Previously on "The Roosevelts"...
Theodore was denied a return to the White House...
He left power too soon. He had to be in the arena.
Then charted a deadly course into the Amazon...
We started down the river of doubt
into the unknown.
While Eleanor and Franklin were rocked by betrayal.
Eleanor Roosevelt never forgave or forgot
what he had done.
And now part 4 of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History."
Funding for this program
was provided by members
of the Better Angels Society,
a nonprofit organization
dedicated to educating Americans
about their history
through documentary film.
Members include Jessica and John Fullerton,
the Pfeil Foundation,
John Wellhouse Newton, Bonnie and John McCloskey
and th Golkin Family.
Additional funding was provided
by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations,
dedicated to strengthening America's future
through education;
by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
exploring the human endeavor;
by Mr. Jack C. Taylor...
and by Rosalind P. Walter.
Major funding was provided by
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by the generous contributions to your
PBS Station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Before the names Theodore,
Eleanor, and Franklin
were indelibly etched into the American consciousness
and the course of human history was forever changed
by their individual endeavors,
a prominent family made a point
of teaching the value of altruism,
the power of perseverance,
and the virtue of helping out one's fellow man.
Campobello was one of the two or three
most important places in Franklin Roosevelt's life.
He'd learned to sail there. His father had taught him there.
He'd been going there since he was a little boy.
And it was also the place
where his children got to know him.
He led the kids on long walks around the island...
And he was a real family man at Campobello.
And to Eleanor Roosevelt,
it was the first place she had ever had a home that belonged
really to her and her husband and not to her mother-in-law.
On Tuesday afternoon, July 6, 1920,
Sara Delano Roosevelt was at work in the garden
of her father's old house overlooking the Hudson,
at Newburgh, New York.
She had seen her daughter-in-law and the grandchildren off
to Campobello for the summer.
Her son Franklin was far away,
attending the Democratic Convention in San Francisco.
A servant called from the house.
Mrs. Roosevelt was wanted on the telephone.
A friend had wonderful news:
Franklin had just been nominated for vice president
of the United States, still another office
his fifth cousin Theodore had once held.
Sara was pleased, but not surprised.
She had taught her boy that nothing he ever really wanted
was beyond his grasp.
She wrote him right away, sending her regards
to the son she now believed would be "our future president."
"All my love and interest goes to you," she said,
"and, as always, is centered in you."
- sync & corrections by wolfen - - www.addic7ed.com -
I think Franklin Roosevelt is simply irresistible.
If you see him on film
with that face and that charm
and that infinite grace
and sort of embracing power,
you can't take your eyes off him.
And it almost doesn't matter what he's saying,
there's just something riveting about him.
And then I think there's just a great drama
about a guy who is slick and charming
and graceful as a young man
who goes through this unbelievable testing
and then somehow finds within... In himself, the ambition
and the power to decide to come back and then comes back
and then becomes the most important President
of the 20th century. It's a pretty good story.
During the 1920s,
memories of Theodore Roosevelt would begin to fade,
and the public's attention shifted to Franklin and Eleanor.
The two would find themselves living
altogether new kinds of lives.
Awkward and diffident,
Eleanor would struggle to emerge from the shadow
of her mother-in-law and the memory
of her husband's relationship with her own Social Secretary
to become a public figure and a political power
in her own right,
while Franklin... active, ambitious, gregarious...
would suddenly find himself immobilized, powerless,
isolated, his career at an apparent end.
And then, displaying qualities of courage and compassion
even he may not have suspected he possessed,
he would re-emerge in time to help restore the faith
of a badly frightened country.
To some extent,
Franklin Roosevelt's ease of life before the polio
might not have equipped him for being the leader that he was.
There was ambition, but not the ambition attached
to that huge substance that later came after the polio.
What the polio did, I think, was to just
transform him in many ways.
He learned by withstanding that adversity
that he could come through a trial of fire
and thereby he could help other people do the same.
This past year
has rather got the better of me.
It has been so full of all kinds of things
that I still have a breathless,
hunted feeling.
During the 20 months that preceded Franklin Roosevelt's nomination
for Vice President in 1920,
American life seemed to have turned upside down.
The great war had ended.
Theodore Roosevelt, who had hoped
to regain the White House, had died.
Women finally could vote in every state,
a new, exciting music would fill new airwaves,
and prohibition would turn millions of Americans
into lawbreakers.
Wall Street climbed steadily upward
as unregulated speculation in stocks, real estate,
and commodities attracted more and more citizens.
It seemed as if the good times would never end.
Aboard the warship that bore Woodrow Wilson home
from peace talks in France, the President told Franklin
and Eleanor that the United States must enter
the new League of Nations that promised to prevent another war
or it would break the heart of the world.
In the end, Wilson's isolationist enemies
and his own stubborn refusal to compromise combined
to keep America out of the League
and broke Wilson's heart.
He himself was a virtual prisoner in the White House,
partially paralyzed by a stroke,
unwilling to be seen or heard in public.
American voters... sick of war,
plagued by soaring postwar prices,
and alarmed by labor strife... Had wearied of reform
and were increasingly uninterested in events overseas.
At Chicago in June of 1920,
the Republicans nominated for president an amiable
but undistinguished Senator from Ohio, Warren G. Harding.
To run against him, the Democrats settled
on another Ohioan, Governor James M. Cox.
Cox then picked 38-year-old Franklin Roosevelt
to balance the ticket.
He was an easterner with an independent reputation,
had a good record in wartime Washington,
and most important, he bore a last name the party hoped
would appeal to independent voters who had planned
to cast their ballots for Theodore Roosevelt.
Washington. July 17, 1920.
Dearest babs, today I went down to the station
and met Governor Cox.
A huge, cheering crowd, more enthusiastic
than any Washington crowd I have ever seen.
Tomorrow we see the president at 10:30.
I still hope to leave Saturday afternoon
and be with you all at Campobello Sunday evening.
I can hardly wait.
I miss you so, so much.
Kiss the chicks.
It is almost a month since I saw them.
Your devoted "F".
The two Democratic candidates went
to the White House the next morning
to get the ailing President's blessing.
Tears filled Cox's eyes when Wilson was wheeled
onto the South Portico, a woolen shawl
around his shoulders despite the summer heat,
his useless left arm dangling.
In a voice that could barely be heard,
he thanked them for coming.
Cox vowed to continue to call
for U.S. entry into the League of Nations.
Wilson managed to say he was grateful
before he was wheeled back inside.
Franklin Roosevelt would never forget the sight
of the president he'd served for 7 years,
defeated and helpless.
On July 25, 1920,
Franklin Roosevelt steered the destroyer hatfield
into Passamaquoddy Bay, went ashore to join his family
at Campobello for a few days' rest,
and was blasted the next day by a republican newspaper
for using a "fighting ship belonging
to the American people for commuting purposes."
From now on, everything in the Roosevelts' lives
would be subject to public scrutiny.
A newsreel cameraman soon arrived
to capture informal footage of the democratic
vice presidential nominee and his family.
Franklin was a natural.
Eleanor was not.
She was still virtually unknown to the public.
When she claimed to have no publishable photographs
of herself, one Washington paper printed
a picture of someone else.
Another paper described her as "essentially a home woman
who seems especially to dislike the official limelight"
and went on to quote a patronizing "friend" who said,
"she is too much of a Roosevelt to be anybody's prize beauty."
The formal ceremony at which Franklin was to accept
the vice presidential nomination was held a few weeks later,
on the lawn at Springwood.
5,000 people turned out to hear him speak,
tearing up his mother's lawn and trouping through her house
where, as Eleanor wrote, "for so many years,
only family and friends were received."
Franklin spoke for nearly an hour.
He bravely denied Americans had tired of reform
or had lost interest in the world beyond their borders.
To reject the League of Nations would betray the cause
of peace for which Americans had gone to war
and sacrificed so much, he said.
The odds against victory were high,
but Franklin hurled himself into the campaign,
traveling by train all across the country,
sometimes delivering 13 speeches a day.
"During three months in the year 1920," he remembered,
"I got to know the country as only a candidate
or a traveling salesman can get to know it."
Dear Franklin,
did you see that Alice is to go on the stump
for Harding, and that Auntie Corinne is
to speak for him in Portland, Maine?
Theodore Roosevelt had always encouraged
his young cousin's political career,
even though Franklin was a Democrat.
But in the years after his death, resentment began
to surface among the republican Oyster Bay Roosevelts.
