BACK IN THE METROPOLIS, DOWN to the terrifying summer of 1921, she kept clearing a path. But to go where? As what?
“If I had to go out and earn my own living, I doubt if I’d even make a very good cleaning woman,” judged Eleanor. “I have no talents, no experience, no training for anything.”1
She tried cooking lessons, but what good was cooking to a lady with a cook? She sent James back to Groton, and Anna and Elliott to Granny at Hyde Park with a tutor, while she camped out at Sixty-Fifth Street, took a class in shorthand and typewriting, put the younger boys in East Side private schools, and brought them all together for weekends at Springwood with their busy father.
Cox’s burial at the polls had been his running mate’s ascension as a presumptive 1924 presidential candidate—certainly a likely New York governor with an unlimited future. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Franklin’s tribe rival for the chief executive’s mantle, had been seduced away to Harding’s loose and easy Washington as assistant secretary of the navy, leaving the former assistant secretary to dominate the largest state in the union from the new first city of the Western Hemisphere.2
Eleanor was expected to rejoin weekly ladies’ luncheons, reestablish her subscriptions, choose her charity boards.3 The Bryson Day Nursery, for example, one of Mama’s pet institutions, where for ten cents a day working women left their tots. Cousin Susie Parish had served as treasurer. “The Bryson” would be “the perfect opening,” declared Mama, citing Eleanor’s goodly ways and native decency toward such women—to say nothing of all the nice things she could do for Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Bacon to help organize this year’s rummage sale.4
“I don’t know how she escaped it,” remarked one friend.5
“Her first choice,” another friend later divulged, “was still to enter into her husband’s work.”6
But except when volunteering for his more progressive social causes, nurturing Franklin’s career always made her out to be staid and prudish. How was she to further her interests in things that mattered to both of them? In the arrogant, unregulated, and fearful America of the booming decade ahead, could she, by herself, commit to the out-of-fashion disciplines of international cooperation and world peace when Franklin was now, by his own boast, “one of the younger capitalists”?7
By day he headed the downtown office of Fidelity & Deposit, a Maryland-based surety and bonding company, the third largest in the country, with $500 million in annual risks. By night he flexed his muscles on the speaking circuit, spreading his essential animal joy and signature expression (“I love it!”) across five state committees, countless charity boards, civic enrichment groups, political clubs, the Harvard Board of Overseers, and capital drives for the Boy Scouts of America, the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Foundation, Lighthouse for the Blind, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Eleanor wondered aloud if he ever again intended to spend an evening at home.8 But it was her own intentions that remained unclear. She had no plan for her life, and no adult would have said a word had she stayed in bed every morning with a breakfast tray and done little more than give “Cook” the day’s order. She might then reply to a few letters before attending her board meeting and making final arrangements for a lively dinner party at which she would serve pre-Prohibition champagne for Franklin’s boss, a Delano-like coal industrialist turned Baltimore Sun owner, aviation explorer, and yachtsman; the flamboyant Van Lear Black thought Franklin Roosevelt the most attractive man he had ever met.
THE NEW YORK LEAGUE OF Women Voters came to her rescue. Chairwoman Narcissa Cox Vanderlip invited Eleanor to join the board and take charge of their committee on legislation. The position required following the twisty passage of congressional bills and obscure Albany measures in order to post League members on the pros and cons of legislation significant to women. She was restless to accept but worried that the League’s lawyer, Elizabeth Fisher Read, a legal scholar and practicing attorney who served as consultant to Eleanor’s committee, would resent her inexperience.9 The alternative was the Bryson rummage sale.
Eleanor gave a firm no to the day care,10 and when Mama responded by getting her invited to join a ladies’ circle that had been “sewing for the poor” since the first Grant administration, Eleanor cunningly became a member.11 She would never get Mama’s approval for any step toward her own independence, but she knew when to cut her losses, and by attending the Monday Sewing Circle’s monthly meeting, she released herself and her conscience from obligation to the woman she had spent fifteen years trying to please.
