task of restarting a ravaged economy and uplifting a demoralized populace.
Organizing what disability advocate Hugh Gallagher called a “splendid deception,” FDR mobilized all available resources to maintain the optimism-cum-pretense that had carried him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. He ordered leg braces in an unobtrusive black finish. He had his touring car fitted with a bar he could grip while standing to address crowds. He expanded the Secret Service’s role; besides keeping the chief executive safe, agents searched for alternate entrances so the president could get into buildings away from the public eye. Roosevelt’s guardians installed ramps, made bathrooms accessible, and bolted down podiums. When FDR moved on foot in public, he did so at the center of a knot of Secret Service men, some of the men supporting him by the elbows.
The press helped maintain appearances, adhering to FDR’s wish that he not be photographed or filmed in awkward or vulnerable positions, such as exiting a vehicle or struggling from chair to chair. When Roosevelt did submit to photo sessions, he stage-managed them, as often as possible in the form of press conferences he conducted in the Oval Office. Seated at his cluttered desk with an air of informal industry, he—and his interlocutors—all could overlook his paralysis.
Polio remains incurable, but in 1930, Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw of Harvard University invented the iron lung. These ponderous metal cylinders, big enough to hold a person, forced air in and out of the lungs of patients lying within, keeping some alive—but also immobilizing them, separating them from human touch, and reducing their field of vision to what they were able to see reflected in a mirror.
And those were the fortunate few. In 1939, a year of hospitalization for polio cost around $900, a tad more than the average American’s annual income. No federal agency funded treatment or rehabilitation, and less than 10 percent of American families had health insurance.
Against the backdrop of polio’s seasonal terror and the specter of lives spent in iron lungs, President Roosevelt threw his clout into fundraising and research. In 1934, he hosted a “Birthday Ball” to benefit the Warm Springs Foundation. That first January 29, more than 6,000 parties took place nationwide, with the premier event, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, featuring a 28-foot-wide cake that fed 5,000 guests. That year’s balls raised more than $1 million, and became an institution. In 1938, Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, focused on finding a cure for polio and assisting patients. The foundation’s efforts kicked off with the March of Dimes—entertainer Eddie Cantor’s pun on the popular “March of Time” newsreels—as mothers went house to house around the country asking neighbors to contribute ten cents to help advance polio research. That first campaign raised $2,680,000.
Reelected three times, beloved by millions—and pilloried by other millions—overseer of the economy’s recovery, pillar of the war against the Axis, Franklin Roosevelt in the execution of his duties as wartime commander-in-chief was “a marvel,” Winston Churchill commented. Even Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was observed to respond to FDR’s fortitude, affectionately patting his ally’s shoulder during meetings. Gas mask draped on his wheelchair, Roosevelt in wartime left Washington more than he ever had. On some visits with wounded troops, he allowed GIs to see him in his wheelchair. However, his schedule forced him to give up his exercise routine, and in early 1944 his health entered into rapid decline.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in his cottage at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage. The following year, the U.S. Treasury Department fittingly memorialized his support for polio research by putting his face on the ten-cent piece.
By the 1950s, thanks to the March of Dimes, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and heightened public support, more than 80 percent of American polio patients were receiving significant financial and medical aid.
Donations to these entities helped fund Dr. Jonas Salk’s research into the vaccine named for him. First made available in 1955, the Salk vaccine was outstandingly effective: in the early 1950s, the U.S. averaged over 45,000 polio cases per year. By 1962, fewer than 1,000 cases were presenting annually.
As generations unfamiliar with polio or President Roosevelt have come of age, an impression has arisen that FDR was “hiding” what polio had done to his body. This is not true. Americans may not have always recognized or remembered that their president was a paraplegic, but Roosevelt’s limitations were popular knowledge, as was his dedication to polio research and treatment. FDR’s legacy is not that he conned fellow Americans, but that he overcame polio’s limitations to become one of the greatest advocates on behalf of fellow patients. In her autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for her husband polio was 'a blessing in disguise, for it 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.'”
Smiling Through a Personal Apocalypse
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The Roosevelts: An Intimate History | FDR Contracts Polio | PBS
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-roosevelts/ On Wednesday, August 10, 1921, Franklin Roosevelt returns from a day of outdoor activities to relax on the back p...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on August 10, 1921 future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was stricken with a paralytic illness at summer home on Canadian island of Campobello.
[my second attempt on this untrustworthy network.]
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History | FDR Contracts Polio | PBS
On Wednesday, August 10, 1921, Franklin Roosevelt returns from a day of outdoor activities to relax on the back porch of the family’s summer home at Campobello Island. He complains of feeling feverish and retires upstairs to bed, where he remains for days, unable to walk, shaking with fever and suffering severe pain. At first, no one knows what is wrong with him, but eventually a diagnosis is made: infantile paralysis--polio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLJ0ytE4cY
Images
1. Roosevelt supporting himself on crutches at Springwood in Hyde Park, New York, with visitors including Al Smith (1924)
2. Roosevelt talking with two young fellow polio patients at Warm Springs.
3. Prescription from Dr. Linder Inc. for leg braces. Includes a handwritten note from FDR saying the braces don’t fit. July 5, 1926.
4. photograph of FDR in a wheelchair, with Ruthie Bie and Fala, taken by his cousin Margaret Suckley (February 1941)
Background from {[ https://www.fdrlibrary.org/polio]}
Introduction
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States. Not only did he serve an unprecedented four terms in office, but he was also the first president with a significant physical disability. FDR was diagnosed with infantile paralysis, better known as polio, in 1921, at the age of 39. Although dealing with this crippling disease was difficult, many believe that his personal struggles helped shape FDR, both as a man and as a president.
Polio Strikes
Coming from a wealthy family, FDR was privileged to enjoy his summers at the Campobello Island family cottage that was purchased by his parents in New Brunswick, Canada. It was at this site that FDR manifested the symptoms of “the insidious and deadly enemy” known as infantile paralysis. No one is certain of the circumstances leading to his contraction of polio, many believe he was exposed to the virus at a Boy Scout camp in New York just prior to going to Campobello.
