The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) s01e04 Episode Script

Announcer: Previously on "the Roosevelts" (Train whistle blows) Theodore was denied a return to the White House Man: He left power too soon.
He had to be in the arena.
Announcer: Then charted a deadly course into the Amazon Man: We started down the river of doubt into the unknown.
Announcer: While Eleanor and Franklin were rocked by betrayal.
Man: Eleanor Roosevelt never forgave or forgot what he had done.
Announcer: And now part 4 of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
" Announcer: Funding for this program was provided by members of the Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating Americans about their history through documentary film.
Members include Jessica and John Fullerton, the Pfeil Foundation, John Wellhouse Newton, Bonnie and John McCloskey and th Golkin Family.
Additional funding was provided by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, dedicated to strengthening America's future through education; by the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploring the human endeavor; by Mr.
Jack C.
Taylor and by Rosalind P.
Walter.
Major funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the generous contributions to your PBS Station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Female announcer: Before the names Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin were indelibly etched into the American consciousness and the course of human history was forever changed by their individual endeavors, a prominent family made a point of teaching the value of altruism, the power of perseverance, and the virtue of helping out one's fellow man.
Geoffrey C.
Ward: Campobello was one of the two or three most important places in Franklin Roosevelt's life.
He'd learned to sail there.
His father had taught him there.
He'd been going there since he was a little boy.
And it was also the place where his children got to know him.
He led the kids on long walks around the island.
And he was a real family man at Campobello.
And to Eleanor Roosevelt, it was the first place she had ever had a home that belonged really to her and her husband and not to her mother-in-law.
(Orchestra playing "Alice Blue Gown") Narrator: On Tuesday afternoon, July 6, 1920, Sara Delano Roosevelt was at work in the garden of her father's old house overlooking the Hudson, at Newburgh, New York.
She had seen her daughter-in-law and the grandchildren off to Campobello for the summer.
Her son Franklin was far away, attending the Democratic Convention in San Francisco.
A servant called from the house.
Mrs.
Roosevelt was wanted on the telephone.
A friend had wonderful news: Franklin had just been nominated for vice president of the United States, still another office his fifth cousin Theodore had once held.
Sara was pleased, but not surprised.
She had taught her boy that nothing he ever really wanted was beyond his grasp.
She wrote him right away, sending her regards to the son she now believed would be "our future president.
" "All my love and interest goes to you," she said, "and, as always, is centered in you.
" - sync & corrections by wolfen - Ward: I think Franklin Roosevelt is simply irresistible.
If you see him on film with that face and that charm and that infinite grace and sort of embracing power, you can't take your eyes off him.
And it almost doesn't matter what he's saying, there's just something riveting about him.
And then I think there's just a great drama about a guy who is slick and charming and graceful as a young man who goes through this unbelievable testing and then somehow finds within In himself, the ambition and the power to decide to come back and then comes back and then becomes the most important President of the 20th century.
It's a pretty good story.
Narrator: During the 1920s, memories of Theodore Roosevelt would begin to fade, and the public's attention shifted to Franklin and Eleanor.
The two would find themselves living altogether new kinds of lives.
Awkward and diffident, Eleanor would struggle to emerge from the shadow of her mother-in-law and the memory of her husband's relationship with her own social secretary to become a public figure and a political power in her own right, while Franklin active, ambitious, gregarious would suddenly find himself immobilized, powerless, isolated, his career at an apparent end.
And then, displaying qualities of courage and compassion even he may not have suspected he possessed, he would re-emerge in time to help restore the faith of a badly frightened country.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: To some extent, Franklin Roosevelt's ease of life before the polio might not have equipped him for being the leader that he was.
There was ambition, but not the ambition attached to that huge substance that later came after the polio.
What the polio did, I think, was to just transform him in many ways.
He learned by withstanding that adversity that he could come through a trial of fire and thereby he could help other people do the same.
Woman, as Eleanor: This past year has rather got the better of me.
It has been so full of all kinds of things that I still have a breathless, hunted feeling.
Narrator: During the 20 months that preceded Franklin Roosevelt's nomination for Vice President in 1920, American life seemed to have turned upside down.
The great war had ended.
Theodore Roosevelt, who had hoped to regain the White House, had died.
Women finally could vote in every state, a new, exciting music would fill new airwaves, and prohibition would turn millions of Americans into lawbreakers.
Wall Street climbed steadily upward as unregulated speculation in stocks, real estate, and commodities attracted more and more citizens.
It seemed as if the good times would never end.
Aboard the warship that bore Woodrow Wilson home from peace talks in France, the President told Franklin and Eleanor that the United States must enter the new League of Nations that promised to prevent another war or it would break the heart of the world.
In the end, Wilson's isolationist enemies and his own stubborn refusal to compromise combined to keep America out of the League and broke Wilson's heart.
He himself was a virtual prisoner in the White House, partially paralyzed by a stroke, unwilling to be seen or heard in public.
American voters sick of war, plagued by soaring postwar prices, and alarmed by labor strife Had wearied of reform and were increasingly uninterested in events overseas.
At Chicago in June of 1920, the Republicans nominated for president an amiable but undistinguished Senator from Ohio, Warren G.
Harding.
To run against him, the Democrats settled on another Ohioan, Governor James M.
Cox.
Cox then picked 38-year-old Franklin Roosevelt to balance the ticket.
He was an easterner with an independent reputation, had a good record in wartime Washington, and most important, he bore a last name the party hoped would appeal to independent voters who had planned to cast their ballots for Theodore Roosevelt.
Man, as Franklin: Washington.
July 17, 1920.
Dearest babs, today I went down to the station and met Governor Cox.
A huge, cheering crowd, more enthusiastic than any Washington crowd I have ever seen.
Tomorrow we see the president at 10:30.
I still hope to leave Saturday afternoon and be with you all at Campobello Sunday evening.
I can hardly wait.
I miss you so, so much.
Kiss the chicks.
It is almost a month since I saw them.
Your devoted "F".
Narrator: The two Democratic candidates went to the White House the next morning to get the ailing President's blessing.
Tears filled Cox's eyes when Wilson was wheeled onto the South Portico, a woolen shawl around his shoulders despite the summer heat, his useless left arm dangling.
In a voice that could barely be heard, he thanked them for coming.
Cox vowed to continue to call for U.
S.
entry into the League of Nations.
Wilson managed to say he was grateful before he was wheeled back inside.
Franklin Roosevelt would never forget the sight of the president he'd served for 7 years, defeated and helpless.
(Sea gulls cry) Narrator: On July 25, 1920, Franklin Roosevelt steered the destroyer hatfield into Passamaquoddy Bay, went ashore to join his family at Campobello for a few days' rest, and was blasted the next day by a republican newspaper for using a "fighting ship belonging to the American people for commuting purposes.
" From now on, everything in the Roosevelts' lives would be subject to public scrutiny.
A newsreel cameraman soon arrived to capture informal footage of the democratic vice presidential nominee and his family.
Franklin was a natural.
Eleanor was not.
She was still virtually unknown to the public.
When she claimed to have no publishable photographs of herself, one Washington paper printed a picture of someone else.
Another paper described her as "essentially a home woman who seems especially to dislike the official limelight" and went on to quote a patronizing "friend" who said, "she is too much of a Roosevelt to be anybody's prize beauty.
" The formal ceremony at which Franklin was to accept the vice presidential nomination was held a few weeks later, on the lawn at Springwood.
5,000 people turned out to hear him speak, tearing up his mother's lawn and trouping through her house where, as Eleanor wrote, "for so many years, only family and friends were received.
" Franklin spoke for nearly an hour.
He bravely denied Americans had tired of reform or had lost interest in the world beyond their borders.
To reject the League of Nations would betray the cause of peace for which Americans had gone to war and sacrificed so much, he said.
The odds against victory were high, but Franklin hurled himself into the campaign, traveling by train all across the country, sometimes delivering 13 speeches a day.
"During three months in the year 1920," he remembered, "I got to know the country as only a candidate or a traveling salesman can get to know it.
" Woman, as Eleanor: Dear Franklin, did you see that Alice is to go on the stump for Harding, and that Auntie Corinne is to speak for him in Portland, Maine? Narrator: Theodore Roosevelt had always encouraged his young cousin's political career, even though Franklin was a democrat.