Oyster Bay and the Hyde Park,
Hudson River Roosevelts were very close in the early years.
In fact, they kept trying to marry one another.
It was almost as though Roosevelts thought
no one else was quite good enough.
As the years went by and as FDR went into the Democratic Party
and did very well,
the remainder of the family
grew more and more and more resentful of this...
This... overly charming fella
from the minor branch of the family
who seemed somehow to them magically
to be succeeding where they were failing.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. ...
still hobbling from war wounds
and now a New York assemblyman... saw himself
as his father's rightful successor in national politics.
He was sent by the Republican National Committee
to dog Franklin's steps.
Franklin was "a Maverick," he told a Wyoming rally
of his father's old rough riders.
"He does not have the brand of our family."
In late September, Franklin wired Eleanor
to join him aboard his train.
He may have missed her,
but 1920 also marked the first national election
in which women had the ballot.
Democrats hoped they would rally to the cause of the League
and international peace,
and seeing Franklin's wife at his side could only help.
Dearest Mama,
this is the most killing thing for a candidate I ever knew.
Franklin made two speeches and drove 26 miles
over awful roads before we ever got any breakfast.
There have been two town speeches since then
and at least one platform speech
every 15 minutes all day.
And now he still has to get to bowling green
for a speech in a hall.
I will never be able to do without
at least 4 large cups of coffee every day.
Eleanor found life aboard the crowded,
smoke-filled train claustrophobic.
But she was also fascinated by the different kinds of people
she met... even grew to enjoy the reporters on board...
And found an unlikely new friend.
She had initially disdained Louis Howe,
her husband's closest aide and chief strategist.
She thought him coarse, crude, cynical,
and insisted on calling him "Mr. Howe."
But he understood her importance to her husband's career,
encouraged her interest in politics,
consulted her about speeches.
"I was flattered," she remembered.
Before long, she was calling him "Louis," and they were
keeping one another company during the endless card games
that filled the candidate's time between stops.
Dearest mama,
Franklin's head should be turned if it ever is going to be,
for there is much praise and enthusiasm for him
personally almost everywhere.
And then we get asked if he's Teddy frequently.
It is becoming almost impossible
to stop Franklin now when he begins to speak.
Ten minutes is always 20,
30 is always 45,
and the evening speeches are now about two hours.
The men all get out and wave at him in front,
and when nothing succeeds, I yank his coattails.
At Hyde Park on Election Day,
Sara and Eleanor cast the first votes of their lives
for Franklin.
They didn't count for much.
Warren G. Harding and his running mate,
Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge,
won in a landslide.
To add insult to injury,
Harding appointed Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
the post both his father and Franklin had held.
One republican newspaper expressed the hope
that for this young Roosevelt, the job would prove
a springboard to the White House,
even though, "for fifth-cousin Franklin,
"it had proved a political scaffold
from which he suddenly dropped into oblivion."
FDR tried to be philosophical.
The race had been "a darned fine sail," he told a friend.
"Every war brings after it a period
"of materialism and conservatism.
"People tire quickly of ideals,
and we are now repeating history."
The American people wanted pause,
they wanted surcease, they wanted rest.
They'd been to war.
They wanted jazz and Martinis
and... literature and the twenties.
Franklin handed out commemorative gold cuff links
to those who had been closest to him during the campaign,
including Louis Howe;
his advance man, Stephen Early;
his press spokesman, Marvin McIntyre;
and his secretary, Marguerite Lehand,
whom Roosevelt and everyone else called "Missy."
They were his "cuff-links gang," he said,
and would remain at his side for years as he tried to build
upon the national reputation he had made.
Until he could mount a serious campaign
for the presidential nomination in 1924,
he had to earn a living.
He practiced law with old friends and went to work
as regional vice president of the fidelity
and deposit company on Wall Street.
He admitted it was "mostly glad-hand stuff."
And like many members of his class, he plunged
into the heedless financial speculation of the 1920s...
A fleet of dirigibles that was supposed to ferry commuters
between Chicago and New York;
a plan to corner the market in live lobsters;
oil exploration that found only worthless gas;
slot machines that peddled pre-moistened postage stamps...
So many dubious schemes that the society
for promoting financial knowledge wrote
to protest his misuse of what it called
a "distinguished and honored name."
In my early married years,
the pattern of my life had been largely
my mother-in-law's pattern.
Later, it was the children and Franklin
who made the pattern, but I began to want
to do things on my own, to use my own mind
and abilities for my own aims.
3 weeks after election day,
Eleanor lunched with her mother-in-law
and Sara's two sisters, Dora and Kassie, in Manhattan.
It did not go well.
"They all, in their serene assurance and absolute judgment
on people and affairs make me want to squirm
and turn Bolshevik," she told Franklin.
The discovery in 1918
that he had been unfaithful to her
with her own Social Secretary, Lucy Mercer,
had nearly destroyed Eleanor's self-confidence.
In marrying Franklin Roosevelt, she had hoped
to find in him a confidant and to find in his mother
something like the loving mother she had never had.
She had found neither.
Her husband was self-absorbed and harbored secrets.
Her mother-in-law's first loyalty was always
to her son and her grandchildren.
Working for the Red Cross during the war
had been her salvation.
When peace came, Sara had urged her
to give it up and return home.
She refused.
The war, she said, had made a life of "nothing but teas
and luncheons and dinners impossible."
She had resolved to find "real work."
Now, back in New York,
she learned typing, shorthand,
and joined the board of a brand-new organization...
The League of Women Voters.
And she began to make new friends...
Veterans of the suffrage movement,
like the activist Esther Lape and her partner,
the lawyer Elizabeth Reid... Who were not only committed
to one another, but to a host of causes.
And she finds her own life
in politics with women she admires.
These become her life-long friends
who are her guides
on the most progressive issues.
"The rest of us were inclined to do a good deal
of theorizing," Lape remembered.
"Eleanor would look puzzled and ask why we didn't just do
whatever we had in mind and get it out of the way."
Like her Uncle Theodore, like her husband Franklin,
Eleanor Roosevelt would always crave action.
Sara Delano Roosevelt had been abroad during
the summer of 1921.
When she returned to New York on August 31st,
she expected to be met by Franklin.
Instead, she was startled to see
Franklin's half-brother Rosy there at the dock.
He handed her a letter from her daughter-in-law.
Dearest Mama,
Franklin has been quite ill
and so can't get down to meet you,
to his great regret.
We are all so happy to have you home again, dear.
We are having such lovely weather.
The island is really at its loveliest.
Franklin sends all his love,
and we are both so sorry we cannot meet you.
Ever devotedly, Eleanor.
Sara hurried north to Campobello
as fast as she could go.
The trouble had begun there 21 days earlier.
Wednesday afternoon, August 10, 1921
had been filled with the kind of activity
for which the Roosevelts were famous.
Franklin took Eleanor, James, and Elliott for a long sail,
spotted a forest fire on one of the rocky islands,
and led everyone ashore to put it out.
Then he sailed home again, took everyone swimming
at the family's favorite pond two miles away,
and insisted on racing his sons back to their cottage.
When he got back, he felt funny.
His legs felt funny and he felt feverish.
And he looked at his mail for a while on the porch,
and then he finally said, "I feel so funny
that I'm going to go to bed," and he went upstairs to go to bed,
and he never walked without help again.
The next morning,
when I swung out of bed, my left leg lagged.
I tried to persuade myself that the trouble with my leg
was muscular, that it would disappear as I used it.
But presently, it refused to work, and then the other.
By the end of the third day, practically all muscles
from the chest down were involved.
It produces terror,
unreasoning terror.
You just can't believe...
That the legs that you depended on simply don't work.
And I don't know how to convey to people the sense...
That suddenly he could not go to the bathroom, he couldn't go
for the telephone, he couldn't do anything on his own.
And the limbs that... you know, he was a great dancer,
he was a great golfer, he loved to run.
None of that would ever happen again.
He dreamed about it all his life,
but he never could do it.
Louis Howe rushed to the island and bedded down
on a cot just outside his boss' sickroom.
He would never again leave Franklin's side
for more than a few days, largely ignoring his own family;
the first of many people who, over the coming years,
would sacrifice their own lives in the interests
of one or the other of the Roosevelts.
At first, no one, including baffled local doctors,
knew what was wrong with Franklin.
He shook with fever and suffered severe pain.
His thumbs refused to work for a time,
and he could not so much as sign his name.