During the summer of 1921, FDR was enjoying a day of sailing on his yacht when he suddenly fell overboard into the icy waters of the Bay of Fundy, which ironically felt paralyzing to his body. The following day, FDR complained of lower back pain and went for a swim in hopes to ease the soreness. As the day progressed, he could feel his legs becoming weaker and by the third day, he could no longer hold his own weight. His skin quickly became very sensitive and eventually even a slight breeze across his body caused great distress.
Eleanor, who couldn’t bear to see her husband in such anguish, began to contact a handful of doctors, hoping one of them would be able to find a remedy to his unknown infirmity. One of these doctors was Dr. Keen who insisted the issue stemmed from a blood clot located in the lower spinal cord and recommended that he receive lumbar massages daily in order to help circulation. Days later, FDR was notified by Dr. Keen that his earlier diagnosis was incorrect and instead he claimed the distress was being caused by spinal lesion. The massage therapy continued but did not prove to be successful in curing the paralysis.
On August 25, 1921, another physician, Dr. Robert Lovett, diagnosed FDR with infantile paralysis (i.e. polio). At that time, polio had no known cure and often resulted in full or partial paralysis and the erosion of one’s motor skills. Lovett, who was an expert on the disease, insisted Franklin stop the massages, as they were not helping the situation and possibly making it worse; he instead suggested that he take hot baths.
Both FDR and Eleanor were surprised by this verdict, as it was uncommon for a middle aged person to contract polio. Most cases of the disease were acquired during infancy, but most children become immune to the disease by the age of four. Lovett explained that in order for a person to combat poliomyelitis, they must be in good emotional and physical health and have a healthy immune system. This made FDR rethink the actuality of having the disease since he could recall frequently becoming ill as a young boy, but for the past few years he had been leading a stressful life in politics that may have weakened his immunity. At the young age of thirty-nine, FDR became a victim of infantile paralysis.
Recovery and Rehabilitation
It was during fall of 1921, when FDR made the decision to remove himself from political life in order to begin his rehabilitation process at his home in Hyde Park, New York. For several years, his main focus shifted from politics to recovering from his paralysis. FDR began routinely swimming three times a week in the Astor pool and in the pond. He had realized that his legs could support the weight of his body in water with ease and used swimming as his main exercise. By the winter of that year, his arms regained strength, his nervous system was functioning normally, and his stomach and lower back were getting stronger (Gallagher 23).
In January 1922, FDR was fit with braces that locked in at the knee and continued the length of his leg, and by the spring of that year he could stand with assistance. FDR made a plan that one day he would walk the length of his driveway, which was a quarter-mile long. Although he never accomplished the task, he used it as a training procedure, working himself to the bone in hopes that he would be able to walk again if he continued exercising.
Due to his bright personality, FDR insisted that he be surrounded by “good cheer” throughout his rehab process. He was known for exercising constantly, even when he was surrounded by friends. He would often have people watch him and provide company as he exercised and would carry out a conversation with them despite devoting all his effort to moving.
FDR also involved his children and family with his daily exercise rituals. At first, his children were heartbroken seeing their father in such a vulnerable state, struggling to move. Eventually they became comfortable around his condition and were proactive in helping him and involving themselves with his rehabilitation process. Eleanor recalled, “The perfect naturalness with which the children accepted his limitations though they had always known him as an active person, helped him tremendously in his own acceptance of them” (Roosevelt, Autobiography 142).
Warm Springs, Georgia
During his rehabilitation process, FDR was contacted by George Foster Peabody, a friend who knew of his recent polio attack. Peabody recently learned of an incident where a young man by the name of Louis Joseph, who was stricken by infantile paralysis, was cured by the “healing waters” of Warm Springs. After hearing of this story, he recommended the Warm Springs facility to FDR, hoping he too would become miraculously cured by its medicinal waters.
In 1924, FDR made a trip to the Georgia resort with high hopes that the mineral water in the springs could treat his paralysis. The spring’s water came from Pine Mountain and was known to be rich in mineral content and extremely pure. Although the waters did not restore FDR to ultimate health, his continued visits throughout his political life resulted in an increase in the resort’s popularity and business.
In 1926, Warm Springs was having financial issues. As its favorite visitor, FDR couldn’t allow the facility to close down; instead, he bought the facility for $200,000 and transformed it into a rehabilitation center for polio patients like himself. The following year, the Warm Springs Foundation was considered a permanent hydrotherapeutic center by the American Orthopedic Association.
Above: Home movie footage of various scenes, circa 1928, showing areas around the treatment facility at Warm Springs, GA. Included in this silent footage are shots of FDR swimming, receiving therapy, and attending picnics.
Return to Political Life
FDR made remarkable progress in Hyde Park and Warm Springs, and all his time was well spent during his rehabilitation period. His efforts and exercises clearly paid off, but he still remained a paraplegic. Roosevelt had such faith that one day he would be able to walk again. His stubborn confidence resulted in a personal ultimatum: he either needed to accept the progress he had made and return to politics or give up his political dreams in hopes of breaking out of this stagnant phase of recovery.
Eleanor also played a huge role in convincing FDR to resume his political career. As his wife and co-pilot, she knew he would not be happy in the end if he had decided to terminate his activity in politics. FDR’s close friend and political advisor, Louis Howe, also urged FDR to participate in politics again. Though this decision to return to the political world was supported by two people he respected, it was also looked down upon by the person he cared about the most, his mother. She became very concerned with his health and suggested that he retire completely from his hectic life as a politician. Of course if it had not been for Eleanor and Howe, America might not have had the experience of having FDR in office, nor anything that stemmed from his presidency. (Gallagher 20)
As FDR made his way back into political life, he was unsure how the public would react to his disability. Since his withdrawal from the public eye, not many people knew exactly what had happened to FDR. There were many rumors concerning his health and his physical state.
All of this made it even more difficult for FDR to stay emotionally strong and confident while making his way back into the limelight. His first attempt to regain political interest was to support New York State Governor Al Smith in the 1924 Democratic Convention. This was FDR’s first public appearance since his polio attack and everyone was curious about his condition.
FDR had expected the public to treat him like any other paraplegic at the time, with ignorance. During the 1920’s, disability was frowned upon. Often disabled family members were put into asylums and banished from the family. The disabled were not employable and were often removed from society.
As FDR began to move up on the political ladder, Americans were not shaken by his disability. More citizens were sympathetic to his condition rather than embarrassed. Fueled by America’s “good cheer” and acceptance, FDR gained more confidence in his political career and ran for governor of New York in 1928. His disability did not affect his votes and as a result, he held the governorship for two terms until he decided to run for President in the 1932 election.