Her new mentor, a systematic legal thinker, had been trained at Smith College, Columbia University, and the law school of the University of Pennsylvania. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Read provided a weekly classroom for what Eleanor ever after described as “the intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt.” Far from condescending, Read treated Eleanor as a serious student of government, teaching her how to investigate baked-in problems that appeared to be beyond solution. Long past Eleanor’s first crack at congressional reporting, Read’s rigorous demands for weighing evidence and presenting precise documentation set standards for thoroughness and accuracy that remained professional benchmarks for life.12
Eleanor was thrilled when Lizzie invited her to East Eleventh Street for dinner with her life partner, the Barnard College journalism professor Esther Everett Lape. Their Village apartment, set in the leafy heart of American Bohemia, was a snug, scholarly place which the two intellectual powerhouses kept filled with cut flowers and “a kind of quiet gaiety that is more satisfactory,” decided Eleanor, “than the very hilarious kind I sometimes have about me.”13
Lizzie was short, practical, the calmer of the two. Esther was black-haired, with warm brown eyes, chic in her patterned-silk dresses and modish strings of pearls. She had a caring, critical nature that gave her “a kind of nervous power.”14 Together, they worked fiercely at co-editing the League’s legislative review, City-State-Nation, and were forever bringing urgent freelance projects to fruition. For Eleanor they prepared stylish dinners, sipped champagne, and savored her superb accent when they read French poetry aloud with the salad and cheese.
Lizzie and Esther spotted and nurtured Eleanor’s gift for action: her directness in taking the necessary steps to get done the things that others could only dither about.15 Unlike the women who had raised her—“the kind,” according to Edith Wharton, “who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their questions left unanswered”16—Eleanor was interested in activating information and seeking real answers. She reached for authority, imaginative engagement, commitment, responsibility: positions that had been conceded to women in the old social order, but only if they stayed home.
Validation from Lape and Read as “a woman who does things” helped Eleanor to see herself fitting into the rising tide of reformist energies.17 Still just an Uptown visitor—a kind of Sunday painter—she could come and go without fuss or arrangements, her confidences secure. Esther adopted herself as the closer mentor for Eleanor. They were nearer in age, and Eleanor could take—indeed, was hungry for—Esther’s bold, sharp judgments, the most constant being Eleanor’s caretaking of others at a cost to her own needs. “She always believed that whatever was left on her doorstep was her responsibility,” tut-tutted Esther. “Whatever came her way was hers to handle.”18
Lizzie argued that it was important to learn to discriminate between those who needed help and could make use of it and those whose need could never be filled. As for whether it was nobler to satisfy personal obligations or to work in the interest of bettering humanity, Lizzie declared for personal commitment: “You could work fifty years for a cause and find your life too dreary and barren to be endured.”19
Effectiveness—a pragmatic life of being effective—was the goal.
POWERFUL VOICES IN THE GREATER world of activist women briefly cut through the muddle of Eleanor’s underemployment. As a delegate to the League of Women Voters’ national convention in April, she scouted the talents of each speaker in Cleveland’s Masonic Hall, taking care to report her observations to Franklin in sharp, snappy thumbnails: Carrie Chapman Catt, the League’s white-haired leader, was “clear, cold reason”; Dorothy Kirchwey Brown, chair of the Child Welfare Committee: “Amusing, apt, graceful.” Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Texas suffragist, the League’s first executive secretary, and all-round force of nature: “Emotional and idealistic, but she made nearly everyone cry!”20
Cunningham’s core message, that in a democracy no citizen had the right to be a loafer, gave Eleanor permission to turn loose the drive she always seemed to have more of than anyone else.21
The selflessness and pure spirit of League leaders appealed deeply, as did the potent, world-remaking force of millions of new voters using their hard-won franchise to clean up corruption in politics, turn government away from war, and protect individual lives from the crushing excesses of industrial capitalism. When action needed taking on that scale, she had no use for stridency or self-pity—party and platform were the tools for transforming the system. Equality for women interested her, but winning elections interested her more. The message she really wanted to give women voters now that they had the ballot in their hands: Vote Democratic.
