FDR's Shadow by Julie M. Fenster

Author:Julie M. Fenster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 2009-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Roosevelt's fever continued during the week, but the progress of the paralysis stopped, just as he was about to lose the use of his hands entirely. As it was, he couldn't write or hold a fork. Eleanor and Louis tended him around the clock, Eleanor sleeping on a couch in his bedroom and Louis using a cot. The children were kept away. Some of them had already exhibited slight symptoms, such as a runny nose and a stiff neck, which could have been related to Franklin's illness. The hope was that by keeping them isolated, the chances for a household epidemic were reduced.

Grace Howe remembered that each of the adults took turns reading to Franklin. Eleanor was especially fond of reading aloud. In fact, before Franklin arrived for his visit, she had written him a letter admitting that when she read aloud after dinner, Grace would be snoring, Louis sleeping soundly, and another guest, Mrs. Shepherdson, holding her eyelids open with her fingertips. Franklin, however, was a more grateful audience. “One day,” Grace recalled in a newspaper interview, “I happened to read a small item about an infantile paralysis epidemic in Upper New York State. He said, ‘Grace, read that story about the epidemic again.’ I did—and I've often thought that that was the first time he realized himself what he had.”7

On Wednesday, August 17, Franklin's fever began to recede, the first sign that the illness, still unidentified, might be in abeyance. As usual, letters awaited his attention and Eleanor turned to the chore of answering them. Howe advised her to be careful. “If the public heard the words, ‘infantile paralysis,’” he told her, “it might think that Franklin's mind had been affected.… The wrong thing at this time might wreck his political career.”8

Eleanor was taken aback. With the illness as yet uncontrolled, and her husband lying in misery on a rugged island, she had not been thinking about possible long-range ramifications. Howe, on the other hand, couldn't help it.

Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, Roosevelt's secretary at his law firm in New York, was among those who had written. Unaware of the trouble at the camp, she had sent a letter asking quite boldly for a raise. One week after the onset of the illness, Eleanor read the letter aloud to Franklin. Still unable to move from the waist down, with his legs hypersensitive to the lightest touch, he summarized his response to her request for a raise. When Eleanor wrote to Missy LeHand that day, she gave a glimpse into Franklin's own state of mind. With all that was happening to him, he was back to business and the secretary's concerns were his.

“He asked me to write to you,” Eleanor responded in the letter to Missy, “that his impression is that you are now getting $30 a week and he fears neither the F&D nor Emmet, Marvin and Roosevelt would be willing to jump to $40 but he feels sure he can get you $35 now and hopes that will be satisfactory for the present.

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