TEN

POLIO

This is the happy Warrior;

    this is he,

That every man in arms

    should wish to be.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

AFTER EIGHT YEARS in Washington, FDR looked forward to spending the summer of 1921 at Campobello. Eleanor and the children left New York for the island as soon as school was over in June.^* Franklin, who was detained by business, embarked on Friday, August 5, traveling the distance aboard Van Lear Black’s oceangoing yacht Sabalo. “I thought he looked tired when he left,” Missy LeHand wrote Eleanor. Both women hoped the brief sea voyage would revive him.¹

FDR arrived at Campobello Sunday evening and found their eighteen-bedroom “cottage” overflowing with guests. In addition to five children and the normal complement of servants, tutors, and governesses, Louis Howe and his family were visiting, as were several friends from Washington, including Romanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of former British prime minister Herbert Asquith.

For the first time in years, Sara was not in her house next door. At sixty-seven she had resumed her prewar practice of an annual trip to Europe and on the spur of the moment had flown from London to Paris in an early twin-engine airplane. “It was five hours,” she wrote Eleanor. “I had been told four hours, but I would not have missed it. If I do it again I shall take an open plane as one sees more and it is more like flying.”²

As soon as he arrived, FDR threw himself into a frantic round of island activity: deep-sea fishing in the Bay of Fundy, afternoon sails, swimming, tennis, baseball, whatever else the children expected. On August 10, while the family was sailing, they spotted a small forest fire on one of the lesser islands. Franklin worked the boat in as close as he could—“almost on the beach,” James recalled—and led Eleanor and the children ashore. They fought the blaze with pine boughs for several hours until it was extinguished. “Our eyes were bleary with smoke,” said Franklin. “We were begrimed, smarting with spark-burns, exhausted.”³

It was about four o’clock when they returned home. FDR admitted to feeling logy and decided the remedy would be a quick swim in the relatively warm waters of Lake Glen Severn, a shallow freshwater pond on the other side of the island. He and the children jogged two miles to the lake, splashed around in the tepid water, and topped it off with an icy dip in the Bay of Fundy. Franklin was disappointed that he did not get “the glow I’d expected.” They trotted back to the cottage, and by then FDR was totally exhausted. The mail had arrived, and he sat down in his wet bathing suit to read it, “too tired even to dress. I’d never quite felt that way before.”⁴

About an hour later Roosevelt felt a sudden chill. He told Eleanor he thought he was catching a cold and had better not risk infecting the children. He would go straight to bed. Eleanor sent up a tray of food, but he was not hungry. He had trouble sleeping that night and continued to tremble despite two heavy woolen blankets.

The next morning he was worse. When he swung his legs out of bed and attempted to stand, his left leg buckled beneath him. He managed to get up and shave and assumed the problem would pass. “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 collapsed as well.”⁵ FDR dragged himself back to bed, and when Eleanor took his temperature it was 102.

There was no telephone in the house, so Eleanor dispatched a runner to fetch their family physician, Dr. E. H. Bennett, from Lubec. Dr. Bennett was an elderly country doctor, well suited to delivering babies and setting broken bones but not especially qualified for complex diagnoses. He examined Franklin and thought he was suffering from a bad cold; he said he would return in the morning to see how his patient was doing.

Roosevelt knew he did not have a cold. The next morning, Friday, August 12, he could not stand, and by evening he had lost the power to move his legs. They were numb, yet extremely sensitive. He ached all over and was paralyzed from the chest down. His thumb muscles had become so weak he could not write.⁶

On Saturday Eleanor and Dr. Bennett decided to seek a second opinion. Louis Howe canvassed the nearby resorts and discovered that the eminent Philadelphia surgeon Dr. William Keen was staying at Bar Harbor. Keen had once operated secretly on President Grover Cleveland and had successfully removed a cancer from the roof of the president’s mouth.⁷ He was a man of discretion, which Howe appreciated, but he was now eighty-four and his experience had been in surgery, not orthopedics. Dr. Keen examined Franklin thoroughly and decided his paralysis was due to a blood clot in the lower spinal cord. He prescribed heavy massages and predicted that Roosevelt would recover, “but it may take some months.”⁸

Dr. Keen was as far off target as Dr. Bennett, and his prescription of vigorous massages exacerbated the problem.^* FDR’s condition worsened daily. Soon his hands and arms were paralyzed as well as his legs. His fever soared, and he lost control of his bodily functions. For a short time his eyesight seemed threatened. Eleanor slept on a couch in Franklin’s room and with the help of Louis Howe managed to move him, bathe him, and turn him over at regular intervals. She administered catheters and enemas, massaged his legs, brushed his teeth, and waited on his every need. “It required a certain amount of skilled nursing,” Eleanor remembered, “and I was very thankful for every bit of training which Miss Spring [the children’s nurse] had given me.”⁹

Slowly, Roosevelt’s temperature subsided. He was still in constant pain, but the feeling of panic diminished. “I think he is getting back his grip and a better mental attitude,” Eleanor wrote Franklin’s half brother, Rosy, on August 18. “We thought yesterday he moved his toes on one foot a little better which is encouraging.”¹⁰

Dr. Keen, for his part, marveled at Eleanor’s devotion. “You have been a rare wife and have borne your heavy burden most bravely,” he wrote in late August. “You will surely break down if you do not have immediate relief. Even when the catheter has to be used your sleep must be broken at least once a night. I hope that by having his urine drawn the last thing at night, he will be able to wait until morning.”¹¹

It was Louis Howe who first suspected Franklin had been misdiagnosed. A confirmed cynic and partial hypochondriac, Howe was skeptical of expert opinion in general and the medical profession in particular. He wrote detailed letters to Sara’s brother Frederic A. Delano (Uncle Fred), the head of the family in New York, describing Franklin’s symptoms and requesting that the information be relayed to orthopedic specialists for their opinion. Uncle Fred saw the point immediately. “All doctors seem to know Dr. Keen,” he wrote Eleanor. “He is a fine old chap, but he is a surgeon and not a connoisseur of this malady. I think it would be very unwise to trust his opinion.”¹² After making soundings in New York, Uncle Fred went to Boston to consult “the great Dr. Lovett”—Dr. Robert Williamson Lovett, professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard and the nation’s leading authority on infantile paralysis.¹³ Lovett was summering in Newport, but his associates at the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission agreed that FDR’s symptoms were unquestionably those of infantile paralysis.