But in the years after his death, resentment began to surface among the republican Oyster Bay Roosevelts.
Ward: Oyster Bay and the Hyde Park, Hudson River Roosevelts were very close in the early years.
In fact, they kept trying to marry one another.
It was almost as though Roosevelts thought no one else was quite good enough.
As the years went by and as FDR went into the Democratic Party and did very well, the remainder of the family grew more and more and more resentful of this This overly charming fella from the minor branch of the family who seemed somehow to them magically to be succeeding where they were failing.
Narrator: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
still hobbling from war wounds and now a New York assemblyman saw himself as his father's rightful successor in national politics.
He was sent by the Republican National Committee to dog Franklin's steps.
Franklin was "a Maverick," he told a Wyoming rally of his father's old rough riders.
"He does not have the brand of our family.
" In late September, Franklin wired Eleanor to join him aboard his train.
He may have missed her, but 1920 also marked the first national election in which women had the ballot.
Democrats hoped they would rally to the cause of the League and international peace, and seeing Franklin's wife at his side could only help.
Woman, as Eleanor: Dearest Mama, this is the most killing thing for a candidate I ever knew.
Franklin made two speeches and drove 26 miles over awful roads before we ever got any breakfast.
There have been two town speeches since then and at least one platform speech every 15 minutes all day.
And now he still has to get to bowling green for a speech in a hall.
I will never be able to do without at least 4 large cups of coffee every day.
(Train whistle blows) Narrator: Eleanor found life aboard the crowded, smoke-filled train claustrophobic.
But she was also fascinated by the different kinds of people she met even grew to enjoy the reporters on board And found an unlikely new friend.
She had initially disdained Louis Howe, her husband's closest aide and chief strategist.
She thought him coarse, crude, cynical, and insisted on calling him "Mr.
Howe.
" But he understood her importance to her husband's career, encouraged her interest in politics, consulted her about speeches.
"I was flattered," she remembered.
Before long, she was calling him "Louis," and they were keeping one another company during the endless card games that filled the candidate's time between stops.
Woman, as Eleanor: Dearest Mama, Franklin's head should be turned if it ever is going to be, for there is much praise and enthusiasm for him personally almost everywhere.
And then we get asked if he's Teddy frequently.
It is becoming almost impossible to stop Franklin now when he begins to speak.
Ten minutes is always 20, 30 is always 45, and the evening speeches are now about two hours.
The men all get out and wave at him in front, and when nothing succeeds, I yank his coattails.
Narrator: At Hyde Park on Election Day, Sara and Eleanor cast the first votes of their lives for Franklin.
They didn't count for much.
Warren G.
Harding and his running mate, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, won in a landslide.
To add insult to injury, Harding appointed Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the post both his father and Franklin had held.
One republican newspaper expressed the hope that for this young Roosevelt, the job would prove a springboard to the White House, even though, "for fifth-cousin Franklin, "it had proved a political scaffold from which he suddenly dropped into oblivion.
" Narrator: FDR tried to be philosophical.
The race had been "a darned fine sail," he told a friend.
"Every war brings after it a period "of materialism and conservatism.
"People tire quickly of ideals, and we are now repeating history.
" George Will: The American people wanted pause, they wanted surcease, they wanted rest.
They'd been to war.
They wanted jazz and Martinis and literature and the twenties.
Narrator: Franklin handed out commemorative gold cuff links to those who had been closest to him during the campaign, including Louis Howe; his advance man, Stephen Early; his press spokesman, Marvin McIntyre; and his secretary, Marguerite Lehand, whom Roosevelt and everyone else called "Missy.
" They were his "cuff-links gang," he said, and would remain at his side for years as he tried to build upon the national reputation he had made.
Until he could mount a serious campaign for the presidential nomination in 1924, he had to earn a living.
He practiced law with old friends and went to work as regional vice president of the fidelity and deposit company on Wall Street.
He admitted it was "mostly glad-hand stuff.
" And like many members of his class, he plunged into the heedless financial speculation of the 1920s A fleet of dirigibles that was supposed to ferry commuters between Chicago and New York; a plan to corner the market in live lobsters; oil exploration that found only worthless gas; slot machines that peddled pre-moistened postage stamps So many dubious schemes that the society for promoting financial knowledge wrote to protest his misuse of what it called a "distinguished and honored name.
" Woman, as Eleanor: In my early married years, the pattern of my life had been largely my mother-in-law's pattern.
Later, it was the children and Franklin who made the pattern, but I began to want to do things on my own, to use my own mind and abilities for my own aims.
Narrator: 3 weeks after election day, Eleanor lunched with her mother-in-law and Sara's two sisters, Dora and Kassie, in Manhattan.
It did not go well.
"They all, in their serene assurance and absolute judgment on people and affairs make me want to squirm and turn Bolshevik," she told Franklin.
The discovery in 1918 that he had been unfaithful to her with her own Social Secretary, Lucy Mercer, had nearly destroyed Eleanor's self-confidence.
In marrying Franklin Roosevelt, she had hoped to find in him a confidant and to find in his mother something like the loving mother she had never had.
She had found neither.
Her husband was self-absorbed and harbored secrets.
Her mother-in-law's first loyalty was always to her son and her grandchildren.
Working for the Red Cross during the war had been her salvation.
When peace came, Sara had urged her to give it up and return home.
She refused.
The war, she said, had made a life of "nothing but teas and luncheons and dinners impossible.
" She had resolved to find "real work.
" Now, back in New York, she learned typing, shorthand, and joined the board of a brand-new organization The League of Women Voters.
And she began to make new friends Veterans of the suffrage movement, like the activist Esther Lape and her partner, the lawyer Elizabeth Reid Who were not only committed to one another, but to a host of causes.
Blanche Wiesen Cook: And she finds her own life in politics with women she admires.
These become her life-long friends who are her guides on the most progressive issues.
Narrator: "The rest of us were inclined to do a good deal of theorizing," Lape remembered.
"Eleanor would look puzzled and ask why we didn't just do whatever we had in mind and get it out of the way.
" Like her Uncle Theodore, like her husband Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt would always crave action.
(Ship's horn blows) Narrator: Sara Delano Roosevelt had been abroad during the summer of 1921.
When she returned to New York on August 31st, she expected to be met by Franklin.
Instead, she was startled to see Franklin's half-brother Rosy there at the dock.
He handed her a letter from her daughter-in-law.
Woman, as Eleanor: Dearest Mama, Franklin has been quite ill and so can't get down to meet you, to his great regret.
We are all so happy to have you home again, dear.
We are having such lovely weather.
The island is really at its loveliest.
Franklin sends all his love, and we are both so sorry we cannot meet you.
Ever devotedly, Eleanor.
Narrator: Sara hurried north to Campobello as fast as she could go.
The trouble had begun there 21 days earlier.
Wednesday afternoon, August 10, 1921 had been filled with the kind of activity for which the Roosevelts were famous.
Franklin took Eleanor, James, and Elliott for a long sail, spotted a forest fire on one of the rocky islands, and led everyone ashore to put it out.
Then he sailed home again, took everyone swimming at the family's favorite pond two miles away, and insisted on racing his sons back to their cottage.
Ward: When he got back, he felt funny.
His legs felt funny and he felt feverish.
And he looked at his mail for a while on the porch, and then he finally said, "I feel so funny that I'm going to go to bed," and he went upstairs to go to bed, and he never walked without help again.
Man, as Franklin: The next morning, when I swung out of bed, my left leg lagged.
I tried to persuade myself that the trouble with my leg was muscular, that it would disappear as I used it.
But presently, it refused to work, and then the other.
By the end of the third day, practically all muscles from the chest down were involved.
(Sniffles) It produces terror, unreasoning terror.
You just can't believe (Clears throat) That the legs that you depended on simply don't work.
And I don't know how to convey to people the sense That suddenly he could not go to the bathroom, he couldn't go for the telephone, he couldn't do anything on his own.
And the limbs that you know, he was a great dancer, he was a great golfer, he loved to run.
None of that would ever happen again.
He dreamed about it all his life, but he never could do it.
Narrator: Louis Howe rushed to the island and bedded down on a cot just outside his boss' sickroom.
He would never again leave Franklin's side for more than a few days, largely ignoring his own family; the first of many people who, over the coming years, would sacrifice their own lives in the interests of one or the other of the Roosevelts.
