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

Roosevelt off his feet and hustled him up the steps to the broad speaker’s platform where party leaders were standing, talking, finding their own chairs. Using crutches, with Jimmy standing by, FDR got to his seat.

That was no simple thing, of course, not with the braces that held his legs rigid under his trousers. In a quick series of moves he had performed many times, he pivoted to turn his back to his chair. Then he and Jimmy gripped each other by the arms. Slowly they lowered FDR until he was sitting with his legs locked straight in front of him. Then he reached behind his knees, undid the locks on the braces and pulled his knees up.

The man seated next to him was Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, an oil company executive who, like FDR, had been a loyal backer of Woodrow Wilson.

FDR put a hand to Guffey’s ear and whispered: “Joe, go up to the pulpit and shake it, will you?”

Guffey gave him a puzzled look. “Why?”

FDR said, “I want to see if it will surely support my weight.”

Guffey got it. He went over to the lectern and gave it a hard nudge. It was heavy. FDR could lean against it without pushing it over.

Finally his name was announced. The crowd settled.

Jimmy and his dad now repeated their act in reverse—legs straight, braces locked at the knees, a quick lift and FDR was standing.

Four years earlier, at the Democrats’ national convention in San Francisco, many of these same delegates had seen Franklin Roosevelt for the first time. He had been a tall, striking young man of thirty-eight who had seized the big banner of the New York delegation and run to the front of the hall, leading a show of support for the retiring President Wilson, who’d been weakened by a stroke.

Now here he was before them again, the same Franklin Roosevelt, yet different. His legs looked flimsy and unnaturally stiff under his trousers. They saw him grasp his crutches and begin to move. With each step, he carefully placed the crutches in front of him, then pulled his legs along. “Everybody was holding their breath,” Frances Perkins said. “The old-line politicians remembered him as a very vigorous young man at the previous convention. Here was this terribly crippled person … getting himself to the platform somehow, looking so pale, so thin, so delicate.”

One step … two steps … three steps …

He did not fall.

 … six steps … seven …

He let go of his left crutch and seized the edge of the lectern. With his right he held down the pages of his speech.

Normally, a politician would toss up his hands and wave to the crowd. But if Roosevelt tried that now, he would crash to the floor.

So instead he tossed up his head—the old gesture that Frances Perkins remembered—and smiled a great, wide smile.

The crowd exploded.

“It just tore the place to pieces,” Perkins said.

When the long roar finally faded, FDR began to speak.

It was the same strong voice they remembered—a cultured East Coast voice. He told the vast crowd that ordinary New Yorkers adored Al Smith.

“Ask anyone when you leave this session—ask the woman who serves you in the shop, the banker who cashes your check, the man who runs your elevator, the clerk in your hotel…”

Perkins, seated nearby, was watching FDR closely. Even as his voice rang through the hall, she could see his body trembling. The hand holding the pages of his speech on top of the lectern “was literally shaking because of the extreme pain and tenseness with which he held himself up to make that speech,” she said.

“… first in the affections of the people of this state … is the man who has twice been honored with election to the governorship…”

He scorned the people who had been whispering that Smith, as a Catholic, could not be a loyal American. He called on his party “to be true to ourselves and put from our hearts and minds every sordid consideration, every ignoble personal prejudice.”

He said Smith fought for the good of common people. He said no other Democrat was more feared by Republicans.

“He is the happy warrior of the political battlefield … this man of destiny whom our state proudly dedicates to the nation—our own Alfred … E.… Smith!”

Watching from the press gallery was the famous Will Rogers, a comedian, columnist, and actor whose funny writings on public affairs were read all over the country. When FDR called out Smith’s name, Rogers wrote, “you would have thought somebody had thrown a wildcat in your face. The galleries went wild.”

The enormous crowd whistled and roared for a full hour—for Al Smith, yes, but also for the electrifying performance given by the man who had returned from the edge of the grave.

When Governor Smith had finished his own speech, more people wanted to talk to Roosevelt than to the governor himself. Some were whispering that it ought to be Roosevelt getting the nomination for president, not Smith. “Hell, it’s not legs we want in the White House,” said one delegate. “It’s brains!”

That evening, as FDR rested back at the house on East Sixty-Fifth Street, he heard one of the family’s closest friends, Marion Dickerman, come in through the front door downstairs. He called for her to come and see him. He threw his arms up and cried, “Marion … I did it!”

Over the next few days, the newspapers were full of admiring descriptions of FDR’s appearance in the Garden. Few reporters took the tone of the writer from the Republican-owned Los Angeles Times who sneered at FDR as “hopelessly an invalid … obliged to prop himself against the speaker’s desk once he had been lifted to his feet.” The correspondent from the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, was much more typical: “There was nothing at the Democratic Convention more inspiring than the heroism of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” It wasn’t so much Al Smith as his “nominator that loomed large in the picture, an invalid on crutches, perhaps in pain, who conquered the frailties of body by sheer