“On Uncle Fred’s urgent advice,” Eleanor wrote Rosy, “which I feel I must follow on Mama’s account, I have asked Dr. Keen to try to get Dr. Lovett here for a consultation to determine if it is I.P. or not. Dr. Keen thinks not but the treatment at this stage differs in one particular and no matter what it costs I feel and I am sure Mama would feel we must leave no stone unturned to accomplish the best results.”^14*

Dr. Lovett arrived at Campobello August 25 and found Franklin paralyzed from the waist down, running a temperature of 100 degrees. His back muscles and arms were weak and the leg muscles even weaker. He could not sit up without assistance. Lovett pronounced the verdict crisply: It was “perfectly clear” that FDR had poliomyelitis.¹⁵

Eleanor was stunned. Were the children in any danger? she asked. Lovett thought not. If any were going to be ill, it would have happened already. As for Franklin, he ordered the massages discontinued immediately, believing that overtiring the weak muscles might damage them further. A complete recovery was possible, said Lovett. There was nothing to do but wait. “I told them frankly that no one could tell where they stood, that the case was evidently not of the severest type.… [I]t looked to me as if some of the important muscles might be on the edge where they could be influenced either way—toward recovery, or turn into completely paralyzed muscles.”¹⁶

Franklin appeared relieved to know the worst. “He looked very strained and very tired,” said Eleanor. “But he was completely calm. His reaction to any great event was always to be completely calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show.”¹⁷

As the days wore on, FDR’s composure deteriorated. His condition was not improving, and he worried that stopping the massages had been a mistake. At the end of August, Dr. Bennett wired Lovett for help: “Atrophy increasing, power lessening, causing patient much anxiety. Attributed by him to discontinuance of massage. Can you recommend anything to keep up his courage?”¹⁸

Dr. Lovett replied instantly. “There is nothing that can be added to the treatment,” he wrote. “This is one of the hardest things to make the family understand.”

Drugs I believe are of little or no value.… Bromide for sleeplessness may be useful. Massage will prolong hyperesthesia and tenderness.… The use of hot baths should I think now be considered again, as it is really helpful and will encourage the patient, as he can do so much more under water with his legs.… I should have him sit up in a chair as soon as it can be done without discomfort.¹⁹

In mid-September it was decided to take Franklin back to New York, where he could be treated at Presbyterian Hospital by Dr. George Draper, a Harvard classmate who was a protégé of Dr. Lovett. Uncle Fred arranged for a private railroad car to be dispatched to Eastport, and Howe ensured that FDR was smuggled aboard out of range of inquisitive reporters. Thus far the press had reported only that Roosevelt was ill and was recovering. Polio had not been mentioned.

The news of Franklin’s malady first appeared on the front page of The New York Times the morning of September 16:

F.D. ROOSEVELT ILL OF POLIOMYELITIS

BROUGHT ON SPECIAL CAR FROM CAMPOBELLO, BAY OF FUNDY, TO HOSPITAL HERE

The accompanying article quoted Dr. Draper to the effect that although Franklin had lost the use of both legs below the knee, “he definitely will not be crippled. No one need have any fear of any permanent injury from this attack.”²⁰

FDR’s hopes soared. That afternoon he dictated a note to his friend Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the Times:

While the doctors were unanimous in telling me that the attack was very mild and that I was not going to suffer any permanent effects from it, I had, of course, the usual dark suspicion that they were just saying nice things to make me feel good. But now that I have seen the same statement officially made in The New York Times I feel immensely relieved because I know of course it must be true.²¹

Wishful thinking. The fact was, FDR was not improving. His fever refused to abate, and his legs continued to atrophy. “There is a marked falling away of the muscle masses on either side of the spine in the lower lumbar region,” Draper warned Dr. Lovett in late September. “The lower extremities present a most depressing picture. There is little motion in the long extensors of the toes of each foot.” Draper believed the psychological factor would be decisive. “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 utterly crushing him.”²²

Slowly Franklin improved. By early October he was well enough for Missy LeHand to be admitted an hour or so each morning to take dictation. Eleanor and Louis Howe kept up with his affairs, and the brief dictation sessions worked wonders on FDR’s morale. But what Roosevelt craved most was personal contact. Close friends were now allowed into his hospital room for brief visits. Interviewed by the journalist Ernest K. Lindley ten years later, many still recalled their visits with awe. “Roosevelt gaily brushed aside every hint of condolence and sent them away more cheerful than when they arrived. None of them has ever heard him utter a complaint or a regret or even acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of bad luck.”²³

FDR saw it as his duty not only to appear in the best of spirits but to bolster the spirits of those about him. Despite the grim reality of his condition, he persisted in seeing the bright side. “I am sure you will be glad to learn that the doctors are most encouraging,” he disingenuously wrote Josephus Daniels in mid-October. “Your surmise regarding the stern determination of my ‘missus’ not to let me proceed too rapidly is absolutely correct. In fact, I already suspect that she has entered into an alliance with the doctors to keep me in the idle class long after it is really necessary.”²⁴

Franklin’s arms and back muscles recovered first. “I was delighted to find that he had much more power in the back muscles than I had thought,” said Draper in early October.²⁵ Dr. Lovett came down from Boston to see the patient on October 15. FDR was now able to sit up. “He is cheerful and doing an hour or so of business each day. He has been in a chair once and I recommended pushing him around, and letting him go home when he wanted to.”²⁶

On October 28, 1921, Roosevelt was discharged from hospital and taken home to East Sixty-fifth Street. He was now able to pull himself up by a strap and, with some assistance, swing himself into a wheelchair. “The patient is doing very well,” Dr. Draper noted on November 19. “He navigates about successfully in a wheel chair. He is exceedingly ambitious and anxious to get to the point where he can try the crutches, but I am not encouraging him.”²⁷

In December, FDR began a carefully constructed exercise regimen with Mrs. Kathleen Lake, a trained physiotherapist. The tendons behind his knees had tightened to the point that it was terribly painful to stretch his legs. Mrs. Lake had him exercise on a board. Some paralytics found this so stressful they could endure it just three days a week. FDR insisted that Mrs. Lake come every day. “Mrs. Lake works so long now every a.m.,” Eleanor reported to Sara, “that F. does not get up till after noon at least, except on Sundays when she doesn’t come.”²⁸

Progress was slow. In mid-December Mrs. Lake reported to Dr. Lovett that Franklin

feels his legs growing stronger all the time. He is perfectly satisfied to remain as he is now and not get up on crutches as he says he has plenty of occupations for his mind, everything is going well in the city, and he would rather strengthen his legs this way than try to get up too soon.

