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

power of will … The world abhors the quitter who in his full strength goes down and will not get up. It admires the man who fights to the last … Franklin D. Roosevelt showed that this was the stuff he was made of.”

The convention soon snarled into a deadlock between the angry forces of Smith and McAdoo, with neither candidate winning enough delegates to be nominated. Every day the July sun pushed temperatures inside the Garden a bit higher, baking the delegates and stretching their nerves. Somehow the deadlock had to be broken. Some new candidate must emerge to unite the party. But the only name mentioned with any enthusiasm was that of Roosevelt, disabled or not. By the second week, another reporter said, that name “would stampede the convention were he put in nomination … He has done for himself what he could not do for his candidate.”

Delegates asked him, pleaded with him. He said no again and again. At one point a smooth-talking, snappily dressed state senator from New York City, Jimmy Walker, soon to be elected mayor, dropped into the chair next to FDR’s and said, “Frank, you are the only man who can be nominated now with any hope.” If either Smith or MacAdoo became the nominee, Walker said, half the party would revolt and sit out the election. Only FDR could hold the warring halves together.

FDR didn’t even pause to think about it.

“I appreciate the compliment, Jimmy, but it’s impossible,” he replied. “In the first place, there is my physical condition to consider. And the Smith followers might misunderstand. I’m going to stay with him until the end.”

He had only one miracle to perform that summer, and he had pulled it off. He had proven to himself and everyone else that he could cross a stage and give a speech. But he could not possibly run for president—not that year.

Finally, after sixteen days, the exhausted conventioneers turned away from the leaders of their divided party and picked an all-but-unknown lawyer from West Virginia, John W. Davis, as their nominee. FDR and every other savvy Democrat went home knowing that “Silent Cal” Coolidge, the Republican who had become president a year earlier when Warren G. Harding died in office, was about to win his own four years in the White House.

The convention hadn’t even ended before politicians were sitting down with FDR for quiet conversations, asking how soon he could run for some high office.

First in line was Al Smith himself.

Smith had put up a stronger fight for the nomination than many had expected, and already he was planning for another campaign four years hence. He was thinking he might leave the governorship when his term was up at the end of 1924, take a job in private business, save some money, and get ready to run for president again. But he wanted to maintain his power base in New York. For that he needed someone he could control in the governor’s chair. Who better than this suddenly popular cripple with the great name?

Again FDR said no. “They have been after me to run for the Governorship in this state,” he confided to a friend, “but I have told them that the crutches must go before I run even for dog-catcher.”

Still, after three lonely years of being pitied and all but forgotten, it was delightful to have people “after him.”

Encouragement was coming from all over the country.

“I have the utmost confidence in you,” an Oregon delegate wrote to FDR after the convention, “and would be glad to support you again, if you will get right.”

“Like the overwhelming majority of the delegates who attended the convention, I became a very ardent admirer of yours,” wrote an Oklahoman, “and had your physical condition permitted, you would have been nominated.”

Even the most powerful Democrat in the Midwest, “Boss” Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, had become a fan.

“You know I am seldom carried away,” Pendergast wrote to one of his allies in the party, “… but I want to tell you that had Mr. Roosevelt … been physically able to have withstood the campaign, he would have been named by acclamation the first few days of the Convention. He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met, and I predict he will be the candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1928.”

All these private conversations, all the talk in the papers about how Roosevelt could have had the nomination if only he had wanted it … It was a new day.

He had another chance.

But his basic problem was the same as ever.

For many months he had been impatient with Dr. Lovett’s cautious, one-step-at-a-time approach to his treatment.

FDR went to Lovett and said he must find some new way of recovering strength in his legs. What more could be done?

Lovett hardly knew what to say. Three years had gone by since the virus had attacked FDR. The nerves it destroyed were never coming back to life. Roosevelt’s one chance for improvement lay in the exercises Lovett had already prescribed. With a little more strength and more practice, he could get better and better with his canes and crutches. That was about it.

The two men were deadlocked.

FDR decided he had learned all he could from Lovett. If he couldn’t find a doctor with new advice, he would have to be his own doctor.

PART 3GETTING READY

FALL 1924– SUMMER 1928

Chapter 9SOMETHING IN THE WATER

One day during the endless infighting at the Democratic convention in 1924, FDR fell into conversation with a friend from his Washington days, a wealthy banker named George Foster Peabody. When Roosevelt mentioned that he was looking for new ways to restore life to his legs, Peabody told him a story.

Some years earlier, Peabody had helped fix up the old resort of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. It was a spa with mineral springs, like the ones in Germany that FDR had visited as a boy with his mother and father. Soaking in