His political advisors often worried about how successful FDR would be in the election. They feared the words of his opponents and the names people often called him hoping to break his stride. Despite all of this, FDR’s disability was never brought up as a problem throughout his 1932 campaign and presidency and did not affect America’s love for him.
Living with Disability
In private, FDR used a special wheelchair he designed himself. He refused to use a “regular” wheelchair because the chairs of the time were one-size-fits-all, bulky and a nuisance to get around in. Most buildings during his era were not wheelchair accessible; therefore Roosevelt needed something small, appealing, efficient, and discreet. To accomplish this, he used a dining chair and replaced the legs with bicycle-like wheels. The chair was small and could move around tight corners and narrow hallways with ease. His wheelchair did not call a lot of attention since it was made out of something people were used to seeing in their own homes.
Although FDR’s disability did not directly interfere with his role as President, he was not completely comfortable being open about his situation.
Masking his disability in his home was one thing, but the real challenge arose when he was asked to appear in public or deliver a speech. Often he was required to navigate to a podium or area in which he would greet listeners. Of course FDR could have simply chosen to remain in his wheelchair during public events, but he wanted to assure America that he was capable. He never wanted Americans to get the impression that he was helpless, so it was important to him to at least seem as if he could walk.
FDR devised a method of “walking” in which he used a cane and the arm of his son or advisor for balance. He would maneuver his hips and swing is legs forward in a swaying motion to make it appear as if he was walking. Stairs were also a challenge for FDR, he learned to support his weight with just his arms, holding himself up as if he were on parallel bars, and swing his way down toward the next step.
FDR requested that the press avoid photographing him walking, maneuvering, or being transferred from his car. The stipulation was accepted by most reporters and photographers but periodically someone would not comply. The Secret Service was assigned to purposely interfere with anyone who tried to snap a photo of FDR in a “disabled or weak” state (Gallagher 94).
Legacy
Although FDR made the choice to put his paralysis on the back burner in order to return to political life, he never gave up on the cause. Throughout his presidency, FDR made sure that he put effort into assisting those who suffered from polio.
After ten years of setting up Warm Springs so that it became the prime place for polio patients to receive therapy, FDR faced funding issues with the foundation. The first Birthday Ball in 1934 was held in commemoration of FDR’s birthday. He urged people in his honor to make monetary donations to the facility and ended up raising one million dollars for the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.
The Birthday Balls continued in order to support both Warm Springs and FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which he created four years later in 1938. The fundraising for the National Foundation evolved into what we now know as the March of Dimes. This was a fund-raiser in which all of its proceeds went to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The annual continuation of this occasion eventually funded the research for the Salk vaccine to treat polio; unfortunately FDR never lived to see it.
FDR’s disability was often called a “blessing in disguise” by his wife. Eleanor had a way of looking at the big picture instead of worrying over the small stuff. She understood that the battles her husband fought in life were often more than what they seemed.
FDR’s illness threw him into a category frowned upon by most of the American population. The way he viewed himself as a person, father and politician despite his limitations helped others to change the way they viewed others crippled by disease or disability. Disabled or not, FDR became a symbol of strength and perseverance to Americans, showing them that “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’…You must do the thing you think you cannot do” (Roosevelt, You Learn by Living 29-30)."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC (Join to see) LTC Wayne Brandon Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Maj Robert Thornton Kim Bolen RN CCM ACM SMSgt Lawrence McCarter PO1 H Gene Lawrence PO2 (Join to see) PO3 Phyllis Maynard GySgt Thomas Vick SSG Chad HenningSPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant SSG Stephen Rogerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SPC Woody Bullard
[my second attempt on this untrustworthy network.]
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History | FDR Contracts Polio | PBS
On Wednesday, August 10, 1921, Franklin Roosevelt returns from a day of outdoor activities to relax on the back porch of the family’s summer home at Campobello Island. He complains of feeling feverish and retires upstairs to bed, where he remains for days, unable to walk, shaking with fever and suffering severe pain. At first, no one knows what is wrong with him, but eventually a diagnosis is made: infantile paralysis--polio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLJ0ytE4cY
Images
1. Roosevelt supporting himself on crutches at Springwood in Hyde Park, New York, with visitors including Al Smith (1924)
2. Roosevelt talking with two young fellow polio patients at Warm Springs.
3. Prescription from Dr. Linder Inc. for leg braces. Includes a handwritten note from FDR saying the braces don’t fit. July 5, 1926.
4. photograph of FDR in a wheelchair, with Ruthie Bie and Fala, taken by his cousin Margaret Suckley (February 1941)
Background from {[ https://www.fdrlibrary.org/polio]}
Introduction
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States. Not only did he serve an unprecedented four terms in office, but he was also the first president with a significant physical disability. FDR was diagnosed with infantile paralysis, better known as polio, in 1921, at the age of 39. Although dealing with this crippling disease was difficult, many believe that his personal struggles helped shape FDR, both as a man and as a president.
Polio Strikes
Coming from a wealthy family, FDR was privileged to enjoy his summers at the Campobello Island family cottage that was purchased by his parents in New Brunswick, Canada. It was at this site that FDR manifested the symptoms of “the insidious and deadly enemy” known as infantile paralysis. No one is certain of the circumstances leading to his contraction of polio, many believe he was exposed to the virus at a Boy Scout camp in New York just prior to going to Campobello.
During the summer of 1921, FDR was enjoying a day of sailing on his yacht when he suddenly fell overboard into the icy waters of the Bay of Fundy, which ironically felt paralyzing to his body. The following day, FDR complained of lower back pain and went for a swim in hopes to ease the soreness. As the day progressed, he could feel his legs becoming weaker and by the third day, he could no longer hold his own weight. His skin quickly became very sensitive and eventually even a slight breeze across his body caused great distress.
Eleanor, who couldn’t bear to see her husband in such anguish, began to contact a handful of doctors, hoping one of them would be able to find a remedy to his unknown infirmity. One of these doctors was Dr. Keen who insisted the issue stemmed from a blood clot located in the lower spinal cord and recommended that he receive lumbar massages daily in order to help circulation. Days later, FDR was notified by Dr. Keen that his earlier diagnosis was incorrect and instead he claimed the distress was being caused by spinal lesion. The massage therapy continued but did not prove to be successful in curing the paralysis.
