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FDR 4/15/2014 7:39:29 AM
FDR – April 12, 2014
Franklin D. Roosevelt was 39 years, the only child of (the late) James and Sarah (died in 1940) Roosevelt, born of wealthy parents on their estate in Hyde Park, NY, when he caught what his mother and her doctors said was infantile paralysis.
It was seven years after he had become a U.S. Senator, and under the Wilson Administration he was appointed the Assistant Secretary of the Navy; FDR was a good choice for ASN, as he had more responsibility than the regular appointee, Josephus Daniels, who mainly held a ceremonious position. Roosevelt, as a navy man, prepared the nation for war with Nazi Germany even back then; he also owned a library of 10,000 books all about the sea; he had read all of them, but one.
He was at Campobello Island, at a family resort in 1921, off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, in the Atlantic Ocean. He and Eleanor (whom he had married in 1905 as a convenience (whatever that means!) when he was 23; she, the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt and a 5th cousin, with whom he, FDR, had had six children, the eldest being Anna, born in 1906 (her father’s favorite and who came to live with her mother at the White House in 1937 while her philandering dad was having one of his many flings). FDR had just given a ride in one of his boats that day to a few of his kids, plus a bunch of neighboring youngsters, when Roosevelt, superb athlete that he was, suddenly jumped over the gunwales and swam to shore, a distance of more than three miles.
Sexual intercourse, Eleanor had recently declared, was just an excuse for gross exercise, an ordeal that must be endured, despite her having six pregnancies in fairly rapid succession (all except the last).
The first produced Anna, born next was James who passed away at eighty-eight; then FDR II arrived, but the baby lived only seven months; then came Elliot (who was named for Eleanor’s deceased father); then there was Franklin D. and lastly, late in life, John A.; all of whom lived to ripe old ages.
John was conceived in 1915; what skullduggery kept FDR and Eleanor apart for so long?
The next morning after his marathon swim Roosevelt’s legs were so weak he could barely get out of bed. His mother immediately called her physicians who eventually diagnosed FDR with poliomyelitis (they examined him on and off for over a month) . . .
A study in 2003, however, said Roosevelt may have contracted Guillain-Barre Syndrome, as the incidence of polio in that area was only 3.1 per 100,000 in FDR’s age group, which meant that only maybe three persons thirty-nine or over normally caught polio in New Brunswick. Interesting, to say the least!
I, one of many, feel the initial diagnoses was incorrect; FDR, I believe, did not have polio, nevertheless his mother’s doctors assumed he had contracted the dreaded disease.
At the time, few even knew of Lateral Sclerosis, then in its pre-conceptual stage. It turned out to be a debilitating malady usually seen on a MRI — a machine suggested in 1952 but not endorsed by the entire medical community until the 1970s — of the brain when there is a malfunction because motor neurons are suddenly and mysteriously asleep.
There are, science now believes, two types of Lateral Sclerosis — Primary and Amyotrophic — the former mostly acquired through the upper dormant motor neurons and normally not painful, though progressive; the latter involves both the upper and lower motor neurons as they become useless, and this form of the disease is usually and eventually fatal and extremely painful.
What brings it on? No one knows for sure, even today. Primary and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis affects anyone, regardless of physical condition or age (normally, though not limited to, older persons; many younger people are today being diagnosed with some symptom or other of Lateral Sclerosis).
One has to be only slightly wiser than his peers, a genius, artistic, adventurous, romantic — a different sort — excelling in one or more disciplines over another.
Why was not, say, Albert Einstein a victim? Or Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Or Leonardo DiVinci? Michelangelo? Or Mozart? Or Ray Jobs?
True, they were all geniuses; none of them had a Lateral Sclerosis (that we know of). Nor was none of them were considered to be the luckiest man on earth, either (none were baseball players. There currently is, however, a well- respected American football player, Steve Gleason, formerly of the New Orleans’s Saints, who has been victimized.)
None was Stephan Hawking, a PhD, who became deformed, crippled and wheelchair-bound before he was twenty; he cannot speak without mechanical amplification. He activates his thoughts by translation into speech through eye-contact with a sensitized keyboard, an invention of his own cunning.
