The Art of Manliness - How Polio Made a President

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.260 Of the dozens of men who have served as U.S. President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a

00:00:15.520 particularly close connection with the citizens he served. The only president elected to four

00:00:19.680 terms, Americans hung FDR's picture up in their homes, wrote him thousands of letters,

00:00:24.160 and regularly tuned in to listen to his fireside chats. My guests would say that much of the depth,

00:00:29.200 gravitas, and empathy Roosevelt was able to convey to the country was not something him

00:00:33.680 born, but in fact grew out of a tragedy which befell him at the age of 39, the contraction

00:00:38.600 of polio. Jonathan Darmann is the author of Becoming FDR, the personal crisis that made

00:00:43.400 a president. And today on the show, he paints a portrait of what Roosevelt was like before

00:00:47.460 he got polio and how, despite charm and ambition, he was considered shallow and a political lightweight.

00:00:52.360 We then discuss what it was like for FDR to get polio, what he did during years of bedridden

00:00:56.680 convalescence, and how the disease and his rehabilitation changed him. We talk about how

00:01:00.920 the influence of FDR's polio experience can be seen in the way he guided the country through the

00:01:05.000 depression in World War II, and the lesson in realistic optimism he offers us today. After the

00:01:10.120 show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash FDR.

00:01:29.360 All right, Jonathan Darmann, welcome to the show.

00:01:32.300 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:33.560 So you got a new biography out about FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's called Becoming

00:01:38.340 FDR, the personal crisis that made a president. There have been a lot of biographies written

00:01:43.100 about FDR because he's one of the most consequential US presidents. He's probably up there with Abraham

00:01:48.860 Lincoln, George Washington in terms of the influence he's had on America. What were you

00:01:53.780 hoping to explore and uncover about the man that previous treatments had skimmed over?

00:01:58.480 Yeah, it is sort of a crazy idea to set out to write a biography of FDR because there have been

00:02:05.880 so many books written about him, and he is a president that I think a lot of people know

00:02:10.280 certainly a lot about what he did leading the country through the Great Depression and World

00:02:15.520 War II, even if they don't necessarily know that much about him as a person. But I wanted to set out

00:02:21.280 to write a book about him because I was sort of interested in this question that feels, felt then,

00:02:27.220 and feels now really relevant to the time that we're living in, which is when the world is

00:02:33.640 really scary, when the country is experiencing crisis and trauma. How does a president sort of

00:02:41.240 form a bond with the people that he's charged with leading and inspire hope and convince them not just

00:02:47.880 that things are going to be okay, but things are going to be better and the country is going to be

00:02:51.780 able to do big things. And FDR is about as good an example as we have of that in the American

00:02:59.120 presidency. And I thought, honestly, when I started working on this, that the book was going to look at

00:03:05.620 his presidency. I didn't think it was going to be about polio at all. I thought it was going to look at

00:03:11.100 FDR's experience with polio in maybe half a chapter because I thought, you know, everyone knows that

00:03:16.780 FDR had polio. And I thought sort of the significance of it was that FDR, you know,

00:03:24.200 the steps that he had taken to conceal his condition from the public and the sort of code

00:03:30.060 of silence that existed in the press around that. And I thought everyone sort of knew all of that.

00:03:34.820 But when I dug into researching FDR's life and really sort of wrestling with who he was,

00:03:41.480 I was really struck by how formative the experience of getting polio at age 39, the middle of his life

00:03:50.180 was in shaping and remaking his character and really creating all of these qualities in him

00:03:57.320 that would make him a great president. And really sort of, I tried to sit in his head and think what

00:04:03.520 it must've been like to be him as someone who, before he'd had polio, he'd had a whole career in

00:04:08.440 politics that was sort of built around this idea of being an athletic, attractive, tall,

00:04:17.180 virile American man. And he gets polio at age 39, he loses the ability to walk on his own unaided for

00:04:23.680 the rest of his life. And sort of just trying to imagine what that would have been like for him

00:04:27.400 at that stage in life really was the way in for me. And I think really, I came to understand this

00:04:34.120 incredibly important effect it all had on his character for the first time when I read his

00:04:40.960 correspondence with other people who had polio. Other people with polio started writing letters

00:04:47.740 to him in the earliest days after his condition was announced to the public in 1921. And I was

00:04:54.640 particularly struck by a letter that he got from one man, someone he didn't know, a former railroad

00:05:01.140 worker who had gotten polio, had been completely paralyzed and had been in a hospital for seven

00:05:07.820 years. And that man wrote to FDR and he described the ways that rage and shame and fear had sort of

00:05:15.940 impeded his recovery. And he wrote to FDR, he said, Mr. Roosevelt, whatever you do, don't worry,

00:05:23.060 it won't help any. And that was sort of the moment that the book kind of revealed itself to me because

00:05:28.900 I could see sort of a direct line from those words to the man who goes on to say,

00:05:34.500 the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

00:05:38.340 Okay. So let's dig into how Roosevelt changed from before polio and after polio. Because I think

00:05:44.880 he did a great job exploring what he was like, his character was like before he got the diagnosis,

00:05:49.800 and then how the process of recuperating and kind of coming to terms with this disease,

00:05:56.160 how it changed him and basically made him the president that he became. Let's start with his

00:06:01.160 childhood. What was FDR's childhood like? And what was he like as a young man?

00:06:06.080 Yeah. So this was super important in the work that I did because I wanted to understand who he was

00:06:10.840 before polio and see the way that it changed him. Because I think a lot of us sort of think of FDR as

00:06:16.460 this kind of like godlike figure who was just sort of made as this natural great leader. And that wasn't

00:06:23.260 really the case at all. He was born in 1882. He grew up largely at his family's estate in the Hudson

00:06:30.400 Valley in Hyde Park. And the sort of hallmarks of that upbringing were extreme privilege. He came from

00:06:38.060 an old New York family, the Roosevelt's and wealth, but also extreme isolation. He didn't have any

00:06:45.320 siblings who were close in age. He had one half brother who was an adult by the time that FDR was born.