At first, no one, including baffled local doctors, knew what was wrong with Franklin.
He shook with fever and suffered severe pain.
His thumbs refused to work for a time, and he could not so much as sign his name.
Eleanor did all she could to nurse him, administering a catheter when his bladder failed.
She and Howe took turns massaging his limbs, too, despite the severe pain it caused.
Man: Dear Mrs.
Roosevelt, you have been a rare wife and have borne your heavy burden most bravely.
You will surely break down if you do not have immediate relief.
Dr.
William Keen.
Narrator: A nurse was hired to help ease Eleanor's burdens.
Local physicians continued to be mystified.
Franklin's fever rose still higher.
He became delirious, cried out, momentarily lost his religious faith, could not understand why God, who had favored him for so long, now seemed to have turned away.
Ward: It's agonizing at first, absolutely agonizing, and you're coming in and out of fevers and you can't You don't know where you are and you don't know what's wrong.
No one told him.
They didn't know what was wrong.
So, for days and days, he lay there terrified, absolutely terrified.
But it was compounded in his case by the fact that everything he had been taught um persuaded him that he must not tell other people how terrified he felt, so all of it was turned inward, and so there's a lot of talk It's perfectly understandable About how gallant he was and how cheerful he was.
And people would say things, strange things like "polio never bothered him.
" Mrs.
Roosevelt said he never spoke of it.
It's absurd.
It was on his mind every day, almost every hour.
Narrator: A specialist from Boston was sent for.
He finally made the right diagnosis: It was infantile paralysis polio A mysterious virus that attacked the central nervous system, randomly destroying muscles.
It was an annual scourge.
Little understood, greatly feared, polio killed or crippled tens of thousands of people every summer, most of them children.
He was 39 years old.
No one could predict how badly affected Franklin would be or what his future held, but he now knew what had happened to him.
His fever subsided.
His mood changed.
When Sara finally reached her son's bedside, he was already back in command of himself.
Woman, as Sara: He and Eleanor at once decided 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 proud of have to be moved often, as they ache when long in one position.
Man: New York City.
September 16, 1921.
Franklin D.
Roosevelt, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and Democratic candidate for Vice President in the last election, was brought to this city aboard a special car from Campobello Island, suffering from poliomyelitis and taken to Presbyterian Hospital.
"I cannot say how long Mr.
Roosevelt will be kept in the hospital," said Dr.
George Draper, "but you can definitely say that he will not be crippled.
No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.
" The "New York Times.
" Narrator: From the first, Louis Howe and Roosevelt's doctors sought to minimize the seriousness of his paralysis in order to keep his political hopes alive and also out of concern for Franklin's own psychological well-being.
Man: He has such courage, such ambition, and yet, at the same time, such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism that it will take all the skill we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.
Dr.
George Draper.
Narrator: It was 5 weeks before his doctors dared try to sit him up.
When they finally allowed him to be carried the 7 blocks to his home under cover of darkness in late October, his chart still read "not improving.
" He was put to bed on the third floor.
His fever returned, his vision blurred, and he feared for a time that he might go blind.
He began daily exercises to stretch his muscles and evidently overdid it.
His hamstrings tightened, drawing his knees up toward his chest.
To straighten his legs again, they had to be encased in plaster.
Each day, wedges were hammered in behind his knees.
It was agony.
Ward: The tendency is for atrophied muscle to shrivel.
You have to keep it stretched; that the exercises that he was made to undergo were terribly painful, that you were All your muscles are stretched over and over and over again and you don't seem to be making any progress.
And, in fact, he was not making any progress.
Narrator: "Mother, how does he stand the pain?" Franklin, Jr.
Asked.
"He does," was all his mother could say.
"He does.
" His family suffered, too.
James was away at Groton, but four children still lived at home, all of them frightened by what had happened to their father.
Louis Howe took over 16-year-old Anna's room, and she angrily resented it.
Eleanor lost her own bed to Franklin's round-the-clock nurse and had to snatch sleep on a cot.
That winter, Eleanor remembered, was "the most trying of my life.
" One evening, while reading to her youngest boys, she began to weep and could not stop.
It was, she said, "the only time I ever remember in my entire life going to pieces in this particular manner.
" Narrator: For Franklin's mother, all the exhausting exercises, all the visits from friends and business associates, politicians and well-wishers, all the tensions in the crowded household, were bad for her boy.
As soon as it could be arranged, she believed, he should return to the quiet of Hyde Park where she could care for him, at least for a time, just as she and Franklin had once cared for his ailing father.
Woman, as Eleanor: My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet, which made our discussions somewhat acrimonious.
She always thought she understood what was best, particularly where her child was concerned, regardless of what any doctor might say.
Narrator: Franklin found himself again trapped between the two most important women in his life: his wife, urging him to greater effort; his mother, urging him to rest and relax.
His doctors eventually insisted that he had to get away from what one of them called "the intense and devastating influence of the interplay of these high-voltage personalities.
" Ward: I think, for anyone who's had polio, it's very hard not to be angry at able-bodied people who urge you to be cheerful and do your exercises.
And I think, in FDR's case, it was particularly hard.
Mrs.
Roosevelt Had very firm views about things like schedules and so on, and so, if he hadn't done his exercises by 11:00 in the morning, she would tell him that he should be doing them, and he bitterly resented it.
Narrator: In Hyde Park, without his wife and children present, the constant stress eased, but the routine set by hisolicitous mother was as rigid as it had been when he was a little boy: Breakfast on a bed-tray, up and dressed by 10:00, lunch with his mother at 1:00, followed by a nap, tea at 4:00, dinner at 7:00, put to bed by 11:00, with physical therapy and sedentary hobbies like building toy boats and stamp-collecting to fill the long hours in between.
One day that spring, Sara made a telephone call to wilderstein, the home of the Suckley family, distant cousins of the Roosevelts, just up the Hudson in Rhinebeck.
She asked to speak to Margaret, known to friends and family as "Daisy.
" Her son was lonely, she said, and needed company.
Would Miss Suckley come to tea? She would.
Ten years younger than Franklin and unmarried, she had been dazzled by him ever since she'd seen him at a party, laughing as he whirled one partner after another around the dance floor.
Now she found him immobilized.
Daisy felt privileged to sit with him several times that spring and summer on the Springwood lawn as he pulled himself around a set of exercise bars, telling extravagant stories about himself to keep her entertained and as unaware as possible of his helplessness.
"I'm not going to be conquered by a childish disease," he told her again and again.
"My God, he was brave," she remembered.
On June 1, 1922, Roosevelt's doctors charted 44 of his muscles in red, ranking them from "normal" to "totally paralyzed.
" Not a single muscle below his ribcage was better than "fair.
" He'd been fitted out with steel braces.
They weighed 14 pounds and ran from above his waist all the way to his heels.
Once the catches at his knees were locked to keep his legs from buckling, it took two people to haul him to his feet and a third to slide crutches under his arms.
Ward: Braces allowed him to stand; Not to walk, but to stand, at least to be upright.
But if you wear them for any amount of time, they begin to hurt, and if you stand for an hour to give a speech, you are in pain during that speech.
Narrator: At first, he simply hung from his crutches, then managed to drag his legs across a room, finally began to try to make his painful way alone down the drive that led from Springwood to the Albany Post Road.
He made it only once.
Ward: Coming back even as far as he did required enormous effort, hours and hours of exercise, all of it aimed at somehow magically making his muscles work again.
They never worked again.
So what he did was master a series of techniques for getting around a little bit.
The first one was to be on crutches, and he was able to swing his body through.
It's an extremely dangerous way to move.
His legs are in rigid braces so that he's sort of like a tower, and you have to swing the bottom of the tower through, through those crutches with each step.
You can't really go up and down steps, and you can't go very far before you get exhausted.
Woman: It's a bit traumatic when you're 16 to see your father, whom you've regarded as a wonderful playmate, who took long walks with you, could out-jump you, walking on crutches, struggling in heavy, steel braces.
And you see the sweat pouring down his face and you hear him saying, "I must get down the driveway today, all the way down the driveway.
" Anna Roosevelt.
(Telephone ringing) Narrator: One day that June, Eleanor received a phone call from a stranger, a lively-sounding woman named Nancy Cook, who said she was the Executive Secretary of the new women's division of the State Democratic Party.
Would Mrs.
Franklin D.