And so, with the old barriers that had confined women’s political activities crashing down around her, she closed that night’s letter to Franklin: “Much much love, dear, and I prefer doing my politics with you.”22
The next day, she met Edna Fischel Gellhorn, former Junior Leaguer, tireless campaigner for women’s suffrage, and the League’s first vice president. Gellhorn would become a frequent and generous collaborator with Eleanor in a sisterhood of causes;23 her daughter, Martha, the world-renowned war correspondent of the Second World War, and youngest son, Albert, an eminent oncologist, would both play critical roles in Eleanor’s far future. At the moment, Edna Gellhorn ignited the convention by parading the hall, brandishing banners at the head of the St. Louis delegation, proclaiming the power of women in nearly every one of Missouri’s 114 counties—a vital message, as the national membership rolls were lagging behind the League’s more populist predecessor, the Women’s Suffrage Association.
On the last day in the hall, Eleanor leapt to her feet to answer Carrie Chapman Catt’s summons to each delegate to “come forward to stay the hand of men.” President Harding had just proclaimed the American government’s final rejection of the League of Nations, and Catt, throwing her set speech away, spoke for fifteen minutes in a cold fury. She begged the spellbound audience of a thousand to act together, to act as women, to confront men directly, and to be silent no more.24 “We have waited too long,” she warned, “and we will get another war by waiting.”25
Less than a month later, when Vassar professor Winifred Smith objected to the government’s arrest and deportation of the Soviet representative in Washington,26 Eleanor had her first chance to answer Minnie Cunningham’s challenge.27 Professor Smith’s criticism of Washington’s extreme Red Scare tactics had provoked Vice President Coolidge to charge that women’s colleges were “filled with radicals,” and that Professor Smith was “dangerous.” On May 23, Eleanor brought the matter to the biggest women’s political group in Dutchess County, the Women’s City and County Club in Poughkeepsie, not far from the Vassar campus. At the club’s regular meeting, Eleanor proposed a resolution condemning Coolidge’s statement.28 The members responded with a yes vote, censuring the vice president.
The press then pounced on Eleanor, gawking at the “strange coincidence” that she had incited her fellow political women to chastise her husband’s recent rival.29 “Foolish of me,” she diarized, “ever to do anything of the kind.”30 Henceforth she would be armed against those who would use her to undermine Franklin’s prospects.
But then, just as she was taking these first steps toward self-control, fate showed its claws at Campobello.
BEFORE ELEANOR RETREATED WITH THE children and assorted governesses for the summer, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read came for the weekend. Esther had spotted Eleanor’s frustrated need to remain vital to her husband. As the women discussed League matters, reform politics, and world peace, Esther drew in Franklin, consulting him as the master strategist. On Sunday, he returned Eleanor’s friends to the Hyde Park station, carrying their bags to the platform. “He was wearing one of those baggy brown suits,” recalled Esther. “He looked so strong and healthy.”31
Franklin was zooming everywhere that summer. Perhaps the only thing he put to rest was the myth that he was always Dr. Peabody’s good boy. In Southampton, at Sheffield Cowles’s wedding to the popular Margaret “Bobbie” Krech, he had shocked the Oyster Bay contingent, who remembered him at the reception, according to Edith Roosevelt’s biographer, making an “uproarious” spectacle of himself as “a lusty womanizer and noisy celebrant.”32 Eleanor spun it that her husband had been “going on his nerves.”33
On July 21, the Republican-run Senate Naval Affairs Subcommittee declared Roosevelt responsible for administering one of U.S. naval history’s most disgraceful episodes: the use of raw recruits to entrap homosexual civilians. Prickly with indignation, Franklin demanded and was given until sundown to prepare a public rebuttal to the committee’s 625-page majority report. But even as he and Stephen Early and his new assistant, Missy LeHand, raced through the summer swelter to examine six thousand pages of newly released testimony, the damning details were leaked, revealing to the world that Franklin Roosevelt had been censured for gross abuse of his high office.