00:06:52.060 And so he didn't really have very many playmates in the area around where he lived. And his sort of

00:06:59.900 chief influences in a lot of ways and his chief companions were his parents, James Roosevelt and

00:07:07.580 Sarah Delano Roosevelt, his mother, who was this incredibly formidable woman who, you know, sort of

00:07:14.760 threw everything she had into FDR's upbringing. A lot of women in her class at that stage in time might 1.00

00:07:21.700 have, you know, given a lot of the child rearing responsibilities to nannies or governesses.

00:07:27.280 Sarah really wanted to be in charge of every aspect of Franklin Roosevelt's experience and

00:07:32.760 upbringing. And she had this sort of, you know, immersive love for him. And she really raised him

00:07:39.160 without any sort of rules about his expectations. She sort of prided herself that he didn't need a lot

00:07:46.240 coddling and rulemaking. But there's just this one giant expectation that hangs over everything in

00:07:54.420 his childhood, which is that he should be as pleasant as he can at all times. And the only thing

00:08:01.060 that would really, you know, bring the hammer down from Sarah, from young Franklin Roosevelt was any sign 0.94

00:08:06.260 of unpleasantness. And that's super important because it develops in him this unique ability

00:08:14.660 that he has. I mean, as an adult, people would talk about his sort of emotional intuition and his

00:08:19.160 ability to read people. And I think it has its roots in that upbringing with Sarah, because if your one

00:08:26.040 rule is don't make other people feel unpleasant, you become very attuned to the sort of first sign that

00:08:33.440 other people are finding you to be unpleasant. And he sort of would modulate his behavior accordingly.

00:08:40.320 It also creates this sort of mask between whatever he's feeling inside and whatever he projects to

00:08:47.460 the world. And that was really, you know, something that he carried with him all through life. So a lot

00:08:52.240 of the work that I did in writing this book about him was trying to sort of penetrate that facade and get

00:08:57.500 at what was really going on inside of his head. Yeah, we'll see how that mask played out when he got

00:09:02.800 the polio diagnosis, but also that idea of just being pleasant and like wanting people to like you

00:09:08.520 that played out later on when he was in politics and particularly as a president, you know, there's

00:09:13.000 stories of people talking to Roosevelt and he'd be like, oh yeah, so, huh? Yeah. And people would walk

00:09:17.800 away from the conversation thinking, oh yeah, Roosevelt agreed with me. Like he, he completely was on board

00:09:22.640 with what I had to say. And then Roosevelt will do the complete opposite. And people were just like

00:09:27.560 dumbfounded. It's like, what, what's going on here? And then you're like, yeah, is he lying to me?

00:09:31.880 He's like, no, he just actually, he wanted people to feel comfortable around him. So he'd say what he

00:09:35.660 needed to say to make that other person feel good. And sometimes that meant not actually saying what

00:09:41.940 you actually felt. That's right. I don't think that speaking his truth as we would put it today

00:09:48.140 was something that he valued highly at all times. He was, he was okay with people sort of getting a

00:09:54.500 surface level view of him and not understanding exactly what he was doing. So he had a very privileged

00:10:00.440 childhood. His mother had a big influence on him. He gets into young adulthood and he instantly moves

00:10:06.800 to a political life, which made sense because his family, he's a Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt,

00:10:13.140 Theodore Roosevelt was like a fifth cousin of his and kind of loomed large in FDR. What influence did

00:10:19.480 Teddy Roosevelt had on FDR's political career? Yeah. Teddy Roosevelt was his fifth cousin. And in his

00:10:26.000 childhood, he'd been this sort of, you know, distant figure, but he takes on this role of

00:10:31.420 prominence at, I think, a really interesting moment in FDR's life. So FDR, you know, goes to boarding

00:10:38.480 school, then he goes to Harvard. And in his freshman year at Harvard, FDR's father, James Roosevelt died.

00:10:45.960 And that's this moment, you know, as I thought about it, it could have been, it was sort of the first

00:10:49.940 real challenge that FDR had faced as a person. And it could have been a sort of moment for growth

00:10:56.620 because FDR's sort of lost and he's looking for a new role model. And he finds it in this cousin of

00:11:05.100 his, Teddy Roosevelt, who that same year gets catapulted from the vice presidency into the

00:11:11.860 presidency after the assassination of William McKinley. And all of a sudden, a man named Roosevelt,

00:11:18.540 who has Franklin Roosevelt's last name, is the most famous and celebrated person in the country

00:11:25.360 and in time in the world. And Franklin sees that and says, I want to be that. And he's sort of,

00:11:32.120 you know, as he's coming into the adult world, very consciously sets out to follow exactly the path

00:11:40.180 that Teddy Roosevelt had followed. He looks at all the jobs that Teddy had in politics,

00:11:46.020 and he sort of ticks them off. He enters the New York state legislature, which Teddy had done. He

00:11:52.040 became assistant secretary of the Navy, which had been the job that sort of Teddy Roosevelt had when

00:11:58.100 he became a national phenomenon at the start of the Spanish American war. Franklin also sort of brought

00:12:04.080 himself into the Teddy Roosevelt orbit by marrying another Roosevelt cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was

00:12:11.720 Teddy Roosevelt's niece. So when he marries her, he comes much, much closer to the sort of Teddy Roosevelt's inner

00:12:19.080 circle. And, you know, that I think was part of what the attraction to Eleanor was. So he very much sort of

00:12:27.380 goes about his early career with this idea that if he can do the best impersonation of Teddy Roosevelt

00:12:34.520 possible, his destiny is going to be the same kind of greatness that Teddy Roosevelt had.

00:12:41.080 What was driving FDR? Like what, why was he so ambitious? Was it just, he just wanted the thing

00:12:46.840 or what did he, was there like an underlying ethos of, I want to serve the greater good?

