Franklin Roosevelt was able to connect with ordinary American people during the Depression despite coming from an immensely wealthy family (and a family that had been in the White House before) because he knew that all good fortune can be taken away at a moment’s notice. He knew that because he had the rare misfortune to contract infant paralysis (polio) at the age of thirty-nine.
The Roosevelt family had a summer home on Campobello Island, off New Brunswick, Canada. On August 9, 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell into the water while sailing. Reboarding the boat he felt chilled. Awaking the next day he felt extremely tired. His usual routine was to go swimming to refresh himself. “I didn’t feel the usual reaction…,” Roosevelt wrote later. “When I reached the house, the mail was in, with several newspapers I hadn’t seen. I sat reading for a while, too tired even to dress.” The next morning, Roosevelt recalled, “my left leg lagged…Presently it refused to work, and then the other.”
By August 12, Mr. Roosevelt found it difficult to stand and even to move his legs. The pain in his legs were almost too much to endure. He further experienced partial paralysis in his back, arms, and hands.
Just like that, Roosevelt went from being a vigorous, athletic man to needing leg braces and a wheelchair. The Roosevelt family had been benevolent-minded and progressive before Franklin’s illness, but there’s no doubt that his experience colored and deepened Franklin’s affinity for the lower strata of American society. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ but he knew hardship and ill fate.
Barack Obama comes to the presidency from the opposite direction. Born biracial in a racist society, abandoned by his father and (for a time) by his mother, Obama knew hardship from the beginning. Polio almost sidetracked FDR’s road to the White House, but Obama had to overcome more than 400 years of history just to get the chance to run.
I don’t think we should expect the two of them to draw the same lessons or govern the same way. When Roosevelt went after southern conservative Democrats in the 1938 primaries, he lost, and he lost credibility and power. I don’t think Obama would ever attempt something like that, which is both good and bad. It’s good, because he would probably lose, too. It’s bad because despite failing, FDR’s willingness to take on the moral blemish in his own party was indicative of a fighting spirit that paid off on many other issues.