Roosevelt be willing to speak at a fund-raising luncheon? Eleanor hesitated she dreaded speaking in public But Louis Howe and her husband insisted she do it.
It would help her to resume the independent life that meant so much to her, and it would keep the Roosevelt name before the public, something Howe and his boss were always eager to do.
The luncheon speech went well, and she got to know Nancy Cook and Cook's partner, Marion Dickerman, a reformer and educator who in 1919 had been the first woman ever to run for the New York State legislature.
For some 15 years, they would be among Eleanor's closest friends.
To some on the Oyster Bay side of the family, her new friends were "female impersonators," but Franklin saw how important they were to his wife and to the work he and Eleanor hoped would keep his political hopes alive.
The women, in turn, admired his courage and appreciated his counsel.
He called them part of "our gang.
" Eleanor began organizing the Democratic women of Dutchess County, and with coaching from Louis Howe, overcame a nervous tendency to giggle while speaking to an audience.
"Have something to say," Howe told her, "say it, and sit down.
" Ward: Louis Howe was as important to Eleanor Roosevelt as he had been to Franklin Roosevelt.
He realized early on that if Franklin was going to be President, she had to have a role to play beyond the standard one of being a mother and a wife.
And he's the one who told her how to speak in public, that she should not fear expressing her opinions, and much later told her he would like to make her President of the United States.
Narrator: She got her first real taste of raw politics on Election Day in 1922.
Some of the Democrats she drove to the polls in Poughkeepsie, just down the road from Hyde Park, had been paid for their votes.
She was appalled by the bribery, but delighted by the outcome: Al Smith, Franklin's old political ally and sometime critic, easily beat his republican opponent for governor.
Over the coming months, she would join the women's city club of New York and the women's Trade Union League, making even more new friends and taking on new causes and responsibilities everywhere she went.
Woman, as Eleanor: I was thinking things out and becoming an individual.
Had I never done this, perhaps I might have been saved some difficult experiences, but I have never regretted even my mistakes.
They all added to my understanding of other human beings.
("Whispering" by Paul Whiteman and his Ambassador Orchestra playing) Ward: A little over a year after he was stricken, FDR decided to try to go back to work at the fidelity and deposit insurance company in Downtown New York.
Narrator: On October 9, 1922, the Roosevelt family buick pulled up in front of 120 Broadway.
The chauffeur opened the back door.
Franklin extended his legs and locked his braces in place.
Ward: A large crowd gathered to watch this big guy get out of a car.
They didn't know who he was.
And he then got on his crutches, which he was very new to, and very slowly began pulling himself into the lobby.
He got into the lobby.
His chauffeur was expected to put a foot in front of one of the crutches so that he wouldn't slip.
Somehow, that didn't happen.
The crutch went out from under him and he fell.
He had to pick his legs up to get them in front of him and asked for people to help him up.
He kept smiling and laughing the whole time as though this was the funniest thing that had ever happened, that it happened all the time, that it was a joke, no one needed to worry.
People finally did help him up.
He got on the elevator.
He went up to a welcome back lunch organized by his secretary, Missy Lehand, and he didn't return for months.
Man, as Franklin: Florida.
March 5, 1923.
Dearest Mama, the west coast of Florida is wholly wild and tropical.
I have been in swimming, and it goes better and better.
I'm sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good.
I am sunburned and in fine shape.
Franklin.
Narrator: In February of 1923, Franklin and Eleanor; Franklin's valet, Leroy Jones; and his secretary, Missy Lehand, all traveled south to the Florida Keys, where he had rented a houseboat, hoping that several weeks in the sun might help rebuild his legs.
Eleanor did not stay aboard for long.
She found the days boring and the nights "eerie and menacing.
" Ward: It's nice to think that Franklin and Eleanor were brought together again by polio somehow.
They were not.
They, in fact, were driven further apart by it.
She began a career of her own with his encouragement.
He spent months and months and months away from her, trying to rebuild his muscles.
He largely ignored his children during that time.
And it's simply it's a romantic myth.
It's not true.
Narrator: With Eleanor away, Missy Lehand served as Franklin's hostess and companion, setting a pattern they would follow for the next 20 years.
She was catholic, unmarried, half his age, and more than half in love with the boss she called "F.
D.
" He was fond of her as well, and some who knew them would always wonder about the nature of their relationship.
There's no question that Franklin Roosevelt was the love of Missy's life.
She loved him from the time she was 18 until she died, and she was a central figure in his little world.
Narrator: Missy seemed to understand his slightest shift of mood.
"She knows when he is bored before he realizes it himself," one visitor remembered.
"She can tell when he is really listening and when he is merely being polite, which no one else can.
" Her devotion was complete.
Suitors came and went, some hoping to gain access to her boss through her.
None could compare with him in her eyes.
Sara called her son's secretary "nice little Missy," but worried that people would talk about his spending so much time alone with a woman not his wife.
Eleanor seems never to have objected, even to have been grateful to know that her husband had the sort of admiring companionship he always craved and which she could not provide.
Cook: She's rather philosophical about Missy Lehand.
In fact, in 1923, Eleanor Roosevelt writes an article called "The women of Tibet" in which she writes, "it has been brought to my attention that the women of Tibet have many husbands, which seems to me a very good thing because so many husbands have so many wives.
" And Missy Lehand is her junior wife.
I mean, she accepts Missy Lehand, she cares about Missy Lehand, and she recognizes the important role that Missy Lehand plays in his life.
Narrator: Franklin loved everything about life aboard the houseboat: Fishing, crawling from deck to deck out of sight of curious strangers, defying prohibition by sharing rum drinks in the evenings with old friends who found the time to come down and be with him, and being lifted in and out of the water with a pulley arrangement of his own devising.
He had grown sideburns by the time he came north again that spring, and when his mother saw him, she thought he looked so like his late father that she burst into tears.
In May of 1923, nearly two years after he was stricken, 12 months after Roosevelt's doctors first tested 44 of his muscles, they saw him again.
7 had improved.
7 had deteriorated.
The rest were unchanged.
Months of hard, lonely work had yielded no measurable overall gain in strength or stability.
He still was trying somehow to walk on what one physician called "flail legs.
" Man: I am very much disheartened about Mr.
Roosevelt's ultimate recovery.
I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limits of his possibilities.
I only hope I may be wrong in this.
Dr.
George Draper.
Narrator: When his doctors told him further progress was unlikely, he refused to accept their verdict.
Ward: He never made peace with the notion that he was going to not improve.
He always thought that rules were not written for him, that somehow he would find a way to walk again, and it really was a sort of delusion that he lived with, really, all his life.
Narrator: One after another, he tried and abandoned supposed "cures.
" Nothing worked.
"Polio was a storm," one of Roosevelt's physiotherapists taught her patients.
"You were what remained when the storm had passed.
" Man: Those were the lonely years.
For a long while during this time of illness, we had no tangible father, no father-in-being whom we could touch and talk to at will, only an abstract symbol, a cheery letter written from off somewhere on a houseboat.
Neither Anna, nor I, nor my brothers had the guidance and training that I think father would have given us had he not been involved in his own struggle to re-establish a useful life for himself.
James Roosevelt.
Narrator: Between 1925 and 1928, Franklin would spend more than half his time 116 of 208 weeks Away from home, struggling to find a way to regain his feet.
Eleanor was with him just 4 of those 116 weeks, and his mother was with him for only two.
Man, as Franklin: Jacksonville, Florida.
Saturday, February 2, 1924.
FDR went on board and put the boat in commission, and the trunks were duly unpacked, fishing gear stowed, and library of the World's Worst Literature placed on shelves.
Narrator: 1924 was the year Franklin had once planned to run for the White House.
Instead, he spent weeks drifting off the Florida Keys that winter with Missy Lehand.
This time, she remembered, he was so depressed he rarely made it on deck before noon.
Goodwin: I think the main difference between Theodore and FDR is the fact that Theodore could always outrun his depressions, his demons.
Because FDR was paralyzed, he had to absorb them, he had to think about them, he had to sit with them in a certain sense.
Woman, as Eleanor: Dearest Franklin, I have wanted you home the last few days to advise me on the fight I'm putting up.
Mr.
Murphy and I disagree.
I imagine it is just a question of what he dislikes most: giving me my way or having me give the papers a grand chance for a story.
There's one thing I'm thankful for.