00:12:52.160 It's a good question. I think that he had in the abstract, this idea that his purpose was to help

00:12:58.940 others. He was a progressive, his father had been a progressive Democrat, and his father gave him this

00:13:05.200 sort of worldview about, you know, noblesse oblige, that if you were a privileged Roosevelt, you had an

00:13:11.880 obligation to help others. But I think when you look at FDR's career in the years before he got polio,

00:13:19.520 he has this idea that if he's going to do good, he first has to become great. And it's really,

00:13:26.280 you know, his focus in those years is therefore really on advancing his own career and his own

00:13:33.920 interests. He's not sort of plugged into this question of what am I doing to help other people?

00:13:40.520 He's not really on an emotional or tactile level interested in the problems of people who have less

00:13:48.760 than he does, because he doesn't really understand what their suffering is about.

00:13:52.800 All right. So in the beginning, it was all vainglory, probably. But what was interesting,

00:13:57.080 he was set out on this trajectory that Teddy Roosevelt laid out, this plan. But people never

00:14:02.980 really took him seriously. They considered him a lightweight. They called him a feather duster.

00:14:07.460 Why didn't he capture the respect of the political class early in his political career?

00:14:12.220 Yeah, I think because people over time, and I think we see this in our politics today,

00:14:16.560 we call it authenticity. They can sort of sense that even if someone has all of the right attributes,

00:14:24.080 which Franklin Roosevelt had, he was handsome, he was athletic, he was charming, he was charismatic,

00:14:30.880 he had the last name Roosevelt. If there's not some substance behind it, people can sense that over

00:14:37.540 time. And you saw that sort of play out. So he did sort of, he had an ability to captivate a room.

00:14:44.780 He got put on the 1920 Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate, in large part because

00:14:52.140 people liked the way he looked running around on the convention floor, sort of jumping over rows of

00:14:57.940 chairs and picking fights. And sort of they thought, oh, there's a coming man. But when people would go

00:15:03.840 to see his speeches, they wouldn't really remember anything particular that he had to say. None of that

00:15:08.960 great oratorical ability that we all associate with FDR was there yet. So they could sort of sense

00:15:16.240 that this was someone who was a lot more sort of surface than he was substance. And I think that,

00:15:22.280 you know, if he had gone on that trajectory, he might have, you know, achieved higher offices. He

00:15:28.200 might have, if he'd been really lucky, even gotten to be president someday. But he never would have been

00:15:33.660 a great president because he hadn't really been tested in a way that would, that would make his

00:15:37.780 character up to that. Okay. So he had a, he had a pretty decent political career early in life.

00:15:43.360 He was representative. He was the assistant secretary of Navy. He got to be vice president

00:15:48.380 candidate, but lost in 1920. So at this point, he's about 38, 39. When exactly did he contract polio?

00:15:56.660 So he contracted polio in the summer of 1921. And that's the year after he had lost in the 1920

00:16:05.620 presidential election in a landslide as the vice presidential candidate. So he was in the private

00:16:10.620 sector and he had come to his family's vacation cottage on Campobello Island, which is a Canadian

00:16:18.660 island off the coast of Maine. And he arrives there and he's, he's on vacation with his family and he's

00:16:24.720 going about it in this sort of typical Roosevelt fashion. He's, you know, sailing, he's running all

00:16:30.280 over the Island. He's swimming, he stamps out a fire. And then in the afternoon on a, on a, on a day in

00:16:37.660 mid August, he starts to feel fevered and has a stiffness in his back and he goes to bed early.

00:16:43.060 And when he wakes up the next morning, he's, he's been, he's had a horrible night of fever dreams

00:16:49.400 and he can barely walk. And by the next day, he's going to be paralyzed in much of his body and he

00:16:56.940 doesn't know it, but he's never going to be able to walk again. People don't, in the, the people who

00:17:03.920 are with him there on Campobello Island, his wife, Eleanor, his political advisor, Louis Howe, the rest of

00:17:09.580 his family, none of them know what's happened to him. And it's this sort, you know, Campobello Island

00:17:14.840 in 1921 is one of the worst places you could possibly get infected with the polio virus. The

00:17:23.220 Roosevelt house there didn't have electricity. It was gas lit. There was only one phone line on the

00:17:28.920 Island. There's not a full-time doctor on the Island. There's just a sort of local country doctor

00:17:33.540 from Maine who would come and take care of patients there. And that, that man was not able to see

00:17:38.800 Franklin Roosevelt's early symptoms and diagnose polio. So he goes through this really terrifying

00:17:44.840 two and a half week ordeal where he's getting sicker. They're worried that he might die and they

00:17:50.980 don't know what's happened to him. And then finally, after two and a half weeks, these sort of experts are

00:17:56.340 brought into Campobello and they give him the diagnosis that he has polio, or as it was known

00:18:02.600 commonly at the time, infantile paralysis, because it was a disease that chiefly affected children.

00:18:10.800 And that's in the summer of 1921, about as frightening a diagnosis as you can get. Polio had

00:18:20.140 been around for a long time before that, but it was only in the sort of two decades up to that point

00:18:24.880 that it had been this well-known thing in the United States. And it was a source of mystery and

00:18:31.280 universal fear. There had been these epidemics in American cities in 1916. There was one in New

00:18:38.740 York city that killed 2000 people. And it was this thing that everyone was sort of terrified about.

00:18:44.580 And the way that I think about it is it's sort of, it was sort of like the early days of COVID-19

00:18:51.100 when we didn't really understand much about how that virus worked. And we were washing our groceries

00:18:57.060 and doing all these things because we just were sort of ignorant, but we were terrified at the same

00:19:03.820 time. That combination of ignorance and fear was there with polio, except it went on for decades. 0.67

00:19:09.860 People really didn't understand much about how the virus worked, how it was communicated,

00:19:15.180 or even the right way to treat it. So when FDR gets that diagnosis of polio, he understands that

00:19:22.920 his life as he's imagined it is going to be completely upended. And it's really a quite

00:19:29.280 bleak picture of what might lie ahead of him. Well, what was his initial reaction when he got

00:19:34.780 the diagnosis? And then they said, yeah, you have polio. Like how did FDR respond? Because again,

00:19:38.560 this guy is typically, he's like very cheerful. He was raised to be, never show people that you're

00:19:42.720 upset. What was his initial response? So his initial response, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt looks at him

00:19:48.500 when he gets, when he gets the news and she looks for some sign of fear, um, sadness, and, and it's

00:19:54.780 just sort of complete placid exterior. He just sort of accepts it. But I think, you know, what was clear

00:20:01.360 to me after, after looking at this period was that inside he's really, he's really quite struck by it.

