Polio Strikes Franklin Roosevelt
On Sunday, August 7, 1921, 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived at Campobello, a small Canadian island across the Bay of Fundy from Maine that was close to his heart, if not as deep in his blood as the Hudson River valley. He thought he was starting a vacation there pretty much like any other.
His parents had first taken the infant FDR to a resort hotel at Campobello in 1883, and they soon purchased a house overlooking the water where the boy could roam free in the wilds and sail the sometimes treacherous waters. After his marriage, in 1905, his widowed mother, Sara, bought a 15-room cottage next door as a gift for her son and his wife, Eleanor. This visit, however, would be FDR’s first extended holiday on the island since he had become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, in 1913. Work had kept him too busy for more than the occasional long weekend, though he always saw to it that Eleanor and the “chicks,” as he called his four sons and one daughter, enjoyed a more leisurely visit.
During the summer of 1916, when a virulent polio epidemic swept the East Coast, causing towns to set up roadblocks against automobiles with young people and terrified parents to greet trains at stations with signs reading “New Yorkers Keep Out: We Sympathize but We Have Children,” he had insisted his family remain in the relative safety—though there were German U-boat scares offshore—of Campobello. Poliomyelitis was, for the most part, a disease that struck children, and Roosevelt was not taking any chances with the “chicks,” though it was hard to know what constituted taking chances.
Polio had been with man since ancient times, but the nineteenth century was the first to record its epidemics, which were, ironically, the result of medical progress. As the germ theory of disease took hold and society grew more obsessed with cleanliness, children became less likely to come into contact with microbes early in life, when they were still partially protected by maternal antibodies, so boys and girls who might have weathered an attack with little or no lasting effects in the past now suffered more serious consequences.
At the time, no one knew for certain what caused polio, although theories abounded. One posited that it was insect-borne. “Please kill all the flies I left,” FDR wrote Eleanor after returning to a suffocating and more contagious District of Columbia from one weekend on the island in that dangerous summer of 1916. He added that there was speculation that the recent wet spring had encouraged the spread of the disease. Not until that autumn had Roosevelt permitted his family to leave the island, and then, rather than risk infection by using public transportation, he had commandeered the Secretary of the Navy’s official yacht, the Dolphin, to bring them home.
Now, five years later, in 1921, FDR was looking forward to an extended and much-needed vacation on Campo, as they called it. He was still tired from the months he had spent crisscrossing the country the previous summer and fall, campaigning for the Cox-Roosevelt presidential ticket. More recently, newly empowered congressional Republicans investigating a sting operation to trap homosexuals at the Newport, Rhode Island, naval base had taken an even greater toll on the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s stamina and spirits. “Lay Navy Scandal to F. D. Roosevelt; Details Are Unprintable,” screamed one headline.
Exhaustion from that ordeal was one of the reasons FDR accepted an invitation from Van-Lear Black, his new boss at the Fidelity & Deposit Company, to sail up to Campo on Black’s 140-foot steam yacht Sabalo rather than make the exhausting trip by the usual three trains and a dinghy. “I thought he looked tired when he left,” his secretary Missy LeHand wrote Eleanor.
FDR got little rest on the trip. As the yacht steamed north, the weather grew stormy and the seas rough, and the captain, who was unfamiliar with Maine waters, turned the helm over to FDR. He took it gladly and proceeded to entertain the nervous passengers during the long hours maneuvering through the fog with stories of having guided huge destroyers through these waters as safely as he had the small sailboats of his youth.
A superb sailor, Roosevelt got the party to port safely, and despite his fatigue he proceeded, after a celebratory dinner aboard, to take his guests fishing the following day. While moving back and forth from forward to aft cockpits, baiting hooks for his fellow fishermen, he slipped and fell into the icy Bay of Fundy. “I’d never felt anything as cold as that water!” he recalled a decade later. “I hardly went under, hardly wet my head, because I still had hold of the motor-tender, but the water was so cold it seemed paralyzing.”
The guests, perhaps exhausted by their host’s vigor, sailed off the following day, but FDR, who the night before had admitted to aching legs, which he ascribed to a touch of lumbago, refused to slow his pace. On Wednesday, August 10, he took Eleanor and the older children for a sail in his 24-foot sloop, the Vireo. When they noticed a forest fire on an island, they sailed in and spent several hours flailing with evergreen branches until they had extinguished the flames. Afterward, begrimed and teary with smoke, smarting from spark burns, they decided a swim was in order, and they jogged two miles across the island to a freshwater lagoon for a dip, then plunged into the icy waters of the Bay of Fundy for a more bracing pick-me-up.
This marathon of physical feats was typical of FDR’s prowess and endurance, but he admitted, “I didn’t get the usual reaction, the glow I’d expected. When I reached the house the mail was in, with several newspapers I hadn’t seen. I sat reading for a while, too tired even to dress. I’d never felt quite that way before.” Once again, he cited a slight case of lumbago, said he would have dinner on a tray in his room, and climbed the stairs to get out of his wet clothing.
The next morning, when he tried to get out of bed, his left leg buckled beneath him. He struggled to the bathroom and managed to shave, though his head and back now throbbed with pain. When Eleanor took his temperature, the thermometer registered 102 degrees. A local doctor diagnosed a bad cold, but the symptoms did not pass, and a few days later, Dr. W. W. Keen, a celebrated Philadelphia surgeon vacationing at Bar Harbor, motored up under cover of secrecy, examined the patient, ascribed the symptoms to a temporary blood clot in the lower spinal cord, and promptly sent a bill for $600 (the equivalent of almost $7,000 today). The Roosevelts never forgave the outrageous bill, or the misdiagnosis.
