Master of His Fate by James Tobin (books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

FDR’s own first letter from Campobello went to Langdon Marvin, his friend and partner in the New York law firm of Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt. He had to let the firm know he would not be able to work for some time. He was more honest than Eleanor had been with Miss LeHand, though he tried hard to sound upbeat.

“My case has been diagnosed by Dr. Lovett as one of poliomyelitis,” he wrote, “otherwise [known as] infantile paralysis. Cheerful thing for one with my gray hairs to get. I am almost wholly out of commission as to my legs but the doctors say that there is no question that I will get their use back again though this means several months of treatment in New York.”

He was not getting better.

Day after day, the muscles of his legs and buttocks were shriveling. At first he could barely notice the change, but soon it became obvious.

Muscles have to move to stay healthy. Otherwise their cells start to die, and the muscles wither. It seemed impossible, but FDR’s legs were getting skinnier by the day.

Above the waist, he was feeling a bit better. The hint of paralysis in his hands had disappeared. His arms felt stronger. But his legs …

Dr. Bennet was dropping in often to see FDR. Finally he sent a telegram to Dr. Lovett, who was now back in Boston.

FDR was feeling “much anxiety,” Bennet wrote. “Can you recommend anything to keep up his courage?”

No, Dr. Lovett wrote back, he had nothing more to say. There was nothing to do but wait and see how many muscles would recover on their own.

On the first day of September, a week after Dr. Lovett left Campobello, Sara Roosevelt arrived on the island. She had stepped off the ship in New York to find her brother Fred waiting for her. He gave her the news. Now, with Eleanor and Dr. Bennet, she hurried up the stairs to her only child’s sickbed.

FDR, still on his back, beamed his old smile.

“Well, I’m glad you are back, Mummy, and I got up this party for you!”

Sara “controlled herself remarkably,” Eleanor recalled.

FDR chattered away, asking questions about her summer trip.

Dr. Bennet was all smiles, too, saying: “This boy is going to get well!”

That night Sara sat in a room by herself, writing letters to her sisters and brothers.

“I hear them all laughing, Eleanor in the lead,” she wrote. “He and Eleanor decided at once to be cheerful and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness. So I have fallen in and follow their glorious example …

“Below his waist he cannot move at all. His legs (that I have always been so proud of) have to be moved often as they ache when long in one position … They have no power … He looks well and eats well and is very keen and full of interest in everything … Dr. Lovett, the greatest authority we have on infantile paralysis … says he will get well.”

FDR may have fooled his mother into thinking he was feeling “very keen.” But we can be sure that underneath his show of good cheer, he was struggling against panic.

Anyone who suddenly can’t walk is going to feel shocked and frightened. A “state of nervous collapse” is typical at first, according to one polio expert. All your life you take it for granted that your body will do what you tell it to do. Then one day it refuses to obey.

In a situation like this, people tend to follow the examples set by their families. That’s what FDR was doing when he tried so hard to be cheerful. He had been taught not to “whine about trouble,” and so had Eleanor.

Both of them knew about Theodore Roosevelt’s ordeals in his youth—how he had fought the smothering effects of severe asthma by building himself up with tireless exercise; and how, when his young wife, Alice, had died, he had thrown himself into strenuous adventures on horseback. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Theodore once wrote, “at any rate, not when he first feels the horse move under him.” FDR certainly couldn’t ride a horse, not right now, but his instincts were telling him to follow the spirit of Theodore’s advice—to fight his anxiety and sadness with action.

From the Delano side of his family—his mother’s side—he got advice along the same line.

Franklin’s uncle, Fred Delano, the one who had persuaded Dr. Lovett to visit Campobello, had been wondering what else he might do to help. He sat down to write Franklin “some ‘fatherly’ advice.”

Franklin must keep a cool head, Delano said. He must analyze his new problem as he would any other. He must not fool himself into thinking things were better than they really were. Doctors could help, but “the construction work of getting well depends largely on your own character …

“I realize you are up against a hard problem, and hard, cruel facts … I feel so confident of your background of health and good habits, and of your courage and good temper, that I refuse to be cast down.”

By the middle of September, more than a month after the earliest symptoms, the doctors said FDR was ready to travel by train to New York, where he would stay in Presbyterian Hospital, not far from the Roosevelts’ townhouse, for several more weeks of rest.

The older children, Anna and Jimmy and Elliott, had already left Campobello to return to their boarding schools. Eleanor was to go with Franklin on the train. The younger boys, Franklin Jr., seven, and John, five, would stay on the island a bit longer with their governess while their parents got settled at home.

Eleanor had told Franklin and John simply that their father was very ill and couldn’t play with them for a while. She didn’t try to explain what polio was.

They had hardly seen him for weeks. They heard the adults talking but couldn’t really tell what was wrong.

Franklin Jr. thought he