Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

"O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you & I would have ended my life — it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of romantic music is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which finishes with the great Ode to Joy, Schiller’s verses about international harmony set to a memorable and moving tune.  Even when poorly played, as when I saw it recently at Geneva’s Victoria Hall, it’s an amazing work of great power, requiring an enlarged orchestra and several choirs.  Yet when it was premiered on 7 May 1824 to a tumultuous reception, it is said that Beethoven, his back to the audience, had to be turned around to see the applause which he had been unable to hear, being totally deaf by this point in his life.

Born in Bonn, he was the son and grandson of musicians, and was soon recognized as having innate talent himself.  His upbringing was chaotic, his mother died, and his father's music teaching was brutal.  Because his father was also a feckless drunk, Beethoven looked after his two younger brothers and supplemented the family income by playing in the court orchestra.   By 13, he had published two sonatas and attracted support from the Elector of  Bonn.   Thanks to this assistance, in 1792 Beethoven went to Vienna to study with Haydn.  He quickly established a reputation as a piano virtuoso, and from 1795 began publishing his own compositions, soon earning enough from them to cover his living expenses.  After 1800 there followed the works of his middle period, known as his “Heroic” period, which comprised the great symphonies, piano sonatas, the violin concerto and the opera Fidelio.

But aged 26, at exactly the same time as his career began to took off, Beethoven began to lose his hearing.  As he explained to a friend: "I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap."  He was not just hard of hearing, he also suffered from tinnitus, a perpetual and distracting ringing in his ears.   No wonder that his first thoughts were of suicide, as he explained in letters to his brother.  In the Heiligenstadt testament, written on 6 October 1802, he talks about his loneliness: 

"O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad 
experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for 
me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf." 

But he changed his mind, and decided instead to dedicate his life to music: he had seven more symphonies to come at this point in his career.  After 1811, he never played in public, and by 1814 he was totally deaf, unable to hear either music or speech.

A side effect of Beethoven’s deafness is that more is known of his everyday life than of those of his contemporaries.   If you wanted to talk to Beethoven, you wrote down your questions or comments in a bound volume – a Conversation Book – of which 400 were known to have been filled in, although 264 were later destroyed.   The surviving Conversation Books give a unique insight into his discussions with friends and colleagues.

Beethoven seems to have been a rather irascible character.  He refused to play if people were not paying attention.  He had no respect for rank.  The Archduke Rupert was forced to announce that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.  But nevertheless, Beethoven had a close circle of devoted friends who supported him.  He fell in love with aristocratic ladies on several occasions, but unfortunately as a commoner he had no hope of marrying one of them.

In the years after 1816, Beethoven was sick and produced little.  But he recovered, and another period of amazing creativity followed, partly influenced by renewed study of Baroque masters such as Bach and Handel.  In this last phase of his career, he composed the late string quartets, Missa Solemnis, Diabelli Variations, and the Ninth Symphony – all while completely unable to hear a note.

From 1825, when he was completing the string quartets, Beethoven was again seriously ill.  He died on 26 March 1827, following hepatitis.  His funeral was attended by 20,000 people, among then Franz Schubert, who was one of the torchbearers and who was himself to die the following year.  Ludwig van Beethoven's life may have been frustrating and troubled, but his work puts him into the first rank of composers, alongside Bach and Mozart.

Janet Frame (1924-2004)

The Lagoon, Janet Frame’s first volume of short stories, sat on my shelf for years.  Only when I visited Dunedin, her home town, did I discover that it was that book, or rather the prize awarded to it, which saved the author from a lobotomy.

On my last flight back to Europe from New Zealand, I read To the Is-Land, Frame’s account of her upbringing in rural Otago, memorably filmed by Jane Campion in An Angel At My Table.   Her father worked on the railway, while her mother was of the Christadelphian faith.  There were many children, and the family was poor: the book is full of vivid descriptions of rural escapades, school traumas and family mishaps.  It also describes Janet’s emerging literary talent, first expressed via poems in the local paper -   she was also very good at maths.

Janet Frame also describes the traumas of her youth: her brother developing epilepsy, and her sister Myrtle drowning in the local swimming pool. Later her sister Isabel was also to drown. Ironically,  the young Janet herself longed to be disabled: “I perceived that in a world where it was admirable to be brave and noble, it was more brave and noble to be writing poems if you were crippled or blind than if you had no disability.  I longed to be struck with paralysis so that I might lie in bed all day or sit all day in a wheelchair, writing stories and poems”.   

Frame attended the Dunedin College of Education and the University of Otago, where she trained as a school teacher.  Home life was difficult, due to the conflict between her epileptic brother and her father, who thought George could overcome the seizures if he tried.  Frame’s teaching placement at a Dunedin school was disrupted when she attempted suicide, and she was later confined to a psychiatric ward, and then in Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where she remained for eight years. 

