FDR Born: The President Who Remade America

Franklin Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down at 39, struck by what was diagnosed as polio while vacationing at Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada in August 1921. He spent years trying to walk again. He never did. The illness transformed both the man and, eventually, the country. Born in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882, to a wealthy family, Roosevelt attended Groton, Harvard, and Columbia Law School. He entered politics early, serving as a New York state senator and then as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, the same position Theodore Roosevelt had held. He ran as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1920 and lost. Then polio struck. For the next seven years, he worked obsessively on his recovery, spending long periods at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he believed the mineral waters helped his muscles. He founded a rehabilitation center there. He developed the ability to stand, briefly, using locked leg braces and leaning on a cane and a companion's arm. It looked like walking. It wasn't. He became Governor of New York in 1928 and President of the United States in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, winning by a landslide over Herbert Hoover. He served four terms, the only president to do so. The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, made sure no one could do it again. He largely hid his disability from the public. The Secret Service confiscated photographs that showed him in a wheelchair. Reporters honored an unwritten agreement not to photograph him being carried or lifted. Radio was his medium: the fireside chats reached Americans in their living rooms and kitchens, a voice without a body, intimate and reassuring. He led the country through its worst economic crisis and its largest war while unable to stand without assistance. He died on April 12, 1945, three weeks before Germany surrendered, at Warm Springs, where he had been sitting for a portrait. He was 63. The portrait was never finished.