Eleanor did all she could to nurse him,
administering a catheter when his bladder failed.
She and Howe took turns massaging his limbs, too,
despite the severe pain it caused.
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, you have been a rare wife
and have borne your heavy burden most bravely.
You will surely break down
if you do not have immediate relief.
Dr. William Keen.
A nurse was hired to help ease Eleanor's burdens.
Local physicians continued to be mystified.
Franklin's fever rose still higher.
He became delirious, cried out,
momentarily lost his religious faith,
could not understand why God, who had favored him for so long,
now seemed to have turned away.
It's agonizing at first, absolutely agonizing,
and you're coming in and out of fevers and you can't...
You don't know where you are and you don't know what's wrong.
No one told him. They didn't know what was wrong.
So, for days and days, he lay there
terrified, absolutely terrified.
But it was compounded in his case by the fact
that everything he had been taught,
um...
persuaded him that he must not tell other people
how terrified he felt,
so all of it was turned inward,
and so there's a lot of talk... It's perfectly understandable...
About how gallant he was and how cheerful he was.
And people would say things, strange things
like "polio never bothered him."
Mrs. Roosevelt said he never spoke of it.
It's absurd.
It was on his mind every day,
almost every hour.
A specialist from Boston was sent for.
He finally made the right diagnosis:
It was infantile paralysis... polio...
A mysterious virus that attacked the central nervous system,
randomly destroying muscles.
It was an annual scourge.
Little understood, greatly feared,
polio killed or crippled tens of thousands
of people every summer, most of them children.
He was 39 years old.
No one could predict how badly affected Franklin would be
or what his future held,
but he now knew what had happened to him.
His fever subsided.
His mood changed.
When Sara finally reached her son's bedside,
he was already back in command of himself.
He and Eleanor at once decided to be cheerful
and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness,
so I have fallen in
and follow their glorious example.
Below his waist, he cannot move at all.
His legs that I have always been proud of
have to be moved often,
as they ache when long in one position.
New York City. September 16, 1921.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Assistant Secretary
of the Navy and Democratic candidate for Vice President
in the last election, was brought to this city
aboard a special car from Campobello Island,
suffering from poliomyelitis
and taken to Presbyterian Hospital.
"I cannot say how long Mr. Roosevelt will be kept
in the hospital," said Dr. George Draper,
"but you can definitely say that he will not be crippled.
No one need have any fear of permanent injury
from this attack."
The "New York Times."
From the first, Louis Howe
and Roosevelt's doctors sought to minimize the seriousness
of his paralysis in order to keep his political hopes alive
and also out of concern
for Franklin's own psychological well-being.
He has such courage, such ambition,
and yet, at the same time, such an extraordinarily sensitive
emotional mechanism that it will take all the skill
we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition
of what he really faces
without crushing him.
Dr. George Draper.
It was 5 weeks
before his doctors dared try to sit him up.
When they finally allowed him to be carried the 7 blocks
to his home under cover of darkness in late October,
his chart still read "not improving."
He was put to bed on the third floor.
His fever returned, his vision blurred,
and he feared for a time that he might go blind.
He began daily exercises to stretch his muscles
and evidently overdid it.
His hamstrings tightened,
drawing his knees up toward his chest.
To straighten his legs again,
they had to be encased in plaster.
Each day, wedges were hammered in behind his knees.
It was agony.
The tendency is for atrophied muscle to shrivel.
You have to keep it stretched;
that the exercises that he was made to undergo
were terribly painful, that you were...
All your muscles are stretched over and over and over again
and you don't seem to be making any progress.
And, in fact, he was not making any progress.
"Mother, how does he stand the pain?"
Franklin, Jr. Asked.
"He does," was all his mother could say.
"He does."
His family suffered, too.
James was away at Groton,
but four children still lived at home, all of them frightened
by what had happened to their father.
Louis Howe took over 16-year-old Anna's room,
and she angrily resented it.
Eleanor lost her own bed
to Franklin's round-the-clock nurse
and had to snatch sleep on a cot.
That winter, Eleanor remembered,
was "the most trying of my life."
One evening, while reading to her youngest boys,
she began to weep and could not stop.
It was, she said, "the only time
I ever remember in my entire life
going to pieces in this particular manner."
For Franklin's mother, all the exhausting exercises,
all the visits from friends and business associates,
politicians and well-wishers, all the tensions
in the crowded household, were bad for her boy.
As soon as it could be arranged, she believed,
he should return to the quiet of Hyde Park
where she could care for him, at least for a time, just as she
and Franklin had once cared for his ailing father.
My mother-in-law thought
we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept
completely quiet, which made our discussions
somewhat acrimonious.
She always thought she understood what was best,
particularly where her child was concerned,
regardless of what any doctor might say.
Franklin found himself again trapped
between the two most important women in his life:
his wife, urging him to greater effort;
his mother, urging him to rest and relax.
His doctors eventually insisted
that he had to get away from what one of them called
"the intense and devastating influence of the interplay
of these high-voltage personalities."
I think, for anyone who's had polio,
it's very hard not to be angry at able-bodied people
who urge you to be cheerful and do your exercises.
And I think, in FDR's case, it was particularly hard.
Mrs. Roosevelt...
Had very firm views about things
like schedules and so on, and so, if he hadn't done
his exercises by 11:00 in the morning,
she would tell him that he should be doing them,
and he bitterly resented it.
In Hyde Park, without his wife
and children present, the constant stress eased,
but the routine set by hisolicitous mother
was as rigid as it had been when he was a little boy:
Breakfast on a bed-tray,
up and dressed by 10:00,
lunch with his mother at 1:00,
followed by a nap,
tea at 4:00,
dinner at 7:00,
put to bed by 11:00,
with physical therapy and sedentary hobbies
like building toy boats and stamp-collecting
to fill the long hours in between.
One day that spring, Sara made a telephone call
to wilderstein, the home of the Suckley family,
distant cousins of the Roosevelts,
just up the Hudson in Rhinebeck.
She asked to speak to Margaret, known to friends
and family as "Daisy."
Her son was lonely, she said, and needed company.
Would Miss Suckley come to tea?
She would.
Ten years younger than Franklin and unmarried,
she had been dazzled by him ever since she'd seen him
at a party, laughing as he whirled one partner
after another around the dance floor.
Now she found him immobilized.
Daisy felt privileged to sit with him several times
that spring and summer on the Springwood lawn
as he pulled himself around a set of exercise bars,
telling extravagant stories about himself
to keep her entertained and as unaware as possible
of his helplessness.
"I'm not going to be conquered by a childish disease,"
he told her again and again.
"My God, he was brave," she remembered.
On June 1, 1922,
Roosevelt's doctors charted 44 of his muscles in red,
ranking them from "normal" to "totally paralyzed."
Not a single muscle below his ribcage
was better than "fair."
He'd been fitted out with steel braces.
They weighed 14 pounds
and ran from above his waist all the way to his heels.
Once the catches at his knees were locked
to keep his legs from buckling,
it took two people to haul him to his feet
and a third to slide crutches under his arms.
Braces allowed him to stand; Not to walk,
but to stand, at least to be upright.
But if you wear them for any amount of time,
they begin to hurt, and if you stand for an hour
to give a speech, you are in pain during that speech.
At first, he simply hung from his crutches,
then managed to drag his legs across a room,
finally began to try to make his painful way alone
down the drive that led from Springwood
to the Albany Post Road.
He made it only once.
Coming back even as far as he did
required enormous effort,
hours and hours of exercise,
all of it aimed at somehow magically
making his muscles work again.
They never worked again.
So what he did was master a series of techniques
for getting around a little bit.
The first one was to be on crutches,
and he was able to swing his body through.
It's an extremely dangerous way to move.
His legs are in rigid braces
so that he's sort of like a tower,
and you have to swing the bottom of the tower through,
through those crutches with each step.
You can't really go up and down steps,
and you can't go very far before you get exhausted.
It's a bit traumatic when you're 16
to see your father, whom you've regarded
as a wonderful playmate,
who took long walks with you, could out-jump you,
walking on crutches,
struggling in heavy, steel braces.
And you see the sweat pouring down his face
and you hear him saying, "I must get down
the driveway today, all the way down the driveway."
Anna Roosevelt.
One day that June,
Eleanor received a phone call from a stranger,
a lively-sounding woman named Nancy Cook,
who said she was the Executive Secretary
of the new women's division of the State Democratic Party.
Would Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt
be willing to speak at a fund-raising luncheon?