00:20:08.320 And he does a couple of days later when that, when that country doctor comes to check on him,

00:20:13.680 FDR actually breaks down in tears and he, and he doesn't say like, you know, what's going to become of

00:20:17.900 me? He's frustrated because he doesn't feel like he has a clear plan. He's not getting good

00:20:25.280 recommendations from doctors about what he should be doing. And that's always been the way that he's

00:20:30.060 sort of understood things up to that point is, you know, if you have a problem, you, you, you just

00:20:35.140 take charge of it yourself and you solve it. And he really sort of struggled to, I think, bring himself

00:20:42.240 around to the idea that at least at first, what he could do for himself was not at all obvious.

00:20:48.620 And a lot of the work that he does in those first weeks, months, years after getting the polio

00:20:54.920 diagnosis is coming to understand all the things that he can do to sort of take charge of his own

00:21:01.140 destiny again, even after it's been completely hijacked by this disease.

00:21:06.100 Well, and there was a key person that helped him come up with this plan. This guy named Lewis Howe.

00:21:10.220 This is a political advisor that FDR had had since he was an assemblyman in New York.

00:21:15.600 And this guy was really, he was setting out a plan for FDR to become president. That was the goal.

00:21:21.140 He was just as invested in this as FDR was. How did Howe respond to FDR's polio diagnosis? Because

00:21:28.640 I mean, I imagine this, this threw a big wrench in his plans, right?

00:21:32.800 Definitely. I mean, I think, you know, we were just talking about all the bad luck that FDR 0.90

00:21:38.560 had that summer and fall of 1921. I think in a lot of ways, the one great stroke of good luck that

00:21:46.080 he had was that he had someone like Louis Howe in his life. You know, we have today, because we will

00:21:53.900 watch shows like House of Cards or Veep, you know, we have this like understanding of political

00:21:59.120 consultants, which was what sort of the role that Howe played for FDR was. We have this idea of them

00:22:05.060 as these like deeply cynical figures. And I think most political consultants, if they find out that

00:22:11.680 the guy that they were trying to make president, and that they'd seen as someone who was a coming

00:22:16.480 man, all of a sudden that that guy has lost the ability to walk, is going to be out of the arena

00:22:22.220 for years at a time, most political consultants would start looking around for another job and for

00:22:27.460 another candidate. Howe did the opposite. He moved into the Roosevelt's house. He cared that much

00:22:35.660 about Franklin Roosevelt that he wanted to just be there in every way that he could to sort of help

00:22:41.480 shape FDR's recovery. And I think the key insight that Howe had came from talking to FDR's doctors

00:22:51.240 in those early days. And those doctors saying that, you know, the sort of quality of his recovery

00:22:57.000 is going to depend in large part on his belief that, you know, some things are going to get

00:23:03.100 better, that good things lie ahead. And at that point in time, a lot of the other people in FDR's

00:23:08.720 life, most prominently his mother, were saying to him, OK, you have this disability now, and it's

00:23:15.120 going to it's going to require we don't know if you're going to be able to walk again. But if it is,

00:23:19.740 it's going to require a lot of work and recovery, you should give up this idea of politics and just

00:23:26.280 sort of retire to a quiet country life as a country squire. And Louis Howe doesn't buy into that at all.

00:23:33.200 He goes to FDR and he says, look, I think you're not only going to return to politics,

00:23:39.320 I think you're going to be the president of the United States. And I have a detailed plan for how

00:23:46.820 it's going to happen. You're going to devote a lot of your life in the coming years to recovery,

00:23:51.860 to trying to get as much mobility again as you can. We're going to find other ways to keep your

00:23:57.580 name in front of the public eye. And we're going to be strategic and sort of looking for moments for

00:24:03.340 you to reemerge. But it's going to take time. And in Howe's eyes, that was it was going to take a lot

00:24:08.320 of time. He told FDR that he could run for governor in 1932 and then run for president four

00:24:14.680 years later in 1936. So he presents FDR with this very detailed plan of the years ahead and the path

00:24:22.320 forward. And FDR's response to him is, when do we start? Because I think that was the thing that he'd

00:24:29.700 been longing for, was someone to tell him, here's the path forward. Here's how things are going to get

00:24:34.500 better from here. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:24:44.800 And now back to the show. Okay. So Howe, he came up with this detailed plan. And then I also was

00:24:49.640 impressed how immediately after the diagnosis, Howe went into action and doing the public relations.

00:24:56.480 He was releasing basically publicity letters saying, oh, look, FDR, he's sick. We're not sure

00:25:02.960 exactly what it is, but he's recovering. I mean, he was kind of, he was doing some spin. And I guess

00:25:07.300 he was, they were just trying to hide the fact that he had polio. They wanted to give the polio

00:25:12.960 diagnosis on their own terms. Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you read the article in the New York

00:25:17.780 Times, when they ultimately announced in September of 1921 to the public that FDR had polio, FDR's doctor

00:25:27.300 is quoted in that article saying, no one need have any fear of a permanent disability. And he knew

00:25:34.380 that that was, the doctor knew when he said that, that that was not true. And that, I think it's safe

00:25:40.160 to assume that that was the hand of Louis Howe sort of trying to influence and put the best face forward

00:25:44.880 because there actually were quite a lot of articles about FDR in these years where they're talking about

00:25:51.820 his condition and the fact that he had had infantile paralysis. But it's always sort of stresses that the

00:25:59.140 worst is behind him, that he's made this miraculous recovery. And very soon he's going to be, he's going

00:26:04.600 to have no effects of polio anymore at all. And I think actually that creates, getting back to the

00:26:11.000 sort of, you know, facade of FDR, it creates a certain distance between him and a lot of the other

00:26:18.580 people in his life because they had been reading these things about how he'd made this miraculous

00:26:24.540 recovery in his own accounts. He was saying, oh, I'm going to be fine, you know, in just a couple of

00:26:29.680 months. And then when they would see him in person, the reality of it was, was really quite striking.