I haven't a thing to lose and, for the moment, you haven't, either.
Narrator: Eleanor, not Franklin, went to political war that spring against Charles Murphy, the Tammany Hall boss who had outmaneuvered her husband during his first term as a State Senator 13 years before.
She and her new friends had already driven all over the State, organizing Democratic women.
The issue now was who would pick two woman delegates and two delegates-at-large to the National Convention in July men like Murphy, who had always run things, or the growing number of women she'd been recruiting for the party.
When Murphy insisted on remaining in charge, she publicly warned him at a Democratic women's dinner of what would happen if he failed to share power fairly.
Woman, as Eleanor: It is always disagreeable to take stands.
It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go.
To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feeling, but I have come to the conclusion this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes.
Narrator: When Murphy still refused to change his ways, Eleanor appealed directly to Governor Al Smith.
He overruled Murphy.
Thanks to her, the women, not the boss, would pick their own delegates-at-large.
Franklin wrote her to tell her how proud he was.
Woman, as Eleanor: You need not be proud of me, dear.
I'm only being active till you can be again.
It isn't such a great desire on my part to serve the world, and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily.
Hurry up, for as you know, my ever-present sense of the uselessness of things will overwhelm me sooner or later.
Ward: I think there are ways in which polio, ghastly as it was, did help him.
If he had not had polio, he would have been a leading candidate to run for President during the republican twenties, and we would never have heard of him again.
Narrator: Governor Al Smith had known Franklin Roosevelt since his days in the State Senate.
They had not much liked each other, but they had become allies of a kind over the years, and as the 1924 presidential race drew closer, the governor asked Roosevelt to serve as chairman of citizens for Smith.
FDR agreed.
It was a chance to get back into national politics, at least behind the scenes.
When the man who was going to put Smith's name into nomination died, Smith asked who should replace him.
"Roosevelt," an aide answered, because "you're a bowery mick and he is a protestant patrician and he'll take some of the curse off you.
" Roosevelt again agreed, even though it meant he would run the risk of appearing in front of thousands of people.
If he so much as stumbled, their pleasure at seeing him again would turn instantly to pity.
He refused to be seen in his wheelchair.
In the library of the house on East 65th Street, he and his eldest son, James, measured off 15 feet The distance between the rear of the platform and the podium And practiced covering it over and over again on two crutches.
He was grinning as he waited for his introduction at noon on June 26, 1924 at Madison Square Garden, but he gripped James' arm so hard, it was all his son could do to keep from crying out.
Then, as 12,000 people held their breath, James handed him his second crutch and he began his slow, careful movement toward the microphones.
When he reached the podium, everyone in the garden stood to cheer.
He had to keep standing for more than half an hour as he spoke and did not dare lift either hand for fear of falling.
But he was determined that no one forget his introduction to Al Smith.
Man, as Franklin: He has a power to strike at error and wrongdoing that makes his adversaries quail before him.
He has a personality that carries to every hearer not only the sincerity, but the righteousness of what he says.
He is the "happy warrior" of the political battlefield Alfred E.
Smith.
(Crowd cheering) Narrator: The next day, Eleanor's friend and confidante Marion Dickerman dropped in to see FDR.
He was sitting up in bed, exhausted but elated.
"Marion," he said, "I did it!" In the end, Al Smith failed to get the nomination.
After 103 ballots, the weary delegates settled upon a colorless conservative, John W.
Davis, but Franklin Roosevelt had made an indelible impression.
Man: From the time Roosevelt made his speech, he has easily been the foremost figure on the platform.
That is not because of his name.
There are many Roosevelts.
It is because, without the slightest intention or desire to do anything of the sort, he has done for himself what he could not do for his candidate.
Narrator: Roosevelt took no further part in the 1924 campaign.
Ward: It's one thing just to try to get back on your feet.
He had a special problem, and the special problem was that he wanted to return to public life, and that pity was poison.
He could not be seen to be To use the word always used then crippled.
He had to be thought lame.
Narrator: Meanwhile, Eleanor remained in the thick of things.
Her late Uncle's son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
, was running against Al Smith for governor, and she had neither forgotten nor forgiven her cousin's attacks on her husband 4 years earlier.
Calvin Coolidge was now in the White House; President Harding had died in office.
Harding's administration had been rocked by a bribery scandal involving the illegal lease of government oil fields in Wyoming at a place called Teapot Dome.
Ted and Archie Roosevelt had both been accused of involvement and called upon to testify before Congress.
Neither had actually been guilty of wrongdoing.
But Eleanor, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman followed Ted around the state anyway, in a car topped with a giant papier mache teapot, steam pouring from its spout.
Eleanor denounced her cousin at every stop as "a personally nice young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.
" One evening, her tricked-out car turned up unannounced at the Farmington, Connecticut home of Theodore Roosevelt's sister, Bamie.
Eleanor asked if she and her friends could spend the night.
Bamie took them all in, even though they were maligning her nephew.
She loved her niece, she said.
Eleanor would later admit her Teapot Tour had been "a rough stunt.
" Ted Roosevelt would never forgive her.
On Election Day, Calvin Coolidge swept the country, including New York State.
The unregulated orgy of easy credit, inflated real estate values, and wild Wall Street speculation would continue without letup.
But Al Smith was re-elected governor, beating Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
Badly.
Goodwin: It's a very big question as to whether or not, if Franklin Roosevelt had not had polio, he would have been able to connect as deeply as he did to the common man.
Eleanor said, "great suffering can change a person.
" And in his case, I think it did connect him with other people who had also had difficulties in their lives in a way that he might not have felt before.
He always loved people; He was always gregarious, but now he needed them, that was his connection to life.
Will: It's tempting and probably true to say that polio gave FDR the gift of empathy.
There was no suffering that he could not in some sense relate to.
And also the just as the irons were clapped on his legs, the steel entered his soul by having to fight through the constant pain of therapy that was unforgiving in its demands and not very fulfilling in its success.
Ward: I think it taught him that there were certain things which he could not overcome by the easy gifts that he had been given; that is, there's some things you can't charm, there's some things you can't use guile on, that you have to really have a goal in mind and try to get there.
Roosevelt remained a very devious person, but he had big goals and he met a lot of them, and I think polio had a lot to do with that.
Narrator: While Eleanor was campaigning against her cousin Ted, Franklin had traveled south to rural Georgia, where he'd been told bathing in mineralized waters at a ramshackle resort near the tiny town of Bullochville might help strengthen his legs.
He loved the warm, buoyant water that allowed him to stand with unbraced legs for the first time since 1921, so long as he held on tightly to a rope or the edge of the pool.
"I feel that a great cure for infantile paralysis," he wrote to his mother, "could well be established here.
" He decided to buy the place.
The price for the Battered Inn, a cluster of tumble-down cottages, two pools, and 1,200 acres of piney woods was $195,000.
Eleanor objected; all 5 children were still in private school.
He was risking nearly 2/3 of his inheritance.
She thought he would inevitably lose interest.
He bought it, nonetheless, officiated at a ceremony renaming the little town Warm Springs because it was thought more saleable than Bullochville, and hoped both to attract wealthy guests to the old hotel and to provide aftercare for fellow polios.
As word of his presence spread, other polio patients, desperate for help, began to turn up on the train, some simply shipped south by families who had been unable to do anything for them at home.
One arrived aboard a freight car in a wooden cage his brother back home had banged together to keep him from being thrown around too much by the hurtling train.
There, among his fellow patients and away from the press, with Missy Lehand to act as his hostess and handle his correspondence with the Democrats he continued to cultivate all across the country, he could be himself.
He didn't need to be self-conscious about his withered legs, could exercise as he wanted, at his own pace, could even wear his braces on the outside of his trousers.
The hotel never did work out.
Prospective guests were scared off by the presence of polio patients.
Roosevelt would never make any money and eventually turned Warm Springs into a foundation.
But Eleanor was wrong; he never lost interest, never backed away.
Ward: So it slowly became the Nation's Premiere Rehabilitation Center for polios.
And Roosevelt became almost obsessed with it, raising money for it and helping people.
For him, personally, it was all kinds of things.
It was the first project that he had ever had which he absolutely ran on his own.
He'd worked in the Navy Department, but as an Assistant Secretary, which deeply troubled him.
This was his creation, and it allowed him to be un-self-conscious about polio.
