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

deepened in 1931-32, homeless people were forced to build makeshift villages of scrap metal and wood. Soon they were known as “Hoovervilles.”

A banner on Franklin Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, promotes Roosevelt’s first campaign for president.

FDR’s thousand-watt smile was a powerful political tool. Here he exhibits it in an outdoor speech during the 1932 presidential campaign.

The leaders of the Allies in World War II, meeting at Tehran, Iran, in 1943—Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, FDR, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom.

The original statue of FDR at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt National Memorial in Washington, D.C., shrouded his disability. After disability advocates said his wheelchair should be plainly displayed, this statue, by the sculptor Robert Graham, was added in 2001. The inscription on the wall, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, reads: “Franklin’s illness … gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”

 A NOTE ON SOURCES

This story draws on many of the same sources I used when writing The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency (2013). But this is a wholly new book, written for younger readers.

By far the most important sources for understanding Franklin Roosevelt’s experience of polio are what historians call original sources—the letters, memos, diaries, and other writings that come directly from those who took part in these events or observed them from up close. Most of the original sources I used are housed in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York. They are kept in many different collections that make up the papers of the Roosevelt family—FDR’s personal and official papers, Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers, a set of family papers donated by the Roosevelts’ children, Louis Howe’s papers, and many more. There is one slim folder titled “Infantile Paralysis,” but the great majority of references to polio are scattered in myriad other folders. Finding them, I like to say, was like looking for a hundred needles in a thousand haystacks, but the search was always fun. The FDR Library also contains a comprehensive collection of Roosevelt’s speeches, all of them available online. The library’s enormous collection of photographs is another important source of information—showing, to take one small example, that FDR as governor of New York often allowed himself to be photographed with his braces showing at the ankles, which tends to deflate the notion of a conspiratorial cover-up of his condition.

Another important source was newspapers, especially for the campaigns in 1928 and 1932. Some major papers, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, make their old editions available online. A great many other stories would be very hard to find were it not for the voluminous scrapbooks of press clippings that FDR’s staff maintained. These, too, are at the FDR Library.

Books by members of FDR’s family and close associates were invaluable. The most important for telling the polio story were Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946); Samuel Rosenman, Working With Roosevelt (1952); Eleanor Roosevelt’s two memoirs, This Is My Story (1939) and This I Remember (1949); and James Farley, Behind the Ballots (1938). James and Elliott Roosevelt both wrote two books about their parents. Elliott’s, especially, raise doubts about the reliability of a grown child remembering early years with parents. In 1949, Anna Roosevelt Halsted published a valuable series of magazine articles titled “My Life With FDR” in a magazine she helped to create, The Woman. It’s a shame Anna never wrote a full memoir, as she seems to have known her father the best of all the children. Two memoirs by Anna’s son, Curtis Roosevelt, Too Close to the Sun (2008) and Upstairs at the Roosevelts’ (2017), give fascinating glimpses of the family’s private life. As a teenager, Curtis lived with his mother and grandparents in the White House for much of World War II, and his account of FDR’s dealings with disability are detailed and insightful. (I gained a great deal from a long interview with Mr. Roosevelt, whose voice sounded astonishingly like FDR’s. He died in 2016.)

Several books by contemporary reporters fill in important details, including John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History (1950), which remains one of the best sources on FDR’s many-faceted life; Ernest Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy (rev. ed., 1934)—Lindley covered FDR’s early campaigns and knew him well; and Earle Looker, This Man Roosevelt (1932). Looker was the writer hired by the Roosevelt campaign to write a magazine story about FDR’s health. That casts a shadow on his reliability, but the book is an important document of the campaign, at least.

Many general biographies of FDR have been published, of course, but most move quickly through the polio story. The exception is Geoffrey C. Ward’s two-volume biography, which takes FDR from his birth to 1928, with a great deal of information about his parents and ancestors—Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 (1985) and A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, 1905–1928 (1989). Ward’s account is deep and rich, and his coverage of FDR’s struggle with polio is based in part on his interviews with people who worked with FDR at Warm Springs. Other biographies I relied on included James MacGregor Burns’s two volumes, especially Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (1954), the second volume of Freidel’s five; Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (1957); and Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (1971). I used the excellent biographies of FDR’s closest aides during the period covered: Alfred B. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe (1962); and Kathryn Smith, The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency (2016).

Readers will gain a deeper understanding of FDR’s life in the context of Hyde Park from F. Kennon Moody’s excellent account, FDR and His Hudson Valley Neighbors (2013).

Besides The Man He