00:26:36.440 There's a scene in the book where, where James Cox, who had been FDR's running mate in 1920 comes to

00:26:43.160 visit him and he's been getting all this positive spin. And when he sees the difference between that spin

00:26:48.200 and the reality of FDR, who's in quite bad shape at that point, he's sort of moved to tears and it's

00:26:54.800 this humiliating moment for FDR. And so even the people who might've been close to him in that

00:27:00.720 moment can't really form a connection because there aren't words that they have to describe

00:27:05.740 what's going on. Do you think FDR believed his own hype? Like he actually, did he actually believe

00:27:12.200 like, yeah, I'm going to walk one day? Like, and like in his mind, he wasn't lying.

00:27:17.280 He had this really remarkable ability to sort of believe things on one plane and then on the

00:27:24.960 deepest level, look at things as they really were. So he understood that the conventional wisdom among

00:27:32.740 doctors treating polio in that period was that polio was an infection that would destroy muscle

00:27:40.100 tissue. And that muscle tissue, some muscles would get weakened and some muscles would be

00:27:45.440 destroyed. And once it was destroyed, it was gone. And it would take time for someone recovering from

00:27:51.360 polio to understand what was going on with particular muscles. But that typically if after one or two years

00:27:58.800 they hadn't regained the use of a muscle, it probably wasn't coming back. So in FDR's recovery,

00:28:04.920 as he's trying to get back the ability to walk, year one goes by, year two goes by, he's been sort of

00:28:11.100 committing himself to all these schemes. He's been researching different approaches to seek

00:28:17.740 rehabilitation, but he doesn't get back the ability to walk unaided. And he really doesn't make the kind

00:28:23.820 of progress that he wants at all. And he understands that that means, you know, from the doctor's

00:28:29.080 perspective, he doesn't have a good chance of walking again on his own. But I think he believes

00:28:34.620 he wants to believe that there's something that they don't see that he doesn't see, that he can

00:28:40.500 find some other path that's going to bring back his ability to walk so that he can really have that

00:28:45.280 full mobility again. Well, I want to talk about some of the links he went to, to rehabilitate

00:28:50.500 himself. But something you talk about that, that first year of him getting polio, he was bedridden for

00:28:56.880 the first time in his life. This is a guy who was always in constant motion, you know, bounding over

00:29:01.260 chairs at conventions, trying to like steal signs and whatever. But now he had to stay in bed because

00:29:06.380 he couldn't walk. What happened during that time? Like, what did he do with himself to pass the time

00:29:10.600 away while he was lying in bed? Yeah. You know, we were talking about Louis Howe. I start the book

00:29:16.560 with a quote from Louis Howe, where he was sort of reflecting on all the things that FDR got from the

00:29:24.020 experience of polio and recovering from it. And he said a year or two in bed should be prescribed for

00:29:31.000 all of our statesmen. And I think it's this idea that FDR had been so hyperactive that up to that

00:29:39.220 point, he always had a way he could sort of avoid engaging with anything deeply because there was

00:29:45.660 always something else to just go do. And when he gets polio and he's lying there in bed, he's forced

00:29:52.500 to sort of stay and think about things really for the first time in his life. Eleanor Roosevelt

00:29:58.400 calls it the first time he's forced to reckon with the fundamentals of living. And, you know,

00:30:04.300 in Howe's eyes, that's the moment when he's lying there and he's thinking about, you know, what's

00:30:09.880 happened to him. He sort of starts thinking about, wow, this has happened to a lot of other people

00:30:15.240 as well. And, you know, Howe says, you know, it's where he develops this ability to empathize

00:30:21.220 with other people. He says he can see things from the other fellow's point of view and he grows

00:30:25.120 bigger by the day. And I think, you know, again, this is why looking at those letters that he got

00:30:31.400 from people, from other polio patients was so important to me because a lot of the reason that

00:30:37.520 these people were writing to FDR was they were reading these same stories in the newspapers about

00:30:45.060 how FDR had made this dramatic recovery. And some of them were writing to him seeking advice. They

00:30:51.080 were saying, you know, what did you do? Like, what can I do based on what you've learned? But others

00:30:56.900 were offering advice. And in his responses to those people, you see FDR being frank and open and honest

00:31:06.480 about his condition in a way that he's not really with anyone else in his life. And it's the beginning

00:31:12.620 of this sort of amazing ability that Franklin Roosevelt will have as president to form almost

00:31:20.080 an intimate connection with people that he's never going to meet, but to give them a sense that he

00:31:27.080 knows them. And I think that that's really the biggest legacy of those years of quiet lying in his bed.

00:31:33.720 So that was the strength he developed to compensate for his loss of physical ability,

00:31:37.120 like that sort of ability to empathize on a mass level.

00:31:39.760 Yeah. And I think that he, you know, he gains other practical things there. He's, he's,

00:31:46.060 he's never up to that point in his life needed to have strategic ability because when you're sort

00:31:51.920 of a charming, handsome guy and you walk into most rooms, you're pretty confident that things are

00:31:58.320 going to work out okay for you. But when you lose that, you have, you have a renewed appreciation

00:32:03.900 for things like timing and planning. And that's when he really starts to think about, okay, what do I

00:32:10.220 need to do to achieve what I want? And, you know, in the presidency, he has this remarkable strategic

00:32:16.040 ability and this sort of ability to always be four steps ahead of everyone else. I think that comes out

00:32:21.600 of these years as well. And even like sort of the understanding of the radio, which is going to be so

00:32:28.740 important in his presidency, you know, the 1920 election, the year before he'd gotten polio,

00:32:34.940 the first radio broadcast was, was the night of that election, sort of someone just speaking into

00:32:40.060 a microphone, delivering the results. So these years where he's lying in bed, where he's chasing

00:32:45.660 recuperation, recovery, rehabilitation, these are the years where radio is sort of taking over.