It's hard to convey, especially a person who was as beautiful as Franklin Roosevelt had been, that he suddenly had withered legs.
I don't care how magnetic and self-confident you are or think you are.
To know that people are staring at them is something that you never really get over.
And at Warm Springs, he could not wear his braces and go to the swimming pool and have everybody see how small his legs were, and it didn't bother him because there were people there with worse problems.
Man, as Franklin: You would howl with glee if you could see the clinic in operation at the side of the pool, and the patients doing various exercises in the water under my leadership.
They are male and female, of all ages and weights.
In addition to all this, I am consulting architect and landscape engineer and giving free advice on the moving of buildings, the building of roads, setting out trees, and remodeling the hotel.
(Distant hammering) Ward: He was the sort of king of Warm Springs.
He knew everybody in town, and he loved being one of them and being the number one of them at the same time, and that was true all his life in everything he did.
He loved to be surrounded by people, all of whom knew that he was number one.
Narrator: Warm Springs was the first project he had ever undertaken meant largely to benefit others.
He began to call himself "old Doctor Roosevelt.
" He devised pioneering water exercises, hired physiotherapists to work with him and his fellow patients in the pool, and paid local "push boys" to wheel them to and from the water.
Well, we actually we got them up in the morning, bed-bathed them, dressed them, fed them, and take them to wherever they had to go.
If they were going to get therapy, we had to take them to the therapy room; If we were going to the pool, we had to load them on an old make-shift bus and take them down the hill.
There was lots of fun, you know, pool play and stuff like that.
Of course, he liked to get in there with the patients And he'd duck you if you got in that pool.
If you got within reach, yeah, he'd duck ya, dunk ya, whichever one you want to call it.
Anyway, your head would go under the water.
Heh heh! Well, he was he was jolly.
Woman: And he was standing at the door.
He was shaking hands with all the patients that came that day.
We all had nicknames, and when he met me, he said, "little girl, what is your name?" I told him "Suzanne.
" "I love that name, Suzanne, but I'd like to call you Suzie.
Is that all right?" And I said, "uh-huh.
" And guess what we called him.
"Rosy.
" And when we called him Rosy, it was always when he drove up in front of Georgia Hall.
We would be out there "Hey, Rosy, hey, Rosy" And he loved it.
Narrator: "Doc Roosevelt's" prescription called for sunshine, swimming, gentle exercise, and massage, and above all, "belief on the patient's part that the muscles are coming back.
" The physical progress he and the others made may have been minimal, but their psychological progress was beyond measure.
Pike: Oh, he was always happy and he gave the impression that it just made you want to achieve everything you could and to be more like that he was.
And if we saw him do it, we wanted to do it.
The only thing that I had a big problem with Those old, gray steps that had 4 different sides to it.
You would learn how to go up and down them, and I didn't want to try it.
But when I saw the rest of them doing it and he was standing there watching, I wasn't about to give up.
I thought, "fall or not fall, I'm going to try.
" And I made it.
Ward: To see someone so famous who suffered from exactly the same problems that you suffered from meant an enormous amount to all of the people that went there.
Most of the people who went there went there, really, out of despair, at least at first.
They couldn't there wasn't any other place to go.
And here was this laughing giant, um who would kid them and would get And would make the kind of awful, sick jokes about being handicapped that other handicapped people love, but that you can't share with anybody else.
He loved doing that.
Narrator: He declared himself vice president in charge of picnics.
His favorite spot was a rocky overhang called Dowdell's Knob.
Whenever a patient seemed about to give in to despair, he once told a friend, he or she should be brought to Dowdell's Knob right away.
(Bird chirping) One look at the glorious view, he believed, would provide the will to go on.
Eleanor now had a place of her own as well, a symbol of her growing autonomy.
Back in 1924, Franklin, Eleanor, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman had spread a picnic blanket on the shore of a meandering stam on Roosevelt land two miles east of Springwood.
Springwood was always closed for the winter, and they'd all agreed it was a shame Hyde Park wasn't available to them all year round.
Franklin volunteered to build Eleanor and her friends a stone cottage of their own.
"My missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods," he wrote a local contractor.
It took a little over a year and a half to complete and would eventually include a small furniture factory in an adjacent building, employing local craftsmen and overseen by Nancy Cook.
For a time, Eleanor, Cook, and Dickerman all lived in a single dormitory room in an atmosphere reminiscent of Allenswood, the English Boarding School that had meant so much to her as a girl.
"The peace of it," Eleanor said, "is divine.
" Once the Val-Kill Cottage was completed, Eleanor rarely slept at Springwood again unless Franklin happened to be there.
Cook: Actually, FDR is relieved that Eleanor Roosevelt has a new community, and they begin to create not only two separate courts, but two separate lives.
And they meet for all the reasons they need to meet to promote political things that they're going to promote together, including FDR's career, but it's really a question of parallel lives at this point.
Woman, as Eleanor: If women believe they have a right and duty in political life today, they must learn to talk the language of men.
Against the men bosses, there must be women bosses who can talk as equals.
Narrator: In the mid-1920s, Eleanor Roosevelt became something of a boss herself and used her clout on behalf of progressive causes on which most of her male counterparts preferred to waffle: The League of Nations, the 5-day work week, an amendment to end child labor.
She even got herself arrested walking a picket line in support of striking box workers.
And because of the tragedies caused by alcohol within her own family, she also publicly supported prohibition, even though her husband was silent on the subject and maintained ready supplies of gin and rum and scotch at Warm Springs and in an upstairs closet in their New York home.
Eleanor's new and independent life meant that she had less time for her children.
They were alternately ignored and indulged.
One by one, she would dutifully escort James and Elliott, Franklin Jr.
, and John to Groton, and she continued to clash again and again with her mother-in-law, who spoiled all her grandchildren and sometimes murmured to them that she was their real mother; Eleanor had only borne them.
Anna, the eldest, may have suffered most from the ongoing tensions within her family.
She adored her absent father, but also sympathized with her mother, who, while Anna was still in her teens, confirmed to her the rumors she had heard about her father's romance with Lucy Mercer.
She was forced by her mother and grandmother into making a formal debut at 18 and failed to go to college, in part because her grandmother believed educated women scared off suitors.
Barely 20, she married Curtis Dall, a wall street broker ten years older than she.
Many years later, explaining her early marriage, she said she'd simply wanted to get out, away from the complications that continued to divide her family.
In the spring of 1928, Al Smith was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president and asked Franklin to nominate him again at the Upcoming Convention in Houston.
"I'm telling everyone you are going to Houston without crutches," Eleanor wrote Franklin at Warm Springs, "so mind you stick at it.
" This time, he needed no urging.
To demonstrate to the delegates that he was making progress toward becoming a potential candidate in his own right, he knew he had to be able to walk Or seem to walk on his own.
For weeks at Warm Springs, he labored at mastering what his physiotherapists called a "two-point walk" The slow, rocking gait he would employ in public for the rest of his life.
Ward: His whole leg would be put forward, and then the other side would be put forward and then the other side would be foot forward.
It was painful, it was very slow, and it was very precarious.
If he got jostled, if the wind blew too hard, if one of his bodyguards forgot or relaxed, he could go to the ground, so he was in constant fear that that was going to happen.
(Crowd cheering) Narrator: At the Houston Convention, he used his new technique to make his way to the podium.
Thousands of onlookers stood again to cheer his progress, and now he was strong enough to use one hand to acknowledge their applause.
Smith won the nomination And then, to Roosevelt's astonishment, insisted that he run for Governor of New York in his place.
Louis Howe thought it madness.
Republicans and their candidate Herbert Hoover were riding a tide of prosperity in 1928.
Smith's catholicism and open opposition to prohibition made a Democratic victory still more unlikely.
Eleanor already committed to heading Democratic women's work for Smith's candidacy Felt that if her husband ran and somehow won, it might mean for her the loss of the separate and fulfilling life she'd worked so hard to build.
And Missy Lehand told Franklin, "don't you dare run.
" She didn't want to give him up to public life, either.
Roosevelt himself was torn, even ducked Smith's calls for a time.
But in the end, he gave in and agreed to run for governor.
"When you're in politics," he told a friend, "you've got to play the game.
" Narrator: Republican newspapers denounced Smith for persuading what they called a "crippled" man to run.
It was a "pathetic and pitiless act," one said.
