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

Lovett gave FDR a talking-to by mail, saying “walking on crutches is not a gift, but an art, acquired by constant practice.”

FDR was all assurance, promising that “I have faithfully carried out all the walking.”

But he really hadn’t done so, and he didn’t start. Within a few weeks, Nurse Rockey was sending Dr. Lovett her own tattletale letter. FDR was doing too much of the “mental work” the doctors had told him not to overdo, she said. If she didn’t nag him, he would “make excuses and put off going to bed until very late, etc.” When he did try his exercises with crutches, he wasn’t ready for them. Just the other day, she said, “he was compelled to walk one-quarter of a mile, which completely took him off his feet for about four days.” And his pain was back. “All this lovely fall has gone with only a few minutes devoted to walking,” she said, “[and] not every day.”

Why didn’t he try harder to follow Dr. Lovett’s orders?

The most likely answer is that the project of mastering crutch-walking simply didn’t appeal to him, since crutches could never take him where he wanted to go.

FDR had been thinking hard about how to resume his quest for the presidency. Just as before his illness, he intended to start by running for a statewide office in New York. But in his mind’s eye, he simply could not imagine making such a campaign without the ability to stand and walk on his own.

In our time we’ve forgotten how important the simple act of standing up used to be for a man who considered himself a “gentleman,” a term that was taken very seriously in the 1920s, especially in the Roosevelts’ social class. In 1922, a writer named Emily Post was just launching her fabulously successful career as an expert on good manners with the publication of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. The book was full of advice about all the times when a well-behaved man must stand up. For example:

“A gentleman always rises when a lady comes into a room.”

“In a restaurant, when a lady bows to him, a gentleman merely makes the gesture of rising by getting up half way from his chair and at the same time bowing. Then he sits down again.”

“Every American citizen stands with his hat off at the passing of the ‘colors’ [the U.S. flag] and when the national anthem is played.”

“If he gets on a street car … [h]e must not take a seat if there are ladies standing.”

Yes, FDR could now be helped to a standing position. But it required something like what a football player requires to score a touchdown—hard physical effort, heavy equipment, and a lot of help from other people.

Then he would have to walk. To run for governor or senator, he would have to visit cities and towns all across the state of New York. Consider the movements necessary for him to deliver just one speech in some other city.

First, from his home on East Sixty-Fifth Street, he would need to get to a railroad platform at Grand Central Terminal. That would require an automobile. He couldn’t possibly drive a car himself, so he would have to be chauffeured by a private car or a taxicab. He’d have to climb into the car, then out again. Then he would walk through jostling crowds, up and down staircases and finally up the steep steps to the railroad car. To get to his seat, he would have to squeeze past people in narrow corridors and step across the gaps between railcars. At his destination, he would find more staircases and more curbs, another taxicab or private car to enter and exit, and then more stairs at the hotel or church or school where he would give his speech, with people reaching to shake his hand. Finally there would be another set of steps up to the stage.

How could he navigate all that on crutches? Even if he could manage it for a day or two, how could he possibly perform the feat day after day and week after week in a hard campaign?

And once he reached the stage, there he would be, on crutches. Just to be seen standing with crutches was to shout to the world, There’s something wrong with me!

So why not make the campaign in a wheelchair?

By the late twentieth century, sophisticated wheelchairs would make it possible—though never easy—for someone with a disability like FDR’s to do one’s job and get on with life. This would include politicians. In 1996, the state of Georgia would elect to the U.S. Senate a man named Max Cleland, whose legs and part of one arm had been amputated after a severe injury in the war in Vietnam. He used a wheelchair. In 2014, the people of Texas would elect Greg Abbott as their governor, though Abbott’s back had been broken in an accident twenty years earlier and he had relied on a wheelchair ever since.

But in the 1920s, wheelchairs were big, clumsy contraptions seldom seen outside hospitals. More important, city landscapes and buildings had none of the accommodations for wheelchairs that we have now, such as ramps from streets to sidewalks and from sidewalks to building entrances, broad elevators in multistory buildings, and doorways wide enough for wheelchairs.

Besides, anyone in a wheelchair was assumed to be incapable of an active life. FDR must have held a memory of the ungainly wheelchair that his grandfather, Warren Delano Jr., once a vigorous and powerful man, was forced to use at the end of his life. It was hardly the image of a person who could lead and command others.

For use at home, FDR had a couple of narrow kitchen chairs converted to wheelchairs so that servants, nurses, and family members could push him easily from one room to another.

But campaigning in a wheelchair, not to mention holding an important position in government, was unthinkable.

So