On August 25, 1921, another physician, Dr. Robert Lovett, diagnosed FDR with infantile paralysis (i.e. polio). At that time, polio had no known cure and often resulted in full or partial paralysis and the erosion of one’s motor skills. Lovett, who was an expert on the disease, insisted Franklin stop the massages, as they were not helping the situation and possibly making it worse; he instead suggested that he take hot baths.
Both FDR and Eleanor were surprised by this verdict, as it was uncommon for a middle aged person to contract polio. Most cases of the disease were acquired during infancy, but most children become immune to the disease by the age of four. Lovett explained that in order for a person to combat poliomyelitis, they must be in good emotional and physical health and have a healthy immune system. This made FDR rethink the actuality of having the disease since he could recall frequently becoming ill as a young boy, but for the past few years he had been leading a stressful life in politics that may have weakened his immunity. At the young age of thirty-nine, FDR became a victim of infantile paralysis.
Recovery and Rehabilitation
It was during fall of 1921, when FDR made the decision to remove himself from political life in order to begin his rehabilitation process at his home in Hyde Park, New York. For several years, his main focus shifted from politics to recovering from his paralysis. FDR began routinely swimming three times a week in the Astor pool and in the pond. He had realized that his legs could support the weight of his body in water with ease and used swimming as his main exercise. By the winter of that year, his arms regained strength, his nervous system was functioning normally, and his stomach and lower back were getting stronger (Gallagher 23).
In January 1922, FDR was fit with braces that locked in at the knee and continued the length of his leg, and by the spring of that year he could stand with assistance. FDR made a plan that one day he would walk the length of his driveway, which was a quarter-mile long. Although he never accomplished the task, he used it as a training procedure, working himself to the bone in hopes that he would be able to walk again if he continued exercising.
Due to his bright personality, FDR insisted that he be surrounded by “good cheer” throughout his rehab process. He was known for exercising constantly, even when he was surrounded by friends. He would often have people watch him and provide company as he exercised and would carry out a conversation with them despite devoting all his effort to moving.
FDR also involved his children and family with his daily exercise rituals. At first, his children were heartbroken seeing their father in such a vulnerable state, struggling to move. Eventually they became comfortable around his condition and were proactive in helping him and involving themselves with his rehabilitation process. Eleanor recalled, “The perfect naturalness with which the children accepted his limitations though they had always known him as an active person, helped him tremendously in his own acceptance of them” (Roosevelt, Autobiography 142).
Warm Springs, Georgia
During his rehabilitation process, FDR was contacted by George Foster Peabody, a friend who knew of his recent polio attack. Peabody recently learned of an incident where a young man by the name of Louis Joseph, who was stricken by infantile paralysis, was cured by the “healing waters” of Warm Springs. After hearing of this story, he recommended the Warm Springs facility to FDR, hoping he too would become miraculously cured by its medicinal waters.
In 1924, FDR made a trip to the Georgia resort with high hopes that the mineral water in the springs could treat his paralysis. The spring’s water came from Pine Mountain and was known to be rich in mineral content and extremely pure. Although the waters did not restore FDR to ultimate health, his continued visits throughout his political life resulted in an increase in the resort’s popularity and business.
In 1926, Warm Springs was having financial issues. As its favorite visitor, FDR couldn’t allow the facility to close down; instead, he bought the facility for $200,000 and transformed it into a rehabilitation center for polio patients like himself. The following year, the Warm Springs Foundation was considered a permanent hydrotherapeutic center by the American Orthopedic Association.
Above: Home movie footage of various scenes, circa 1928, showing areas around the treatment facility at Warm Springs, GA. Included in this silent footage are shots of FDR swimming, receiving therapy, and attending picnics.
Return to Political Life
FDR made remarkable progress in Hyde Park and Warm Springs, and all his time was well spent during his rehabilitation period. His efforts and exercises clearly paid off, but he still remained a paraplegic. Roosevelt had such faith that one day he would be able to walk again. His stubborn confidence resulted in a personal ultimatum: he either needed to accept the progress he had made and return to politics or give up his political dreams in hopes of breaking out of this stagnant phase of recovery.
Eleanor also played a huge role in convincing FDR to resume his political career. As his wife and co-pilot, she knew he would not be happy in the end if he had decided to terminate his activity in politics. FDR’s close friend and political advisor, Louis Howe, also urged FDR to participate in politics again. Though this decision to return to the political world was supported by two people he respected, it was also looked down upon by the person he cared about the most, his mother. She became very concerned with his health and suggested that he retire completely from his hectic life as a politician. Of course if it had not been for Eleanor and Howe, America might not have had the experience of having FDR in office, nor anything that stemmed from his presidency. (Gallagher 20)
As FDR made his way back into political life, he was unsure how the public would react to his disability. Since his withdrawal from the public eye, not many people knew exactly what had happened to FDR. There were many rumors concerning his health and his physical state.
All of this made it even more difficult for FDR to stay emotionally strong and confident while making his way back into the limelight. His first attempt to regain political interest was to support New York State Governor Al Smith in the 1924 Democratic Convention. This was FDR’s first public appearance since his polio attack and everyone was curious about his condition.
FDR had expected the public to treat him like any other paraplegic at the time, with ignorance. During the 1920’s, disability was frowned upon. Often disabled family members were put into asylums and banished from the family. The disabled were not employable and were often removed from society.
As FDR began to move up on the political ladder, Americans were not shaken by his disability. More citizens were sympathetic to his condition rather than embarrassed. Fueled by America’s “good cheer” and acceptance, FDR gained more confidence in his political career and ran for governor of New York in 1928. His disability did not affect his votes and as a result, he held the governorship for two terms until he decided to run for President in the 1932 election.
His political advisors often worried about how successful FDR would be in the election. They feared the words of his opponents and the names people often called him hoping to break his stride. Despite all of this, FDR’s disability was never brought up as a problem throughout his 1932 campaign and presidency and did not affect America’s love for him.
