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

it appeared in one region but not another; or why it targeted the young. Doctors knew by 1921 that only a fraction of the people who caught the virus became paralyzed, perhaps one in a thousand. But they had no idea why one person recovered while another became paralyzed or even died.

As to the where and how of FDR’s infection, Dr. Lovett may have asked, Have you been around any children lately?

Not his own children. They had been at Campobello.

But near the end of July, he had spent several hours with a large group of children—Boy Scouts, hundreds of them.

It had been just another appointment on his calendar. Indeed, Roosevelt’s calendar in 1921 was crammed with events like his visit to the Boy Scout campgrounds north of New York City on July 27. They made up the everyday rounds of a man who meant one day to run for president.

For most Americans, aiming for the White House would be a wild long shot, but not for Franklin Roosevelt.

To start with, he had the most famous name in American politics. He was related by both blood and marriage to Theodore Roosevelt, who had died just two years earlier after a thundering career as a crusading politician, cowboy, writer, war hero, and president.

And FDR had accomplishments of his own. He had been a state senator, then assistant secretary of the navy. In 1920 the Democrats chose him to run for vice president with Governor James Cox of Ohio, the presidential nominee. They lost that race, but FDR made a good showing across the country and proved that “another Roosevelt” was on the rise in politics.

Now, after eight years in Washington, he intended to reestablish himself as a public figure in his home state of New York. Soon he would run for statewide office, and then, when the time was right, he would run for president. In the meantime, he planned to do good things and make influential friends in as many civic and charitable organizations as possible. One of these groups was the Boy Scouts of Greater New York. He had agreed to become chairman of the organization because he thought highly of the Scouts—two of his sons were members—and because it was one more way to meet and befriend important New Yorkers who were volunteering their time to help the boys.

Every summer, Boy Scouts from New York City and its suburbs gathered for weeklong outings at campgrounds near the massive hump of Bear Mountain, fifty miles north of the city. On July 27 there was to be a giant cookout, so FDR and other supporters of the Scouts made a day trip out of it, cruising up the Hudson River to Bear Mountain, then jouncing over dirt roads by car to join hundreds of Scouts for an outdoor supper.

Somewhere at Bear Mountain, it seems clear, there was a virus too small to be seen with even the most powerful microscope available in 1921. If five thousand such viruses were placed in a single-file line, they would barely reach from one edge of a grain of salt to the other. That made it one of the smallest viruses ever discovered. Despite the havoc it could cause, as it had in 1916, the virus was very common and not very dangerous—not for most people, anyway. It was dangerous only if it found its way into a person with a particular vulnerability, and if, by pure chance, it slipped into the wrong part of that person’s body.

In 1921 no one knew the poliovirus passed from one person to another via tiny specks of human waste. An infected bit of human feces could have reached the campground by any of a number of paths.

It might have turned up on the hand of one of the Boy Scouts. If so, it’s not hard to imagine how it got there. The boy could have picked up the virus a few days earlier when he changed his baby brother’s diaper. The virus could have entered the Scout’s system without making him sick—again, most people who caught it never got sick at all—so his parents would have had no reason to keep him home from the campout. Then maybe the Scout used the outdoor toilet at the campground and forgot to wash his hands. Then he might have grabbed a piece of fried chicken from a platter on a picnic table—but right then maybe his friend called him away and he put the chicken back. And then maybe Franklin Roosevelt picked up the chicken leg and took a bite.

Or the virus may have been in a cup of drinking water. Just a few months earlier, the New York Department of Health had sent an expert to see if Bear Mountain’s lakes and streams were safe for swimming and drinking. The expert tested the water and said, no, the water definitely was not safe. There weren’t enough toilets for the large number of people visiting the state parks in the area. The expert found signs of human feces in the lakes and streams. So the poliovirus might have been in the water, too. But the state didn’t close the parks. If the Boy Scouts pumped water from wells fed by underground streams or dipped water from the lake, the virus might have been in the water they drank at the cookout, and it could have ended up in a cup of water served to FDR.

Or maybe the boy who forgot to wash his hands ran straight up to the famous man who was the cousin of the great Teddy Roosevelt and stuck out his hand to shake. FDR was a politician, and a good politician shakes every hand that comes along.

Later, scientists would discover that it takes ten to fourteen days for the poliovirus to cause noticeable symptoms. The day of the forest fire, when he felt the first pains in his lower back and went to bed early, was August 10, fourteen days after his trip to Bear