The press knew, I assume Congress knew.
But the general public did not know , correct?
Many people believed he had beaten polio somehow, assuming that he could walk with leg braces on. Actually he could barely even stand with the braces. There are a lot of people who didn’t know the extent of his paralysis, but most everyone should have known he was physically disabled to some degree, that was no secret.
Virtually every time FDR appeared in public, the people there saw him “walking.” One of his sons or a few other trusted members of his political family supported him by learning how to inobtrusively take most of his weight, allowing FDR to swing his dead legs forward in a seeming walking gait. These “walks” were always for short distances, usually from the curtains to a center stage podium or from the door of the building to a platform. He would be put into his wheelchair backstage and whisked off to his car.
While there were rumors and his enemies called him a cripple, my impression is that the overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans had no idea that he couldn’t walk at all and that he was confined to a wheelchair from morning till night in the White House.
But it’s possible that people knew and didn’t allow themselves to think about it. The only evidence I have for this is negative. You’d think if he wanted to fool everyone about his ability to walk that he would have been photographed standing to reinforce this, but if you do a Google image search on FDR, virtually every single picture on the first many pages are of him sitting. Change that to “FDR standing up” and a half dozen pictures of him upright are mixed in with pages of pictures of him sitting.
That may be just projecting our world back to theirs, though. They may have thought that showing him sitting at a desk was simply more Presidential. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the “general public” knew on a variety of issues and it’s brain bending. Look at how ignorant people are today with a thousand types of news in their faces every minute.
My mother said that everybody sort of knew he couldn’t really walk. But they rarely saw him in a wheelchair or getting help to say, make it to a podium…
IIRC he had shoulders like a linebacker because for most of his speeches he appeared to be standing up, whereas in reality he was supporting his full weight by tightly gripping the podium the whole time.
IIRC it was known that he was disabled.
How old were you at the time?
between -51 and -39.
I was -11 when he died, but I’ve asked many people who were alive at the time about this subject. Every person I asked said they knew he was crippled by polio. If they were unsure at all they didn’t know the extent of it. Maybe some didn’t know and didn’t want to admit it. It seems there was a dumb person joke at the time, “Bob’s so dumb he didn’t know Rooseveldt was crippled!”. Maybe only the truly clueless didn’t realize it, or maybe they all pretended to know after he died and it became an acceptable topic for the mainstream media to discuss.
Doctors who have looked into it now believe it wasn’t polio at all. His symptoms better fit Guillain-Barré syndrome. No way to be certain now.
Did people know about his illness before his first election in 1932? Or did they find out while he was in office?
The ‘beating polio’ theme was part of his 1932 campaign. There was a widely seen newsreel shot that purported to show him walking out of a clinic. In actuality he was supported by others and only took a single step with his braces on. His campaign was carefully crafted to show him as a vital man. He was often portrayed wearing a hat with the front brim folded up as if he was facing into the wind, and the cigarette holder clenched in his teeth was an obvious phallic symbol.
Everybody knew he was severely disabled. How severely was not a subject of public discussion. It would have been considered extraordinarily rude. You just did not call attention to people’s disabilities. Polio was also an extremely feared disease, whereas today nobody gets a new case in the US, and few people are alive who had severe cases of it. I’ve known three people who had mild cases. One can’t walk without crutches, another has a shriveled leg and a terrible limp and a third you would not notice anything. Some people couldn’t even breathe and lived in “iron lung” machines that breathed for them. The depth of fear for this disease cannot be overstated. It struck the poor, middle class and, like Roosevelt, the rich.
I discount the Guillain-Barré syndrome theorists. People who recover from Guillain-Barré syndrome with physical therapy make a very good recovery, not the kind of recovery Roosevelt had, and he worked his recovery very hard.
Don’t read too much modern-day into these things. Wearing your brim up was more of a 19teens thing than a “wind” thing. Cigarette holders stood for the patrician set, not penises (or he’d have smoked a long, fat cigar).
This is an interesting point: things really did look different back then.
We modern folk have grown up with television. In the old days, there were fewer visual inputs of any sort, and nobody expected to see every detail of everything that happened.
For example, compare war coverage–the Vietnam and Iraq wars happened in our living rooms, and we felt it in our guts. World War II, like WW I, happened far far away, out of sight and out of mind. (There was even an expression in the 1940’s : “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” .The expression was used when somebody complained about , say , the lack of sugar in the stores.)
Yes, there were newsreels in the movie theaters, but they were not visceral and graphic the way TV is today–they were produced by Hollywood, with patriotic music, narrated by an announcer with a booming, confidence-inspiring voice, and they rarely discussed anything unpleasant, and even more rarely showed pictures of anything unpleasant.
People back then used their brains differently than we do today–they thought in words, not pictures.
Even if many people knew that FDR was ill, there were no attention-grabbing visuals of him acting sick. So it was easier to ignore his illness, and concentrate on the verbal side of the news. And since FDR was a powerful speaker , it was easy to imagine him as having a powerful body.
I read somewhere that one enemy in particular, a certain Adolf H., said things like that, to the effect that he scornfully considered Americans a bunch of wussies for electing a helpless cripple as their president.
A few years ago, when that statue of Roosevelt was being planned in Washington, there was public debate about how he should be portrayed. Should his wheelchair be hidden (or not even present), in accordance with the sensibilities of the time? Or should his chair be more prominently visible, in accordance with modern sensibilities? (IIRC, it was during that debate that I read of Hitler’s remarks.) The final decision was to show FDR sitting in his chair, covered by a blanket, such that a small bit (but not too much) of the chair is visible.
I just googled up images for Roosevelt statues, and this one seems most likely to be the one I think I’m talking about.
It seemed like people treated Jonas Salk as some kind of god because he invented the polio vaccine. Guess that shows how scary polio was.
Neither would he patent it.
Since I’m one of the few posters here who’s old enough to remember polio, let me try and set the stage here.
Many - if not most - people knew first-hand about polio. I had classmates who had polio.
Polio had a whole range of aftereffects, from a slight weakness or limp all the way to spending the rest of your life on a respirator, paralyzed from the neck down. (Google images for “iron lung.” The first one that came up for me was absolutely nightmarish.)
Did people know Roosevelt had polio? Absolutely. Did the press sometimes note he was in a wheelchair? Sometimes obliquely. Here’s a little something I found in Time magazine from 1935.
Of course, there are no photos, and the article goes on to say that Roosevelt drove himself in his specially equipped car, and as part of his therapy, went “to the pools every morning for his health swim.”
So if you want to read that as a man who was confined to a wheelchair and receiving physical therapy, you certainly can. But if you choose to read it as a vigorous man who made some minor concessions, no one would correct you.
So… people can overlook a wheel-bound president if he’s… good at fellatio?