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

a couple of the children—had come down with fevers and chills of their own, though there was no problem in their limbs. The symptoms were not as bad as FDR’s, but still, Howe reasoned, didn’t it seem likely that if several people in the same house were sick, there was a common cause? And surely all these people didn’t have blood clots in their spinal cords.

So it seemed to Howe the cause must be an infectious germ. If so, which one? What germ could cause symptoms like the flu in one person and paralysis in someone else?

Howe always kept close track of the news. Even at distant Campobello, the Roosevelts had the New York newspapers sent to them. Over the last couple of weeks, the papers had carried small reports of a dangerous disease, just a few cases here and there across upstate New York.

The disease had two names. Most people called it infantile paralysis, because it usually struck babies and small children, who suddenly lost strength in one or more of their limbs. The scientific name was poliomyelitis—or polio, for short.

Maybe Howe had seen the news reports. Maybe he hadn’t. But something made him suspect that Dr. Keen was wrong about a clot in FDR’s spine and that infantile paralysis might be the cause of the trouble.

Without telling Eleanor, Howe sent a telegram to FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano, who worked for the government in Washington. Delano knew many important people and was good at getting difficult things done.

Please, Howe said, find an expert on poliomyelitis as quickly as possible.

In Washington, Fred Delano called his son-in-law, a doctor, who said Delano should consult the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Uncle Fred was soon in touch with Dr. Robert Lovett, head of the commission. Lovett was an orthopedist—a bone doctor—and a professor at Harvard University. He agreed to make the long trip up to Campobello.

On August 24, two weeks after FDR had gone upstairs with pain in his lower back, Eleanor Roosevelt greeted Dr. Lovett, a quiet, handsome, serious man with a dark mustache turning gray. Upstairs, he examined FDR. Then he inserted a thick needle into Roosevelt’s spine and drew some fluid out of the spinal cord. The procedure causes terrible pain. But it had to be done to confirm the diagnosis. In a healthy person, the spinal fluid is clear. If it looks cloudy, it’s full of the white cells that fight infection—a clear sign of a virus in the spinal cord. Lovett had to be sure.

He looked at the fluid.

It was cloudy white.

Infection in the spinal cord combined with paralyzed limbs meant that Roosevelt had contracted poliomyelitis.

He gave the news to FDR and Eleanor.

Many years later, near the end of her life, someone asked Eleanor about that moment. How had her husband looked when he heard what Dr. Lovett said?

She thought about it, then remarked that she had seen a certain expression on FDR’s face only twice in all the time she knew him.

Once was that moment with Dr. Lovett at Campobello.

The other was twenty years later, on December 7, 1941, when FDR was told that Japanese fighter planes had attacked U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II.

“His reaction to any great event,” she remembered another time, “was always to be 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 … I have never known him not to be ready to face the worst that could happen, but always to be hopeful about the solution that could be found.”

Chapter 2QUESTIONS

The Roosevelts struggled to make sense of what Dr. Lovett had told them.

What they knew about infantile paralysis consisted of little more than fading memories of a terrible epidemic five years earlier.

There had been isolated outbreaks in the United States starting in the 1890s. Then, in the summer of 1916, the disease made headlines with a far worse outbreak than any before. It was centered in New York City. Some nine thousand people were paralyzed, many of them babies. The Roosevelts were fearful their own children might catch the disease. Working in Washington, far away from the family, FDR wrote to Eleanor and urged her to swat every fly she saw, since flies were suspected of spreading the contagion.

There had been more cases in the years since, but nowhere near as many, and the polio panic of that wartime summer faded.

The news stories of 1916 had described terribly sick children, not adults. Reporters focused on immigrant children in the dirty, close-packed city neighborhoods called slums—children dying or crippled, with twisted legs and arms; children rushed out of the city to escape the danger of infection. When the Roosevelts thought about infectious diseases, they pictured filthy streets and squalid houses with bad plumbing. Those were hardly the sort of surroundings in which they lived.

So how could FDR—a healthy, vigorous man of thirty-nine who lived and worked in fine buildings that were cleaned every day—get that disease?

Wasn’t it possible, they asked, that something else explained FDR’s condition, something less serious and frightening?

Dr. Lovett could only shrug and say that adults sometimes did catch the virus that caused infantile paralysis, even adults as healthy as FDR. The truth was shocking, but he had no doubt about it.

“I detected some uncertainty in their minds about the diagnosis,” Dr. Lovett said later, “but I thought it perfectly clear.”

The Roosevelts must have asked Lovett where the virus had come from. How had FDR contracted it? And how could this have happened when there was no widespread epidemic?

Dr. Lovett could answer only a few of their questions. Medical scientists were largely mystified about even the most basic facts. They knew the sickness was caused by an impossibly tiny germ called the poliovirus. But it would be many years before scientists detected how the virus spread; or why polio struck in summer; or why