Eleanor hesitated... she dreaded speaking in public...
But Louis Howe and her husband insisted she do it.
It would help her to resume the independent life
that meant so much to her,
and it would keep the Roosevelt name before the public,
something Howe and his boss were always eager to do.
The luncheon speech went well,
and she got to know Nancy Cook and Cook's partner,
Marion Dickerman, a reformer and educator
who in 1919 had been the first woman ever
to run for the New York State legislature.
For some 15 years,
they would be among Eleanor's closest friends.
To some on the Oyster Bay side of the family,
her new friends were "female impersonators,"
but Franklin saw how important they were to his wife
and to the work he and Eleanor hoped
would keep his political hopes alive.
The women, in turn, admired his courage
and appreciated his counsel.
He called them part of "our gang."
Eleanor began organizing the Democratic women
of Dutchess County, and with coaching from Louis Howe,
overcame a nervous tendency to giggle
while speaking to an audience.
"Have something to say," Howe told her,
"say it, and sit down."
Louis Howe was as important to Eleanor Roosevelt
as he had been to Franklin Roosevelt.
He realized early on that if Franklin was going
to be President, she had to have a role to play
beyond the standard one of being a mother and a wife.
And he's the one who told her how to speak in public,
that she should not fear expressing her opinions,
and much later told her he would like to make her
President of the United States.
She got her first real taste of raw politics
on Election Day in 1922.
Some of the Democrats she drove to the polls
in Poughkeepsie, just down the road from Hyde Park,
had been paid for their votes.
She was appalled by the bribery, but delighted by the outcome:
Al Smith, Franklin's old political ally
and sometime critic, easily beat
his republican opponent for governor.
Over the coming months, she would join
the women's city club of New York
and the women's Trade Union League,
making even more new friends
and taking on new causes and responsibilities
everywhere she went.
I was thinking things out
and becoming an individual.
Had I never done this,
perhaps I might have been saved some difficult experiences,
but I have never regretted even my mistakes.
They all added to my understanding
of other human beings.
A little over a year after he was stricken,
FDR decided to try to go back to work
at the fidelity and deposit insurance company
in Downtown New York.
On October 9, 1922,
the Roosevelt family buick pulled up
in front of 120 Broadway.
The chauffeur opened the back door.
Franklin extended his legs
and locked his braces in place.
A large crowd gathered
to watch this big guy get out of a car.
They didn't know who he was.
And he then got on his crutches, which he was very new to,
and very slowly began pulling himself into the lobby.
He got into the lobby.
His chauffeur was expected to put a foot in front
of one of the crutches so that he wouldn't slip.
Somehow, that didn't happen.
The crutch went out from under him and he fell.
He had to pick his legs up to get them in front of him
and asked for people to help him up.
He kept smiling and laughing the whole time as though
this was the funniest thing that had ever happened,
that it happened all the time, that it was a joke,
no one needed to worry.
People finally did help him up. He got on the elevator.
He went up to a welcome back lunch organized
by his secretary, Missy Lehand,
and he didn't return for months.
Florida. March 5, 1923.
Dearest Mama, the west coast of Florida
is wholly wild and tropical.
I have been in swimming, and it goes better and better.
I'm sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good.
I am sunburned and in fine shape.
Franklin.
In February of 1923,
Franklin and Eleanor; Franklin's valet, Leroy Jones;
and his Secretary, Missy Lehand, all traveled south
to the Florida Keys, where he had rented a houseboat,
hoping that several weeks in the sun
might help rebuild his legs.
Eleanor did not stay aboard for long.
She found the days boring
and the nights "eerie and menacing."
It's nice to think that Franklin and Eleanor
were brought together again by polio somehow.
They were not.
They, in fact, were driven further apart by it.
She began a career of her own
with his encouragement.
He spent months and months and months away from her,
trying to rebuild his muscles.
He largely ignored his children during that time.
And it's simply... it's a romantic myth. It's not true.
With Eleanor away,
Missy Lehand served as Franklin's hostess
and companion, setting a pattern
they would follow for the next 20 years.
She was catholic, unmarried, half his age,
and more than half in love with the boss she called "F.D."
He was fond of her as well, and some who knew them would
always wonder about the nature of their relationship.
There's no question that Franklin Roosevelt
was the love of Missy's life.
She loved him from the time she was 18 until she died,
and she was a central figure in his little world.
Missy seemed to understand
his slightest shift of mood.
"She knows when he is bored before he realizes it himself,"
one visitor remembered.
"She can tell when he is really listening
and when he is merely being polite,
which no one else can."
Her devotion was complete.
Suitors came and went, some hoping to gain access to her boss through her.
None could compare with him in her eyes.
Sara called her son's secretary "nice little Missy,"
but worried that people would talk about his spending
so much time alone with a woman not his wife.
Eleanor seems never to have objected,
even to have been grateful to know that her husband had
the sort of admiring companionship he always craved
and which she could not provide.
She's rather philosophical
about Missy Lehand.
In fact, in 1923,
Eleanor Roosevelt writes an article called
"The women of Tibet" in which she writes,
"it has been brought to my attention
that the women of Tibet have many husbands,
which seems to me a very good thing
because so many husbands
have so many wives."
And Missy Lehand is her junior wife.
I mean, she accepts Missy Lehand,
she cares about Missy Lehand,
and she recognizes the important role
that Missy Lehand plays in his life.
Franklin loved everything
about life aboard the houseboat:
Fishing, crawling from deck to deck out of sight
of curious strangers, defying prohibition
by sharing rum drinks in the evenings with old friends
who found the time to come down and be with him,
and being lifted in and out of the water
with a pulley arrangement of his own devising.
He had grown sideburns by the time he came north again
that spring, and when his mother saw him,
she thought he looked so like his late father
that she burst into tears.
In May of 1923,
nearly two years after he was stricken,
12 months after Roosevelt's doctors first tested
44 of his muscles,
they saw him again.
7 had improved.
7 had deteriorated.
The rest were unchanged.
Months of hard, lonely work
had yielded no measurable overall gain
in strength or stability.
He still was trying somehow to walk
on what one physician called "flail legs."
I am very much disheartened
about Mr. Roosevelt's ultimate recovery.
I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached
the limits of his possibilities.
I only hope I may be wrong in this.
Dr. George Draper.
When his doctors told him further progress
was unlikely, he refused to accept their verdict.
He never made peace with the notion
that he was going to not improve.
He always thought that rules were not written for him,
that somehow he would find a way to walk again,
and it really was a sort of delusion
that he lived with, really, all his life.
One after another, he tried
and abandoned supposed "cures."
Nothing worked.
"Polio was a storm," one of Roosevelt's
physiotherapists taught her patients.
"You were what remained when the storm had passed."
Those were the lonely years.
For a long while during this time of illness,
we had no tangible father,
no father-in-being whom we could touch
and talk to at will,
only an abstract symbol,
a cheery letter written from off somewhere on a houseboat.
Neither Anna, nor I, nor my brothers
had the guidance and training that I think father
would have given us
had he not been involved in his own struggle
to re-establish a useful life for himself.
James Roosevelt.
Between 1925 and 1928,
Franklin would spend more than half his time...
116 of 208 weeks...
Away from home, struggling
to find a way to regain his feet.
Eleanor was with him just 4 of those 116 weeks,
and his mother was with him for only two.
Jacksonville, Florida.
Saturday, February 2, 1924.
FDR went on board and put the boat in commission,
and the trunks were duly unpacked, fishing gear stowed,
and library of the World's Worst Literature placed on shelves.
1924 was the year Franklin had once planned
to run for the White House.
Instead, he spent weeks drifting off the Florida Keys
that winter with Missy Lehand.
This time, she remembered, he was so depressed
he rarely made it on deck before noon.
I think the main difference
between Theodore and FDR is the fact that Theodore
could always outrun his depressions, his demons.
Because FDR was paralyzed, he had to absorb them,
he had to think about them, he had to sit with them
in a certain sense.
Dearest Franklin,
I have wanted you home the last few days
to advise me on the fight I'm putting up.
Mr. Murphy and I disagree.
I imagine it is just a question of what he dislikes most:
giving me my way or having me give the papers
a grand chance for a story.
There's one thing I'm thankful for.
I haven't a thing to lose
and, for the moment, you haven't, either.
Eleanor, not Franklin,
went to political war that spring
against Charles Murphy, the Tammany Hall boss
who had outmaneuvered her husband
during his first term as a State Senator 13 years before.
