F D Roosevelt and A D A and Healing Waters

Periodically I get e-mail notifications from pbs passport of interesting shows. ($60 annual ubscription). Recently I was notified of a Ken Burns Documentary about Henry David Thoreau which I watched with great affection and engagement. Next I was notified of two episodes on American Experience about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR is my idea of an American President, so was Barack Obama - men with grace, poise, dignity, education, self-control, wide intellectual attainments and consciousness. Men we could be proud to hav represent us on the world stage.

Although I have followed FDR's biography many times both in books and documentaries and once owned the two folume VCR which I watched many times, one thing that stood out to me this time was how he faced the deepest despair of his life, really at the bottom of the well of despair, when he was struck down with POLIO at age 39. He wass in the full vigor of his youth, the prime of life, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. It was stated that in that period of our cultural history, disabled people were hidden away at home, cared for as invalids in back rooms or sanatoriums. and that would have been FDR's fate had he not discovered Warm Springs, Georgia in his quest for some healing therapy. Nothing could bring back his legs, but Warm Springs, Georgia brought back his will and his inspiration. It was a remnant of the era of healing waters.

Local History - we have the remains of our own place of healing waters in Egg Harbor, NJ, near the Historical Society building. It is a serpentine ditch in which people seeking healing waters would walk up to their shoulders in healing waters. There are, of course, many famous healing water spas in Europe such as Lourdes in France. Most of these date from the Victorian period. Anyhow what FDR found might not have been physically healing but it was emotionally healing. The mostly dilapidated former resort became his mission. He spent a fortune renovating it and turning it into a place of therapy for others, who, like himself, had been struck down by polio.

Saving that place and helping those others saved Franklin Delano Roosevelt and gave him a new lease on life.

Because of the times in which he lived, and served our nation, disabilities were culturally held as shameful. In order to successful re-enter his political career, FDR had to pretend he could walk. How he did that was he developed such upper body strength that with the support of a strong arm on one side and a cane on the other, he would swing a leg forward, then the other leg, giving the illusion of walking. He successfully continued this ruse until near his death in April of 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia, of congestive heart failure.

Even in the generation just before mine, disabilities were viewed with some shame as I discovered on a trip to Washington D. C. with an old friend who was outraged that they had put in a statue of FDR in his wheelchair in the memorial sculpture garden. She felt he should only have been portrayed standing. My attitude (I was 12 years younger and the product of the 1970's) was that it was about time the truth was told because what it meant was that someone could be disabled in one way and save the nation in another!

That is exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt did. They saved the nation. First they dug us out of the Depression by establishing the Works Project Administration WPA. They put thousands of people to work planting trees to save our destroyed forests, the FSA (Farm Security Administration) to help farmers and the FHA to make it possible for low income Americans to afford to buy a home. And I am today the grateful recipient of Social Security, meant to help support the elderly after retirment. Eleanor fought vigorously and tirelessly to influence FDR to integrate the armed forces both racially and in gender She also advocated for Child Labor laws and Unions.

FDR saved us from the economic Depression and saved himself from his personal Depression! Together the Roosevelts got us through that disastrous period and the following horror of the second World War. A disabled man with paralyzed legs saved this nation from the two most devastating onslaughts to ever strike us.

I think it is especially interesting to consider how Donald Trump made a public display of ridicule for handicapped people when our nation ahd risen so far above such ignorance as to have made a nationwide effort to include civil rights for Americans with Disabilities. I am personally grateful for this effort every time I use the ranp to enter my Municipal building or the sidewalk corner ramps when I walk around town becaue now, I, too, due to my age, have become an American with disabilities. My wide array of age related disabilities, however, have not kept me from participating in a productive way in a variety of artistic efforts as well as cultural and historic ones.

Happy Trails - whether on foot, on wheels, or by imagination! wrightj45@yahoo.com