Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

Why would they think his life was ruined?

The reason was that many people of that era thought a physical disability was something to be ashamed of, even something repulsive. The common word for a disabled person was cripple, which implied that the person was not a whole and normal human being. To be crippled by polio seemed especially unpleasant. Like the Roosevelts themselves, their friends heard the words “infantile paralysis” and thought of children with horribly twisted arms and legs. It was an awful disease, and many people just didn’t want to think about it.

Maybe they wouldn’t say it out loud, but some still had wild notions that came out of the Middle Ages, when people with disabilities were thought to be children of the devil. Many took it for granted that disability was God’s punishment for sins. The word for cripple in several languages came from the ancient word for crawl, since that was the only way severely disabled people of ancient times could move around. Even in the twentieth century, the idea lingered that a disabled person was like a crawling animal.

The treatment of disabled people had improved. But most disabled people in the 1920s lived lonely, boring lives, shut away in the homes of relatives. Very few could get jobs. Employers asked, Why hire a disabled man—let alone a disabled woman—over a non-disabled person, especially since people with disabilities were thought to be nervous, depressed, and unreliable?

So it was just a matter of common sense that a “crippled” man could never be a leader. People weren’t even thinking about the sheer physical difficulty of moving around. Elect a crippled man to high office? It was as if someone thought a five-year-old should run for president. It just wasn’t going to happen.

In late October 1921, two months after the diagnosis of polio, Dr. Robert Lovett traveled from Boston to see firsthand how Roosevelt was doing. He and Dr. Draper discussed the case, then agreed the patient was ready to leave the hospital.

With that, Sara Roosevelt announced that the house at Hyde Park was ready and waiting. But she had a surprise coming.

No, Mama, her son said. (He gave it the upper-class English pronunciation ma-MA.) He would not be taking the train up to Hyde Park anytime soon, at least not for the reasons she had in mind. He was going straight back to East Sixty-Fifth Street, close to the doctors and nurses who would help him with his recovery program. He meant to start right away.

People who thought Franklin Roosevelt was a “mama’s boy” would have learned something from that short conversation.

Uncle Fred had advised him to face facts and not fool himself.

But FDR had decided he was going to make his own facts.

Louis Howe was thinking the same way.

In the months before FDR became ill, Howe had been pondering his own future. He had been working under Roosevelt at Fidelity & Deposit, but he was now weighing a couple of offers for better positions with bigger salaries. He felt the deepest loyalty to FDR. But in the wake of the polio attack, did it make sense to keep working for a politician who suddenly seemed to have no political future? Howe had his family to think of. But he would not make his decision until Roosevelt made a decision of his own.

As Howe told the story, the two men were talking one day when Howe remarked on the choice that FDR had to make.

FDR could do what his mother was proposing, Howe said. He could retire to Hyde Park, live the life of a quiet country invalid, tinkering with this project or that, writing on subjects that interested him, and give up any thought of a life in politics.

That would be perfectly all right, Howe said. It would be “a useful life engaged in literary work and other things that required no personal agility.”

Or, he told FDR, “you can … gather up your courage and plunge forward as though nothing had happened.” Maybe he could learn to walk again; maybe not. He would have to find ways to climb the stairs to railroad platforms, get in and out of automobiles, cross stages in front of thousands of people. He would risk embarrassment, maybe even ridicule.

If he wanted to do that, Howe said, “I will go along with you every inch of the hard way.”

According to Howe, FDR did not hesitate. He flashed his giant grin and said, “Well, when do we begin?”

There is every reason to think FDR had made that decision already. He did not need Louis Howe to arouse his ambition.

For Eleanor Roosevelt, her husband’s decision meant she must abandon the work she wanted to do, or so it certainly seemed.

Soon after FDR’s failed campaign for vice president in 1920, she had begun to work in politics herself. Women had just gained the right to vote, and Eleanor saw that many women needed encouragement to take a larger part in public affairs—to vote, to campaign for candidates, to organize supporters in favor of good laws and policies, even to run for office. She began to join committees and work for Democratic Party candidates in New York.

But now her husband’s illness seemed to dominate everything. FDR wanted Louis Howe to move in with the family so he could help with FDR’s recovery, his business affairs, and his political plans. So Eleanor would have to reorganize the whole household to make room for Howe. She would have to arrange all the details of hiring a live-in nurse and making appointments with doctors. Getting Franklin ready for a return to politics was going to be a full-time job. She would have less time than ever for her own projects.

That would be difficult enough, but the idea of retiring to Hyde Park seemed to Eleanor to be even worse. In Hyde Park, her mother-in-law ruled the roost. The estate there belonged to Sara, not her son. Eleanor loved her mother-in-law, but she resented