She and her new friends had already driven
all over the State, organizing Democratic women.
The issue now was who would pick two woman delegates
and two delegates-at-large to the National Convention
in July... men like Murphy, who had always run things,
or the growing number of women
she'd been recruiting for the party.
When Murphy insisted on remaining in charge,
she publicly warned him at a Democratic women's dinner
of what would happen if he failed to share power fairly.
It is always disagreeable to take stands.
It is always easier to compromise,
always easier to let things go.
To many women, and I am one of them,
it is extraordinarily difficult
to care about anything enough
to cause disagreement or unpleasant feeling,
but I have come to the conclusion
this must be done for a time
until we can prove our strength
and demand respect for our wishes.
When Murphy still refused to change his ways,
Eleanor appealed directly to Governor Al Smith.
He overruled Murphy.
Thanks to her, the women, not the boss,
would pick their own delegates-at-large.
Franklin wrote her to tell her how proud he was.
You need not be proud of me, dear.
I'm only being active till you can be again.
It isn't such a great desire on my part to serve the world,
and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily.
Hurry up, for as you know,
my ever-present sense of the uselessness of things
will overwhelm me sooner or later.
I think there are ways in which polio,
ghastly as it was, did help him.
If he had not... had polio,
he would have been a leading candidate to run for President
during the republican twenties,
and we would never have heard of him again.
Governor Al Smith had known Franklin Roosevelt
since his days in the State Senate.
They had not much liked each other,
but they had become allies of a kind over the years,
and as the 1924 presidential race drew closer,
the governor asked Roosevelt to serve as chairman
of citizens for Smith.
FDR agreed.
It was a chance to get back into national politics,
at least behind the scenes.
When the man who was going to put Smith's name
into nomination died, Smith asked who should replace him.
"Roosevelt," an aide answered,
because "you're a bowery mick and he is a protestant patrician
and he'll take some of the curse off you."
Roosevelt again agreed, even though it meant
he would run the risk of appearing
in front of thousands of people.
If he so much as stumbled,
their pleasure at seeing him again
would turn instantly to pity.
He refused to be seen in his wheelchair.
In the library of the house on East 65th Street,
he and his eldest son, James, measured off 15 feet...
The distance between the rear of the platform and the podium...
And practiced covering it over and over again
on two crutches.
He was grinning as he waited for his introduction
at noon on June 26, 1924
at Madison Square Garden,
but he gripped James' arm so hard,
it was all his son could do to keep from crying out.
Then, as 12,000 people held their breath,
James handed him his second crutch
and he began his slow, careful movement
toward the microphones.
When he reached the podium,
everyone in the garden stood to cheer.
He had to keep standing for more than half an hour as he spoke
and did not dare lift either hand for fear of falling.
But he was determined that no one forget
his introduction to Al Smith.
He has a power to strike
at error and wrongdoing
that makes his adversaries quail before him.
He has a personality
that carries to every hearer
not only the sincerity,
but the righteousness of what he says.
He is the "happy warrior" of the political battlefield...
Alfred E. Smith.
The next day, Eleanor's friend and confidante
Marion Dickerman dropped in to see FDR.
He was sitting up in bed, exhausted but elated.
"Marion," he said, "I did it!"
In the end, Al Smith failed to get the nomination.
After 103 ballots,
the weary delegates settled upon a colorless conservative,
John W. Davis,
but Franklin Roosevelt had made an indelible impression.
From the time Roosevelt made his speech,
he has easily been the foremost figure on the platform.
That is not because of his name.
There are many Roosevelts.
It is because, without the slightest intention
or desire to do anything of the sort,
he has done for himself what he could not do for his candidate.
Roosevelt took no further part
in the 1924 campaign.
It's one thing just to try to get back on your feet.
He had a special problem,
and the special problem was that he wanted to return
to public life, and that pity was poison.
He could not be seen to be...
To use the word always used then... crippled.
He had to be thought lame.
Meanwhile, Eleanor remained in the thick of things.
Her late Uncle's son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.,
was running against Al Smith for Governor,
and she had neither forgotten nor forgiven
her cousin's attacks on her husband 4 years earlier.
Calvin Coolidge was now in the White House;
President Harding had died in office.
Harding's administration had been rocked by a bribery scandal
involving the illegal lease of government oil fields
in Wyoming at a place called Teapot Dome.
Ted and Archie Roosevelt had
both been accused of involvement
and called upon to testify before Congress.
Neither had actually been guilty of wrongdoing.
But Eleanor, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman
followed Ted around the state anyway,
in a car topped with a giant papier mache teapot,
steam pouring from its spout.
Eleanor denounced her cousin at every stop
as "a personally nice young man
whose public service record shows him willing
to do the bidding of his friends."
One evening, her tricked-out car turned up unannounced
at the Farmington, Connecticut home
of Theodore Roosevelt's sister, Bamie.
Eleanor asked if she and her friends could spend the night.
Bamie took them all in,
even though they were maligning her nephew.
She loved her niece, she said.
Eleanor would later admit her Teapot Tour
had been "a rough stunt."
Ted Roosevelt would never forgive her.
On Election Day,
Calvin Coolidge swept the country,
including New York State.
The unregulated orgy of easy credit,
inflated real estate values, and wild Wall Street speculation
would continue without letup.
But Al Smith was re-elected governor,
beating Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Badly.
It's a very big question as to whether or not,
if Franklin Roosevelt had not had polio,
he would have been able to connect as deeply as he did
to the common man.
Eleanor said, "great suffering can change a person."
And in his case, I think it did connect him with other people
who had also had difficulties in their lives
in a way that he might not have felt before.
He always loved people; He was always gregarious,
but now he needed them, that was his connection to life.
It's tempting and probably true to say
that polio gave FDR the gift of empathy.
There was no suffering
that he could not in some sense relate to.
And also the... just as the irons were clapped on his legs,
the steel entered his soul by having to fight through
the constant pain of therapy that was unforgiving
in its demands and not very fulfilling in its success.
I think it taught him that there were certain things
which he could not overcome
by the easy gifts that he had been given;
that is, there's some things you can't charm,
there's some things you can't use guile on,
that you have to really
have a goal in mind and try to get there.
Roosevelt remained a very devious person,
but he had big goals and he met a lot of them,
and I think polio had a lot to do with that.
While Eleanor was campaigning
against her cousin Ted,
Franklin had traveled south to rural Georgia,
where he'd been told bathing in mineralized waters
at a ramshackle resort near the tiny town of Bullochville
might help strengthen his legs.
He loved the warm, buoyant water
that allowed him to stand with unbraced legs
for the first time since 1921,
so long as he held on tightly
to a rope or the edge of the pool.
"I feel that a great cure for infantile paralysis,"
he wrote to his mother, "could well be established here."
He decided to buy the place.
The price for the Battered Inn,
a cluster of tumble-down cottages, two pools,
and 1,200 acres of piney woods was $195,000.
Eleanor objected;
all 5 children were still in private school.
He was risking nearly 2/3 of his inheritance.
She thought he would inevitably lose interest.
He bought it, nonetheless, officiated at a ceremony
renaming the little town Warm Springs
because it was thought more saleable than Bullochville,
and hoped both to attract wealthy guests to the old hotel
and to provide aftercare for fellow polios.
As word of his presence spread,
other polio patients, desperate for help,
began to turn up on the train,
some simply shipped south by families
who had been unable to do anything for them at home.
One arrived aboard a freight car
in a wooden cage his brother back home
had banged together to keep him from being
thrown around too much by the hurtling train.
There, among his fellow patients and away from the press,
with Missy Lehand to act as his hostess
and handle his correspondence with the Democrats
he continued to cultivate all across the country,
he could be himself.
He didn't need to be self-conscious
about his withered legs,
could exercise as he wanted, at his own pace,
could even wear his braces on the outside of his trousers.
The hotel never did work out.
Prospective guests were scared off
by the presence of polio patients.
Roosevelt would never make any money
and eventually turned Warm Springs into a foundation.
But Eleanor was wrong;
he never lost interest,
never backed away.
So it slowly became the Nation's
Premiere Rehabilitation Center for polios.
And Roosevelt became almost obsessed with it,
raising money for it and helping people.
For him, personally, it was all kinds of things.
It was the first project that he had ever had
which he absolutely ran on his own.
He'd worked in the Navy Department,
but as an Assistant Secretary, which deeply troubled him.
