Lesson 12 min 20 XP
FDR's Early Life and Polio
How Franklin Roosevelt's privileged upbringing and devastating bout with polio forged the empathy and resilience that defined his presidency.
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How Franklin Roosevelt's privileged upbringing and devastating bout with polio forged the empathy and resilience that defined his presidency.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, into one of America's oldest and wealthiest families. He grew up on a sprawling estate in Hyde Park, New York, educated by private tutors before attending Groton, Harvard, and Columbia Law School. His fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt was already a political legend, and Franklin married Theodore's niece, Eleanor, in 1905 with the sitting president giving away the bride.
Nothing in this biography predicted the man who would become the champion of the 'forgotten man.' Roosevelt's early political career followed a conventional patrician path: New York state senator at 28, Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920 on a ticket that lost badly. He was handsome, ambitious, and widely regarded as charming but lightweight.
His mother Sara was domineering and controlling, managing every detail of Franklin's life well into his adulthood. His marriage to Eleanor was complex from the start. Eleanor discovered Franklin's affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, and though they remained married, the relationship transformed into something more like a political partnership than a conventional marriage. Both would find emotional sustenance elsewhere.
In August 1921, at age 39, Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis while vacationing at Campobello Island. Within days he lost the use of his legs permanently. For a man whose identity was built on physical vigor and aristocratic confidence, the devastation was total. He spent years in agonizing rehabilitation, most notably at the therapeutic waters of Warm Springs, Georgia, which he eventually purchased and turned into a polio treatment center.
Roosevelt never walked unaided again. He used heavy steel leg braces, leaned on the arms of aides, and developed extraordinary upper-body strength to create the illusion of mobility. Through a remarkable gentleman's agreement with the press, he was almost never photographed in his wheelchair. Of the roughly 35,000 photographs in the Roosevelt presidential library, only two show him in a wheelchair.
The impact of polio on Roosevelt's character is debated but widely acknowledged. His secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, said the experience 'purged the slightly arrogant attitude' of his youth. His friend and advisor Louis Howe believed the long convalescence gave Roosevelt time to read, think, and correspond with thousands of ordinary Americans, broadening his understanding of suffering in ways his sheltered upbringing never had. Whether polio literally made him a better leader or simply deepened qualities already present, the man who returned to politics in the mid-1920s was markedly different from the one who had left it.
Roosevelt's return to public life was carefully orchestrated. His nominating speech for Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic Convention — where he dragged himself to the podium on crutches and stood gripping the lectern — was a sensation. The crowd roared not for Smith but for Roosevelt's visible courage. He won the governorship of New York in 1928 by a razor-thin margin even as Smith lost the presidential race, and his performance as governor during the early Depression made him the frontrunner for 1932.
What distinguished Roosevelt from other ambitious politicians was the emotional intelligence polio had either given him or deepened. He could project warmth and reassurance in a way that seemed genuine because, in some measure, it was. He had suffered. He had been helpless. He understood what it meant to need help and to depend on others. That understanding would become the emotional foundation of the New Deal.