00:32:51.380 And he comes to understand that this is going to be this medium that can help someone like him who

00:32:56.780 can't necessarily go everywhere to form a connection with people.

00:33:02.020 Okay. So, uh, he's got polio, he started his recovery process. And at this point, people like

00:33:06.560 the public knows that he has polio, but you talk about how he just, he went to extreme lengths to

00:33:12.280 hide the fact that he couldn't walk. And then he didn't really talk of when he made public appearances,

00:33:17.020 he wouldn't talk about his disability. And what was interesting, the media really didn't cover it

00:33:23.040 as well. What was going on there? Cause I mean, today that would, I think that would be like a

00:33:27.500 topic that people would be thinking about or writing about the most like, well, there's this political

00:33:31.340 leader who's got this disability. Why did he try to hide it? And why did the press ignore it?

00:33:38.700 Yeah. So it's, it's a sort of rich and nuanced story that I think changes over time. So certainly

00:33:45.280 when he was president, he never really talked about his disability publicly, except for a couple of

00:33:50.600 exceptions at all. And the press really didn't talk about it because they understood that there

00:33:55.800 were, that he didn't want to have focus on that. But in the 1920s, the decade before he becomes

00:34:02.340 president, you know, there was actually a lot. I was surprised by how much conversation there was

00:34:07.900 about his illness and his disability. So if you were reading the newspapers in those years and you were

00:34:14.540 interested in Franklin Roosevelt, you would certainly know that he'd had infantile paralysis.

00:34:18.740 You would have definitely maybe even seen pictures of him with his body where you could see his legs,

00:34:23.740 you know, quite shrunken from the effects of the disease. And you could understand that he was

00:34:29.620 really devoting himself most of the time to trying to regain the ability to walk. And I think that that

00:34:35.720 was actually in a lot of ways intentional. They wanted to have the polio story to humanize him,

00:34:43.180 particularly in the latter part of the 1920s, when he, when he ultimately returned to politics,

00:34:47.860 it's this sort of, you know, what we would today call a comeback narrative that makes him sort of

00:34:53.760 feel like someone that people can understand and root for. But so even though they're, they're sharing

00:34:59.960 details about it, they, what they really didn't want was for him to ever be seen in a situation where

00:35:06.320 his disability made him look weak. So they were terrified about situations where, you know,

00:35:13.840 he's in a public crowd and he would get jostled and maybe he would fall. They were always trying

00:35:18.420 to prevent that. And so to, so to try and prevent that, they would sort of carry him up, you know,

00:35:24.200 many different flights of back staircases. They would sort of dangle him down onto stages,

00:35:29.900 all just trying to avoid these situations where he might be sort of out of the ability to control

00:35:36.300 the perception of his disability. And it was all about sort of preventing this image of weakness.

00:35:44.200 And I think, you know, the irony there is that, you know, as, as I, as I describe in the book and

00:35:49.580 what we've been talking about in the conversation, polio is not really his weakness. It's the source

00:35:55.400 of all that's great in him. And what really drove that home for me was an essay that I, that I found

00:36:01.240 from another polio patient that was written in the first days of FDR's presidency, where he was

00:36:08.480 talking about this conversation about the president's disability and what, as he put it, able-bodied

00:36:14.240 people thought of FDR. And he said, perhaps they failed to realize that the paralysis, which has made

00:36:21.460 us weaker animals, has also made us stronger men. And that's it. Like, that's the heart of FDR.

00:36:28.420 Yeah. I think it's interesting too. I think what it did, maybe this is kind of my theory,

00:36:32.840 so you can dismiss it if you want, but like, you know, I think he put on a strong front because he

00:36:39.260 knew that people wanted someone, a leader who was strong. Right. But by like not talking about it,

00:36:45.580 like it made the polio, people actually became more aware of the polio and it kind of, it, I don't

00:36:51.080 know, for some reason, I think it might've made it more powerful. Like when you don't talk about it,

00:36:54.640 does that make sense? I actually think that's completely right. It's, you know, the, to use

00:37:00.900 the cliche, it's sort of show, don't tell people knew enough about polio to know that he had been

00:37:08.160 through this experience, that it had been a trying experience that he had sort of persevered, but he

00:37:15.060 wasn't sort of making the link for them directly saying, I understand your suffering because I

00:37:22.900 have suffered. And it was therefore a lot more powerful because people could sort of sense when

00:37:27.800 he's saying these, these words to them that are inspiring, that this is someone who knows what

00:37:32.280 he's talking about. So an important part of his rehabilitation process was he discovered this

00:37:38.660 place in Georgia called Warm Springs. Tell us about that place. Yeah. So Warm Springs, I think is,

00:37:45.680 is such a great part of this story. He goes there in the fall of 1924 and that's three years after he

00:37:54.000 had first gotten polio. So it's outside of that window where he's really got a chance of regaining

00:38:01.300 the ability to walk on his own unaided. So he goes there because in a lot of ways he's looking for

00:38:07.040 a miracle and Warm Springs is built to him as this place in the mountains of Georgia where there are

00:38:15.220 these waters that have had this, that have these sort of miraculous healing properties and that have

00:38:23.240 given other paralysis patients back the ability to walk. So he hears about it and he's sort of

00:38:29.140 immediately drawn in and he goes down there in the fall of 1924 and he discovers that it's,

00:38:36.040 it had been billed to him as this sort of spa resort, but it's really this sort of ramshackle

00:38:42.180 beaten down place. But it does have a pool with these waters and he gets in the water and he right

00:38:50.880 away has two thoughts. The first thought is this really does feel like magic. And the second thought

