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

“And so, my friends, as I was coming over this afternoon from Batavia, I thought of a little verse that was taught to me when I was pretty small, and I thought it was a pretty good motto for me in this campaign, a motto that will apply to what we are trying to do in this state … and it is this: ‘Look outward and not in; look forward and not back; look upward and not down; and lend a hand.”

Seneca Falls … Syracuse … Watertown … Rome … Utica … Herkimer … Albany …

The Roosevelt caravan turned south on Route 9 and headed down through the Hudson Valley toward New York City, where religious loyalties were fueling ugly charges on both sides of the campaign. The powerful publisher William Randolph Hearst, still a sworn enemy of Al Smith and no friend of FDR, charged that Roosevelt had been “trying to drag a religious question into politics” by defending Smith against anti-Catholic attacks. Samuel Untermyer, a prominent Jewish Democrat, praised Herbert Lehman, FDR’s running mate, as “a better Jew” than Attorney General Ottinger. But it appeared that the mudslinging over religion might actually be bringing votes to FDR.

A reporter for the New York Sun saw evidence that “independent Democrats who are against Smith because he is a Catholic are for Roosevelt. Independent Republicans who are against Ottinger because he is a Jew are for Roosevelt. Ottinger does not seem to be able to profit in this strange division along the lines of intolerance.”

In the city the press swarmed around the campaign. There were many newspapers in and around the great city, and some competed for customers by running big photographs to catch the eyes of commuters dashing for the subway. They also kept a sharp eye out for what were called sob stories—articles that catered to the public’s enjoyment of sentimentalizing over the fate of people less fortunate than themselves.

These practices in the press posed a new risk. FDR and Howe knew that from certain angles at certain vulnerable moments, the candidate’s body in motion could appear, as he had said himself, “clumsy,” or worse, difficult to look at. There was a comparable risk in print: Stories of his fight against polio could be told to provoke the maximum output of readers’ pity. In both cases, attention would be attracted to FDR’s legs.

For all of Howe’s tricks in orchestrating press coverage, neither he nor FDR could control it entirely. But they did what they could.

When reporters asked about polio, he would answer, but mostly by describing the programs he had developed at Warm Springs. “I don’t want any sob stuff in the relation of my own experience,” he would say.

He and Howe worried more about photos and newsreel footage of FDR getting in or out of an automobile. Worst of all would be a chance film clip that showed him taking a fall. At least once he gave newsreel camera operators an explicit directive: “No movies of me getting out of the machine [automobile], boys.” In that particular case, an observer said, “the motion picture machines and cameras were turned away until he had gotten out of his car and taken a pose before the photographic apparatus.” Whether he asked or not, newspapers generally did not publish photos highlighting his disability.

Such pleas to the press—and the journalists’ own reluctance to put the spotlight on a disability in a man they liked and admired—helped to muffle the glaring fact that he could walk in only a very limited way, and that there were many times each day when other people had to lift him, lower him, and carry him. As a man now living much of each day in public, however carefully he calculated his movements, he could not escape the fact that some people were going to witness just how dependent he was on others.

So along with all his efforts to persuade people that a “crippled” man could be governor, for all his vigor on the campaign trail and the ingenious tactics he used to divert people’s attention away from his legs, he needed to do one last thing, perhaps the hardest of all. In certain situations there was simply no way to deflect attention from his legs, so he had to summon the courage to endure the stares.

Frances Perkins saw this quality in him on the evening of October 31 in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. FDR was scheduled to speak in a ballroom at a big community center called the Yorkville Casino. The main doors stood at the top of a broad stone staircase leading up from the sidewalk. There was no railing, which made it impossible for him to climb the stairs on his own. Inside the ballroom, hundreds of milling people were waiting—another obstacle course. The only alternative was to go up the fire escape at the rear of the building, which led to the back of the ballroom. Jimmy Roosevelt and another man linked hands to make a seat for FDR. He lowered himself into that seat and put his arms around the men’s shoulders. Then the men slowly and carefully carried him up the stairs.

In the ballroom, some fifty people were waiting to join FDR on the speaker’s platform. Some of them watched as he was carried up the fire escape, Perkins among them.

“Those of us who saw this incident,” she wrote later, “with our hands on our throats to hold down our emotion, realized that this man had accepted the ultimate humility which comes from being helped physically. He had accepted it smiling. He came up over that perilous, uncomfortable, and humiliating ‘entrance,’ and his manner was pleasant, courteous, enthusiastic. He got up on his braces, adjusted them, straightened himself, smoothed his hair, linked his arm in his son Jim’s, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual.”

Sometimes a staircase or a fire escape wasn’t