Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

Sara’s efforts to dominate the family’s life. Retirement to Hyde Park before Eleanor was even forty years old would mean consigning herself to a comfortable cage.

She went to Dr. Draper: What did he think of her husband’s wish to return to politics?

Dr. Draper said he was all for it. Even if FDR didn’t succeed in the long run, he told her, the effort would lift his spirits and improve his chance to make a strong physical recovery.

Eleanor agreed. Frances Perkins, now Eleanor’s friend as well as Franklin’s, said, “She thought he would die spiritually, die intellectually, and die in his personality, if he didn’t have political hope.”

As for her own hopes, Eleanor said much later, “I do not think I ever stopped to analyze my feelings. There was so much to do to manage the household and the children and to try to keep things running smoothly that I never had any time to think of my own reactions. I simply lived from day to day and got through the best I could.”

She fit a new job into her crowded routine. In league with Louis Howe, she set about keeping FDR in touch with politics and government even as he lay in his bed. She clipped newspaper reports and editorials for him to read. She invited friends in politics to come to the house and fill him in on the latest news and gossip. She and Louis sat and talked with him by the hour.

Sara Roosevelt could hardly believe what she was hearing.

It was absolutely crazy—a crippled man running for office? Like most people, she took it for granted that a man with a disability should remove himself from public view. If being crippled was not quite shameful, she thought, it was certainly something to be kept as private as possible. Her son, exhibiting himself with crippled legs before common people? Unable to go up a staircase unless two men carried him?

She insisted that he stop the nonsense. She became “quite vociferous in her demands,” Anna remembered.

Sara went to Louis Howe. She disapproved of the little man, with his sour manners and his sloppy habits, but she respected his judgment. Surely, she said, Howe, with all his experience, must realize that FDR had no future in politics.

In fact, Louis told her, he still believed that one day her son would be president of the United States.

Finally FDR told his mother he had heard quite enough. She was not to speak of the matter again.

“Franklin had no intention of conforming to my quiet ideas for his future existence,” Sara wrote later. “He was determined to ignore his disability and carry on from where he had left off.”

He simply refused to voice any doubt of his ability to make a complete recovery. “He has never said he could not walk,” Eleanor remarked later, and he wanted no one else in the family to say it, either. If he allowed himself to think for an instant that he might not reach his goal, then he might lose his courage and fall into despair.

Psychologists call this way of thinking denial. It means refusing to accept a fact that you just can’t bear. It can get you in deep trouble. Usually it’s best to face up to harsh truths, just as Uncle Fred had advised FDR.

But sometimes denial is a powerful tool that helps people do things no one else thinks they can do.

FDR knew very well that people privately made fun of him as a man spoiled and bossed around by his mother. His hard-charging Roosevelt cousins—Theodore Roosevelt’s children—used to say his initials stood for Feather Duster. People said all the good things in life had been handed to him on a silver platter.

Now he’d been cut down by a disease that normally struck children. In every phase of his life, it seemed, somebody had whispered that he was a weakling.

So he just said no—no to the insults, no to his mother, no to polio.

He intended to show everybody who and what he really was.

PART 2STANDING UP

NOVEMBER 1921– JULY 1924

Chapter 5TRIAL AND ERROR

“When do we begin?” he had asked Louis Howe.

FDR wanted to start today, tomorrow—whenever the doctors gave the signal, if not sooner.

“The patient is doing very well,” Dr. Draper wrote Dr. Lovett in November 1921. “[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.”

For the time being, Dr. Draper insisted, more rest was essential.

But FDR wanted no more rest.

“I absolutely concur in your belief that a fellow ‘can put anything across if he is game to tackle it,’” he wrote one friend. “I am trying out the theory myself, having determined to get well in the shortest possible time.”

“I am still just as much of an optimist as ever,” he declared.

He got an encouraging message from Joseph Tumulty, a powerful politician who had been chief of President Woodrow Wilson’s staff in the White House. FDR replied: “The doctors all predict a speedy and complete recovery for me. I hope not only to be back on the fighting line but to have a lot of highly spirited ammunition in the way of convincing arguments as to why one should be a Democrat.”

When he talked like that, he was stretching the doctors’ predictions well beyond what they had really said. True, Dr. Lovett had told FDR to expect some improvement in the first few weeks. But that was very different from saying he would make “a speedy and complete recovery.” Dr. Lovett had said only that a complete recovery wasn’t out of the question. FDR didn’t hear it that way. He wanted progress by leaps and bounds.

Dr. Lovett’s whole approach was the opposite of leaps and bounds.

The doctor was thinking about the microscopic landscape of FDR’s muscles. Deep in the muscle tissue, some of FDR’s nerve cells had been killed and would never come back to life. Others had