By Marjorie Cohen
FDR–American Experience. PBS 2007. Filmed and Written by David Grubin.
It was the summer of 1921 when Franklin Roosevelt, former undersecretary of the Navy and rising star in the Democratic Party, was stricken. He had visited a boy’s summer camp and left with a strange virus that rendered his legs useless to him. He was finally diagnosed with polio or as it was then called, Infantile Paralysis.
It appeared that Roosevelt’s political career was truly finished. In the 1920s, polio, if not a death sentence, was a scourge on the populace. “Nice families kept their disabled children in a back room with the blinds drawn. There was a terrible shame attached to it, somehow,” says one biographer quoted in David Grubin’s gripping documentary FDR for the PBS program American Experience, which is available on DVD and VHS.
The ever domineering Sara, Franklin’s mother, decided it would be best for Franklin to move back to the home he grew up in on the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York, and take up hobbies. This was a defining moment for Eleanor, FDR’s wife. She knew were this to happen his soul would be destroyed.
So she confronted Sara and proclaimed that he could and would continue with his life in politics. She had become the voice for his inner needs and in some ways remained so for the rest of their lives. However his life was now in limbo. He would devote the next seven years to one singular goal: Getting back on his feet.
He began rounds of painful and humiliating exercises. After a year of unrelenting struggle, he was told he would never walk again. But he was a Roosevelt, by gum, and wouldn’t listen. He continued some form of exercise until his dying day. He also refused to discuss his paralysis with anyone. He was in denial and it served him well. He may have entered other stages of grief at the loss of his legs but if he did, no one spoke of it.
His biographers tell a different story, however. In spite of Franklin’s inherent optimism, he wasn’t getting better and sank into a depression. He was angry, and he was grieving. Doris Kearns Goodwin said that he couldn’t express the sense of despair around Eleanor, certainly not his mother nor around the children.
So he bought a houseboat, the Larooco and headed south off the coast of Florida because it was a haven.
“It allowed him to be sad,” Goodwin says. “And to mourn the loss of the body that had once been his.”
But polio also resulted in a profound change in Roosevelt’s life. In 1924 he discovered the buoyant minerals waters at a place called Warm Springs in Georgia. The waters gave him such hope that he decided to buy the place and rebuild it as a therapeutic retreat and physical therapy center for those with paralysis. He loved it there; it became his second home. And the people of the town loved him as well.
It was here that he fashioned a car to motor about in, using hand levers instead of pedals. In this way, he met people from circumstances foreign to his patrician background. He listened and learned of their struggles, with money as well as disease. He learned patience. He learned persistence. Most important, he learned empathy. And that, more than anything else, would see him through the great depression and World War II.
In short, the film argues, had Franklin Roosevelt not contracted polio, he might never have become one of the most beloved figures in American history.
I found FDR informative and surprisingly moving. Of course the film examines was a in great detail all of Roosevelt’s accomplishments, most brave, some excellent and others wanting. This film never holds back. And much to filmmaker Grubin’s credit, while he makes excellent use of his commentators and eyewitnesses, he doesn’t allow them to tell the story for him. Rather we are swept up into Roosevelt’s world through the use of an often poetic script, stock footage (some newly discovered), excellent visuals, still photos, and a fine score. And of course the wonderful narration of David McCullough. This is one documentary not to be missed.
Next time we’ll be discussing a docudrama on FDR’s experience at his Georgia retreat. We’ll see just how well the film, Warm Springs deals with Roosevelt’s experience there, as well as struggle with polio. Both films are available for rental. I encourage you to see them.
In the meantime, this review will be up on our website. I encourage you to leave comments as part of a discussion. I’d love to hear some of your memories of FDR as well as your parent’s and friends. Were they as unaware of his disability as mine were? How did you or they respond upon hearing that he had died? I hope that once you see this film, you’ll come online and contribute your own response. And I hope by seeing it, it may spark a memory or a thought you’d like to share.
Marjorie Cohen, a lifelong movie buff, narrates the audio version of Action, which is available by calling 718-803-3782, ext. 279 or writing action@unitedspinal.org.
