We often take diversity for granted., especially in racially polyglot nations like Canada, the US, or Singapore. In fact, the scope of that word has steadily expanded to include LGBT rights, and those considered to be “disabled” in mind or body. These are generally positive trends as these various groups not only contribute to economies financially through taxes or retail purchasing power, they add a richness of socio-cultural uniqueness to the human experience. As we learn more about each other, so too do we learn more about ourselves in terms of tolerance, prejudices, and misconceptions. At the very least our very differences seemed a basis for dialogue, and, as history has proven repeatedly, dialogue can lead to understanding and tolerance.
Yet, as is often the case, the best of intentions can be carried to extremes. So far did the social pendulum swing that diversity became Political Correctness, fostering an entire overzealous PC culture which soon took on a witch hunt, crusading, elitist, feel. No longer, it seemed, was diversity a matter of acknowledging and celebrating differences as a means towards integration and fostering tolerance. Rather, being PC became synonymous with ticking off boxes on a checklist to ensure proper “representation” with “appropriate” topics of conversation and interaction rather than the free and easy open exchange of ideas that was to follow dialogue. Small wonder then, that such a notoriously anti-PC figure like Donald Trump got elected president, partially in reaction to an PC enforcement culture that supports unilateral quotas and which occasionally both defines and seeks to enforce “proper” socio-political behaviour.
Nor, it seems, does this zealotry confine itself to the present, but seeks to change even the past, affecting no less a personage than President Franklin Delano Rooselvelt himself.
During his epic 12-year run in the White House, FDR was hardly ever photographed in a wheelchair. Not surprisingly, the longest-serving president in American history disliked drawing attention to his polio symptoms. He had been stricken suddenly by the disease in 1921, at age 39, seven years before he was elected governor of New York and 11 years before his first presidential campaign. Teaching himself how to mimic the effects of walking by swinging his hips forward on ten pounds of steel braces clasped firmly around his withered legs, Roosevelt took the stage supported by crutches and his son at the 1924 Democratic National Convention to nominate New York governor Alfred E. Smith for president with a blistering speech that both electrified the delegates and instantly seared himself into the American public consciousness as a man of destiny. Later, after he had recovered as completely as he ever would he mastered appearing as if being able to "walk" and "stand" with a cane.
Once Roosevelt took the governor’s office in Albany, four years after his convention apperance, the press corps was discouraged from photographing him being assisted out of cars or otherwise exhibiting signs of physical dependence. When 'Life' published a photo of him in a wheelchair in 1937, presidential press secretary Steve Early was displeased. Most stills and newsreels from Roosevelt’s White House years show him seated (often in a car), gripping a lectern, or, frequently, clutching the arm of his son James. To compensate for the immobility of his legs, he developed his arms and upper body and used them effectively in his signature speaking style.
Fast-forward half a century. Although FDR had explicitly rejected the idea of a memorial to himself, his admirers eventually succeeded in having one erected between the monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson in Washington, D.C. It opened in 1997 to decidedly mixed reviews. While some commentators were enthusiastic, others felt that it was a bland, politically correct celebration not so much of the late president and his accomplishments as of the pervailing liberal pieties of the 1990s. Some of the few living journalists who could recall the New Deal years, complained that “FDR is remembered for the cigarette holder he held between his teeth at a jaunty angle. You will not find that in any of the statues in the memorial. The argument is that if he had known what we know today about tobacco, he wouldn’t have smoked.” After noting that Eleanor Roosevelt’s trademark fox fur stole is also never shown, it begs the question , “Why does everybody with a cause seem to know that FDR and Eleanor today would be sharing that cause?” For all their service to the nation and visionary zeal, they were still people fitted entirely to their times, not ours.
However, the biggest controversy was characterized as “the great battle of the wheelchair.” The committee that designed the memorial had acceded to Roosevelt’s wish that he not be shown in one. Disability rights groups, however, demanded that the biases of his own time not be countenanced in ours. (The possibility that a proud man might have minimized his handicap as much to avoid pity as stigma did not seem to occur to them.) After President Bill Clinton announced that he felt both their pain and his late predecessor’s, Congress authorized a bronze statue of FDR sitting proudly in the homemade wheelchair he had designed for himself, like a man who, with superhuman effort, had rolled himself out of the closet of ancient prejudices on disability and simultaneously somehow kicked his tobacco habit while doing so.
There's nothing wrong with an inspirational narrative, but there are issues with deliberately taking things out of context.