The Lagoon was published in 1951, while Frame was still a patient.  Subsequently she was discharged and lived with another writer, Frank Sargeson, in Auckland.   Her first novel, Owls Do Cry, was published in 1957.  Later, she spent time in Europe.  In London, she had a recurrence of depression and began psychoanalysis.   A steady stream of novels continued to be published through the 1960s and 70s.  Many of them contain accounts of mental illness, or descriptions of eccentrics, dreamers and nonconformists, such as this story published in The New Yorker . She continued to spend time in Europe and also America, where she visited various artists colonies and developed close friendships with other writers and artists.  She returned to New Zealand in 1963, and lived a rather solitary life in various towns on North Island. 

"When you bring home a shell treasure from the beach, you shake free the sand and the mesh of seaweed and the other crumbled pieces of shell and perhaps even the tiny dead black-eyed inhabitant.  I may have polished this shell of memory with the application of time but only because it is constantly with me, not because I have varnished it for display."


In the 1980s, she produced the three volumes of autobiography for which she is perhaps best known: by this time she was acclaimed as New Zealand’s greatest living writer.  As well as many national awards and honours, she was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. 

Janet Frame died, aged 79, in 2004.   In the wonderful Scribes bookshop in Dunedin, I bought her final collection of poems The Goosebath (so called because her manuscripts piled up in an old tin bath): it was to win her, posthumously, New Zealand’s top poetry prize.

Janet Frame’s  mental illness was never clear: the initial diagnosis of schizophrenia was disproven.  In her memoir she wrote: ''Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?''.  She always felt very different from other people.   She found friendships difficult, and everyday life very stressful.  Interactions with her family were particularly difficult. More recently, it has been claimed that she might have had high-functioning autism, but this suggestion has been rejected by her literary executor.

“I can’t camp here at the end.

I wouldn’t survive

unless returning to a mythical time

I became a tree

toothless with my eyes full of salt spray:

rooted, protesting on the edge of this cliff

-       Let me stay!”

Nicholas Owen (c.1550-1606)

"I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular." Father Gerard

Richard Coles, singer, broadcaster and vicar, keeps his fans and friends intrigued by sharing the stories of a series of “saints for the day” – not pious hagiography but tall tales of extraordinary lives, which is how I discovered this intriguing individual. Nicholas Owen was possibly a dwarf – certainly extremely short – and had a series of other health problems, such as hernia and a crippled leg. The latter because a horse fell on him, and the broken leg was never properly set (disability was presumably much more common in the Early Modern period). The hernia was an injury caused by Owen’s work as a carpenter.

But no ordinary carpenter: Nicholas Owen was a Catholic, a lay Jesuit, at a time when his religion was proscribed in England. He was born in Oxford, and apprenticed as a carpenter, like his father Walter, later becoming a servant to Henry Garnett, a Jesuit who employed Owen to do some covert carpentry. Known to other recusants as Little John, Owen travelled around the country by night, and did his work secretly, because he was a builder of priests’ holes, secret compartments in the houses of the crypto-Catholic gentry.

Whereas previously, these refuges were no more than holes in the floor, Owen built every one differently, and each more ingeniously than earlier examples. Despite his physical limitations, he labored with masonry and carpentry and trompe l’oeil effects. Over thirty years, he is known to have built at least 100 priest-holes, expertly hidden from the eyes of Pursuivants (anti Catholic agents) by false fronts, secret trapdoors, covert stairs or underground passageways. He was arrested several times, for example in 1594, when he was released after a wealthy Catholic family paid his fine. He is also said to have helped Father John Gerard to escape from captivity in the Tower of London in 1597.

For his efforts, Nicholas Owen was later canonized by the Catholic Church. Apparently, he began each building project with prayer and Eucharist. Sadly, his piety was not enough to protect him from the forces of Puritan law and order: he was arrested in Worcestershire in 1606, when anti-Catholic feeling was at a height in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Hearing of the capture, one of the Privy Councillors said: “Is he taken that knows all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.”

Nicholas Owen was taken first to the Marshalsea Prison, and then to the Tower of London, where he was tortured on the track. This, apparently, in contravention of the medieval tradition that “maimed people” were not to be exposed to torture. Nevertheless, Owen named no names – even though he would have certainly known hundreds of Catholics and their networks of support. He made a confession of his own activities, but without incriminating anyone else. With no skilled accomplice to break him out, he died in the Tower on March 2^nd 1606, disemboweled: the authorities later claimed that he had done the deed himself. A jailor admitted to one of Nicholas Owen’s relatives that in fact his hands were so damaged by the end that he could barely feed himself. So perished the man whom the Rev Richard Coles has labelled the patron saint of Illusionists and Escapologists.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

“The history of the universe...is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.”