Living with Disability
In private, FDR used a special wheelchair he designed himself. He refused to use a “regular” wheelchair because the chairs of the time were one-size-fits-all, bulky and a nuisance to get around in. Most buildings during his era were not wheelchair accessible; therefore Roosevelt needed something small, appealing, efficient, and discreet. To accomplish this, he used a dining chair and replaced the legs with bicycle-like wheels. The chair was small and could move around tight corners and narrow hallways with ease. His wheelchair did not call a lot of attention since it was made out of something people were used to seeing in their own homes.
Although FDR’s disability did not directly interfere with his role as President, he was not completely comfortable being open about his situation.
Masking his disability in his home was one thing, but the real challenge arose when he was asked to appear in public or deliver a speech. Often he was required to navigate to a podium or area in which he would greet listeners. Of course FDR could have simply chosen to remain in his wheelchair during public events, but he wanted to assure America that he was capable. He never wanted Americans to get the impression that he was helpless, so it was important to him to at least seem as if he could walk.
FDR devised a method of “walking” in which he used a cane and the arm of his son or advisor for balance. He would maneuver his hips and swing is legs forward in a swaying motion to make it appear as if he was walking. Stairs were also a challenge for FDR, he learned to support his weight with just his arms, holding himself up as if he were on parallel bars, and swing his way down toward the next step.
FDR requested that the press avoid photographing him walking, maneuvering, or being transferred from his car. The stipulation was accepted by most reporters and photographers but periodically someone would not comply. The Secret Service was assigned to purposely interfere with anyone who tried to snap a photo of FDR in a “disabled or weak” state (Gallagher 94).
Legacy
Although FDR made the choice to put his paralysis on the back burner in order to return to political life, he never gave up on the cause. Throughout his presidency, FDR made sure that he put effort into assisting those who suffered from polio.
After ten years of setting up Warm Springs so that it became the prime place for polio patients to receive therapy, FDR faced funding issues with the foundation. The first Birthday Ball in 1934 was held in commemoration of FDR’s birthday. He urged people in his honor to make monetary donations to the facility and ended up raising one million dollars for the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.
The Birthday Balls continued in order to support both Warm Springs and FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which he created four years later in 1938. The fundraising for the National Foundation evolved into what we now know as the March of Dimes. This was a fund-raiser in which all of its proceeds went to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The annual continuation of this occasion eventually funded the research for the Salk vaccine to treat polio; unfortunately FDR never lived to see it.
FDR’s disability was often called a “blessing in disguise” by his wife. Eleanor had a way of looking at the big picture instead of worrying over the small stuff. She understood that the battles her husband fought in life were often more than what they seemed.
FDR’s illness threw him into a category frowned upon by most of the American population. The way he viewed himself as a person, father and politician despite his limitations helped others to change the way they viewed others crippled by disease or disability. Disabled or not, FDR became a symbol of strength and perseverance to Americans, showing them that “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’…You must do the thing you think you cannot do” (Roosevelt, You Learn by Living 29-30)."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC (Join to see) LTC Wayne Brandon Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Maj Robert Thornton Kim Bolen RN CCM ACM SMSgt Lawrence McCarter PO1 H Gene Lawrence PO2 (Join to see) PO3 Phyllis Maynard GySgt Thomas Vick SSG Chad HenningSPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant SSG Stephen Rogerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SPC Woody Bullard
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LTC Stephen F.
History in Five: James Tobin on How Polio Shaped FDR's Political Career
Learn more about Man He Became at http://books.simonandschuster.com/The-Man-He-Became/James-Tobin/9780743265157?mcd=vd_youtube_book James Tobin, author of TH...
History in Five: James Tobin on How Polio Shaped FDR's Political Career
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5V2C53trt0
Images:
1. Franklin Roosevelt with his family in 1919.
2. Franklin Roosevelt with his mother Sara in 1887.
3. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Franklin Roosevelt’s burial at his estate in Hyde Park, New York.
Background from {[ https://www.fdrlibrary.org/fdr-biography]}
The Early Years
Franklin D. Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882. He was the son of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. His parents and private tutors provided him with almost all his formative education. He attended Groton (1896-1900), a prestigious preparatory school in Massachusetts, and received a BA degree in history from Harvard in only three years (1900-03). Roosevelt next studied law at New York's Columbia University. When he passed the bar examination in 1907, he left school without taking a degree. For the next three years he practiced law with a prominent New York City law firm. He entered politics in 1910 and was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat from his traditionally Republican home district.
In the meantime, in 1905, he had married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. The couple had six children, five of whom survived infancy: Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1910), Franklin, Jr. (1914) and John (1916).
Roosevelt was reelected to the State Senate in 1912, and supported Woodrow Wilson's candidacy at the Democratic National Convention. As a reward for his support, Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, a position he held until 1920. He was an energetic and efficient administrator, specializing in the business side of naval administration. This experience prepared him for his future role as Commander-in-Chief during World War II. Roosevelt's popularity and success in naval affairs resulted in his being nominated for vice-president by the Democratic Party in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox of Ohio. However, popular sentiment against Wilson's plan for US participation in the League of Nations propelled Republican Warren Harding into the presidency, and Roosevelt returned to private life.
While vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). Despite courageous efforts to overcome his crippling illness, he never regained the use of his legs. In time, he established a foundation at Warm Springs, Georgia to help other polio victims, and inspired, as well as directed, the March of Dimes program that eventually funded an effective vaccine.
With the encouragement and help of his wife, Eleanor, and political confidant, Louis Howe, Roosevelt resumed his political career. In 1924 he nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president at the Democratic National Convention, but Smith lost the nomination to John W. Davis. In 1928 Smith became the Democratic candidate for president and arranged for Roosevelt's nomination to succeed him as governor of New York. Smith lost the election to Herbert Hoover; but Roosevelt was elected governor.
Following his reelection as governor in 1930, Roosevelt began to campaign for the presidency. While the economic depression damaged Hoover and the Republicans, Roosevelt's bold efforts to combat it in New York enhanced his reputation. In Chicago in 1932, Roosevelt won the nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for president. He broke with tradition and flew to Chicago to accept the nomination in person. He then campaigned energetically calling for government intervention in the economy to provide relief, recovery, and reform. His activist approach and personal charm helped to defeat Hoover in November 1932 by seven million votes.