Privately, Smith thought Franklin was little more than an invalid.
"He won't live a year," he told a friend.
But he assured the press, "a Governor doesn't have to be an acrobat.
We do not elect him for his ability to do a double back-flip.
" To demonstrate he was up to the job, Roosevelt campaigned through every one of New York's 62 counties Something no candidate for governor had ever done before.
He did all he could to minimize the impact of his disability on the voters: "No movies of me getting out of the machine, boys," he'd shout to the newsreel cameramen as he arrived for a speech, and they obliged.
On Election night, Franklin, Eleanor, and Sara waited for the returns at Democratic Headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan.
It was quickly clear that Al Smith and the Democrats had suffered a terrible defeat.
Smith carried only 7 states; even his own State of New York went to Herbert Hoover.
Franklin and Eleanor left for home well before midnight, convinced Franklin's candidacy had also failed, even though all the returns were not yet in.
But Sara Delano Roosevelt stayed put.
By 4:00 in the morning, Franklin was going to win a narrow victory.
A friend called room service and, because of Prohibition, ordered milk, not champagne.
with which to toast her son's surprising triumph.
FDR would occupy still another of the offices his cousin Theodore had held on his way to the presidency.
Al Smith had assumed Franklin would be a mostly-absentee governor, allowing him somehow to retain power through the men and women he'd appointed to State Office.
He was quickly disabused of that notion.
FDR fired Smith's two closest aides.
I've got to be the governor of the State of New York," he told a friend, "and I have got to be it myself.
" Al Smith would never forgive him.
Narrator: The morning after the election, a reporter had asked Eleanor if she were excited by her husband's triumph.
"No," she answered.
"If the rest of the ticket didn't get in, what does it matter?" Woman, as Eleanor: I felt governor Smith's election as president might have meant something, but whether Franklin spends two years in Albany or not matters comparatively little.
It will have pleasant and unpleasant sides for him, and the good to the State is problematical.
Crowds, newspapers, etcetera, mean so little, it does not even stir me.
Narrator: As the First Lady of New York, she reluctantly resigned her political and lobbying posts.
But she refused to give up the job that meant the most to her teaching American history and 19th-century literature 3 days a week at the Tod Hunter School for girls in Manhattan.
It gave her an opportunity to instill in her students some of the qualities her own beloved schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Souvestre, had instilled in her: Open-mindedness, independent thinking, social consciousness.
"I teach because I love it," she explained.
"I cannot give it up.
" She organized the household in Albany, assigning Missy Lehand a bedroom larger than hers, found space for her circle of friends as well as Franklin's, and toured prisons and hospitals on her husband's behalf, remembering his exhortation to lift the lids on cooking pots to check whether people were getting the quality of food they were supposed to get.
And she sometimes stood in for him at political events as well.
Woman, as Eleanor: Dear Franklin, arrived at the Staten Island Democratic lunch 12:30, stood and shook hands till 1:30, ate till 3:30, talked till 5:20, home here at 6:40, nearly dead.
You are the finest Governor ever, and I have all the virtues and would gladly have dispensed with half of them could I have left at 4:00.
Narrator: Soon after becoming Governor, Franklin ordered that wherever Eleanor went, she be accompanied by corporal Earl Miller of the New York State Police, who would serve as her bodyguard.
Cook: He's not just her driver and her guard, he's her buddy.
He teaches her how to shoot a pistol, how to shoot a rifle without breaking your shoulder.
He teaches her how to dive.
He is her great friend, and they spend hours and hours together.
She has a lot of fun with Earl Miller.
Narrator: He was handsome, high-spirited, and devoted.
Eleanor was flattered by his attention and pleased to be asked for advice about his many girlfriends.
Miller became a member of her closest circle, even starred with her in a homemade parody of a Douglas Fairbanks Movie, filmed at Val-Kill by Marion Dickerman.
(Distant men shouting) Man: The "New York Times.
" October 25, 1929.
The most disastrous decline in the biggest and broadest stock market of history rocked the financial district yesterday.
It carried down with it speculators, big and little, in every part of the country.
Losses were tremendous, and thousands of prosperous brokerage and bank accounts, sound and healthy a week ago, were completely wrecked in the strange debacle due to a combination of circumstances, but accelerated into a crash by fear.
Narrator: Americans had survived panics before, but they had experienced nothing remotely like the great depression that began with the stock market crash in the autumn of 1929.
Within 12 months, the number of jobless more than doubled.
Within another year, it would double again, with no recovery in sight.
Kansas farmers burned their wheat to keep warm.
Kentucky coal miners survived on Pokeweed and Dandelion Greens.
Ten Pennsylvania convicts out on parole asked to be locked up again.
Life beyond prison walls was too hard.
Everyone seemed to feel the effects.
In Manhattan, Franklin Roosevelt's own son-in-law, Curtis Dall, lost his job and his home in Westchester County and had to move with Anna and FDR's first two grandchildren into the Roosevelt house on East 65th Street.
Just a few blocks to the west, homeless men built tar-paper shacks in the heart of Central Park.
They had nowhere else to go.
Like hundreds of thousands of desperate people all across the country, they named their temporary village "Hooverville" after the President whom they had come to blame for everything that had happened to them.
Americans differed over what caused the depression and what should be done about it.
But Herbert Hoover's grim personality and his repeated, unconvincing promises that recovery was just months away combined to persuade a growing majority of Americans that a change was needed.
Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt took more bold action than any of his fellow governors.
He championed public power, put unemployed men to work on state conservation projects, created the temporary emergency relief administration, the first state agency in the country to provide public relief for the unemployed "Not as a matter of public charity," he said, "but as a matter of social duty.
In the final analysis," he declared, "the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind.
Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.
" Narrator: In 1930, Roosevelt was re-elected governor by almost 3/4 of a million votes.
"I do not see how Mr.
Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party," the State Democratic Chairman told the press, "even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.
" Even Ted Roosevelt reluctantly agreed.
"Well, as far as I can see, the republican ship went down with all on board," he wrote his mother.
"Cousin Franklin now, I suppose, will run for the presidency, and I am already beginning to think of nasty things to say concerning him.
" The most serious hindrance to FDR's winning the nomination were persistent rumors about his health.
People whispered that infantile paralysis had affected his mind, even that he was actually suffering from syphilis.
To offset them, Roosevelt secretly paid a freelance journalist named Earle Looker to "challenge" him to prove his fitness for office and write up the results in "Liberty" Magazine.
Then, also behind the scenes, Roosevelt provided the money to pay 3 leading diagnosticians to look him over.
The examination itself was legitimate.
All 3 doctors signed a statement pronouncing Roosevelt in fine shape, aside from the aftereffects of polio, though one of them an implacable republican Privately told his colleagues he wanted it understood that "so far as I'm concerned, this doesn't go for above the neck.
" Man: July 16, 1931.
Well, sir, we got away with the "Liberty" article, despite all obstacles.
I think we can be sure that at least 7 1/2 million readers are sure you are physically fit.
Earle Looker.
Narrator: FDR would never again feel the need to speak in detail about his health to any journalist.
As the 1932 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago, Roosevelt was the clear front-runner, with a reputation as one of the most activist and effective governors in the country.
John e.
Mack: I call on you, whose standards I see before me, to here and now testify to your determination that the candidate of this convention shall be and must be that incarnation of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York! (Crowd cheering) Narrator: Still, he had 9 rivals, including his embittered old ally, Al Smith, and the conservative speaker of the house, John Nance Garner of Texas.
It took 4 ballots And the second place on the ticket for Garner For Roosevelt to win the nomination.
Man: for President of the United States.
(Crowd cheering) Narrator: Custom still required the candidate to wait weeks to be formally notified of his nomination.
Franklin: We have a perfect day for this trip, and I am very happy to be going out to Chicago, and everybody knows the reason why I'm so happy.
Narrator: In an electrifying break with that tradition, FDR decided to fly from Albany to Chicago to accept the nomination right away.
(Crowd cheering) Louis Howe handed him his speech.
(Crowd whistling and applauding) My friends of the Democratic National Convention of 1932 I appreciate your willingness after these 6 arduous days to remain here, for I know well The sleepless hours which you and I have had.
(Audience laughter) The appearance before a National Convention of its nominee for president to be formally notified of his selection is unprecedented and unusual, but these are unprecedented and unusual times.