If I ever had to choose my favourite author, it would be a difficult thing to decide between PG Wodehouse and Jorge Luis Borges. And I would defend the contention that they have much in common. Borges is one of the most Anglophile of foreign writers, with his love of Kipling and Shakespeare and Chesterton. His plots are ingenious, as are those of Wodehouse, although of course Borges is by far the more cerebral writer. Each mastered the short story – none of Borges’ works are longer than 14 pages. Borges is continually quoting from others, in a way that is almost as arch and witty as Wodehouse. Wodehouse created a series of fictional settings – the world of Blandings, the world of the Drones, the world of the Anglers’ Rest – albeit they are ultimately one continuous unreal world. Borges was forever creating different worlds, each more intriguing and mysterious than the last.

As a resident of Geneva, I take pleasure in the fact that Borges spent much of his youth in this city, and came back at the end of his life. One of my first excursions here was to his grave, in the Cimetière des Rois in Plainpalais. I had forgotten to bring flowers, but felt that some tribute was in order. So I slid my old Cambridge University Library card, which I had carried around with me for 25 years, into the earth of the grave. It’s no longer there: it was retrieved, along with the other gifts left by fans, and ended up in Buenos Aires, which is how I once happened to be profiled by an Argentinian newspaper: my suitably Borgesian anecdote, and no less true for that.

Borges was born in Buenos Aires, son of a lawyer and a woman descended from a long line of freedom fighters, both of whom spoke and read English as well as Spanish. Borges’ paternal grandmother was from Staffordshire. For all of these reasons, Borges may not have been exaggerating when he later said that as a child he had not at first realized that English and Spanish were separate languages.

With his younger sister Norah, Borges invented imaginary friends and games and adventures, roaming the library and garden of the house. He later described his father’s collecton of 1000 books as “the chief event in my life”. He was a shortsighted and bookish child, who did not attend school until he was nine. It was always thought that Jorge would become a writer, and it was at that age that his Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” was published in the local paper. By twelve, he was reading Shakespeare in English.

When Borges was 15, his father was forced to retire due to his failing eyesight, and the family moved to Geneva so that he could consult an eye specialist. For four years, the children attended College Calvin. Here, Borges discovered French Symbolist literature, Schopenhauer, Walt Witman, and even made a few friends. When Borges was 20, the family returned to Buenos Aires, where he talked, read, and wrote poetry: his first collection was published a few years later. He had a brief involvement in politics, but his enthusiasm was soon eroded when his chosen hero revealed himself to be out of touch and ineffective, and was replaced by a series of repressive military juntas.

During his twenties, Borges devoted himself to writing stories and articles for magazines, strange surreal stories such as those in A Universal History of Infamy, with his trademark blend of fact and fiction. To make ends meet, he became a municipal librarian, where he led a “menial and dismal existence” with unprepossessing colleagues. He seems to have spent much of his time in the basement, reading or translating the books.

A turning point came in 1938 when first his father died, and then Borges developed septicaemia after a minor injury, which nearly killed him. After he recovered, and fearing that he could no longer write, he produced “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”, the first of the ingenious and highly original stories for which he is best known, always based on a fantastic intellectual conceit, in this instance borrowed from Thomas Carlyle. He has been claimed as one of the forerunners of Latin American “magic realism”, but he also influenced the fantasy and science fiction genres. In lighter vein, Borges would publish spoof stories co-written with his friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares (author of The Invention of Morel, one of the most perfect and haunting novels ever written, in my opinion), using the preposterous pseudonym H.Bustos Domecq. I was delighted to find an English edition of these stories in a Greenwich Village bookstore last year.

After Juan Peron was elected in1946, Borges was made “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets” – in response to the series of political articles he had been writing criticizing the rise of fascism. Borges was a liberal, anti-fascist, but equally anti communist. He was soon fired, observing: “dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers.” Instead, he became a lecturer in literature, with a police informer attending every lecture. In 1955, the political situation changed again: under a more progressive government, Borges was appointed as Director of the National Library. The following year, he was made Professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

Long before, the blindness which had afflicted his father had turned out to be hereditary. In his 20s, Borges had the first of multiple operations for cataracts, none successful. By now he was completely blind, hence his comment: 

“I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.”

Blindness was one of the reasons that he returned to poetry, a form which is easier to compose entirely in one’s head, and retain in the memory. In an interview he said:

“…in a certain way there is a purification in the blindness. It purifies one of visual circumstances. Circumstances are lost, and the external world, which is always trying to grab us, becomes fainter.”

Also at this time, he also developed his love of Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature. For two years at Cambridge, I followed the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic tripos, and was therefore delighted to find the inscription from the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon on Borges’ grave in Geneva.

In 1961, Borges shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett, and from then on became a global literary superstar, travelling to the United States and to Europe: he was translated into English particularly after 1967. His first marriage, to an old friend Elsa Astete Millan, was not successful. He then took up with one of his students, Maria Kodama. She was an Argentinian of Japanese origin, who began as his secretary and ended up as his wife.