This was his creation,
and it allowed him
to be un-self-conscious about polio.
It's hard to convey,
especially a person who was as beautiful
as Franklin Roosevelt had been,
that he suddenly had withered legs.
I don't care how magnetic and self-confident
you are or think you are.
To know that people are staring at them
is something that you never really get over.
And at Warm Springs, he could not wear his braces
and go to the swimming pool and have everybody see
how small his legs were, and it didn't bother him
because there were people there with worse problems.
You would howl with glee
if you could see the clinic in operation at the side
of the pool, and the patients doing various exercises
in the water under my leadership.
They are male and female, of all ages and weights.
In addition to all this, I am consulting architect
and landscape engineer and giving free advice
on the moving of buildings, the building of roads,
setting out trees, and remodeling the hotel.
He was the sort of king of Warm Springs.
He knew everybody in town,
and he loved being one of them
and being the number one of them at the same time,
and that was true all his life in everything he did.
He loved to be surrounded by people,
all of whom knew that he was number one.
Warm Springs was the first project
he had ever undertaken meant largely to benefit others.
He began to call himself "old Doctor Roosevelt."
He devised pioneering water exercises,
hired physiotherapists to work with him
and his fellow patients in the pool,
and paid local "push boys" to wheel them
to and from the water.
Well, we actually... we got them up in the morning,
bed-bathed them, dressed them,
fed them, and take them to wherever they had to go.
If they were going to get therapy, we had to take them
to the therapy room; If we were going to the pool,
we had to load them on an old make-shift bus
and take them down the hill.
There was lots of fun, you know, pool play and stuff like that.
Of course, he liked to get in there with the patients...
And he'd duck you if you got in that pool.
If you got within reach, yeah, he'd duck ya, dunk ya,
whichever one you want to call it.
Anyway, your head would go under the water. Heh heh!
Well, he was... he was jolly.
And he was standing at the door.
He was shaking hands with all the patients that came that day.
We all had nicknames, and when he met me,
he said, "little girl, what is your name?"
I told him "Suzanne."
"I love that name, Suzanne, but I'd like to call you Suzie.
Is that all right?" And I said, "uh-huh."
And guess what we called him.
"Rosy."
And when we called him Rosy,
it was always when he drove up
in front of Georgia Hall.
We would be out there... "Hey, Rosy, hey, Rosy"...
And he loved it.
"Doc Roosevelt's" prescription called
for sunshine, swimming,
gentle exercise, and massage,
and above all, "belief on the patient's part
that the muscles are coming back."
The physical progress he and the others made
may have been minimal,
but their psychological progress was beyond measure.
Oh, he was always happy
and he gave the impression
that it just made you want to achieve
everything you could
and to be more like that he was.
And if we saw him do it,
we wanted to do it.
The only thing that I had a big problem with...
Those old, gray steps
that had 4 different sides to it.
You would learn how to go up and down them,
and I didn't want to try it.
But when I saw the rest of them doing it
and he was standing there watching,
I wasn't about to give up.
I thought, "fall or not fall, I'm going to try."
And I made it.
To see someone so famous
who suffered from exactly the same problems
that you suffered from meant an enormous amount
to all of the people that went there.
Most of the people who went there went there, really,
out of despair, at least at first.
They couldn't... there wasn't any other place to go.
And here was this laughing giant,
um...
who would kid them and would get...
And would make the kind of awful, sick jokes
about being handicapped that other handicapped people love,
but that you can't share with anybody else.
He loved doing that.
He declared himself vice president
in charge of picnics.
His favorite spot was a rocky overhang
called Dowdell's Knob.
Whenever a patient seemed about to give in to despair,
he once told a friend,
he or she should be brought to Dowdell's Knob right away.
One look at the glorious view, he believed,
would provide the will to go on.
Eleanor now had a place of her own as well,
a symbol of her growing autonomy.
Back in 1924,
Franklin, Eleanor, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman
had spread a picnic blanket on the shore
of a meandering stam on Roosevelt land
two miles east of Springwood.
Springwood was always closed for the winter,
and they'd all agreed it was a shame
Hyde Park wasn't available to them all year round.
Franklin volunteered to build Eleanor and her friends
a stone cottage of their own.
"My missus and some of her female political friends want
to build a shack on a stream in the back woods,"
he wrote a local contractor.
It took a little over a year and a half to complete
and would eventually include a small furniture factory
in an adjacent building, employing local craftsmen
and overseen by Nancy Cook.
For a time, Eleanor, Cook, and Dickerman all lived
in a single dormitory room in an atmosphere
reminiscent of Allenswood, the English Boarding School
that had meant so much to her as a girl.
"The peace of it," Eleanor said, "is divine."
Once the Val-Kill Cottage was completed,
Eleanor rarely slept at Springwood again
unless Franklin happened to be there.
Actually, FDR is relieved
that Eleanor Roosevelt has a new community,
and they begin to create not only two separate courts,
but two separate lives.
And they meet for all the reasons they need to meet
to promote political things that they're going
to promote together, including FDR's career,
but it's really a question of parallel lives at this point.
If women believe they have a right
and duty in political life today,
they must learn to talk the language of men.
Against the men bosses,
there must be women bosses
who can talk as equals.
In the mid-1920s, Eleanor Roosevelt became
something of a boss herself and used her clout on behalf
of progressive causes on which most of her male counterparts
preferred to waffle: The League of Nations,
the 5-day work week, an amendment to end child labor.
She even got herself arrested walking a picket line
in support of striking box workers.
And because of the tragedies caused by alcohol
within her own family,
she also publicly supported prohibition,
even though her husband was silent on the subject
and maintained ready supplies of gin and rum and scotch
at Warm Springs and in an upstairs closet
in their New York home.
Eleanor's new and independent life
meant that she had less time for her children.
They were alternately ignored and indulged.
One by one, she would dutifully escort James
and Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John to Groton,
and she continued to clash again and again
with her mother-in-law, who spoiled all her grandchildren
and sometimes murmured to them that she was their real mother;
Eleanor had only borne them.
Anna, the eldest, may have suffered most
from the ongoing tensions within her family.
She adored her absent father,
but also sympathized with her mother,
who, while Anna was still in her teens,
confirmed to her the rumors she had heard
about her father's romance with Lucy Mercer.
She was forced by her mother and grandmother
into making a formal debut at 18
and failed to go to college, in part because her grandmother
believed educated women scared off suitors.
Barely 20, she married Curtis Dall,
a wall street broker ten years older than she.
Many years later, explaining her early marriage,
she said she'd simply wanted to get out, away from
the complications that continued to divide her family.
In the spring of 1928,
Al Smith was the frontrunner
for the Democratic nomination for president
and asked Franklin to nominate him again
at the Upcoming Convention in Houston.
"I'm telling everyone you are going to Houston
without crutches," Eleanor wrote Franklin
at Warm Springs, "so mind you stick at it."
This time, he needed no urging.
To demonstrate to the delegates that he was making progress
toward becoming a potential candidate in his own right,
he knew he had to be able to walk...
Or seem to walk... on his own.
For weeks at Warm Springs, he labored at mastering
what his physiotherapists called a "two-point walk"...
The slow, rocking gait he would employ in public
for the rest of his life.
His whole leg would be put forward,
and then the other side would be put forward
and then the other side would be foot forward.
It was painful, it was very slow,
and it was very precarious.
If he got jostled, if the wind blew too hard,
if one of his bodyguards forgot
or relaxed, he could go to the ground,
so he was in constant fear that that was going to happen.
At the Houston Convention,
he used his new technique to make his way to the podium.
Thousands of onlookers stood again to cheer his progress,
and now he was strong enough to use one hand
to acknowledge their applause.
Smith won the nomination...
And then, to Roosevelt's astonishment, insisted
that he run for Governor of New York in his place.
Louis Howe thought it madness.
Republicans and their candidate Herbert Hoover
were riding a tide of prosperity in 1928.
Smith's catholicism and open opposition to prohibition
made a Democratic victory still more unlikely.
Eleanor... already committed
to heading Democratic women's work for Smith's candidacy...
Felt that if her husband ran and somehow won,
it might mean for her the loss of the separate
and fulfilling life she'd worked so hard to build.
And Missy Lehand told Franklin,
"don't you dare run."
She didn't want to give him up to public life, either.
Roosevelt himself was torn,
even ducked Smith's calls for a time.
But in the end, he gave in and agreed to run for governor.
"When you're in politics," he told a friend,
"you've got to play the game."