(Applause) Narrator: 29 years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had promised the American people a "Square Deal.
" Now, 11 years after polio seemed to have crushed his political hopes, Franklin Roosevelt made a promise of his own.
Franklin: On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever.
Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.
(Crowd cheering and applauding) I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.
(Crowd cheering and whistling) (Orchestra playing "Happy Days Are Here Again") Narrator: President Hoover had grown so unpopular that one of Roosevelt's defeated rivals for the nomination told FDR all he had to do to win was to stay alive till November.
With the depression deepening, a double line of policemen armed with rifles now ringed the U.
S.
Capitol to keep out demonstrators.
When 17,000 mostly jobless veterans of the Great War and their families descended on Washington to demand an immediate payment of a bonus they'd been promised, Hoover called out the army.
The veterans were brutally driven from the Capital.
Roosevelt told an aide, "this will elect me.
" Still, he took no chances.
Roosevelt campaigned hard all across the country, promising help for "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid," attacking Hoover for inaction, and simultaneously pledging to slash the federal budget by 25%.
Hoover denounced him as "a chameleon on plaid.
" ("Happy Days Are Here Again" continues) (Song ends) Narrator: Now, when Americans spoke of Roosevelt, they meant Franklin, not Theodore.
"The Oyster Bay Roosevelts have become the out-of-season Roosevelts," a friend wrote.
Theodore Roosevelt's younger sister, Corrine, would cross party lines to vote for FDR that fall.
But Alice Roosevelt longworth, tr's eldest daughter, campaigned hard against him aboard president Hoover's train.
Woman, as Alice: There we were, the Roosevelts, hubris up to the eyebrows, beyond the eyebrows, and then who should come sailing down the river but Nemesis in the person of cousin Franklin.
Narrator: And at Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt's widow, Edith, was so infuriated at receiving some 300 congratulatory messages from people who mistakenly thought Franklin was one of her sons that she made an unprecedented appearance at a Republican Rally in Manhattan to introduce the republican incumbent, just to make it clear that this Oyster Bay Roosevelt would also be voting for Herbert Hoover.
Someone once asked Sara Delano Roosevelt why so many of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay seemed so hostile to her branch of the family.
She didn't know, she said, but "perhaps it's because we're so much better-looking than they are.
" Sitting down here next to me is Mrs.
Roosevelt, my wife, and my granddaughter, Anna Roosevelt dall, on her lap.
What's our campaign slogan, Sistie? Woman: "Happy days are here again.
" "Happy days are here again.
" Good.
That's right.
(Orchestra playing "Happy Days Are Here Again") Narrator: On Election night, November 8, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency of the United States of America by 7 million votes and carried 42 of the 48 states.
His party took control of both houses of congress.
It was the greatest Democratic victory in more than 3/4 of a century.
In the Philippines, where Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
Was serving as governor-general, he identified himself to a reporter as the president-elect's "fifth cousin, about to be removed.
" Woman, as Eleanor: I was happy for him, of course, because I knew that in many ways it would make up for the blow that fate had dealt him.
But for myself, I was deeply troubled.
As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own.
I had watched Mrs.
Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the President.
The turmoil in my heart was rather great that night and The next few months were not to make any clearer what the road ahead would be.
Narrator: During the 4 long months between Roosevelt's election and his inauguration, the depression got still worse.
Stocks, bonds, farm prices Everything continued to spiral downward.
Anxious depositors withdrew their savings in frenzied runs on banks.
Nearly 400 of them failed in January and February alone.
President Hoover called repeatedly upon the president-elect to join him in what he called "co-operative action" to end the crisis.
Roosevelt refused, wary of being trapped into supporting orthodox policies of which he did not approve.
Off the record, the President-elect told a reporter the country's troubles were not yet "my baby.
" FDR visited Hyde Park, rested at Warm Springs, then went to sea for 12 days, fishing in the Caribbean and sleeping aboard a palatial yacht owned by an old Hudson River friend, Vincent Astor.
Man: I got this idea when I was 17 years old.
I see a lot of things I see in my mind.
I see a lot of poor people are hungry for a piece of bread.
People want bread, don't have bread to eat.
In my mind, the idea is to kill the President in one country.
After he is killed, kill another, and then kill another.
Giuseppe Zangara.
Narrator: The President-elect's fishing trip ended at Miami, Florida on the evening of February 15, 1933.
Roosevelt stopped his car to speak to the crowd that had gathered to see him.
(Crowd cheers and applauds) Franklin: Mr.
Mayor, my friends in Miami, I am not a stranger here because for a good many years, I used to come down here.
But on my coming back, I have firmly resolved not to make it the last time, and to see all of you and to have another wonderful 10 days or two weeks in Florida waters.
Many thanks.
Narrator: A deranged Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara was waiting with a revolver.
(Three gunshots) (Woman screams, men shout) Narrator: He hated "all presidents," he said later, and "everybody who is rich.
" He had hoped to shoot Hoover; Now he wanted to kill Roosevelt.
(Three gunshots, woman screams) He got off 5 shots and hit 5 bystanders, including the Mayor of Chicago, who happened to be standing next to the president-elect.
FDR never flinched.
He refused to take cover, ordered the secret service to lift the mortally wounded mayor into his car, held onto him during the race to the hospital.
Eleanor was in New York.
Franklin called to reassure her.
"He's all right," she said afterwards.
"He's not the least bit excited.
These things are to be expected.
" Like Theodore Roosevelt nearly 21 years earlier, Franklin seemed unaffected by coming so close to death.
"There was nothing," an aide who spent that evening with him remembered, "not so much as the twitching oa muscle, "the mopping of a brow, or even the hint of a false gaiety "to indicate that it wasn't any evening in any other place.
I have never seen anything in my life more magnificent.
" (Orchestra playing "Hail to the Chief") At his inauguration 17 days later, gripping James' arm, Roosevelt would demonstrate another kind of courage.
In 40 of the 48 states, all the banks were closed.
The stock exchange suspended trading.
Industrial production had been cut almost in half.
Nearly half of all American farmers faced foreclosure.
Almost one out of 3 wage-earners Some 14 million men and women Was without work.
When their families were included, at least 40 million people had no dependable source of income.
("Hail To The Chief" ends) You, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear Woman, as Eleanor: It was very, very solemn and a little terrifying.
You felt people would do anything if only someone would tell them what to do.
One has the feeling of going it blindly because we're in a tremendous stream and none of us know where we are going to land.
Franklin: of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.
(Crowd cheering and whistling) Narrator: Americans everywhere were waiting to hear what the new president had to say.
I shall ask the congress for the one remaining instrument Narrator: He would promise bold action and call upon Congress to grant him "broad executive powers to wage a war against the emergency.
" Franklin: as great as the power that would be given to me if we were, in fact, invaded by a foreign foe.
(Crowd cheering and applauding) This nation is asking for action, and action now.
(Cheers and applause) Narrator: But it was another line his frightened fellow citizens remembered best.
It echoed hard-earned lessons that had informed the lives of first Theodore and then Eleanor Roosevelt and now informed his life as well.
Franklin: So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
In every dark hour of our Jonathan alter: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," in some ways, is inspired nonsense.
If you're worried about putting food on the table, that's something real to fear, that's not fear itself.
And yet, like all great works of fiction, all great stories, that line captures the willing suspension of disbelief that makes anything possible.
And somebody watching the speech Tommy Corcoran, who later went to work for Roosevelt said that the moment was like Excalibur being pulled from the stone and that you just had a sense, "this guy can do it.
He can lift us up.
" (Orchestra playing "Happy Days Are Here Again") - sync & corrections by wolfen - Announcer: Tomorrow night on "The Roosevelts," FDR champions sweeping new programs Man: Social security represents a redefinition of the American Social Contract.
Announcer: While confiding in a discreet friend Woman: Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt evidently don't get on together.
Announcer: As the shadow of war hangs over Europe.
Part 5 of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," tomorrow night.
These extraordinary Americans all share one thing in common: A past they never knew until now.
A.
Cooper: "it's incredible!" In his new season on PBS, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
helps them uncover the truth about where they come from.
S.
Field "I can't believe that these documents even exist!" C.
B.
Vance: "wow!" Get to know them, as they discover who they really are.
K.
Alexander "that's pretty amazing.
" Finding your roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Starts Tuesday only on PBS.