Fought Paralysis—And Won!

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 566, 19 January 1929, Page 24

Fought Paralysis—And Won!

NEW GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK AND HIS VALIANT BATTLE AGAINST ILLNESS

BIGHTER - Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tlie new governor of the State of New York is one of the most gallant scrappers in Seven years ago he was regarded as the ideal American college man in the political. arena. He had an enviable record as an athlete. He was a keen, clean, straight dealer, with years of mental and fthysical vigour ahead of him —apparently. He was an expert tennis player, and >a noted yachtsman. And then, one August day, lie went swimming in the Bay of Fundy. The water was icy cold. With all the swiftness of a stroke of lightning, he was stricken with infantile paralysis. Within 72 hours he was as wood from the hips down. Not a muscle would move. They said he was doomed to linger out his life a half-man. Friends and enemies counted him out. Sadly or gleefully political thinkers passed him by. to think of other men and other, influences.

Seven years ago; Now, one of the few survivors of the colossal Republican landslide that burled his friend, A 1 Smith, in the oblivion of has-beens, Roosevelt is triumphant. He won at the polls, hut he has scored a far greater victory than that. With infinite doggedness, painstaking persistence, he drove life bit by bit back into those wood-like legs of his, till now he can walk almost unaided, and sood. doctors say, he will be completely recovered.

It was one of the most admirable, unspectacular, unassumiug examples of slier grit that a politician has ever

shown. It would have made the great fighting Theodore, first ot the Roosevelts, say “Well done!” No sooner had Franklin Roosevelt learned the worst about his case than, like a good general in defeat, he studied the weaknesses of his enemy. He became an authority on infantile paralysis. To-day he probably knows far more about it than most good physicians. He learned that Dr. Robert S. Lovett, of Boston, was one of the outstanding specialists in the disease. Dr. Lovett had found that infantile paralysis patients could be greatly benefited by keeping up, even over a long period of years, systematic exercise of the affected muscles, and that taking this exercise while in water aided the treatment’s effectiveness. So Roosevelt went south to Warm Springs, Georgia, where a spring of water constantly gushes from the earth at a temperature of S 9 degrees. For two years he lived much of his life in this hot water. Day by day he was carried to the baths, till slowly, slowly, he learned to walk with crutches and braces. At the Democratic convention of 1924 men cried like babies to see him hobble on platform, with crutches and attendants. His legs were mere pitiful shanks of skin and bone in those days, yet there was nothing pathetic about him as he made his painful waydown the aisle with —as an American writer expre.ssed it —“the red badge of courage pinned to his breast.” His eyes were unconquered. The convention —a very vexed one, be it remem- | bered —gave him the one thrilling, spontaneous ovation accorded during j its entire course. He emerged as its j real liero.

It was very different at the Houston convention this year. There everyone could see that the fight was almost won, and that the report that physicians promised complete recovery was not at all optimistic. Roosevelt walked easily to the platform with one cane, and his hand on the shoulder of his son Elliot. When asked if he felt up to the strain of the fight for the governorship, he replied that he assurely did. “Colonel Lindbergh didn’t get his reputation by running foot races,” he said. Mr. Roosevelt was chairman of the Boy Scouts in and around New York, and raised almost a million for them. Since 1926 he has been national chairman of the 10,000,000 dollar drive to complete the cathedral of St. John the Divine, and New York chairman of the American Legion Endowment Fund. He has written two books, edited much historical matter, acted as trustee of Vassar College. And, typically, he has founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to aid other paralysis sufferers, 60 of whom are now taking the treatment from which he derived such benefit. “So tell anybody who is interested that I have an idea that 1 can hobble through the next few years,” he told an interviewer.