The Great Depression
The Depression worsened in the months preceding Roosevelt's inauguration, March 4, 1933. Factory closings, farm foreclosures, and bank failures increased, while unemployment soared. Roosevelt faced the greatest crisis in American history since the Civil War. He undertook immediate actions to initiate his New Deal programs. To halt depositor panics, he closed the banks temporarily. Then he worked with a special session of Congress during the first "100 days" to pass recovery legislation which set up alphabet agencies such as the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) to support farm prices and the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) to employ young men. Other agencies assisted business and labor, insured bank deposits, regulated the stock market, subsidized home and farm mortgage payments, and aided the unemployed. These measures revived confidence in the economy. Banks reopened and direct relief saved millions from starvation. But the New Deal measures also involved government directly in areas of social and economic life as never before and resulted in greatly increased spending and unbalanced budgets which led to criticisms of Roosevelt's programs. However, the nation-at-large supported Roosevelt, and elected additional Democrats to state legislatures and governorships in the mid-term elections.
Another flurry of New Deal legislation followed in 1935 including the establishment of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) which provided jobs not only for laborers but also artists, writers, musicians, and authors, and the Social Security act which provided unemployment compensation and a program of old-age and survivors' benefits.
Roosevelt easily defeated Alfred M. Landon in 1936 and went on to defeat by lesser margins, Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey in 1944. He thus became the only American president to serve more than two terms.
After his overwhelming victory in 1936, Roosevelt took on the critics of the New Deal, namely, the Supreme Court, which had declared various legislation unconstitutional, and members of his own party. In 1937 he proposed to add new justices to the Supreme Court, but critics said he was "packing" the Court and undermining the separation of powers. His proposal was defeated, but the Court began to decide in favor of New Deal legislation. During the 1938 election he campaigned against many Democratic opponents, but this backfired when most were reelected to Congress. These setbacks, coupled with the recession that occurred midway through his second term, represented the low-point in Roosevelt's presidential career.
World War II
By 1939, with the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt was concentrating increasingly on foreign affairs. New Deal reform legislation diminished, and the ills of the Depression would not fully abate until the nation mobilized for war.
When Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt stated that, although the nation was neutral, he did not expect America to remain inactive in the face of Nazi aggression. Accordingly, he tried to make American aid available to Britain, France, and China and to obtain an amendment of the Neutrality Acts which rendered such assistance difficult. He also took measures to build up the armed forces in the face of isolationist opposition.
With the fall of France in 1940, the American mood and Roosevelt's policy changed dramatically. Congress enacted a draft for military service and Roosevelt signed a "lend-lease" bill in March 1941 to enable the nation to furnish aid to nations at war with Germany and Italy. America, though a neutral in the war and still at peace, was becoming the "arsenal of democracy", as its factories began producing as they had in the years before the Depression.
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, followed four days later by Germany's and Italy's declarations of war against the United States, brought the nation irrevocably into the war. Roosevelt exercised his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a role he actively carried out. He worked with and through his military advisers, overriding them when necessary, and took an active role in choosing the principal field commanders and in making decisions regarding wartime strategy.
He moved to create a "grand alliance" against the Axis powers through "The Declaration of the United Nations," January 1, 1942, in which all nations fighting the Axis agreed not to make a separate peace and pledged themselves to a peacekeeping organization (now the United Nations) upon victory.
He gave priority to the western European front and had General George Marshall, Chief of Staff, plan a holding operation in the Pacific and organize an expeditionary force for an invasion of Europe. The United States and its allies invaded North Africa in November 1942 and Sicily and Italy in 1943. The D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches in France, June 6, 1944, were followed by the allied invasion of Germany six months later. By April 1945 victory in Europe was certain.
The unending stress and strain of the war literally wore Roosevelt out. By early 1944 a full medical examination disclosed serious heart and circulatory problems; and although his physicians placed him on a strict regime of diet and medication, the pressures of war and domestic politics weighed heavily on him. During a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, he suffered a massive stroke and died two and one-half hours later without regaining consciousness. He was 63 years old. His death came on the eve of complete military victory in Europe and within months of victory over Japan in the Pacific. President Roosevelt was buried in the Rose Garden of his estate at Hyde Park, New York.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Fast Facts:
BORN: January 30, 1882 in Hyde Park, New York
PARENTS: Sara Delano and, James Roosevelt His father died when he was 18. His mother died when he was 59. BROTHER: A half brother named James Roosevelt Roosevelt, (1854-1927)
EDUCATION: Tutored at home until 1896 Groton School, Groton, Massachusetts (1896-1900) Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1900-1903) Received a B.A. in History Columbia Law School, New York City (1903-1905) Course work towards a degree in law, but no degree earned
MARRIED: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (fifth cousin once removed), March 17, 1905 in New York City.
CHILDREN: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (May 3, 1906 - December 1, 1975) James Roosevelt (December 23, 1907 - August 13, 1990) Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (March 18, 1909 - November 8, 1909) Elliott Roosevelt (September 23, 1910 - October 27, 1990) Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (August 17, 1914 - August 17, 1988)
ACTIVITIES: New York State Senator Assistant Secretary of the Navy Nominated for Vice President on ticket with James Cox Founded the Warm Springs Georgia Foundation Two term Governor of the State of New York Four term President of the United States, guiding the nation through the Great Depression and World War II
PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: Brown hair, 6 feet 2 inches tall, blue -grey eyes
DIED: April 12, 1945 in Warm Springs Georgia-cause of death listed cerebral hemorrhage.
Chronology of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Career
The Early Years
1882 Born in Hyde Park, NY on January 30
1896-1900 FDR attends Groton, a private preparatory school in Massachusetts
1900-1903 FDR attends Harvard, receiving a BA in history
1905 Married Eleanor Roosevelt, a fifth cousin once removed, in NYC on March 17 Enters Columbia Law School
1907 FDR passes the bar examination and leaves Columbia without completing a degree
1910 FDR elected to the New York State Senate
1912 FDR was re-elected to the New York State Senate
1913 FDR was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Woodrow Wilson
1920 Ran as Vice-President on the Democratic ticket along with James Cox of Ohio. Lost the election to Warren Harding and returned to private life.
1921 FDR is stricken with polio while vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick.
1924 FDR returns to politics by nominating Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president at the Democratic National Convention.
1928 FDR elected governor of New York State
1930 FDR re-elected governor of New York State. Begins his campaign for the presidency.
1932 FDR is nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president and defeats Hoover in November by seven million votes.