He is a wonderful patient, very cheerful, and works awfully hard and tries every suggestion one makes. He has certainly improved since he started the board which he insists on calling “the morgue!”²⁹

FDR did his utmost to reassure his children, displaying his withered legs and reciting the anatomical names of the muscles affected. “How we loved to talk about Pa’s gluteus maximus,” James recalled.³⁰ When Christmas came, Franklin presided as always, carving the turkey and reading Dickens’s Christmas Carol. He could no longer trim the tree himself but supervised every detail. “Father was a perfectionist,” said one of the children. “Though fear of fire was his only phobia, [he] insisted on decorating the tree with candles rather than electric bulbs.… I still don’t know how he did it, but Father kept us completely at ease. He cushioned the shock for us. He made it possible to participate in various festivities that Christmas without feeling any depression or guilt.”³¹

As was usually the case with the Roosevelts, the double town house on East Sixty-fifth Street was jammed to capacity. Franklin was ensconced in the large back bedroom on the second floor, the quietest in the house. Louis Howe, who had committed himself irrevocably to FDR’s fortunes, took the big front room, while the children filled the fourth floor and spilled over into Sara’s adjoining house. Live-in servants occupied the rooms on the fifth and sixth floors under the roof. Eleanor slept on a cot in young Elliott’s room and dressed in her husband’s bathroom. “In the daytime I was too busy to need a room for myself,” she recalled.³²

By this time, Eleanor had become fiercely attached to Louis Howe. “She had called for help and Louis came,” said Frances Perkins. “I know that Mrs. Roosevelt loved Louis Howe. She loved him the way you love a person who has stood by you in the midst of the valley of the shadow and not been afraid of anything.”³³

Howe was downtown at Fidelity & Deposit most of the day attending to Franklin’s business. But he took breakfast with the family and spent most of his time at the table reading the dozen or so newspapers he consumed daily. “He read more newspapers than any human being I’ve ever known,” Eleanor said.³⁴

From the beginning, ER and Howe agreed that insofar as possible Franklin should not be treated as an invalid. Louis maintained that FDR’s political future was bright and downplayed the seriousness of his illness. He planted optimistic stories with the press and wrote cheery letters to Roosevelt’s wide circle of correspondents.

“Do you really believe that Franklin has a political future?” asked Eleanor.

“I believe someday Franklin will be President,” Howe replied.³⁵

Eleanor supported Howe in every way. She ushered a continuous stream of visitors in to see Franklin and soon undertook speaking engagements on his behalf. She joined Howe in urging FDR to persevere in his exercises—perhaps a little more sternly than Roosevelt might have desired. Howe was better at cajoling Franklin because he had a lighter touch, interspersing gossipy anecdotes among his exhortations to get on with the job.

Sara took a different view. Instead of resuming public life, she felt Franklin should retire to the pastoral comfort of Hyde Park and settle into the graceful life of an invalid country squire, much as Mr. James had done. There was no need to earn a living—Sara’s share of the Delano fortune ensured that—and Franklin could pursue the hobbies and bucolic interests of which he was so fond.

A struggle of wills ensued. “This was the most trying winter of my entire life,” Eleanor remembered.³⁶ She and Howe worked to keep Franklin focused on recovery; Sara just as resolutely decried their efforts and sought to convince her son to follow the path his father had chosen. “My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet. This made the discussions about his care somewhat acrimonious on occasion.”³⁷

Dr. Draper sided with Eleanor and Howe and thought it best for FDR to make every effort to resume a normal life.^* Most important, so too did Franklin. As Sara noted laconically, “Franklin had no intention of conforming to my quiet ideas for his future existence.”³⁸ Out of courtesy he offered to resign as vice president of Fidelity & Deposit, but Van Lear Black refused to consider it. Howe kept on top of the work for FDR, and Black was far more interested in retaining the Roosevelt name and the connections associated with it than in Franklin’s physical presence at the office. FDR retained his position on the boards of various charitable organizations, including the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and the Boy Scouts, and with the help of Howe and Missy LeHand kept up a constant correspondence with Democratic leaders about the party’s future.

In March FDR was fitted with steel braces that weighed fourteen pounds and ran from his heels to above his hips. After seven months in bed, Franklin’s ability to balance had vanished, and it required the assistance of all hands just to get him to his feet. Since his hips were paralyzed, he was incapable of moving his legs individually and was taught to pivot forward on his crutches, using his head and upper body for leverage. Despite the constant danger of falling, FDR rejoiced at being on his feet and able to move under his own power. “I am indeed delighted to hear you are getting well so fast and so confidently,” Woodrow Wilson wrote on April 30. “I shall try and be generous enough not to envy you,” said the former president, now confined to a wheelchair at his S Street home in Washington.³⁹

Dr. Draper’s progress report to Dr. Lovett was guarded. Franklin “was walking quite successfully and seems to be gaining power in the hip muscles. The quadriceps are coming back a little, but they are nothing to brag of yet. Below the knee I must say it looks rather hopeless.” When Dr. Draper said FDR was walking, he simply meant he was capable of moving forward on crutches wearing his braces. There was no suggestion that he would ever walk normally.⁴⁰

When summer came, Franklin was moved to Hyde Park, where it was cooler and he would have easier access to the outdoors. Sara installed ramps (“inclined planes,” she called them) and removed all the thresholds so her son’s wheelchair could roll smoothly.^* The old trunk elevator, operated by rope pulleys and designed to move heavy trunks to the attic, made it possible for FDR to move easily from floor to floor. He resisted having it electrified, believing a power failure would leave him trapped, whereas he could always manipulate the ropes manually. “Mr. Roosevelt seems to be cheerful and I should say that he has gained considerably in the tricks of handling himself,” Dr. Draper reported. “There is no question but that the change of scene has had a very beneficial effect … and I look forward to the continued stretch of quiet at Hyde Park with great hopefulness.”⁴¹

FDR’s routine rarely varied. He slept late, breakfasted on a tray sent to his room, and worked out on a set of rings mounted over his bed. Three days a week Mrs. Lake came to oversee his exercises, after which he went downstairs and was pushed out onto the porch, where he read and worked on his stamp collection. He swam in Vincent Astor’s heated pool in Rhinebeck and exercised with parallel bars on the lawn. Progress remained slow. “I think it is very important for you to do all the walking that you can within your limit of fatigue,” wrote Dr. Lovett on August 14. “Walking on crutches is not a gift, but an art, acquired by constant practice just as any other game, and you will have to put in quite a little time before you get about satisfactorily.”⁴² Franklin devoted his afternoons to struggling up the gravel driveway to the Albany Post Road, awkwardly pushing his braces, his hips swiveling, his crutches working, as he inched ahead, a little farther each day until he reached the brownstone gateposts a quarter mile away. At the end of the summer he reported to Dr. Lovett, “I have faithfully followed out the walking and am really getting so that both legs take it quite naturally, and I can stay on my feet for an hour without feeling tired.”⁴³

