Memories |
© 1995, 2001 Carter Jefferson FDR and Polio by Carter Jefferson On TV recently I saw a thing about press treatment of politicians over the years that included some comments by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I have no quarrel with most of her statements and writings, but on this show she said roughly that most Americans were unaware of FDR's inability to walk, citing as her evidence that no pictures of him on crutches or in his wheelchair appeared in newsreels or newspapers. She also commented on his leaning on other men when he walked in to address the House Of Representatives, or otherwise was required to stand up in public, and indicated that the public was unaware of this. I checked J.B. West's book, Upstairs at the White House; he says he was shocked when he first saw FDR in his wheel chair: "Everybody knew," he wrote, "that the President had been stricken with infantile paralysis, and his recovery was legend, but few people were aware how completely the disease had handicapped him." Goodwin's comments, I thought, gave an impression stronger that than of West, and may have misled some people. Even West's comment seems to me to be a slight exaggeration. In any case, because her work is so well known and well thought of, her view is likely to become received opinion, and therefore I think it is worthwhile to make the following comments: I think indeed that everybody knew the President was handicapped and needed help to walk. I recall vaguely the campaign to raise funds to build a swimming pool in the White House when I was a child (1933), and I knew then (I was about six at the time) that the President was "crippled"--that was why he needed the swimming pool, and people talked about it. In later years I heard several people who didn't like him refer to him as "that crippled son of a bitch in the White House." As for his legendary recovery from infantile paralysis, all he had to do was survive without an iron lung (a sort of tin-can-like thing that enclosed the body from the neck down and made breathing possible) to seem to have made an astonishing recovery. The fear of infantile paralysis was comparable to the current fear of AIDS; in some ways it was worse, because it seemed to hit children most often, and nobody knew how it was transmitted. Anyone who recovered at all was considered to be incredibly fortunate. Infantile paralysis (it was not called polio until later) was the great fear of every family--most of us knew someone who had died from it or been permanently condemned to an iron lung. We usually also knew someone else who had recovered to be left with a limp or useless legs, and we all thought how lucky they had been. Roosevelt did indeed do his best, with the co-operation of the press, to downplay his infirmity. But I think Goodwin underestimates public knowledge of his handicap. We knew, but, to most of us, the fact that he was a cripple was just not an issue--he was our saviour. |
Carter Jefferson |