FDR’s condition continued to worsen. By the end of the week, he was paralyzed from the chest down, and his arms, shoulders, and thumbs were weak. His skin was so sensitive that even the breeze coming through the open windows was painful. Nonetheless, Eleanor and his friend and adviser Louis Howe, who was visiting, continued to massage his legs, as Dr. Keen had ordered, and Roosevelt continued to endure the agony of the treatment, which may well have increased the severity of the disease. But his hope was fading. By the following Monday, he was, according to Eleanor, “out of his head.” Not until August 25, 15 days after he had slipped off the boat into the “paralyzing” waters, did Dr. Robert Williamson Lovett, of Boston, the leading American authority on infantile paralysis, diagnose FDR’s disease as poliomyelitis.
Three weeks later, Roosevelt directed, and Louis Howe carried out, the first in a lifetime of deceptions designed to hide his crippled state from a nation that would, when crippled by the Depression, turn to him in hope and trust. FDR was strapped to a stretcher, carried by several strong islanders down the steep hill to the water, loaded onto a small boat, ferried across a two-mile stretch of water to a fishing dock, hauled onto an iron-wheeled baggage car, and passed, through an opening where a window had been removed, to a berth in a private railroad car. Every bounce of the cart, every toss of the skiff was agony for FDR, but by the time reporters, who had been put off the scent by Howe, caught up with him, he was reclining in the berth, the familiar wide, winning smile pasted on his face, the trademark cigarette holder pointing jauntily at the heavens.
Though disaster had struck, as it so frequently does, from out of the blue, FDR was not so unlikely a candidate for disease as he seemed. Before his ordeal, he had appeared to be the most robust of men, but a childhood isolated from other children—he was privately tutored at home and did not enter school, at Groton, until he was 14—had left him with few of the usual immunities. In the intervening years he had suffered from an assortment of illnesses, including typhoid fever, swollen sinuses, infected tonsils, stomach problems, and recurrent sore throats. In 1918, returning from a fact-finding tour of war-torn Western Europe, he was stricken with a case of double pneumonia so severe he had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher.
But if Roosevelt was not as physically strong as he seemed, he was mentally determined. On July 28, refusing to give in to exhaustion and strain after undergoing excruciating Congressional questioning and the shame of those lurid headlines, he had joined 50 other prominent men, many of them members of Tammany Hall, on a trip up the Hudson to Bear Mountain to inspect a Boy Scout camp for underprivileged city youths. He had thrown himself into the festivities, drinking with the men, comparing knot-tying skills with the boys, roughhousing with everyone. It was all good, clean outdoor fun, the kind that he relished. He would have been the last to suspect that one of those youths who had grown up in the slums and been fortunate enough to develop the immunities of which the pampered FDR had been deprived might pass on an infection. Whether or not that is where his polio came from, and many historians speculate that it is, a photograph taken that day at the Boy Scout camp on Bear Mountain is the last picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt standing unaided.
Historians and physicians have long concluded that a series of unfortunate conditions came together to infect FDR and then to worsen his condition. Stress can hamper the immune system. Physical exercise after the onset of polio can increase the paralysis. Chilling can further weaken resistance. As David M. Oshinsky writes in his excellent book Polio: An American Story, no one is predestined to contract polio, but surely FDR ran a higher risk than most.
In 2003 a group of physicians suggested another diagnosis. After examining the evidence, they concluded that FDR may not have suffered from paralytic poliomyelitis, but more likely from Guillain-Barré syndrome. While they admit that that disease is rarely accompanied by fever, they argue that it is characterized by other non-polio-related symptoms that FDR exhibited, including ascending paralysis for 10 to 13 days, bladder and bowel dysfunction for 14 days, and numbing and dysesthesia. They further argue that in 1921 few adults older than 30 contracted paralytic poliomyelitis. The authors of the study concede that we can never be completely sure of a diagnosis after the fact, so FDR’s illness will forever remain something of a mystery.
Perhaps what matters for history is not which disease struck down the future President in August 1921, but which disease he thought paralyzed him. FDR believed he had polio. That was the enemy he set out to fight and conquer. He never overcame it in himself, but he helped banish it and some of its social and psychological repercussions from the world. He changed the way the public viewed polios (as those with the disease prefer to be called) and others with debilitating conditions. Before his time, the rich were cared for at home, in secret and in shame. Indeed, after Roosevelt lost the use of his legs, his mother wanted him to retire to Hyde Park to live out his life in private as a country squire. Those with fewer assets were shunted off to state facilities. By establishing the Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, in Georgia, in 1927, and by his own example, Roosevelt proved that those with disabilities need not retreat into invisibility but can go out into the world to lead full and productive lives.
To visit Warm Springs, with its Little White House, where he often stayed, and its museum, is to meet an FDR different from the towering presidential image or the man who casts his huge and impressive shadow over Hyde Park. In Warm Springs, one comes to know an easier, less guarded individual, at home, almost conspiratorially comfortable, with children and adults who shared his hardships and indignities and triumphs. One also sees, in the photographs and artifacts and records of the countless and arduous treatments he pursued, how desperately this man who loved to run and swim and golf and dance wanted more than anything else simply to walk again.