Republican newspapers denounced Smith for persuading
what they called a "crippled" man to run.
It was a "pathetic and pitiless act," one said.
Privately, Smith thought
Franklin was little more than an invalid.
"He won't live a year," he told a friend.
But he assured the press,
"a Governor doesn't have to be an acrobat.
We do not elect him for his ability
to do a double back-flip."
To demonstrate he was up to the job,
Roosevelt campaigned through every one
of New York's 62 counties...
Something no candidate for governor
had ever done before.
He did all he could to minimize the impact
of his disability on the voters:
"No movies of me getting out of the machine, boys,"
he'd shout to the newsreel cameramen
as he arrived for a speech, and they obliged.
On Election Night, Franklin, Eleanor,
and Sara waited for the returns at Democratic Headquarters
at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan.
It was quickly clear that Al Smith and the Democrats
had suffered a terrible defeat.
Smith carried only 7 states;
even his own State of New York went to Herbert Hoover.
Franklin and Eleanor left for home well before midnight,
convinced Franklin's candidacy had also failed,
even though all the returns were not yet in.
But Sara Delano Roosevelt stayed put.
By 4:00 in the morning,
Franklin was going to win a narrow victory.
A friend called room service and, because of Prohibition,
ordered milk, not champagne.
with which to toast her son's surprising triumph.
FDR would occupy still another of the offices
his cousin Theodore had held
on his way to the presidency.
Al Smith had assumed Franklin would be
a mostly-absentee governor, allowing him somehow
to retain power through the men and women
he'd appointed to State Office.
He was quickly disabused of that notion.
FDR fired Smith's two closest aides.
"I've got to be the governor of the State of New York,"
he told a friend, "and I have got to be it myself."
Al Smith would never forgive him.
The morning after the election,
a reporter had asked Eleanor if she were excited
by her husband's triumph. "No," she answered.
"If the rest of the ticket didn't get in,
what does it matter?"
I felt Governor Smith's election
as president might have meant something,
but whether Franklin spends two years in Albany or not
matters comparatively little.
It will have pleasant and unpleasant sides for him,
and the good to the State is problematical.
Crowds, newspapers, etcetera, mean so little,
it does not even stir me.
As the First Lady of New York,
she reluctantly resigned her political and lobbying posts.
But she refused to give up the job that meant the most to her...
teaching American history
and 19th-century literature 3 days a week
at the Tod Hunter School for girls in Manhattan.
It gave her an opportunity to instill in her students
some of the qualities her own beloved schoolmistress,
Mademoiselle Souvestre, had instilled in her:
Open-mindedness, independent thinking,
social consciousness.
"I teach because I love it," she explained.
"I cannot give it up."
She organized the household in Albany,
assigning Missy Lehand a bedroom larger than hers,
found space for her circle of friends
as well as Franklin's, and toured prisons
and hospitals on her husband's behalf,
remembering his exhortation to lift the lids
on cooking pots to check whether people were getting
the quality of food they were supposed to get.
And she sometimes stood in for him at political events as well.
Dear Franklin, arrived
at the Staten Island Democratic Lunch 12:30,
stood and shook hands till 1:30,
ate till 3:30, talked till 5:20,
home here at 6:40, nearly dead.
You are the finest Governor ever,
and I have all the virtues
and would gladly have dispensed with half of them
could I have left at 4:00.
Soon after becoming Governor,
Franklin ordered that wherever Eleanor went,
she be accompanied by corporal Earl Miller
of the New York State Police,
who would serve as her bodyguard.
He's not just her driver and her guard,
he's her buddy.
He teaches her how to shoot a pistol,
how to shoot a rifle
without breaking your shoulder.
He teaches her how to dive.
He is her great friend,
and they spend hours and hours together.
She has a lot of fun with Earl Miller.
He was handsome, high-spirited, and devoted.
Eleanor was flattered by his attention and pleased
to be asked for advice about his many girlfriends.
Miller became a member of her closest circle,
even starred with her in a homemade parody
of a Douglas Fairbanks Movie, filmed at Val-Kill
by Marion Dickerman.
The "New York Times." October 25, 1929.
The most disastrous decline
in the biggest and broadest stock market of history
rocked the financial district yesterday.
It carried down with it speculators,
big and little, in every part of the country.
Losses were tremendous,
and thousands of prosperous brokerage and bank accounts,
sound and healthy a week ago, were completely wrecked
in the strange debacle
due to a combination of circumstances,
but accelerated into a crash
by fear.
Americans had survived panics before,
but they had experienced nothing remotely like
the great depression that began with the stock market crash
in the autumn of 1929.
Within 12 months, the number of jobless more than doubled.
Within another year, it would double again,
with no recovery in sight.
Kansas farmers burned their wheat to keep warm.
Kentucky coal miners survived
on Pokeweed and Dandelion Greens.
Ten Pennsylvania convicts out on parole
asked to be locked up again.
Life beyond prison walls was too hard.
Everyone seemed to feel the effects.
In Manhattan, Franklin Roosevelt's own son-in-law,
Curtis Dall, lost his job and his home in Westchester County
and had to move with Anna and FDR's first two grandchildren
into the Roosevelt house on East 65th Street.
Just a few blocks to the west,
homeless men built tar-paper shacks
in the heart of Central Park.
They had nowhere else to go.
Like hundreds of thousands of desperate people
all across the country,
they named their temporary village "Hooverville"
after the President whom they had come to blame
for everything that had happened to them.
Americans differed over what caused the depression
and what should be done about it.
But Herbert Hoover's grim personality
and his repeated, unconvincing promises
that recovery was just months away
combined to persuade a growing majority of Americans
that a change was needed.
Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt took more bold action
than any of his fellow governors.
He championed public power,
put unemployed men to work on state conservation projects,
created the temporary emergency relief administration,
the first state agency in the country
to provide public relief for the unemployed...
"Not as a matter of public charity," he said,
"but as a matter of social duty.
In the final analysis," he declared,
"the progress of our civilization will be retarded
if any large body of citizens falls behind.
Without the help of thousands of others,
any one of us would die,
naked and starved."
In 1930,
Roosevelt was re-elected governor
by almost 3/4 of a million votes.
"I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming
the next presidential nominee of his Party,"
the State Democratic Chairman told the press,
"even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about."
Even Ted Roosevelt reluctantly agreed.
"Well, as far as I can see, the republican ship went down
with all on board," he wrote his mother.
"Cousin Franklin now, I suppose, will run for the presidency,
and I am already beginning to think of nasty things
to say concerning him."
The most serious hindrance
to FDR's winning the nomination
were persistent rumors about his health.
People whispered that infantile paralysis
had affected his mind,
even that he was actually suffering from syphilis.
To offset them, Roosevelt secretly paid
a freelance journalist named Earle Looker to "challenge" him
to prove his fitness for office and write up the results
in "Liberty" Magazine.
Then, also behind the scenes, Roosevelt provided the money
to pay 3 leading diagnosticians to look him over.
The examination itself was legitimate.
All 3 doctors signed a statement pronouncing Roosevelt
in fine shape, aside from the aftereffects of polio,
though one of them... an implacable republican...
Privately told his colleagues he wanted it understood that
"so far as I'm concerned, this doesn't go for above the neck."
July 16, 1931.
Well, sir, we got away with the "Liberty" article,
despite all obstacles.
I think we can be sure that at least 7 1/2 million readers
are sure you are physically fit.
Earle Looker.
FDR would never again feel the need to speak in detail
about his health to any journalist.
As the 1932 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago,
Roosevelt was the clear front-runner,
with a reputation as one of the most activist
and effective governors in the country.
I call on you, whose standards I see before me,
to here and now testify to your determination
that the candidate of this convention shall be and must be
that incarnation of Thomas Jefferson,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York!
Still, he had 9 rivals,
including his embittered old ally, Al Smith,
and the conservative speaker of the house,
John Nance Garner of Texas.
It took 4 ballots...
And the second place on the ticket for Garner...
For Roosevelt to win the nomination.
... for President of the United States.
Custom still required the candidate to wait weeks
to be formally notified of his nomination.
We have a perfect day for this trip,
and I am very happy to be going out to Chicago,
and everybody knows the reason why I'm so happy.
In an electrifying break with that tradition,
FDR decided to fly from Albany to Chicago
to accept the nomination right away.
Louis Howe handed him his speech.
My friends
of the Democratic National Convention of 1932...