Franklin saw the bright side. His daughter, Anna, back from a summer in Europe, was aghast at the effort FDR put in. “It’s a bit traumatic,” she noted, “to see your father, who took long walks with you, sailed with you, could out-jump you, and suddenly you look up and you see him walking on crutches—trying, 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.’ ”⁴⁴

As FDR convalesced, the New York Democratic party once again found itself in disarray. The GOP occupied the governor’s mansion, and all bets for the November election were off. William Randolph Hearst, the flamboyant publisher of the New York Americanand Evening Journal, had begun corralling delegates for the Democratic nomination and appeared to have a clear track unless Al Smith could be coaxed back from private life. Following his defeat in 1920, Smith had found safe haven as chairman of the United States Trucking Corporation, a largely symbolic position that paid the princely salary of $50,000 a year. That, plus the sizable fees he earned as a director of other firms, made Smith reluctant to run again. But Smith loathed Hearst. He soon agreed with party leaders that the maverick publisher did not have a chance of prevailing in the general election and would likely pull the entire ticket down with him. To save the party, Smith privately agreed to run. And to get the ball rolling he asked Franklin, as the most prominent upstate Democrat, to issue a public appeal for him to do so.

Delighted to be called on, if only to play a symbolic role, FDR wrote a “Dear Al” open letter on August 13. “The Democratic party must put its best foot forward,” he told Smith. “I am taking it upon myself to appeal to you in the name of countless citizens of upstate New York. You represent the type of citizen the voters of this state want to vote for for Governor. We realize that years of public service make it most desirable that you think now of your family’s needs. I am in the same boat myself—yet this call for further service must come first.”⁴⁵

The letter was front-page news throughout the state. So too was Smith’s “Dear Frank” reply. The former governor agreed to accept the party’s call. Hearst saw the handwriting on the wall and immediately withdrew.⁴⁶

AL NOMINATED WITH GREAT ENTHUSIASM, Howe wired FDR from the Democratic convention in Syracuse. MORGENTHAU [Henry Morgenthau, Jr.] AND YOUR MISSUS LED THE DUTCHESS DELEGATION WITH THE BANNER THREE TIMES AROUND THE HALL.⁴⁷

Smith shared Howe’s elation. “Everything went along first rate,” he wrote Franklin. “I had quite a session with our lady politicians as Mrs. Roosevelt no doubt told you. I was delighted to see her taking an active part and I am really sorry that you could not be there, but take care of yourself—there is another day coming.”⁴⁸

Eleanor was now committed to the Democratic party. At Louis Howe’s urging, she had broadened her nonpartisan attachment to the League of Women Voters to include active participation in mainstream politics. As Howe put it, Eleanor “had to become actively involved in Democratic politics in order to keep alive Franklin’s interest in the party and the party’s interest in him.”⁴⁹ In June 1922, when Nancy Cook of the New York State Democratic Committee asked her to address a fund-raising luncheon, she dutifully accepted despite her terror of speaking in public. “I trembled so that I did not know whether I could stand up,” Eleanor wrote later. “I am quite sure my voice could not be heard.”⁵⁰ Evidently ER exceeded her expectations: she was immediately asked to chair the finance committee of the Women’s Division of the party and later edited the Women’s Democratic News.

Nancy Cook and Eleanor became fast friends almost immediately, and through Nancy, ER soon met Marion Dickerman, the first woman to run for legislative office in New York. Cook and Miss Dickerman had been partners since their days as graduate students at Syracuse in 1909 and shared an apartment in Greenwich Village. Ardent feminists and committed pacifists, they had served as Red Cross volunteers at a London hospital during the war. After the war ended, Cook managed Dickerman’s campaign for the legislature.⁵¹

Cook was short, athletic, and excitable, with close-cropped hair and expressive brown eyes. One biographer described her as “dashing and roguish, flirtatious and irreverent.” Dickerman, by contrast, was tall, calm, steady, and soft-spoken—a woman of “rhythmic regularity.”⁵² When ER met them, Dickerman was dean of New Jersey State College in Trenton and taught English at Bryn Mawr during the summer; Cook was assistant director of the women’s division of and an indefatigable organizer for the New York Democratic party. Eleanor, who sometimes lamented her lack of a university education, rejoiced in the company of these professional women. During the next dozen years, she, Nancy, and Marion would become almost inseparable.⁵³

At Franklin’s urging, Eleanor devoted as much time to Dutchess County politics as to her work with the state committee. FDR recognized that an upstate Democrat had to secure his base if he were to be effective statewide. He also believed that the dismal showing of the Democratic party upstate was the result of poor organization and neglect.⁵⁴ Franklin directed the local effort from his sitting room at Hyde Park, and Eleanor and Howe became his eager lieutenants.^* ER recruited several friends and set out to organize and register the women in the county. She spoke frequently to various civic groups. Initially, Howe accompanied her, sat in the back of the hall, and monitored her performance. When her hands shook, he told her to grip the lectern; when she felt nervous, he told her to breathe deeply. Howe was especially critical of ER’s penchant to giggle inappropriately. It sent the wrong message. His advice was terse: “Have something to say. Say it. And sit down.”⁵⁵

In the autumn, Franklin returned to the city. “I am just back in New York after a very successful summer at Hyde Park,” he wrote defeated presidential candidate James Cox, now titular head of the Democratic party. “The combination of warm weather, fresh air and swimming has done me a world of good.” To his friend and sometime hunting companion Richard E. Byrd he wrote, “By next autumn I will be ready to chase the nimble moose with you.” To General Leonard Wood he boasted that his leg muscles “were all coming back.”⁵⁶

ON OCTOBER 9, after an absence of fifteen months, FDR returned to the offices of Fidelity & Deposit on Lower Broadway. Franklin was determined to walk from the car across the sidewalk, in the front door, and through the lobby to the bank of elevators at the far end. As he heaved himself across the sidewalk, his chauffeur at his side, a crowd of passersby gathered to watch. Someone opened the door. Others stood aside to let him through. Drenched in sweat, Roosevelt began to crutch himself across the highly polished floor of the marble lobby. Suddenly his left foot gave way and he began to fall. The chauffeur reached out but was unable to hold him. Franklin crashed flat on the marble, his crutches clattering down beside him. Onlookers rushed in, then drew back, uncertain what to do.

