When Franklin D. Roosevelt was stricken with polio at 39, it was reasonable to assume that his only future was retirement as an invalid. Alonzo Hamby reviews James Tobin’s “The Man He Became.”

Book Review: ‘The Man He Became’ by James Tobin

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was stricken with polio at 39, it was reasonable to assume that his only future was retirement as an invalid.

Alonzo L. Hamby

Dec. 27, 2013 4:38 p.m. ET

Visitors to the District of Columbia’s greatest theme park, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, are greeted at the entrance by a life-size statue of FDR in a wheelchair. Not in the original plan, it was added in 2001 after sustained advocacy by groups representing the handicapped. Roosevelt, despite his own championing of polio victims, would surely have preferred to see himself depicted without a wheelchair. He avoided such images during his lifetime, carefully constructing instead the persona of a leader who had grappled with the dread disease and prevailed over it. In “The Man He Became,” James Tobin describes, with a crisp narrative sweep, the difficult physical battle that culminated in FDR’s election to the presidency in 1932.In the summer of 1921, Franklin Roosevelt was the brightest rising star in the Democratic Party. Assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913 at the age of 31, vice-presidential candidate in 1920 at 38, he appeared to have an unlimited future that might well include the White House. A year later he was stricken with polio while vacationing with his family on Campobello Island, off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada. At first he was misdiagnosed, then kept alive largely thanks to the tireless nursing of his wife, Eleanor. After a month he was transferred by train to New York and placed under the care of the nation’s best polio specialists. By then, however, the disease had laid waste to his lower extremities and had weakened his lower back muscles so badly that he could sit up for no more than an hour a day.

The Man He Became

By James Tobin
Simon & Schuster, 370 pages, $30

It was reasonable to assume that Roosevelt’s only future was a long retirement as an invalid. His mother expected him to return to the family estate at Hyde Park, N.Y., and spend the rest of his life managing it. His refusal revealed both stubborn determination and an unquenchable ambition that could be satisfied only by the presidency.

For months, as Mr. Tobin tells us, Roosevelt was flat on his back in the family’s crowded New York townhouse on East 65th Street. He was subject to intense pain whenever his attendants tried to massage or otherwise move his legs. More than a year after the onset of the disease, he was finally able to stand and move about a bit on crutches.

On Oct. 9, 1922, he attempted to return to his office in lower Manhattan—at the Fidelity and Deposit Co., an insurance firm with which he had been affiliated after his losing vice-presidential candidacy. As he painstakingly made his way across the ground-floor lobby to the elevators, he slipped and fell on a polished marble floor. He didn’t return for months.

Convinced that sunshine and warm water were good for his legs, he spent part of several winters—from 1923 through 1926—on houseboats off the south Florida coast. The physical exercise of swimming and deep-sea fishing was good for him. So was the escape from his tense home atmosphere, crowded with nurses, restless and apprehensive children, a distracted wife embarking on her own career in reform politics, and resident political aides. Mr. Tobin refrains from speculation about the psychological dimensions of the houseboat experience, characterized by a forced gaiety that seems to have covered up a profound depression. FDR’s private secretary and close companion, Missy LeHand, recalled many days during which he didn’t get out of bed before noon.

In 1924, Roosevelt made his first visit to the little town of Warm Springs, Ga. There he sampled the naturally heated waters at the swimming pool of a dilapidated resort and found them ideal for sustained exercise. After two years, he purchased the resort, transformed it into a rehabilitation center for polio victims, built a second home nearby, acquired property in the area and established himself as an honorary Georgian. Mr. Tobin rushes too quickly through these events. He doesn’t explore the ways in which FDR made the Warm Springs project a national symbol of the struggle against polio and eventually established the March of Dimes, which would finance the long effort to develop a polio vaccine. If Roosevelt had abandoned politics, he would be remembered as an important philanthropist.

FDR’s political ambition remained a driving force throughout his illness. He re-emerged in the summer of 1924 to make the nominating speech for New York Gov. Al Smith at the Democratic National Convention. Then, as later, his commanding voice, broadcast through the country over the new radio networks, overshadowed his physical infirmity. Smith failed to win the nomination; a compromise candidate, John W. Davis, would be soundly defeated in the general election. Within the party, the one winner was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Over the next four years, FDR worked hard at regaining the use of his legs while keeping a hand in Democratic Party politics. His crutches gave way to a form of walking that involved gripping a cane with one hand and the strong arm of a companion with the other. In September 1928, he was able to manage a few steps unassisted across the living room of his Warm Springs cottage.

The improvement was remarkable, if well short of a full recovery. Perhaps FDR realized that he could go no further. Shortly afterward, he agreed to run for governor of New York. Al Smith was the party’s presidential candidate in 1928 and lost badly to Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt won the governorship in a squeaker. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 made the new governor, widely recognized as the most attractive Democratic candidate in 1932, a man of destiny.

At every step of his political revival, Roosevelt’s opponents asserted that he was too impaired to handle major executive posts. Roosevelt knew that he had to convince the larger public that he was sufficiently robust to govern. As Mr. Tobin puts it, describing FDR’s state of mind: “He must persuade the audience to discard its ancient, inherited belief about a man who was crippled. He must persuade them that a crippled man could be strong.” Able to manage a semblance of walking for short distances, he presented himself as someone who, with effort, had largely rehabilitated himself—”a fighter and, better yet, an underdog; not a man to pity, not a man to envy, but a man to cheer.”

There is much truth to this conclusion, but FDR also practiced outright deception. News clippings and correspondence at the Roosevelt presidential library make it clear that, as governor of New York, he permitted his aides to issue denials that he required a wheelchair and to assert falsely that he rode horses for recreation.

Mr. Tobin’s tight, lucid narrative may leave readers longing for more, in which case they might turn to Geoffrey Ward’s “A First-Class Temperament” (1989) for a more detailed account of FDR’s polio ordeal. Still, the story merits retelling. Mr. Tobin presents it skillfully and with admirable empathy.

—Mr. Hamby is a distinguished professor of history at Ohio University. His biography of Franklin Roosevelt is scheduled to appear in 2014.