The New Deal Presidency
1933 FDR takes the oath of office on March 4 During his first "100 Days," he is able to get a large number of Legislative Initiatives through Congress which set up the alphabet agencies such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration & Civilian Conservation Corps aimed at bringing about economic relief recovery & reform.
1935 Additional New Deal legislation is passed including the Works Progress Administration and Social Security
1936 FDR was re-elected president to a second term
1937 FDR proposes to add justices to the Supreme Court, in an ill fated court "packing" plan
World War II
1939 Germany invades Poland there by starting WWII. While the U.S. remains neutral, FDR does try to make American aid available to the Allied powers
1940 FDR is re-elected for an unprecedented third term
1941 In March, FDR signs the Lend-Lease bill to aid nations at war with Germany & Italy On December 7, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor bringing the United States into the war. The next day FDR delivers his "day of infamy" speech before Congress and asks for a formal declaration of war against Germany.
1942 FDR moves to create a "grand alliance" of Allied powers through "the Declaration of the United Nations"
1944 FDR is re-elected president for a fourth term
1945 On April 12, FDR passes away at Warm Springs, Georgia. He is buried in the Rose Garden of his estate at Hyde Park, New York.
FYI SSG Robert Mark Odom SPC Matthew LambSSG Robert "Rob" WentworthCapt Rich BuckleyCW4 G.L. SmithSPC Russ BoltonSFC Terry WilcoxPO2 Roger LafarletteSgt Jim BelanusSGT Denny EspinosaSGM Gerald FifeSSG Michael NollSFC (Join to see)CPT (Join to see)1SG Steven ImermanSSG Samuel KermonSP5 Geoffrey VannersonSFC Richard WilliamsonCW2 James HughesSGT Aaron Reed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5V2C53trt0
Images:
1. Franklin Roosevelt with his family in 1919.
2. Franklin Roosevelt with his mother Sara in 1887.
3. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Franklin Roosevelt’s burial at his estate in Hyde Park, New York.
Background from {[ https://www.fdrlibrary.org/fdr-biography]}
The Early Years
Franklin D. Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882. He was the son of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. His parents and private tutors provided him with almost all his formative education. He attended Groton (1896-1900), a prestigious preparatory school in Massachusetts, and received a BA degree in history from Harvard in only three years (1900-03). Roosevelt next studied law at New York's Columbia University. When he passed the bar examination in 1907, he left school without taking a degree. For the next three years he practiced law with a prominent New York City law firm. He entered politics in 1910 and was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat from his traditionally Republican home district.
In the meantime, in 1905, he had married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. The couple had six children, five of whom survived infancy: Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1910), Franklin, Jr. (1914) and John (1916).
Roosevelt was reelected to the State Senate in 1912, and supported Woodrow Wilson's candidacy at the Democratic National Convention. As a reward for his support, Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, a position he held until 1920. He was an energetic and efficient administrator, specializing in the business side of naval administration. This experience prepared him for his future role as Commander-in-Chief during World War II. Roosevelt's popularity and success in naval affairs resulted in his being nominated for vice-president by the Democratic Party in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox of Ohio. However, popular sentiment against Wilson's plan for US participation in the League of Nations propelled Republican Warren Harding into the presidency, and Roosevelt returned to private life.
While vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). Despite courageous efforts to overcome his crippling illness, he never regained the use of his legs. In time, he established a foundation at Warm Springs, Georgia to help other polio victims, and inspired, as well as directed, the March of Dimes program that eventually funded an effective vaccine.
With the encouragement and help of his wife, Eleanor, and political confidant, Louis Howe, Roosevelt resumed his political career. In 1924 he nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president at the Democratic National Convention, but Smith lost the nomination to John W. Davis. In 1928 Smith became the Democratic candidate for president and arranged for Roosevelt's nomination to succeed him as governor of New York. Smith lost the election to Herbert Hoover; but Roosevelt was elected governor.
Following his reelection as governor in 1930, Roosevelt began to campaign for the presidency. While the economic depression damaged Hoover and the Republicans, Roosevelt's bold efforts to combat it in New York enhanced his reputation. In Chicago in 1932, Roosevelt won the nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for president. He broke with tradition and flew to Chicago to accept the nomination in person. He then campaigned energetically calling for government intervention in the economy to provide relief, recovery, and reform. His activist approach and personal charm helped to defeat Hoover in November 1932 by seven million votes.
The Great Depression
The Depression worsened in the months preceding Roosevelt's inauguration, March 4, 1933. Factory closings, farm foreclosures, and bank failures increased, while unemployment soared. Roosevelt faced the greatest crisis in American history since the Civil War. He undertook immediate actions to initiate his New Deal programs. To halt depositor panics, he closed the banks temporarily. Then he worked with a special session of Congress during the first "100 days" to pass recovery legislation which set up alphabet agencies such as the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) to support farm prices and the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) to employ young men. Other agencies assisted business and labor, insured bank deposits, regulated the stock market, subsidized home and farm mortgage payments, and aided the unemployed. These measures revived confidence in the economy. Banks reopened and direct relief saved millions from starvation. But the New Deal measures also involved government directly in areas of social and economic life as never before and resulted in greatly increased spending and unbalanced budgets which led to criticisms of Roosevelt's programs. However, the nation-at-large supported Roosevelt, and elected additional Democrats to state legislatures and governorships in the mid-term elections.
Another flurry of New Deal legislation followed in 1935 including the establishment of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) which provided jobs not only for laborers but also artists, writers, musicians, and authors, and the Social Security act which provided unemployment compensation and a program of old-age and survivors' benefits.
Roosevelt easily defeated Alfred M. Landon in 1936 and went on to defeat by lesser margins, Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey in 1944. He thus became the only American president to serve more than two terms.
After his overwhelming victory in 1936, Roosevelt took on the critics of the New Deal, namely, the Supreme Court, which had declared various legislation unconstitutional, and members of his own party. In 1937 he proposed to add new justices to the Supreme Court, but critics said he was "packing" the Court and undermining the separation of powers. His proposal was defeated, but the Court began to decide in favor of New Deal legislation. During the 1938 election he campaigned against many Democratic opponents, but this backfired when most were reelected to Congress. These setbacks, coupled with the recession that occurred midway through his second term, represented the low-point in Roosevelt's presidential career.