With an enormous effort Roosevelt wrestled himself into a sitting position. He laughed reassuringly. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he told anxious spectators. “We’ll get out of this all right. Give me a hand there.” Two muscular young men stepped forward and with the help of the chauffeur lifted Franklin to his feet. His crutches were restored and his hat was replaced on his head. “Let’s go,” he said. The spectators opened a path and watched breathlessly as FDR hauled himself across the marble floor, smiling and nodding, one laborious step after another, his knuckles white on the handles of his crutches.⁵⁷

Describing the day to his friend Livingston Davis, Franklin said only that he’d had a “Grand reception at 120 Broadway where I lunched and spent 4–5 hours.”⁵⁸ In the future, FDR allowed himself to be whisked in by wheelchair. He initially came two days a week, then three, then four. But Roosevelt did not return to his law firm. “The partners are dear, delightful people,” he wrote Van Lear Black, “but their type of law business is mostly estates, wills, etc., all of which bore me to death.” Instead, Franklin decided to organize a new firm “with my name at the head instead of at the tail as it is now.”^* This, he told Black, would benefit F & D, “as our connections would be the type of corporations which would help in the bonding end of the game.”⁵⁹

One of the men who helped pull Franklin to his feet in the lobby at 120 Broadway was Basil O’Connor, a young red-haired attorney whose office was next door to Fidelity & Deposit. A live-wire graduate of Dartmouth (voted “most likely to succeed” by his classmates) and the Harvard Law School, O’Connor was exactly the type of energetic partner FDR was looking for. He had developed a successful one-man practice handling a variety of international clients in the oil and gas industry and thought nothing of working fifteen-hour days for weeks at a time.

The two men hit it off instantly. Franklin respected O’Connor’s aggressiveness and dedication; O’Connor admired the way Roosevelt handled his affliction—his grace under pressure—and saw the advantages that would flow from identifying himself with so illustrious a name. They agreed to form a partnership. The firm would be called “Roosevelt & O’Connor.”⁶⁰ FDR would be the front man and provide “general legal advice” at a salary of $10,000 a year. O’Connor would do the work.

As with Louis Howe, it was a case of opposites attracting each other. O’Connor’s father had been an impoverished tinsmith in Taunton, Massachusetts, and Basil had worked his way through Dartmouth playing violin in a dance orchestra. He and FDR became lifelong friends, and their partnership endured until Roosevelt’s death. The president often used O’Connor to transmit messages he did not wish to entrust to political associates—a confidential conduit he knew he could rely on. The fact that during the 1920s their law office was adjacent to Fidelity & Deposit made it easy for Franklin to dovetail both callings.

FDR kept close watch on the Democratic political scene. In December 1922 he counseled against the search for a charismatic figure to lead the party out of the wilderness. “Personal candidacies so rarely develop into anything tangible,” he wrote Byron R. Newton of the New York Herald.“In our own Party for the last 50 or 60 years the nomination for the Presidency has been nearly every time a matter of luck, or some eleventh hour opportunity boldly seized upon.” What was important, said Roosevelt, was “to make the nation understand again that Republican rule means government by selfish interests and powerfully entrenched individuals.”⁶¹

Friends and acquaintances bombarded FDR with home remedies. In February 1923 an old friend in England sent a new elixir that she was certain would effect a cure. “It may be monkey glands or perhaps it is made out of the dried eyes of the extinct three-toed rhinoceros,” Franklin wrote Dr. Draper. “You doctors have sure got imaginations. Have any of you thought of distilling the remains of King Tut-Ankh-Amen? The serum might put new life into some of our mutual friends. In the meantime, I am going to Florida to let nature take its course—nothing like Old Mother Nature anyway.”⁶²

Roosevelt rented a sixty-foot houseboat, the Weona II, for $1,500 and planned to spend several months cruising off the Florida Keys. Eleanor accompanied him for the first few days but did not enjoy herself and returned to New York. “I had never considered holidays in winter or escape from cold weather an essential part of living,” she remembered. “I tried fishing but had no skill and no luck. When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all seemed eerie and menacing to me.”⁶³

Franklin, on the other hand, had a rollicking good time. Old friends came down to visit—Livingston Davis; Lewis Cass Ledyard, Jr., and his wife, Ruth; Henry and Frances De Rahm; and John Lawrence and his wife, Lucy. Ledyard had been an intimate friend of FDR since their clerkship days at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn; De Rahm was a Harvard classmate, and Frances, née Dana, had been one of Franklin’s early heartthrobs; Lawrence, another classmate, was now a prosperous New England wool manufacturer.

Except for Franklin, the men began each day with a swim au naturel. Frances De Rahm evidently went skinny-dipping too on occasion. As she jauntily wrote in the ship’s log:

A female went swimming—she was far from a peach.

She was as the Lord made her, so what could she do

But call herself, gaily, a true 32.

Louis Howe brought down some paperwork that needed FDR’s attention and spent a few days on board. Like Eleanor, he had little luck fishing; unlike ER, he gladly took refuge in the illicit rum that flowed freely. As Howe put it:

Colder, colder grew the night, we really suffered pain.

We’d sat and sat with rod and reel and fished and fished in vain.

And that we thought was reason fair to take to rum again.

In Miami, former presidential candidate James Cox came aboard for a visit. “Jim’s eyes filled with tears when he saw me,” FDR recalled years later. “I gathered from his conversation that he was dead certain that I had had a stroke and that another one would completely remove me. From that day on Jim always shook his head when my name was mentioned and said in sorrow that I was a hopeless invalid.”⁶⁴

Cox to the contrary, the voyage worked wonders for Franklin’s morale. “I am sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good,” he wrote his mother on March 15. “I am sunburned and in fine shape. My friends have been dear and look after me all the time. They are great fun to have on board in this somewhat negligée existence. All wander round in pyjamas, nighties and bathing suits.”⁶⁵ When the cruise ended at the end of March, FDR felt that his legs had improved so markedly that he might soon walk simply with a cane or crutches. “Except for the braces, I’ve never felt better in my life,” he wrote Virginia senator Carter Glass.⁶⁶

Kathleen Lake, Franklin’s physical therapist, examined him shortly after he returned and found him “immensely improved, looking at least ten years younger.” But the improvement was short-lived. The hectic pace of FDR’s life in New York soon wiped out the gains from the Florida trip. “If only his wife could be persuaded that he does not need urging on all day and entertaining all evening,” Mrs. Lake wrote Dr. Lovett. “He himself begins to understand how the city affects him … but he is so surrounded by family, all giving him advice and ordering him round that he gets quite desperate.”⁶⁷

In May 1923 FDR traveled to Boston for a final examination by Dr. Lovett. The doctor told Eleanor he was satisfied that Franklin “handles himself better than he ever had” but there was no improvement in his condition. His arms and neck were normal. So were his bowel, bladder, and sexual functions. Yet he remained paralyzed from the waist down. He was unable to flex his hips; there was no motion in his hamstrings and very little in his toes.⁶⁸ Six months later Dr. Draper confirmed Lovett’s diagnosis. “I am very much disheartened about his ultimate recovery,” wrote Draper. “I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limit of his possibilities. I only hope that I may be wrong on this.”⁶⁹ FDR refused to accept the medical judgments as final. He continued to search for miracle cures, devoting himself increasingly to swimming and exercise, but other than improving his ability to get around, his efforts effected no change in his condition.