00:38:58.660 is it's a shame that it's only for me. And I think that's, you know, so important because you see

00:39:05.340 there how much that sort of quality of empathy that he's been developing has really become central to

00:39:11.880 him. And he goes from that point on really Warm Springs becomes this place that's much more about

00:39:19.200 his ability to help other people than it is about his ability to help himself. He very quickly starts

00:39:26.760 thinking of himself as sort of the leader of Warm Springs. Later in the 1920s, he'll actually

00:39:32.360 invest a large portion of his personal fortune to buy the colony. And that's, that's a big deal

00:39:40.420 because it's like the 1920s. Other people in FDR's social circle are spending their money in the stock

00:39:46.980 market and getting rich. He puts it into Warm Springs, which like, I think he has sort of vague ideas

00:39:52.320 that it could be a moneymaker, but anyone who looks at it objectively sees that that's, that's not going

00:39:57.380 to happen. This is really about service to others. And he gets super involved in bringing other patients

00:40:04.600 to Warm Springs and in sort of guiding their recovery. So I would like, when I was researching this,

00:40:12.120 read medical reports from Warm Springs that would describe a patient who'd arrived there, describing the

00:40:18.280 condition that they were in when they arrived, describing the condition when they left and

00:40:22.640 tracking all these specific measures of improvement. And then down at the bottom of the report, you would

00:40:28.200 see the author of the report had signed his name and it was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was that engaged

00:40:34.480 on an individual level. And I, and I, I came to sort of see Warm Springs as in a lot of ways,

00:40:41.660 the sort of place where he puts into practice, the sort of all of the principles that he's developed

00:40:47.640 about how you foster hope and nurture recovery and, and uses it almost as a, as a laboratory for how you

00:40:55.500 can use those principles to inspire recovery and other people. And how does this experience influence

00:41:01.200 his approach to his presidency? I mean, I think at Warm Springs, he gets this sort of, it crystallizes for

00:41:09.100 him the pragmatic necessities of hope. So he focuses on things like the centrality of dignity. He knew

00:41:19.920 from his own experience that when you're disabled, there are a lot of moments when you're out in the

00:41:24.180 world where you're sort of exposed and vulnerable. He heard from other, from other polio patients that

00:41:29.920 one of the most sort of dignity robbing moments was going to some kind of pool to seek water therapy

00:41:38.200 and having to change and be changed out in the open. So FDR focuses on, on, on addressing that at

00:41:46.600 Warm Springs. He builds really nice changing rooms for the patients there. And that sounds like sort of

00:41:52.540 a small thing, but I think it shows this focus on, okay, dignity is a really important thing that you

00:41:59.160 need when you're experiencing suffering. And it's something that you can, you can address right away,

00:42:04.520 even if you can't do everything to make people completely better right away. And that sort of,

00:42:10.060 you know, goes directly into the principles of the new deal. When he's, when he's coming up with these

00:42:15.660 programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, it's this idea that

00:42:22.520 people who are out of work want to be useful and need some sort of outlet for how they should spend

00:42:28.540 their time and that that's going to have palliative effects that go far beyond just sort of a standard

00:42:34.560 economic cure. He also focuses on the sort of centrality of needing community before he'd come

00:42:40.860 to Warm Springs. People just sort of came there on their own and sought treatment. He builds walkways

00:42:47.240 between all the cottages there. And he creates this sort of culture around meals where other people are

00:42:53.300 sharing in their experiencing and forming connections with other people so that they can

00:42:58.920 sort of bond over their shared experience. Because he knew that that had been so important in his

00:43:03.980 own experience as well. And that, I think, was such a big driver in his presidency as well, was not just

00:43:09.260 trying to make the country find its way out of the Depression, but to sort of create a stronger sense

00:43:14.700 of community and citizenship among the American people so that they felt more tied to each other and that

00:43:21.300 there were more people looking out for them. So those are some of the sort of practical things

00:43:26.260 that he gets from his own experience and from Warm Springs that I think he directly applies to the

00:43:31.160 presidency.

00:43:32.180 And another thing you talked about, too, that stood out to me was he was constantly experimenting at

00:43:36.540 Warm Springs. And then he was very, as you said, he had these reports. He wanted to measure progress.

00:43:41.300 And if he saw that something wasn't working, he would just discard it. And he took that approach in his

00:43:47.160 presidency in those first hundred days. Like, he would just try different things, like throwing

00:43:50.940 spaghetti in the wall to see what worked. And they'd measure the progress. If it wasn't working,

00:43:54.400 they'd get rid of it. And I think you can trace that back to Warm Springs.

00:43:59.500 There's a famous FDR quote that he gives in his 1932 campaign for the presidency, where he's sort

00:44:06.300 of laying out the New Deal for the first time. And he says, try something. If it fails, admit it

00:44:12.480 plainly. But above all, try something. And that ethos is, yes, completely at the heart of the New Deal,

00:44:19.800 that it's much better to be seen acting and trying to find a solution than to ponder and wait and find

00:44:26.420 exactly the right solution. And it comes completely from his own experience of sort of doing his

00:44:32.140 research, but then throwing himself into whatever he can and trying to assess whether it's working.

00:44:38.000 And then if it doesn't, sort of very pragmatically moving on.

00:44:41.400 What role do you think FDR's polio played in his being able to win the presidency in 32?