“Lay Navy Scandal to F.D. Roosevelt,” headlined the New York Times, although owner Adolph Ochs had recently attended Van Lear Black’s stag testimonial at Delmonico’s welcoming Roosevelt to Wall Street. The patriarchal paper limited the damage to a page-four story discreetly subheaded, “Details Are Unprintable,” even as it saw fit to print on Page One the damning evidence of how eight ballplayers on the Chicago “Black Sox” conspired with a gambling syndicate to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati for $100,000.34
Eleanor wrote from Campobello: “It must be dreadfully disagreeable for you, and I know it worries you though you wouldn’t own it. But it has always seemed to me that the chance of just such attacks as this was a risk one had to take with our form of government and if one felt clear oneself, the rest did not really matter.”35
But how could Franklin feel clear? The subcommittee had made public for the first time the findings of a naval court-martial. Not only were Roosevelt’s actions unfortunate and ill-advised, agreed the committee’s two Republicans and one Democrat, but “most reprehensible.”36 The details of their investigation clearly showed that after three days of conferring with his “Section A” officers Franklin, a subcabinet official and “man of unusual intelligence and attainments,” knew perfectly well—indeed, had tried to cover up—that his own secret orders for the sting operation had put young enlisted men in “a most deplorable, disgraceful, and unnatural” position.37
“One should not be ruffled by such things,” Eleanor held; and when the New York Daily News later that year asked for Franklin’s motto in less than thirty-five words, he replied: “Never remember an injury or forget a favor.”38
Franklin had been deeply injured. Partisanship could be blamed, but he knew the truth. Committee member Henry W. Keyes, Republican of Vermont, had scapegoated him, and Franklin couldn’t live with it. He wanted vengeance. He set his hardening rage upon one scheme after another, finally sitting down with Missy LeHand to dictate his personal grievance to the senator. Finding himself sounding stuffy and impotent, he never mailed the letter, but remained unappeasably furious; and for the next fifteen years, he held Keyes responsible for intensifying his susceptibility to viral disease.39
Franklin later distanced himself from the devastating effect of public disgrace by claiming that his depleted constitution could be blamed on a career in which he never felt able to say no. Taking inventory of how his own risk-seeking nature might have teetered and toppled with the follies of the decade,40 FDR reckoned that if disease had not thrown him off the rails in 1921, “I would have been dead in five years.”
ONE COMMITMENT IN PARTICULAR HAD hampered his leaving for Campobello. As president of the Boy Scout Foundation of Greater New York, Franklin enthusiastically served as toastmaster for the Lake Kanowahke Scout Camp jamboree at Bear Mountain. This meant entertaining more than fifty Foundation supporters as they steamed upriver on his friend Barron Collier’s party boat, awash in illegal gin. Duty done around the campfire, he hurried back to clear his desk in the city, as Missy LeHand helped as best she could to get him on his way to Van Lear Black’s motor yacht, a decommissioned 141-foot naval patrol boat.