At the dedication of the statue in early 2001, the air was heavy with fatuous self-congratulation. “While Roosevelt hid his disability from the public during his lifetime, believing that the country wasn’t ready then to elect a wheelchair user as president, he nevertheless stayed in his chair when it was uplifting to particular audiences, such as when touring veterans’ hospitals,” proclaimed the chairman of the National Organization on Disability. “It’s wonderful that the whole world will now know that President Roosevelt led this country to victory in World War II and through the Great Depression from his wheelchair.” Clinton echoed this view of the past, explaining, “He lived in a different time, when people thought being disabled was being unable.” The implication was that if FDR had had the good fortune to run for president today, his disability would have been no handicap at all.
Embracing this view of a supposedly tolerant SJW/PC present contrasting with a darker, "unenlightened" past requires negotiating a major obstacle: Americans of what has been called the greatest generation elected FDR to the presidency four times -- twice during the worst depression in history and twice more during its most devastating war. How could such unenlightened people have done a thing like this? Through a PC lens the answer is simple: the voters must not have known what they were doing. His affliction must have been kept secret, hidden through two decades of public life from all but his intimates.
This trope has been widely circulated in recent years. Since his passing it has almost become conventional wisdom -- even though many of those who espouse the "cover up" theory do make the more modest claim that the impact of polio on FDR’s personality and motivation has been underestimated.
How much truth is there to these claims that most Americans knew little or nothing about their president’s paralyzed legs until after his death? Such major historians as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in the 1950s when the Roosevelt administration was a comparatively recent memory, made no mention of such a secret. Their accounts treat his polio and its physical manifestations matter-of-factly, as if every well-informed person knew at least the essentials of his condition at the time. As members of a generation less obsessed with health and youthful appearance than ours is, perhaps they did not find it remarkable that a demonstrated ability to perform presidential duties was sufficient physical qualification in voters’ eyes. The rite of exhibiting fitness for high office through frenetic athleticism didn’t emerge until the administration of John F. Kennedy, whose general health, ironically, was much worse than FDR’s.
Many historians discuss at length the ways in which the future president dealt with the disease and indicate that he was fortunate in his friends and supporters. Reacting early in the 1928 gubernatorial campaign to the Republican charge that paralysis made Roosevelt unfit for office, Al Smith, who had drafted the younger man to succeed him in Albany while he himself ran for president, snorted, “But the answer to that is that a governor does not have to be an acrobat. We do not elect him for his ability to do a double back-flip or a handspring.” Indeed, Republicans soon stopped talking about Roosevelt’s physical condition for fear of actually creating a sympathy vote for him.
Questions and rumors about Roosevelt’s health were proffuse as his plans to run for president became increasingly evident. In July 1931, 'Liberty' magazine, a weekly that claimed a circulation of 2.5 million, published an article headlined “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Physically Fit to Be President?” The opening paragraph bluntly stated, “It is an amazing possibility that the next President of the United States may be a cripple. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of the State of New York, was crippled by infantile paralysis in the epidemic of 1921 and still walks with the help of a crutch and a walking stick. Yet by all the political signs he will emerge as the Democratic nominee.”
Though the piece did not focus on his crutches there was a photograph of him displaying them. Another photo showed him barelegged on the edge of the pool at Warm Springs, Georgia, where, he explained, “swimming in tepid water” gave him buoyancy and somewhat improved the feeling in his legs. As for his limited mobility, he portrayed it as an advantage on the job; it forced him to concentrate. “I don’t move about my office,” he was quoted as saying. “But I can and do move about the state.”
Roosevelt eagerly accepted the challenge. In a moment of unintentional humor, when would-be detractors asked whether he would be willing to sacrifice his “personal desires” to assume the burdens of the presidency, the candidate retorted, “The opportunity for service that the Presidency affords has not honestly been considered a personal sacrifice by anyone I have ever known or heard of who has had that opportunity.” Eleanor Roosevelt added famously, “If the paralysis couldn’t kill him, the presidency won’t.”
A number of publications scrutinized FDR’s polio as it related to his fitness for office. After he formally declared his candidacy, no less a high-profile magazine than 'Time' ran a sympathetic cover story on February 1, 1932, that described the onset of the disease in 1921. Its writers were candid when writing:
“Swimming at Warm Springs several months each year and special exercises at Albany have made it possible for the Governor to walk 100 feet or so with braces and canes. When standing at crowded public functions, he still clings precautiously to a friend’s arm. Constitutionally he is sound as a nut and always has been. His affliction makes people come to him to transact business, saves him useless motion, enables him to get prodigious amounts of work done at a sitting. Governor Roosevelt is confident of ultimate total recovery. . . . Never have his crippled legs deterred him from going where he would.”