Yes, they have Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and, at last report, are still alive. No, they are not free from pain. They are no more like me than I to Hercules!
What was different about Franklin Roosevelt and is different about Hawking, and others? Well, for one thing, they were not like other men; they were unique, though not necessarily geniuses — they were and are special, in that they had thoughts, ambitions and dreams that set them apart from others. They had a quality, which others do not have. They were and are, then and always, prime candidates for one of the Lateral Sclerosis.
FDR was stricken with Amyotrophic (probably) Lateral Sclerosis, the worst sort, as he sometimes suffered great pain in his legs, back and lower body (he also passed away at 63, twenty-four years later, with what was then called a cerebral stroke).
He got to the stage of needing ten-pound steel braces on both legs in order to stand up; he could not walk without crutches, a single-point cane was always needed, or the arm of one of his sons, or a podium to hold onto if he were speaking to a group of voters who might elect him to whatever office he was seeking.
He often required a wheelchair, or to be hoisted up and carried about, but he was careful never to allow the public to know that he was permanently and hopelessly disabled. He even had an automobile designed and built for him, so he could drive himself to and fro.
It is no wonder in 1921 Sarah’s doctors misdiagnosed his case entirely and declared that he had gotten infantile paralysis, or polio.
It was over 44 years and FDR had asked Eleanor for a divorce many times, but she, despite knowing details of his infidelities, refused to give him one, aware it would destroy his political career (not that her own career as a syndicated columnist would not have been in jeopardy!) was the reason she gave.
I was just thirteen years and nine months old on April 12, 1945 when I pulled my wagon to the corner three blocks away, where my nightly load of 109 editions of the Buffalo Evening News awaited. I saw the headline immediately — FDR DEAD!
I read the article more than once, but still it did not sink in: “President Roosevelt was pronounced dead by Dr. Lt. Com. (of the Navy) Howard Bruenn, his personal physician, at 2:44 PM at the Little White House in Warm Springs, near White Sulpher Springs, Georgia . . .”
The President died of an apparent stroke, according to his friend, the widowed Mrs. Lucy Mercer Rutherford, who, although not medically trained, was visiting the ill president (I, like everyone one else in America, did not know the President was ailing) along with portrait-painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who immediately tried to whisk Mrs. Rutherford away the instant the Chief Executive was pronounced dead, lest there be more scandalous innuendo attached to her presence at the Little White House.
Too late; Mrs. Rutherford had already contacted the First Lady in D.C. and told her the President was dead.
Say what? FDR was dead! The only President I had ever known — DEAD! I was devastated. It was as though God Himself had died!
It was years later that I learned my idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, regarded his predecessor so lightly that Harry S. Truman, his Vice President and after FDR’S death, the current President of the United States, reached his decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than sixteen months after the death of my President, without his having been briefed so much as a minute on what the Manhattan Project was all about! (not that many except those deemed worthy knew much about it, anyway).
An editorial in the New York Times said the following week after Roosevelt died, “Men will fall to their knees within a hundred years and thank their God we once had a president like FDR.” A number of my peers today have a SAY WHAT!?!? reaction to that!
True, Roosevelt gave us the New Deal as a way to end to the Great Depression, the WPA, the CCC, the TVA, farm subsidies, the Right to Work Bill, an end to Prohibition, the beginning of the March of Dimes, Social Security, Medicare, the IRS and the IRD review, the two-term limit for presidents, a full-time Treasury Department and a Joint Chiefs of Staff that really worked, the Rehabilitation Center for Handicapped Victims —most importantly — a final end to WWII — also stamp collecting so we might learn all about the planet we lived on, etc. He was elected to the presidency four consecutive times!
FDR fought like hell for the Governorship of NY State from 1926 to 1934; he even took on Teddy Roosevelt and the entire Republican Party on behalf of Al Smith when he realized that the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, was on the outside looking in.
Roosevelt did more for this country from 1932 to 1945 than any other president dreamed possible; even George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt would have been amazed. It is no wonder he had a rare type of Lateral Sclerosis.
The Unfinished Portrait of the 32nd President of the United States of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, still hangs in the Little White House in Warm Springs, which I have visited many times — one of several rewards for living in Georgia since 1991.