“I thought he looked quite tired when he left,” reported Missy to Eleanor, “so perhaps he will have a good rest.”41
The voyage was supposed to be a pleasure cruise. In nasty weather Franklin had to take over from Black’s captain to pilot Sabalo to safe anchorage beyond the daunting Bay of Fundy tides. Off Campobello, he took a party to fish for cod from Sabalo’s motor tender. Overheated, baiting hooks, promising great sport—ever eager to please—he slipped from the tender into the sea, chilling himself so severely that he felt his arms and legs turning to marble. All his life he had been energized by Welchpool Harbor’s bracing temperatures. Never had the water seemed—his word, that day—“paralyzing.”42
Landing in a blue haze on Campobello, Franklin took the children sailing on the adjacent Cobscook Bay, putting ashore to stamp out a forest fire, then swimming afterward in a kettle-hole pond, dipping into the bay, and trotting a mile home—a last harried lamp-rubbing of the Strenuous Life. This time, however, the teeth-gnashing genie failed to appear, leaving Franklin alone on the cottage porch, exhausted, spark-burned, pawing a handful of days-old mail. It was his first quiet moment to think about the tarnish he had put on the Navy Department. At the same time, a deep, uneasy chill had settled under his skin—a touch of lumbago, he thought. He could weigh up the consequences later, after a change of clothes, some dinner, bed.
First, the stairs.
IN THE MORNING, TRYING TO shave, he felt a distinct weakness in his right knee. Eleanor took his temperature—102 degrees—and sent to Lubec for the doctor. Louis Howe (“who, thank heavens, is here,” she exclaimed43) had come to Campobello to draft a 1922 run for the U.S. Senate—only days after Franklin’s censure by a subcommittee of that body. Leaving the men to strategize, Eleanor and Louis’s wife, Grace, had concurrent plans with the children for a camping trip.
All that was now off, for by the time Dr. Bennet arrived and diagnosed an ordinary summer cold, Franklin’s right leg would not support his weight. That night, the left knee buckled, and Eleanor moved into the window seat alongside his bed.
It was light when she woke. Franklin was struggling to get up. He tried to swing out of bed—his legs wouldn’t move. All through the morning, one after another, from thumb to toes and back up to fingers, the muscles refused. The day appeared to have turned on him. All along until dinnertime, the afternoon refused to be the good old afternoon. Nightfall seemed a sinister business. By the time Eleanor returned with Franklin’s supper tray, he could not hold a fork.44
Rarely seen in a father of five,45 his symptoms were not unlike those of polio’s more familiar victims: children, typically awakening one morning in high summer, stiffness at the back of their necks. Within hours, power would drain from their limbs. If they survived the ravages of the virus’s acute phase, they grew into old-looking young people with bodies twisted like roots, then into childlike teenagers with pipe-cleaner legs. Many died at onset, choking down last frozen breaths.46
Still called “the baby malady” a quarter century after its first outbreak had taken the lives of eighteen small children in a Vermont village, infantile paralysis remained a mysterious and random killer. Little was known about why the virus struck one victim but not another; or why some forms were mild, lasting only two or three days; or why outbreaks remained disproportionately prevalent in rural communities. FDR’s likeliest source of infection had come through contaminated drinking water at the Bear Mountain scout jamboree.47 Depletion of his immune system, dating back through two decades of severe, chronic infections, ranging from sinusitis to typhoid fever, on top of the stress of overwork and the public crisis of the Senate inquisition, had likely rendered him that much more susceptible.
But polio had not yet been diagnosed, and for forty-eight hours on their fog-bound Canadian island, exactly halfway between the North Pole and the Equator, Eleanor held her breath.
LEAVE IT TO LOUIS TO recruit from Bar Harbor the first brain surgeon in America. Eighty-four-year-old William Williams Keen, Jr., had been one of six surgeons who for several hours on a yacht under sail off Cape Cod had riskily operated in secret to remove a tumor from President Grover Cleveland’s mouth.48 Now, nearly thirty years later, the white-bearded surgeon decided that Franklin was paralyzed because of a blood clot pressing into his lower spinal cord. Boldly, Dr. Keen declared that massaging Franklin’s legs was vital to dissolve the clot.
For the next eleven mornings, as all muscles from Franklin’s hips down blazed at the slightest touch, Eleanor doggedly followed the Keen massage regimen. She alternated sessions with Louis so that she would have time to spoon-feed Franklin while managing his food trays. He also had to be catheterized in these first weeks, and was having difficulty controlling his bowels as well. Eleanor learned to sterilize and insert a lubricated glass catheter, to move his hindquarters on and off bedpans, and, with Louis’s help, to give him a bath.49
Before their eyes he transformed. Gone was the hyperactive charmer and larkish campaigner in the prime of life, replaced by an invalid pinned to a mattress suffering the powerlessness of pain without end.50
Until at last, the storm broke.
