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

that he was bending his legs slightly at the knee and using the muscles below his waist to move his legs forward. But if you looked at the two of them moving together, more or less identically, they both seemed to be, well, walking.

Now you do it, she said.

Slowly, through trial and error, he began to get the hang of it. He would never be able to do it swiftly. He would never be able to jump up from a chair and hurry off across the room. He would always need at least one helper to lift him to the standing position, then walk along with him. And he would never do this without the danger that something would go wrong and he would fall, as he still did from time to time. But with a strong and well-trained aide at his side, he began to see that he could perform this athletic feat whenever he needed to show that he was not “confined to a wheelchair.” He might be lame, but he could “walk like a man”—across a stage or into a room—and “without scaring everyone to death.”

In later years some would say this was nothing more than a clever deception, a parlor act—that FDR could not “really walk.” No, not by himself. But doctors define the act of walking with the two words bipedal ambulation, which means “traveling across a surface while standing upright on two feet.” That’s what he was doing. He just needed a little help. Thanks to Alice Lou Plastridge, Helena Mahoney, and his new willingness to bend his goals to what was truly possible, he could move about in public without a wheelchair or crutches, the symbols of being “crippled.”

The more he practiced, the more graceful his sway-walking became. His natural athletic skill reasserted itself. During his exercises he could even manage to walk with just two canes, holding no one’s arm, though that was too risky to do as a regular thing.

With so much exercise his muscles grew stronger. Better coordination and greater strength began to feed off each other.

As March turned to April and the warm Georgia spring came on, Mahoney, who was not easily impressed, was delighted with her patient’s accomplishment. But she began to worry that he might once again squander the progress he was making once he returned home. So she wrote to Eleanor to ask for her help:

“Mr. Roosevelt is doing so very well I want you to know it. He is walking with two canes at exercise and also with my arm and a cane. His muscles are greatly improved, his knees especially are much stronger. He has never shown such interest and attention to this work since I have been here. I do dread having it interrupted and do hope he will stay just as long as possible for we always have to go back some each time he goes away. Even two weeks or so longer will help to establish what we have. We hope you will persuade Mr. Roosevelt to stay a bit longer.”

Eleanor likely knew her own persuasive powers with her husband were seldom a match for Louis Howe’s. So she showed the letter to Howe, who quickly urged FDR to stay on in Georgia. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am, old man, at the details she gives of the way you have come back,” Howe wrote. “I have always felt you would.” (Here Howe may have been picturing something more like the complete recovery that FDR had wished for earlier.) “Now I’m not going to advise one way or the other because I concluded long ago that you know more about your case and what to do for it than the doctors did.”

FDR did stay two weeks longer, and after a short trip home, he returned to Warm Springs for three more weeks.

Mahoney wrote again to tell Eleanor of his progress. “We are very happy to have Mr. Roosevelt back with us,” she said. “I did not realize how much we needed him until I saw him and slipped the burden back to his shoulders … He gets his exercise every day and it is good to see him walk around the house with a crutch and cane and stand up to the table and do and get what he wants. His balance improves. I am sure you will find him doing more and more on his feet.”

Late in the evening of April 6, 1927, Paul Hasbrouck, a young man with polio, arrived in Warm Springs for a visit of several weeks. He was from Poughkeepsie, New York, just a few miles from Hyde Park. He and FDR had struck up a friendship. Hasbrouck, an army veteran of World War I, had been paralyzed below the waist in his mid-twenties when he was a member of the U.S. Senate’s staff. He went home to live with his parents in Poughkeepsie and work on his recovery. He arranged to study for a master’s degree in political science and economics from his alma mater, Hamilton College, then a Ph.D. from Columbia University—in that era, an extraordinary achievement for a person with a disability. In the spring of 1927, he had just submitted the manuscript of his first book, a study of political parties in the U.S. House of Representatives, to a major publisher. Short and very thin, he could walk haltingly with braces and canes but hoped to do much better. He and FDR had been corresponding about polio treatments off and on for several years, and FDR had urged him to come and try Warm Springs. Now, at the age of thirty-one, with his studies complete, he was ready to do so.

Hasbrouck was dropped off at one of the compound’s new, long bungalow-style cottages. In back there was a screen porch with rocking chairs under a canopy of shade trees. His spacious room, plain but cheerful, had the pleasant scent of clean, fresh lumber, with brand-new linens on the bed and