The Man He Became by James Tobin

Author:James Tobin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 10

* * *

“As If I Had Nothing the Matter”

– Fall 1924 to Spring 1925 –

About the time Roosevelt became ill in 1921, a teenaged boy named Louis Joseph contracted infantile paralysis in Columbus, Georgia. He was paralyzed below the waist. The next summer his parents took the boy on a family vacation to a fading resort hotel called the Meriwether Inn in the Georgia village of Bullochville, in the Appalachian piedmont about halfway between Columbus and Atlanta. At the inn there was an outdoor swimming pool fed by water that flowed from mineral springs nearby. Louis swam in the pool often. The next year the family returned and again Louis swam. After swimming in the pool during a third vacation in 1924, Louis, using canes, could walk again. No one could explain it. Perhaps he simply experienced spontaneous recovery in his damaged muscles and helped himself by exercising. But the story of the Joseph boy went around among people who knew the resort.

The Meriwether Inn had recently been purchased by the New York banker and philanthropist George Foster Peabody. Like Louis Joseph, Peabody had been a boy in nearby Columbus. His family’s business fortunes had been broken by the Civil War, and in 1866, when Peabody was fourteen, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York. There Peabody worked his way up from a job as a clerk in a dry-goods business to being one of two principal partners in the investment banking firm of Spencer Trask & Co. With substantial investments in railroads, sugar, and the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in the years when the company became General Electric, Peabody amassed a fortune, retired in 1906 at fifty-four, and started a new career in philanthropy and social activism. He became a prominent backer of education for African-Americans, treasurer of the Democratic Party, and an important supporter of Woodrow Wilson, who asked Peabody to be his secretary of commerce. Peabody declined, but he served as an informal advisor to Wilson and other members of his administration, including his fellow New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt.

When Peabody’s business partner, Spencer Trask, was killed in a railroad accident in 1909, Peabody stepped in to help his widow with the Trasks’ own philanthropies and service work. These included an effort to restore the mineral springs at Saratoga Springs, New York, where the Trasks had built Yaddo, their summer estate. Advancing this project, Peabody learned a good deal about the nature and management of mineral springs. He told friends he was “nerve-tired” in these years, and he found the baths at Saratoga relaxing and restorative. In 1920 he married Trask’s widow, Katrina—the two had been childhood sweethearts—but she died only two years later. Now nearly seventy, heartbroken but still fit and eager to do good things, Peabody looked for new projects.

In his boyhood, Peabody’s family had spent summer weeks at the resort at Bullochville, Georgia, also known in the region as Warm Springs. In 1923, he learned the old Meriwether Inn had fallen on hard times and was up for sale.

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