That is not the rhetoric of cover-up. In fact, all the essential information is laid out with succinctness and precision -- the history of the disease, how it affected him after more than 10 years (with a clear distinction between the effects of polio and general health), complete with a slightly skeptical reference to the ingrained optimism that helped make FDR such an appealing leader -- in time for voters to factor it in, if they wanted. It’s hard to imagine fuller disclosure. Certainly it's a less disingenuous observation than that attributed to Donald Trump's former physician, Dr. Daniel Bornstein, when he supposedly declared that Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency" (now famously debunked by the doctir himself as a staement written by the then-candidate).
References to FDR’s paralyzed legs did not end with his election. Faced with a manifestly energetic president in a time of national crisis, however, the press had more important things to cover. After the public rendered its verdict in 1932, his health was never a significant political issue again until the 1944 campaign, when he was visibly deteriorating. Then, the White House was indeed less than informative, but at issue were heart disease and exhaustion rather than polio. In the countless attacks on a controversy-riddled administration, FDR’s polio was rarely a target-- not because it was taboo, but because it had ceased to be relevant to his job performance. “It’s not a story,” FDR's circle would answer when asked about the president’s handicap, and they were largely right.
Making light of an affliction is not the same as denying it. Indeed, Roosevelt aggressively identified himself with the cause of curing polio. Starting with his 52nd birthday, in 1934, he promoted an annual series of nationwide “birthday balls” to raise money for polio treatment and research.In 1938, his advocacy efforts culminated in a national radio address and media extravaganza to announce the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, soon to become known as the March of Dimes. Press coverage was profuse and laudatory. The 'New York Times' carried a story on page 1 and several more on page 3. 'Life' featured pictures of the Hollywood stars who had participated. Time began its story with the lead, “Franklin Roosevelt is not only the nation’s No. 1 citizen but its No. 1 victim of infantile paralysis. He is not only President of the U.S. but president of the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.”
'Newsweek' printed a cover that showed polio sufferers in wheelchairs and a benevolent FDR sitting in his car lighting a cigarette, with the headline, “Paralysis war: Roosevelt’s gift becomes a national institution.” Like other publications, it recounted the by-then-familiar story of the president’s crippling infantile paralysis, his early experiences at Warm Springs, and the creation of the Warm Springs Foundation in 1927. Courting this kind of publicity was hardly the act of a man trying to distance himself from a stigma, let alone practice a deception.
Although he never abandoned the unrealistic hope of a complete recovery, as a candidate and as president Roosevelt was more candid about his health than Kennedy was in 1960 or former senator Paul Tsongas (who downplayed the lymphoma that would later claim him) was in his 1992 run for the Democratic nomination. But even if he had been less forthright, how could such a secret have been kept? It would have required the collusion not only of the president’s associates and an admittedly supine press, but also of thousands of people who met him in situations in which his paralysis was obvious or who had known about it before he became president. His worst political enemies would have had to conspire to keep quiet. The whole theory is ultimately incongrous.
Yet the myth will not die. Myths by their very nature are immune to evidence, and the 21st century has already enshrined this one in film and bronze. Like other myths, it reveals more about its believers than about its ostensible subject. At the dedication of FDR’s statue in 2001, his granddaughter, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, made the observation, “Memorials are for us. They aren’t necessarily for the people they memorialize.”
So, the PC culture's nicotine-free FDR sits placidly in his wheelchair next to the D.C. Tidal Basin, as if contemplating the changes wrought by time over the country he served. Americans who elected and re-elected him in the second quarter of the 20th century held some attitudes, particularly on race, that we rightly repudiate today. But they were not fools, and they were not, on the whole, deceived about their president’s abilities or disability. Rather, they shared with him a notion of dignity and reserve that entailed suffering in silence, emphasizing what one could do instead of what one couldn’t. “Don’t stare” was the first rule of etiquette. At a time when everybody knew victims of polio and was at least somewhat familiar with its effects, discreet sympathy seemed the most appropriate and humane posture toward those with an affliction that remained all too common until the Salk vaccine (whose development had been largely funded by the March of Dimes) came into use a decade after FDR’s passing.
This stoic observance of privacy has gradually come to seem obsolete over the past fifty years. Subsequent political history and present-day attitudes make it amply clear that a man handicapped as Roosevelt was would stand no chance of reaching the White House today. In an age when pictures trump words (pun intended), television would mercilessly fix in every viewer’s mind the very images of physical helplessness that FDR largely managed to avoid. Polio would drown out every other issue. The insistence that the voters who chose the greatest president of the 20th century (and arguably one of the greatest in American history) must not have known the inspiring truth about him is simply one more example of the present misrepresenting the past to serve its own ends -- in this case, a powerful need for assurance that, whatever our faults, we immeasurably surpass our forebears in the supreme contemporary virtue of tolerance.
We should seek to learn from history, not twist, turn and shape it to fit our present .