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

own troubles—hardly what people wanted to see in their governor. “There was an implicit limit on how much [able-bodied people] wanted to hear about our successes and failings,” wrote one survivor of polio. “Gradually the lesson was learned that no one including myself really wanted to hear the mundane details of being sick or handicapped, not the triumphs or the hardships.”

Still, the question of FDR’s strength, as the New York Times noted, was “the greatest under-cover issue of his campaign.” He wanted to put it out on the table.

He could do so just once, he decided, but no more.

So what should he say?

In the papers of Roosevelt’s 1928 campaign there is a single sheet of paper containing some drafted remarks about his disability. It was more than he’d said so far, but not much. It was framed as another jibe at the Republican charges that he’d been “dragooned” to run, and as a rebuttal to the scuttlebutt about his poor health. The draft remarks repeated that he hadn’t been “dragooned,” that his health was excellent, and that a governor’s work was not physical. “Let me assure them [Republican critics] that my only physical disability, which is a certain clumsiness in locomotion and which I trust will eventually disappear, has interfered in no way with my power to think. Possibly because I find it more convenient to sit at my desk than to move around, I pride myself that during the past four years, I have done rather more than the average man’s daily stint [of thinking].”

It wasn’t quite the right note, and somebody realized it, probably FDR himself. The note not used is scribbled in pencil across the top of the sheet.

He and Sam Rosenman traded drafts back and forth, developing something new.

At a reception at Rochester’s Seneca Hotel, FDR shook hands with more than eight hundred people. The big event at the city’s Convention Hall was scheduled for unusually late in the evening, since people wanted to hear Herbert Hoover give a scheduled address by radio. By the time FDR was driven over to the hall through the October evening, passing sidewalks crammed with onlookers, there were four thousand people in the seats.

As other Democrats made opening remarks, they saw his big-shouldered figure move across the stage in his slow, swaying gait, smiling all the way, then drop into a big armchair. Those watching closely noticed that he reached to one knee, then the other, to unlock his braces so he could bend his legs. When his moment to speak came, he relocked his braces, stood up (with a quick bit of help from an aide), and walked slowly to the lectern. Then he thrust his chin toward the upper gallery and smiled.

“I have been trying to focus in these great night meetings on one topic at a time,” he began, “especially because nowadays one talks not just to the fine audience in front of one but also to thousands of people scattered all over the state who are listening in by radio.”

Tonight, the topic would be “what I call the human being function of our state government.” He promised to build upon the great increase in state spending on education under Governor Smith and to raise standards for teachers.

Then there was the matter of children’s health. Infant mortality in New York had declined under Smith, “but we have only just begun the task, for much remains to be done.”

This brought him by quiet steps to his main subject.

“I may be pardoned,” he said, “if I refer to my own intense interest in the care of crippled children and, indeed, of cripples of every kind.” Not only polio but tuberculosis, industrial accidents, and other misfortunes had disabled some one hundred thousand New Yorkers, children and adults, he said. For practical reasons alone, more must be done to restore these people to productive lives, since “a wheelchair cripple is not only a dead load on the earning power of the community, but in most cases requires also the attention and care of some able-bodied person as well.”

Then there was “the great humanitarian side of the subject.” As governor, Al Smith had proposed more aid for disabled people, but the Republicans in Albany had shot him down. Why, the state didn’t even know how many crippled children there really were—a public nurse had told him so.

“We need an expansion of medical service to every out-of-the-way corner in the cities and on the farms.”

Then he got to it.

“I suppose that people readily will recognize that I myself furnish a perfectly good example of what can be done by the right kind of care.”

Applause began to rustle through the hall.

“I dislike to use this personal example, but it happens to fit. Seven years ago … I came down with infantile paralysis … and I was completely—for the moment—put out of any useful activities.”

People were rising to clap and cheer. Tears were welling.

“By personal good fortune I was able to get the very best kind of care, and the result of having the right kind of care is that today I am on my feet.”

By then it was hard to hear him.

“And while I won’t vouch for the mental side of it, I am quite certain that from the physical point of view, I am quite capable of going to Albany and staying there two years!”

It was a clever twist of the topic, even a brilliant one. He had turned his own personal disaster into a plea for humanitarian government. He had defied the whispered rumors. He had turned himself from a man to pity into a man to cheer.

It was a long speech full of proposals, but he ended on a simple note.

He said he detected a surge in the state for “government by common sense and not by statistics.” (This was a dig at Herbert Hoover, known as the Great Engineer, a politician inclined to reduce human problems to columns of figures.) “The people want the national government run by a human being