World War II
By 1939, with the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt was concentrating increasingly on foreign affairs. New Deal reform legislation diminished, and the ills of the Depression would not fully abate until the nation mobilized for war.
When Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt stated that, although the nation was neutral, he did not expect America to remain inactive in the face of Nazi aggression. Accordingly, he tried to make American aid available to Britain, France, and China and to obtain an amendment of the Neutrality Acts which rendered such assistance difficult. He also took measures to build up the armed forces in the face of isolationist opposition.
With the fall of France in 1940, the American mood and Roosevelt's policy changed dramatically. Congress enacted a draft for military service and Roosevelt signed a "lend-lease" bill in March 1941 to enable the nation to furnish aid to nations at war with Germany and Italy. America, though a neutral in the war and still at peace, was becoming the "arsenal of democracy", as its factories began producing as they had in the years before the Depression.
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, followed four days later by Germany's and Italy's declarations of war against the United States, brought the nation irrevocably into the war. Roosevelt exercised his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a role he actively carried out. He worked with and through his military advisers, overriding them when necessary, and took an active role in choosing the principal field commanders and in making decisions regarding wartime strategy.
He moved to create a "grand alliance" against the Axis powers through "The Declaration of the United Nations," January 1, 1942, in which all nations fighting the Axis agreed not to make a separate peace and pledged themselves to a peacekeeping organization (now the United Nations) upon victory.
He gave priority to the western European front and had General George Marshall, Chief of Staff, plan a holding operation in the Pacific and organize an expeditionary force for an invasion of Europe. The United States and its allies invaded North Africa in November 1942 and Sicily and Italy in 1943. The D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches in France, June 6, 1944, were followed by the allied invasion of Germany six months later. By April 1945 victory in Europe was certain.
The unending stress and strain of the war literally wore Roosevelt out. By early 1944 a full medical examination disclosed serious heart and circulatory problems; and although his physicians placed him on a strict regime of diet and medication, the pressures of war and domestic politics weighed heavily on him. During a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, he suffered a massive stroke and died two and one-half hours later without regaining consciousness. He was 63 years old. His death came on the eve of complete military victory in Europe and within months of victory over Japan in the Pacific. President Roosevelt was buried in the Rose Garden of his estate at Hyde Park, New York.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Fast Facts:
BORN: January 30, 1882 in Hyde Park, New York
PARENTS: Sara Delano and, James Roosevelt His father died when he was 18. His mother died when he was 59. BROTHER: A half brother named James Roosevelt Roosevelt, (1854-1927)
EDUCATION: Tutored at home until 1896 Groton School, Groton, Massachusetts (1896-1900) Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1900-1903) Received a B.A. in History Columbia Law School, New York City (1903-1905) Course work towards a degree in law, but no degree earned
MARRIED: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (fifth cousin once removed), March 17, 1905 in New York City.
CHILDREN: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (May 3, 1906 - December 1, 1975) James Roosevelt (December 23, 1907 - August 13, 1990) Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (March 18, 1909 - November 8, 1909) Elliott Roosevelt (September 23, 1910 - October 27, 1990) Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (August 17, 1914 - August 17, 1988)
ACTIVITIES: New York State Senator Assistant Secretary of the Navy Nominated for Vice President on ticket with James Cox Founded the Warm Springs Georgia Foundation Two term Governor of the State of New York Four term President of the United States, guiding the nation through the Great Depression and World War II
PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: Brown hair, 6 feet 2 inches tall, blue -grey eyes
DIED: April 12, 1945 in Warm Springs Georgia-cause of death listed cerebral hemorrhage.
Chronology of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Career
The Early Years
1882 Born in Hyde Park, NY on January 30
1896-1900 FDR attends Groton, a private preparatory school in Massachusetts
1900-1903 FDR attends Harvard, receiving a BA in history
1905 Married Eleanor Roosevelt, a fifth cousin once removed, in NYC on March 17 Enters Columbia Law School
1907 FDR passes the bar examination and leaves Columbia without completing a degree
1910 FDR elected to the New York State Senate
1912 FDR was re-elected to the New York State Senate
1913 FDR was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Woodrow Wilson
1920 Ran as Vice-President on the Democratic ticket along with James Cox of Ohio. Lost the election to Warren Harding and returned to private life.
1921 FDR is stricken with polio while vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick.
1924 FDR returns to politics by nominating Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president at the Democratic National Convention.
1928 FDR elected governor of New York State
1930 FDR re-elected governor of New York State. Begins his campaign for the presidency.
1932 FDR is nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president and defeats Hoover in November by seven million votes.
The New Deal Presidency
1933 FDR takes the oath of office on March 4 During his first "100 Days," he is able to get a large number of Legislative Initiatives through Congress which set up the alphabet agencies such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration & Civilian Conservation Corps aimed at bringing about economic relief recovery & reform.
1935 Additional New Deal legislation is passed including the Works Progress Administration and Social Security
1936 FDR was re-elected president to a second term
1937 FDR proposes to add justices to the Supreme Court, in an ill fated court "packing" plan
World War II
1939 Germany invades Poland there by starting WWII. While the U.S. remains neutral, FDR does try to make American aid available to the Allied powers
1940 FDR is re-elected for an unprecedented third term
1941 In March, FDR signs the Lend-Lease bill to aid nations at war with Germany & Italy On December 7, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor bringing the United States into the war. The next day FDR delivers his "day of infamy" speech before Congress and asks for a formal declaration of war against Germany.
1942 FDR moves to create a "grand alliance" of Allied powers through "the Declaration of the United Nations"
1944 FDR is re-elected president for a fourth term
1945 On April 12, FDR passes away at Warm Springs, Georgia. He is buried in the Rose Garden of his estate at Hyde Park, New York.
FYI SSG Robert Mark Odom SPC Matthew LambSSG Robert "Rob" WentworthCapt Rich BuckleyCW4 G.L. SmithSPC Russ BoltonSFC Terry WilcoxPO2 Roger LafarletteSgt Jim BelanusSGT Denny EspinosaSGM Gerald FifeSSG Michael NollSFC (Join to see)CPT (Join to see)1SG Steven ImermanSSG Samuel KermonSP5 Geoffrey VannersonSFC Richard WilliamsonCW2 James HughesSGT Aaron Reed
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