Franklin reckoned the date as August 25, 1921—“the 12th day after I was hit.” Like a man overboard, treading water in a fast night sea, glimpsing the safety of shore: “I knew I would live.”51
That day, Dr. Robert W. Lovett, leading orthopedic surgeon at the Harvard Medical School and the nation’s foremost specialist in the treatment of infantile paralysis, arrived from Boston. He performed a lumbar puncture, which allowed him to diagnose definitively what Louis Howe and his uncle Fred Delano had both suspected—acute anterior poliomyelitis.
Eleanor asked the urgent question: Were any of the six children, including Louis’s son Hartley, vulnerable? Lovett was confident that if they had shown no sign of outbreak after two weeks they had escaped.
As to Franklin’s recovery, three possibilities hung in the balance: complete revitalization of the wasted limbs; partial healing with residual paralysis; or total paralysis with severe permanent disability. Which it would be, they had no way yet to know. When the infectious phase was over, probably within a matter of weeks, they could begin to think about transferring to a hospital.
Lovett lifted their hopes by judging the case mild. He cautioned, however, that some of the back and leg muscles could go either way—“toward recovery or turn into completely paralyzed muscles.” Tactfully, he let Eleanor know that massaging the limbs in this acute stage was the greatest harm she could have done. “Let the children alone during that period,” Lovett had recently warned his colleagues in Cambridge, “otherwise the disease becomes worse or is prolonged.”52
Franklin’s mother had been in Europe on a prewar-style Grand Tour when the virus struck. She returned to the double shock of having been kept in the dark and then welcomed home as if to a “party” that her bravely smiling, freshly shaven Franklin had “got up” for her. Sustaining his gallantry, she sat cheerily by his side and saw him through several of his meals, but lasted only another twenty-four hours before he had talked her into retreating to Fairhaven to attend a family wedding.
Sara noticed his legs. She had always been proud of Franklin’s lean, shapely limbs—now so lifeless they had constantly to be repositioned by hand to keep up circulation. She told herself not to worry: already Franklin was improving “from the waist up,” and in the happy atmosphere Eleanor had managed to create in the stricken household, her son would make a “hasty” recovery.53
The truth was, no one had any idea what was going to happen, or when. On the 31st, after another day of back muscles withering rather than strengthening, Franklin despaired of regaining control of his body. So far gone into torment was he that when Dr. Bennet rowed over from Lubec, Franklin implored him to instruct Eleanor to resume the now-forbidden massages. They were torture, no question, but they were something. Doing nothing—that was the horror.
Day upon day, the family kept vigil, the children sensing that their father was being tested as never before. Only later would he share his secret: he had lost his nerve, and in the rapid, darkening delirium that followed, Franklin Roosevelt’s faith had been shaken. “I think,” wrote Eleanor, “he felt he could ask God for guidance and receive it,”54 and so, when none came, he felt his God forsaking him.55
ELEANOR AND LOUIS BECAME TWO tired and distressed people. Taking alternate night watches in the sickroom, they discovered that they were equally determined and united. They would not let him be beaten.
They had no precedent in the annals of American history. No president or vice president or even cabinet member had ever been raised up to high office paralyzed. Polio had just closed that door. Immediately, Louis and Eleanor pried it back open. In her autobiography, Eleanor would cast this new dawn as an electrifying movie moment; less Sunrise at Campobello, more silent-screen title-card: Louis Howe Takes Charge.