I appreciate your willingness
after these 6 arduous days
to remain here,
for I know well...
The sleepless hours
which you and I have had.
The appearance before a national convention
of its nominee for President
to be formally notified of his selection
is unprecedented and unusual,
but these are unprecedented and unusual times.
29 years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had promised
the American people a "Square Deal."
Now, 11 years after polio seemed
to have crushed his political hopes,
Franklin Roosevelt made a promise of his own.
On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas,
in the smaller cities and in the villages,
millions of our citizens cherish the hope
that their old standards of living and of thought
have not gone forever.
Those millions cannot
and shall not hope in vain.
I pledge you,
I pledge myself
to a new deal for the American people.
President Hoover had grown so unpopular
that one of Roosevelt's defeated rivals for the nomination
told FDR all he had to do to win
was to stay alive till November.
With the depression deepening, a double line of policemen
armed with rifles now ringed the U.S. Capitol
to keep out demonstrators.
When 17,000 mostly jobless
veterans of the Great War and their families
descended on Washington to demand an immediate payment
of a bonus they'd been promised,
Hoover called out the army.
The veterans were brutally driven from the Capital.
Roosevelt told an aide,
"this will elect me."
Still, he took no chances.
Roosevelt campaigned hard all across the country,
promising help for "the forgotten man
at the bottom of the economic pyramid,"
attacking Hoover for inaction,
and simultaneously pledging to slash
the federal budget by 25%.
Hoover denounced him as "a chameleon on plaid."
Now, when Americans spoke of Roosevelt,
they meant Franklin, not Theodore.
"The Oyster Bay Roosevelts have become
the out-of-season Roosevelts," a friend wrote.
Theodore Roosevelt's younger sister, Corrine,
would cross party lines to vote for FDR that fall.
But Alice Roosevelt longworth, tr's eldest daughter,
campaigned hard against him aboard president Hoover's train.
There we were, the Roosevelts,
hubris up to the eyebrows, beyond the eyebrows,
and then who should come sailing down the river but Nemesis
in the person of cousin Franklin.
And at Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt's widow,
Edith, was so infuriated at receiving
some 300 congratulatory messages from people
who mistakenly thought Franklin was one of her sons
that she made an unprecedented appearance at a Republican Rally
in Manhattan to introduce the republican incumbent,
just to make it clear that this Oyster Bay Roosevelt
would also be voting for Herbert Hoover.
Someone once asked Sara Delano Roosevelt
why so many of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay seemed
so hostile to her branch of the family.
She didn't know, she said, but "perhaps it's because
we're so much better-looking than they are."
Sitting down here next to me is Mrs. Roosevelt,
my wife, and my granddaughter,
Anna Roosevelt dall, on her lap.
What's our campaign slogan, Sistie?
"Happy days are here again."
Good. That's right.
On Election Night, November 8, 1932,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency
of the United States of America
by 7 million votes
and carried 42 of the 48 states.
His party took control of both houses of congress.
It was the greatest Democratic victory
in more than 3/4 of a century.
In the Philippines, where Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
Was serving as Governor-General,
he identified himself to a reporter
as the President-elect's "fifth cousin,
about to be removed."
I was happy for him, of course,
because I knew that in many ways
it would make up for the blow
that fate had dealt him.
But for myself, I was... deeply troubled.
As I saw it, this meant the end
of any personal life of my own.
I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt
and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the President.
The turmoil in my heart was rather great that night and...
The next few months were not to make any clearer
what the road ahead would be.
During the 4 long months
between Roosevelt's election and his inauguration,
the depression got still worse.
Stocks, bonds, farm prices...
Everything continued to spiral downward.
Anxious depositors withdrew their savings
in frenzied runs on banks.
Nearly 400 of them failed
in January and February alone.
President Hoover called repeatedly
upon the president-elect to join him in what he called
"co-operative action" to end the crisis.
Roosevelt refused,
wary of being trapped into supporting
orthodox policies of which he did not approve.
Off the record, the President-elect told
a reporter the country's troubles were not yet "my baby."
FDR visited Hyde Park,
rested at Warm Springs,
then went to sea for 12 days,
fishing in the Caribbean
and sleeping aboard a palatial yacht owned
by an old Hudson River friend, Vincent Astor.
I got this idea when I was 17 years old.
I see a lot of things I see in my mind.
I see a lot of poor people are hungry for a piece of bread.
People want bread,
don't have bread to eat.
In my mind,
the idea is to kill the President in one country.
After he is killed, kill another,
and then kill another.
Giuseppe Zangara.
The President-elect's fishing trip ended
at Miami, Florida on the evening
of February 15, 1933.
Roosevelt stopped his car
to speak to the crowd that had gathered to see him.
Mr. Mayor, my friends in Miami,
I am not a stranger here
because for a good many years, I used to come down here.
But on my coming back, I have firmly resolved
not to make it the last time,
and to see all of you
and to have another wonderful 10 days
or two weeks in Florida waters.
Many thanks.
A deranged Italian immigrant
named Giuseppe Zangara was waiting with a revolver.
He hated "all presidents," he said later,
and "everybody who is rich."
He had hoped to shoot Hoover; Now he wanted to kill Roosevelt.
He got off 5 shots and hit 5 bystanders,
including the Mayor of Chicago,
who happened to be standing next to the president-elect.
FDR never flinched.
He refused to take cover, ordered the secret service
to lift the mortally wounded mayor into his car,
held onto him during the race to the hospital.
Eleanor was in New York.
Franklin called to reassure her.
"He's all right," she said afterwards.
"He's not the least bit excited.
These things are to be expected."
Like Theodore Roosevelt nearly 21 years earlier,
Franklin seemed unaffected by coming so close to death.
"There was nothing," an aide who spent that evening with him
remembered, "not so much as the twitching oa muscle,
"the mopping of a brow, or even the hint of a false gaiety
"to indicate that it wasn't any evening in any other place.
I have never seen anything in my life more magnificent."
At his inauguration 17 days later,
gripping James' arm,
Roosevelt would demonstrate another kind of courage.
In 40 of the 48 states,
all the banks were closed.
The stock exchange suspended trading.
Industrial production had been cut almost in half.
Nearly half of all American farmers faced foreclosure.
Almost one out of 3 wage-earners...
Some 14 million men and women...
Was without work.
When their families were included,
at least 40 million people had no dependable source of income.
You, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
do solemnly swear...
It was very, very solemn
and a little terrifying.
You felt people would do anything
if only someone would tell them what to do.
One has the feeling of going it blindly
because we're in a tremendous stream
and none of us know where we are going to land.
... of my ability
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution
of the United States, so help me God.
Americans everywhere were waiting to hear
what the new president had to say.
I shall ask the congress for the one remaining instrument...
He would promise bold action
and call upon Congress to grant him
"broad executive powers to wage a war against the emergency."
... as great as the power
that would be given to me if we were,
in fact, invaded by a foreign foe.
This nation is asking for action, and action now.
But it was another line
his frightened fellow citizens remembered best.
It echoed hard-earned lessons that had informed the lives
of first Theodore and then Eleanor Roosevelt
and now informed his life as well.
So, first of all,
let me assert my firm belief
that the only thing we have to fear is
fear itself...
Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror
which paralyzes needed efforts
to convert retreat into advance.
In every dark hour of our...
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,"
in some ways, is inspired nonsense.
If you're worried about putting food on the table,
that's something real to fear, that's not fear itself.
And yet, like all great works of fiction, all great stories,
that line captures the willing suspension
of disbelief that makes anything possible.
And somebody watching the speech... Tommy Corcoran,
who later went to work for Roosevelt... said that
the moment was like Excalibur being pulled from the stone
and that you just had a sense, "this guy can do it.
He can lift us up."
- sync & corrections by wolfen - - www.addic7ed.com -
Tomorrow night on "The Roosevelts,"
FDR champions sweeping new programs...
Social security represents
a redefinition of the American Social Contract.
While confiding in a discreet friend...
Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt
evidently don't get on together.
As the shadow of war hangs over Europe.
Par 5 of "The Roosevelt: An Intimate History,"
tomorrow night.
These extraordinary Americans all share one thing in common:
A past they never knew... until now.
"it's incredible!"
In his new season on PBS, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. helps them
uncover the truth about where they come from.
S. Field "I can't believe that these documents even exist!"
"wow!"
Get to know them, as they discover who they really are.
K. Alexander "that's pretty amazing."
Finding your roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Starts Tuesday only on PBS.