Roosevelt believed that cruising the warm waters of the Florida Keys held the secret to recovery. “The water got me into this fix,” he was fond of saying, “and the water will get me out.”⁷⁰ Shortly after returning from his 1923 trip, he convinced John Lawrence to join him in purchasing a secondhand houseboat, the Roamer, for which they paid $3,750. They renamed it the Larooco—a contraction of Lawrence, Roosevelt, and Company—and planned to sail off the Florida coast each winter.

FDR went aboard for the first time on February 11, 1924. The Larooco was seventy-one feet long and according to John Lawrence looked like a floating tenement. The paint was peeling, the bulkheads leaked when it rained, and power was provided by two recalcitrant 35-horsepower engines that looked as though they might have been invented by Robert Fulton. “A great little packet,” Roosevelt proclaimed, believing that the boat simply suffered from “lots of bad luck.”⁷¹

Franklin’s stateroom, with an adjacent bath, was on the port side. Across a narrow passageway were two smaller cabins for guests, each with two beds. On the deck above was a large stateroom that doubled as wheelhouse. Above that was a broad deck, shaded by a ragged canopy. The ship’s crew consisted of an elderly couple from Connecticut, Robert and Dora Morris, who were paid $125 a month. Robert Morris sailed the ship; Dora did the cooking and housekeeping. They were assisted by George Dyer, a young mechanic who labored to keep the engines running.⁷²

Before FDR went south, Louis Howe presented him with an elegant black leather logbook embossed in gold letters: “Log of the Houseboat Larooco, Being a More or Less Truthful Account of What Happened (Expurgated for the Very Young).” It was dedicated to St. Ananias and St. Sapphira, “the patron saints of liars and fishermen.” Not to be outdone, Livingston Davis sent Franklin his old ensign as assistant secretary of the Navy. “A million thanks for the old astnav flag,” Roosevelt replied. “I will take it south with me and some day … ‘hist’ the old rag to the mast-head and salute it with 17 rum swizzles.”^73*

Franklin was accompanied on that first voyage by his Negro valet, LeRoy Jones, and Missy LeHand. Jones played a vital but unsung role in FDR’s life. He woke him in the morning, bathed him, dressed him, and took care of his most basic needs—a gentle caregiver without whom Roosevelt could not have functioned. Missy was FDR’s personal secretary and already a member of the family. She was totally devoted to the Roosevelts and they to her.

Marguerite A. LeHand, twenty-five in the winter of 1924, stood five feet, seven inches tall. She was warm and attractive, with ink-blue eyes, black hair already turning gray, and an engaging, throaty voice. She was also modest, well mannered, exceptionally capable, and thoroughly organized—“a compound of cunning and innocence forever baffling,” in the words of the author and editor Fulton Oursler. A native of Potsdam, New York, Missy had grown up in Somerville, Massachusetts, the third child of an Irish gardener. It was at Eleanor’s suggestion in 1921 that she left her employment with the Democratic National Committee to work full-time for FDR, clearing up his correspondence after the vice presidential race. In the three years since, she had become indispensable, not only managing Roosevelt’s office, screening his visitors, and keeping track of his varied interests but doing so with such charm and courtesy that even those turned away felt placated. In New York, she stayed with a relative on the East Side so she could reach the Roosevelt home at any hour and became almost as ubiquitous as Louis Howe.⁷⁴

Missy often accompanied FDR to Hyde Park for working weekends, and over the years she allowed her life to be taken over by his, assuming his likes and dislikes, his favorite drinks and games, even his turns of phrase. She called him “F.D.”—a name no one else dared use—and, like Louis Howe, she always leveled with him and said exactly what she thought. “She was one of the very, very few people who was not a yes-man,” remembered Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. “She told [the president] not what she knew he wanted to hear, but what were, in fact, her true views and convictions.”⁷⁵

What is most remarkable is that Eleanor was completely supportive and solicitous of Missy. As her friend and biographer, Joseph Lash, noted, ER “was grateful to the young woman. She knew that lack of mobility made the daily routines of life cumbersome and difficult for Franklin, and Missy’s presence freed him from housekeeping anxieties and enabled him to stay in touch with the political world through a vast political correspondence, while it eased Eleanor’s sense of guilt because she was unable to do more for him.”⁷⁶

Aboard the Larooco, Missy served as combination hostess and secretary, doing her utmost to ensure Franklin enjoyed himself. That was not always easy. “There were days on the Larooco when it was noon before he could pull himself out of depression and greet his guests wearing his lighthearted façade,” she tearfully told Frances Perkins many years later.⁷⁷ Missy entertained graciously, encouraged FDR to tell his favorite stories, went fishing with him—though she sunburned easily—and was accepted naturally by Roosevelt’s many acquaintances. Once that spring she was called away suddenly by the death of her father and was gone almost two weeks. When Missy returned, Eleanor wrote Franklin, “I haven’t told Mama that Missy is back because she has more peace of mind when she doesn’t know such things.”⁷⁸

It was a unique arrangement.^* Franklin, Missy, and LeRoy Jones went back again to the Larooco in the spring of 1925 and again in 1926, after which FDR decided he had had enough. “The sharks make it impossible to play around in the deep water for any length of time, and the sand beaches are few and far between.”⁷⁹ After the 1926 cruise, Larooco was laid up at the Pilkington Yacht Basin on the Fort Lauderdale River while Roosevelt and Lawrence attempted to sell her. A September hurricane swept the boat upriver, where it came to rest high and dry at the edge of a pine forest, a mile from the nearest water. FDR tried to sell the boat as a hunting lodge, but there were no takers, and in 1927 Larooco was scrapped. “So ended a good craft with a personality,” he wrote Sara.⁸⁰

Franklin went back to New York toward the end of April 1924. The presidential campaign was heating up, and Al Smith, fresh from his overwhelming reelection as governor, was angling for the Democratic nomination. His principal opponent was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law (and former secretary of the Treasury) William Gibbs McAdoo. McAdoo was dry, Protestant, and old-stock American. Because of his support for Prohibition he enjoyed the support of Bryan and the rural wing of the party and had become the darling of the Ku Klux Klan, a potent force in national politics following the Red Scare of 1919–20.^† Smith was none of the above. Almost by default he became the candidate of the urban, progressive wing of the party, and FDR announced his support early on. “I have always supposed that if I went to the next Convention I would, in common with the rest of the [New York] delegation, be for Al,” he told the New York Post in January.