THEY BOTH DID. THE INFECTIOUS period over, Franklin safe for travel, Louis stage-managed and Eleanor enacted what appeared to be a moderately urgent seasonal transfer from an end-of-summer sickbed in the Canadian Maritimes to Manhattan’s Presbyterian Hospital. So far as reporters were given to understand, Franklin had been ill with a severe cold, and though threatened by pneumonia remained as eligible as ever to return at full strength to life and work.56
Lowered headfirst down the front steps in a canvas sling, Franklin was belted to a homemade stretcher, his lifeless Frankenstein limbs covered by a blanket. As the children mumbled, “So long, Pa,”57 he stuck out his chin and flash-grinned his way down across Campobello’s rough ground and stony beach. Eleanor followed to the family pier, where the wind rose sharply, then boarded the tossing vessel behind her husband. “Don’t worry, chicks,” their father called out, “I’ll be all right!”
John, the youngest—five-and-a-half—later stated the fact plain: “From then on, I had no parents.”58
They crossed the two miles of spray-drenched seaway in an open dory, landing at the steep, slime-slippery sardine dock in Eastport. There, by ruse of a “mix-up,” Louis decoyed a gang of reporters to another landing, while he and Eleanor had just time enough to load the deadweight of Franklin onto a luggage dray, cart him over cobblestoned streets, hustle him by further improvised stretcher to a private railcar, and lift him in through an open window.
Inside, now in view of reporters on the siding, Roosevelt appeared chipper after his bout of summer-holiday grippe. He smiled and smoked his pipe. Chatted with his wife, joshed Dr. Bennet. One of the family’s Scotch terriers sat obediently at his side.
In fact, pillows propped him up. Eleanor swabbed the sweat from under his traveling fedora. Duffy clawed her to get the withheld treat. … All perfectly concealing the unspeakable truth: Franklin Roosevelt was a rag doll. Louis Howe had staged the illusion so that anyone peering in would want to see the youngest vice-presidential nominee in more than half a century try to cheat “the old man’s friend,” as pneumonia was called. That this handsome statesman was unable to lift even his head made the effect uncanny.
Thanks to his newspapering expertise, Louis’s tableau translated smoothly into print: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT ON ROAD TO RECOVERY, read one headline, the accompanying front-page story picturing the former assistant secretary puffing commandingly on “his famous briar pipe.”59 Less than two months had elapsed since the New York Times had declared “unprintable” the details of Roosevelt’s political disgrace at Newport. All was now forgotten in the page-one drama of so dynamic a national leader and family man attacked “below the knees”—almost as if, in this one special case, the virus had discreetly served him penance below the waist.
In years ahead, a quill cigarette holder, uptilted, clamped into the famous Roosevelt smile, would replace the briar pipe as FDR’s trademark. For now, and over the nearly six-hundred-mile ordeal ahead, this casualty of a Boy Scout jamboree’s infected water supply needed the equivalent of a Civil War bullet to bite on.
Met at Grand Central by his mother and a Hyde Park friend, Tom Lynch, he once again had to be belted in and stretchered through the window for transfer uptown in an ambulance. George Draper, the Harvard acquaintance and holistic orthopedist who in 1918 had brought Franklin ashore from the influenza-ridden troopship—the day Eleanor found the Lucy Mercer letters—had committed to taking charge of day-to-day treatment at the healing clinic he directed at Presbyterian Hospital.
Informing reporters about Roosevelt’s prospects, Draper conceded that he could not tell how long his patient would be kept in hospital, but certified that his condition was already “much improved.” Roosevelt was “regaining control of his legs.” The reporters could “definitely” tell their readers that he would not be crippled. “No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.”60
A “slight attack,” reported the World in all editions the next day.
And so began the subterfuge that would turn recovery into a guessing game down to the opening gavels in each of the 1924 and 1928 Democratic National Conventions.61
For Eleanor the question was not only whether Franklin would walk again. Would he realize that he needed her? Could she find a way in these next months and years to be useful to his recovery? And if she could not, would she still have first place in her husband’s life in 1924—in 1928? Or would she—this time—be publicly replaced?