00:44:47.740 I think it was essential. And what's ironic is that a lot of people thought when he ran for

00:44:54.680 president in 1932 that it was going to be the thing that kept him from it. So he came back into

00:45:00.180 politics in the late 1920s. He got elected governor of New York, in part by using this comeback story

00:45:06.720 from polio. And that made him the front runner to be the Democratic nominee in 1932. But a lot of

00:45:15.380 the sort of other potential candidates, some of his rivals in the Democratic Party, kind of discounted

00:45:22.180 him because they had known the pre-polio FDR, the guy that we were talking about at the beginning of

00:45:28.500 this conversation, who was sort of shallow and vain. And they assumed that he was still that same person

00:45:35.140 and that if anything, he was just a sort of weaker version of that person because now he was,

00:45:40.180 in their words, a cripple. But what they didn't know was all the ways that polio had changed him. 0.67

00:45:46.860 And it gave him this remarkable new strategic ability that he'd never had before. And if you

00:45:53.800 read the book, you see that sort of play out over the course of the campaign. And I think polio was

00:45:58.960 also central to what he did in that campaign and in the early years of his presidency, which was

00:46:04.820 form this bond with the American people. When he was accepting the nomination for the presidency

00:46:12.620 in the summer of 1932 at the Democratic Convention, this is a line that I always come back to. He said,

00:46:19.740 out of every crisis, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge of higher decency

00:46:27.400 and of purer purpose. And that was, you know, the summer of 1932, the depths of the Great Depression.

00:46:35.500 And that, I mean, if ever there was a crisis, that was it. And people believed him when he said those

00:46:41.980 words. And they believed it because he believed it. And he believed it because he had lived it in his

00:46:46.840 life. Are there moments in his presidency that you can point to and say, yeah, his polio is what made

00:46:52.800 that possible? Yeah, I see it a lot. I think you, if you look at the fireside chats, Roosevelt's famous

00:46:58.720 fireside chats, if you read them, they're not really like soaring oratory. They're quite dense and

00:47:06.380 detailed. And I think that that came in a lot of ways out of his own experience with polio, because if

00:47:13.100 you've had a serious disease, you know that in those situations, when you're looking to a voice

00:47:18.260 of authority, if it's the doctor, if you're a patient, or if it's the president, if you're someone

00:47:23.740 living through the depression, you want the details, because it's going to give you confidence

00:47:27.780 that this person knows what they're talking about, and that they have a clear idea of what the path

00:47:32.600 forward is. So I think that's certainly huge. I think in his leadership during the war,

00:47:38.200 Eleanor Roosevelt talked about how polio gave FDR the ability to make a decision and then draw a

00:47:46.420 curtain and go to sleep. And that was really important when he was leading the country during

00:47:51.540 World War II, because he had to make these really tough decisions that had huge consequences, I mean,

00:47:57.760 really in terms of the fate of liberty and civilization. And he didn't know if he was going to be right or

00:48:04.160 not. And he knew that he might not know for months or even years at a time. But he was okay with that.

00:48:10.480 And he was sort of comfortable enough in his own skin to make those decisions. And I think he was

00:48:15.580 able to do that because he'd been there before. That was in a lot of ways analogous to what he'd gone

00:48:21.180 through when he was pursuing rehabilitative strategies for polio, was this idea of finding

00:48:27.120 out what's a course you can take and trying it and then waiting over time to see what the result would be.

00:48:32.520 What do you think are some lessons listeners can take from FDR and how to handle a big setback in

00:48:39.020 life?

00:48:39.840 I think in a lot of ways, the simplest way to answer that is to look at some advice that FDR got from a

00:48:47.840 relative himself in the earliest days of FDR's recovery. So he had this uncle named Frederick

00:48:55.140 Delano, his mother's brother, who was a very capable, action-oriented guy. And in those weeks

00:49:04.080 where they were trying to figure out what had happened to FDR, what he was suffering from and

00:49:08.540 how to get him the best treatment, Frederick Delano sort of comes into the breach and he's as helpful

00:49:13.720 as he can be. And he has this affection for Franklin Roosevelt. And he's really thinking about what this

00:49:19.880 disease is going to mean for FDR. And he worries about it. And there's one night where he's up all

00:49:24.640 night worrying about it. And he gets up in the morning and he writes FDR a letter. And he starts

00:49:31.480 out the letter by saying, I might give you some fatherly advice. And I think that's kind of a signal

00:49:36.620 that this is not going to be your typical sort of Delano or Roosevelt family letter. This is going to be

00:49:42.460 talking about heavy stuff and feelings, which was not sort of the way that they typically

00:49:47.780 operated. And he said, you know, you're facing this challenge and it's going to rely on your

00:49:54.180 own character. And I thought it might be helpful if I give you my philosophy for living. And he says,

00:49:59.260 to my mind, philosophy means in substance, making the best of the situation, taking things as they are,

00:50:06.120 and above all, not fooling yourself. And by intelligent reasoning, determining the right course

00:50:11.920 to pursue. And then twinned with that, he talks to FDR about the importance of optimism. He says,

00:50:20.520 I never worry. I accept things as they are. I look forward and not back. You know, so when people are

00:50:27.140 going through hardship, you know, optimism can be a hard thing to find. And it certainly is easy for us

00:50:33.640 who are not suffering to tell other people to focus on the positive. But I think that FDR, if he were here

00:50:40.400 to tell people what they need in suffering, he would really give another version of that same

00:50:46.140 set of advice from Frederick Delano, sort of pairing the realism that you give to yourself

00:50:51.560 with optimism about the future and what you can really get out of this setback that you don't see

00:50:56.520 even in the midst of hardship. Well, Jonathan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go

00:51:01.000 to learn more about the book and your work? The book is available in hardcover, in audio,

00:51:05.720 and digital. You can get it on Amazon or bookshop.org or any other platform. You can also go to my

00:51:12.820 website, jonathandarman.com. That has links to all of those platforms. It also has a lot of other

00:51:19.040 information about the book and about me. And you can sign up there for my newsletter where I'll give

00:51:25.460 updates about the book. But I also write pieces about how the past sort of informs our understanding

00:51:31.860 of the present about topics beyond just Franklin Roosevelt. Fantastic. Well, Jonathan Darman,

00:51:36.440 thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. It's been a great conversation.

00:51:40.240 My guest here is Jonathan Darman. He's the author of the book, Becoming FDR. It's available on

00:51:43.780 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website,

00:51:47.620 jonathandarman.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash FDR. We find links to resources.

00:51:52.800 We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure

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00:53:05.220 You

The Art of Manliness - December 07, 2022

How Polio Made a President

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