The 1924 convention would be held in New York City—a powerful advantage for Smith—and Charles Murphy was calling the shots for the campaign, another advantage given Tammany’s preeminence among the big-city organizations in the Democratic party. But on April 25, 1924, Murphy suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving the Smith campaign leaderless. “New York has lost its most powerful and wisest leader,” said FDR in a prepared statement released to the press by Louis Howe.⁸¹

Two days later, two of Al Smith’s closest advisers, Belle Moskowitz and New York Supreme Court justice Joseph Proskauer, called on Roosevelt at East Sixty-fifth Street. The Smith campaign needed a chairman, they said: someone with national standing, preferably Protestant, preferably dry (or at least not publicly identified as wet) who could appeal to the rural, dry, Protestant element in the party. FDR, they said, would be ideal. Would he take the job?

Roosevelt initially demurred. His disability would prevent him from dashing about from meeting to meeting as might be expected of a campaign chairman. Moskowitz and Proskauer assured him that would not be necessary. They would do the work for him. What they wanted was Franklin’s name and support.

Roosevelt accepted the position on those terms. Press coverage was generous. “What the campaign lost in practical political ability through the death of Murphy, it has now compensated for in prestige and principles,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune.⁸²

Back in the political spotlight, FDR worked diligently on Smith’s behalf. In so doing he helped eradicate the taint of anti-Catholicism that had clung to him since his fight against Blue-Eyed Billy Sheehan. As one historian put it, Roosevelt’s new list of political correspondents “read like a sampling of the Dublin telephone directory.”⁸³ FDR attempted to lessen the bitterness between Smith and McAdoo supporters but with little success. Smith was demonized by McAdoo’s backers because of his religion and opposition to Prohibition; McAdoo was castigated for his dependence on the Ku Klux Klan. As Franklin saw it, the personal vilification obscured the basic differences between Democrats and Republicans and virtually assured that Coolidge would be reelected in November.

Roosevelt sought support for Smith among Florida fishermen, middle western farmers, and Pennsylvania coal miners. Even Babe Ruth was mobilized in the cause. “Sure, I’m for Al Smith,” the Bambino wrote FDR.

There is one thing about your letter, Mr. Roosevelt, that went across with me good and strong—that was the take about the humble beginning of Governor Smith.

Maybe you know I wasn’t fed with a gold spoon when I was a kid. No poor boy can go any too high in this world to suit me.⁸⁴

The death of Charles Murphy had allowed FDR to reenter public life as chairman of the Smith campaign. And it was the death of a second Tammany stalwart that catapulted Franklin to the center of the political stage. Smith had originally counted upon Bourke Cockran, the legendary Irish orator who had nominated him at San Francisco four years earlier, to do the job again. But Cockran had died the year before, and Smith had yet to name a replacement. On the eve of the convention, the governor asked Judge Proskauer for advice. “Who ought to put me in nomination?”

Proskauer reflected a moment and said, “Frank Roosevelt.”

“For God’s sake why?” Smith asked.

“Because you’re a Bowery mick and he’s a Protestant patrician and he’d take some of the curse off you.”⁸⁵

Smith nodded his head, and the two men walked over to see FDR at campaign headquarters. “Joe and I have been talking this over, and I’ve come here to ask you to make the nominating speech,” Smith said.

“Oh, Al, I’d love to do it, but I’m so busy here working with delegates I have no time to write a speech.” Could Joe write it? Roosevelt asked. The fact was, Proskauer had already prepared a draft, concluding with a paraphrase of William Wordsworth’s encomium to the “Happy Warrior.” FDR thought the reference too poetic for the ordinary delegate on the floor but under the pressure of time agreed to deliver it. “It will probably be a flop,” he told Proskauer.⁸⁶

The Democratic convention convened in Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden on June 24, 1924, for what would prove the longest convention on record. With 1,098 delegates, and 732 votes required to nominate under the party’s two-thirds rule, the Democrats met for an unprecedented seventeen days and required 103 ballots before settling on West Virginia’s John W. Davis, a prominent Wall Street lawyer, as the most viable compromise between Smith and McAdoo. The 1924 convention was also the first covered by national radio and broadcast live across the country.⁸⁷

FDR was in his seat as chairman of the New York delegation when the opening gavel fell on June 24, and he attended every session thereafter. His arrival each day was carefully planned. He was driven to a side entrance of the Garden and wheeled inside by his sixteen-year-old son, James. When they reached the door to the hall closest to the New York delegation, James would lock his father’s braces and pull him to a standing position so he could enter the convention floor on his feet. FDR would then grasp his son’s upper arm with his left hand, place most of his weight on the crutch under his right arm, and ratchet himself forward one halting step at a time.

To make the passage up the aisle as easy as possible, the Roosevelts arrived early and left late. “So as not to scare everyone to death,” as FDR put it, he and James joked and bantered as they made their way along. “The process of getting into his seat was an ordeal for Father,” James recalled. “We practiced the awkward business standing together by a chair, with me supporting him and taking his crutch as he lowered himself into his chair. Once he was seated, it was my task to stand by, run errands, deliver messages, and help Father off the floor when he wanted to leave.”⁸⁸

The galleries, stuffed with Tammany supporters, recognized FDR and regularly broke into applause as he made his perilous way down the aisle each day. Over the radio, a national audience could hear the applause as the announcer intoned, “I don’t know what it is, but I rather imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt is coming in. He always gets a hand for the gallant fight he is making.… Yes, it is. There he comes slowly down the aisle on his crutches.”⁸⁹

Roosevelt was scheduled to speak at twelve noon on Thursday, June 26. Waiting expectantly in the gallery were Sara, Eleanor, and the four other children, plus Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, who joined the family for the occasion. Dickerman recalled how carefully Franklin had prepared himself: “Nobody knows how that man worked. They measured off in the library of the Sixty-fifth Street house the distance to the podium, and he practiced getting across that distance. Oh, he struggled.”⁹⁰

Shortly before noon Franklin and James left their seats on the floor and made their slow, awkward way up the aisle. “Outwardly, [Father] was beaming, seemingly confident and unconcerned, but I could sense his inner tenseness,” James recalled. “His fingers dug into my arms like pincers. His face was covered with perspiration.”⁹¹

Finally, they reached the platform. As FDR was introduced, he called out in a stage whisper to Pennsylvania’s Joseph Guffey, who stood nearby: “Joe, shake the rostrum.” Guffey evidently did not understand, and Roosevelt repeated his request: he wanted to be certain the speaker’s stand would support him when he leaned against it. Guffey tested and reported it was firm.

Then came the moment when FDR would have to walk alone: the moment he had been practicing for. James handed him his second crutch, and he began moving slowly toward the podium unassisted. Marion Dickerman held her breath and prayed. “It seemed like an hour,” she remembered. Frances Perkins, sitting near the platform, recalled that no one in the Garden seemed to breathe. Eight thousand delegates, alternates, and spectators watched spellbound as FDR fought his way across the stage, the personification of courage, defying pain with every forward thrust of his heavily braced legs.

When he finally reached the podium, unable to wave for fear of falling but flashing that famous smile, head thrown back, shoulders high, the Garden erupted with a thunderous ovation. Delegates rose to their feet and cheered for three minutes, admiration tinged with awe at the dramatic performance they had witnessed.

Roosevelt spoke for thirty-four minutes. His resonant tenor rang through the Garden with a new and telling passion, interrupted frequently by sustained cheering and applause. When he reached his peroration, his lilting cadence very nearly sang the phrases:

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. Smith⁹²

Pandemonium. “The crowd just went crazy,” said Marion Dickerman. “It was stupendous, really stupendous.”⁹³ The New York Times called FDR the outstanding personality of the convention. The Herald Tribune hailed him as “the foremost figure on floor or platform.” Tom Pendergast, the no-nonsense head of the Missouri delegation, thought that if Franklin “had been physically able to withstand the campaign, he would have been nominated by acclamation.”⁹⁴

Roosevelt’s speech set off a demonstration that lasted more than an hour, delegates parading, galleries cheering, the Garden reverberating with chorus after chorus of Smith’s anthem, “The Sidewalks of New York.”

Franklin remained on his feet, glued to the rostrum. No one had considered how he was to exit. “I saw all around him all those fat slob politicians,” said Frances Perkins, “and I knew they wouldn’t think of it.” She enlisted the woman beside her, and they rushed onstage to stand in front of FDR and shield him from view as he turned to leave. As the cheering continued, Roosevelt finally permitted James to bring his wheelchair to the rear of the platform so that he could ease himself into it and be wheeled offstage.⁹⁵

That evening the Roosevelts gave a reception for the New York delegation at their Sixty-fifth Street home. Marion Dickerman went early to see if she could help Eleanor with the preparations. When she arrived, the butler told her Mr. Roosevelt was upstairs and wished to see her. “He was sitting upright in his bed and obviously was very tired. But his face lit up and he held out his arms.”

“Marion,” he said, “I did it.”⁹⁶

^* Moving the Roosevelt household from New York to Campobello each year was a logistical operation of considerable proportions, often involving as many as a dozen express crates, thirty or so barrels and trunks, plus a vast assortment of hand luggage. As described by FDR’s son James, “First, we would proceed from New York to Boston by train—six hours if we were lucky. We would arrive in Boston in mid-afternoon and go to a certain old-fashioned hotel to rest until train time.… [U]sually we took the 11 p.m. sleeper, arriving next morning at Ayers Junction, Maine. There we would change to an antique train—a real museum piece—and ride to Eastport [Maine]. We would reach Eastport at noon, then transfer to a carriage, which would take us to the dock. If the tide was right, we could get off fairly quickly; if not, we had to wait to board the ‘chug-chug’ that took us to Campobello. We switched there to a rowboat, which took us to our own pier. Those mountains of baggage, boxes, and trunks, which had been shipped by express, came across separately on a larger ferry and were brought by horse-drawn dray to the house on Campobello.” James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 138 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959).

^* For his services, Dr. Keen sent ER a bill for $600, which, converted to today’s dollars, would be the equivalent of $6,000. ER to James Roosevelt Roosevelt, August 18, 1921. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 414, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).

^* Writing in the Journal of Medical Biography in October 2003, Dr. Armond Goldman of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston suggested that FDR might have suffered from Guillian-Barré syndrome (also known as acute ascending polyneuritis), not polio. “No one can be absolutely sure of the cause of Roosevelt’s paralysis because relevant laboratory diagnostic studies were not performed or were not available at the time of his illness,” Goldman said. Whatever the diagnosis, it would have made no difference since there were no effective treatments for either disease in 1921. Armond S. Goldman, Elisabeth J. Schmalstieg, Daniel H. Freeman, Jr., Daniel A. Goldman, and Frank C. Schmalstieg, Jr., “What Was the Cause of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Paralytic Illness?” 11 Journal of Medical Biography 232–240 (2003).

^* Years later, Dr. Draper told his sister, Alice Carter, that if it had not been for Eleanor and Louis Howe, FDR “would have really become an invalid.” Joseph P. Lash, interview with Alice Carter, cited in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 276 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).

^* FDR soon designed his own wheelchair: an armless kitchen chair that was easy to slide onto, mounted on wheels, with a holder attached for his ashtray. He used this simple expedient for the remainder of his life.

^* The Democrats swept New York in 1922. Smith polled 55.2 percent of the vote—the largest plurality a gubernatorial candidate had ever received in the state—and carried the entire ticket to victory. In contrast to past years, the Democrats ran surprisingly well upstate. FDR called it “the reawakening of the Rip Van Winkle of upstate Democracy.” FDR to Smith, December 3, 1922, FDRL.

^* FDR’s former firm, Marvin, Hooker, & Roosevelt, had been established in 1911 with offices at 52 Wall Street. Other partners included Grenville Emmett and Albert de Roode, a classmate of FDR at Harvard. Franklin’s responsibility, as at Fidelity & Deposit, was to bring clients to the firm, but, as he told Black, “I get not one red cent out of my connection with them.” Remarkably, FDR’s withdrawal from the firm did not damage his friendship with any of the partners. “He was a very devoted and real friend,” said Langdon Marvin many years later. Langdon Marvin interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

^* Bermuda rum swizzles were a popular hot-weather drink in FDR’s time, Prohibition notwithstanding: two ounces dark rum, one ounce lime juice, one ounce pineapple juice, one ounce orange juice, and a generous dash of falernum. Shake with ice. Strain into a highball glass filled with ice. Garnish with a slice of orange and a cherry.

^* During the four-year period from 1925 to 1928, FDR spent 116 of 208 weeks away from home trying to regain his health. According to one biographer, “Eleanor was with him for four of those weeks, Sara for two, and Missy LeHand for 110. Thus Missy is the sole adult ‘member of the family’ to share an aggregate of more than two years of the most trying and self-searching four years of Roosevelt’s life.” Bernard Asbell, The F.D.R. Memoirs 244 (New York: Doubleday, 1973).

^† In an early showdown between McAdoo and Smith supporters, the 1924 Democratic convention narrowly rejected (542⁷⁄₂₀–543³⁄₂₀) a plank in the platform that would have condemned the Klan. It also rejected (353½–742½) a plank that called for immediate membership in the League of Nations and participation in the World Court.