The return of Juan Peron in 1973 meant that Argentina was again uncomfortable for Borges. He said in an interview: “Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I’ll be glad I’ve lost my sight. Well, they can’t humiliate me as they did before my books sold so well.” 
The political situation, together with the death of his mother at the age of 99, meant he again spent more time abroad. With Kodama, he compiled a travel atlas of his writing and her pictures. Finally, on June 14 1986, aged 86, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer, back in Geneva.

Like Wodehouse, Borges is one of a kind, a writer who is widely admired, but is impossible to imitate (as I know to my cost, having tried to copy both). Both led quiet lives (although Borges’ contained rather more sex and romance). Each has suffered from being regarded as a conservative, or worse. On my desert island, I would turn to Wodehouse for relaxation, Borges for stimulation, but I would derive an equal enjoyment from each of them. As the epigraph to this entry shows, Borges, like Wodehouse, had an effortless ability to phrase a sentence – but whereas Wodehouse’s are merely sublimely amusing, those of Borges are always provocatively intelligent.

Links

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946)

"Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint, I have started on a self-portrait. This way the model is always available, although it isn't at all pleasant to see oneself." - letter to a friend, 1921

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of one of Finland’s most famous painters, whose long career spanned phases of Realist, Romanticism, Impressionism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism and Abstraction. Across Finland, there will be events and exhibitions to mark her life and work. The fact that she succeeded as a disabled woman artist, in an era where female creativity was rarely celebrated, is truly a cause for celebration.

None of this might have happened had she not falled down stairs and broken her hip as a four year old. As a result, she ended up with a limp. She never attended school, and was left with limited mobility. But being housebound meant that she could concentrate on drawing. By the time she was eleven years old, she had enrolled at the Finnish Art Society – five years younger than the other students. Although the death of her father from TB left the family poor, she continued her studies, despite the disapproval of her mother. Rather than tackling “feminine” themes, at this time she opted for large scale historical paintings.

She then moved to Paris for further study, funded by a grant from the Russian Imperial Senate (Finland being part of Russia at this time), travelling around Europe and trying to promote her career. In 1885 she came close to marriage, but her fiance’s parents thought her bad hip was caused by TB and discouraged the match. Perhaps being single meant she could concentrate on painting, but she wanted to have a child, and even tried at one stage to adopt.

Problems of health and poverty took her back to Finland in 1890. She lived with her mother, whom she looked after till the latter died in 1923. However, she also continued to paint, and taught at the Art Society Drawing School. However, in 1902, her poor health forced her to resign from her teaching position. In this phase of her life, her work moved away from the larger scale and historical style, towards depicting inner experience in an intimate style. Finally, she was rediscovered by art dealer Gösta Stenman, after which her career took off. In 1917, Schjerfbeck finally had her first solo exhibition. From this point on, her career went well and the days of poverty were over. She spent the last two years of her life at a santorium in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, where she died on January 23 1946.

It’s easy, as with her biography, to see Schjerfbeck as a sad and crippled figure, but actually in her life she showed huge resilience, and finally achieved the success she hoped for. Well into her 80s, she continued to paint her marvelous self-portraits: she was working energetically to the end.

Links

Images

Finnish anniversary celebrations

Franklin D.Roosevelt (1882-1945)

Who was the greatest ever American president? A good case could be made for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is undoubtedly one of the top three people to have held that office. In his first administration from 1933, he helped drag USA out of the Great Depression. He went on to became the only US president ever to serve for three terms. He brought America into the war against significant domestic opposition, and was instrumental in the final Allied victory. All this, from a man who had become paralysed as a result of polio, contracted in 1921. What a hero!

Born into a privileged old American family - President Theodore Roosevelt was a distant cousin - Roosevelt attended Harvard and became a lawyer. His marriage to Eleanor (a fifth cousin) produced six children, but ended up as an expedient political partnership rather than a loving relationship. The major factor in the breakdown was FDR’s long standing affair with Lucy Mercer (codenamed “Mrs Johnson” by the Secret Service).

Roosevelt’s career began in the New York Senate. After he supported Woodrow Wilson’s bid for the Presidency, he was appointed Assistant Secretary to the Navy in 1913. His rise to power was not plain sailing: he failed in a bid to win election to the Senate in 1914, and was the vice-presidential candidate when James Cox were beaten by Warren Harding in the 1920 presidential election. However, in 1929, he was elected Governor of New York, and his career went from strength to strength.

FDR, however, had lost the use of his legs after contracting polio – or possibly another virus such as Guilllaume Barré - during a vacation in August 1921. He was 39. He did not accept that he was permanently disabled, trying a whole range of therapies, in particular swimming. He spent time at the Warm Springs resort, and subsequently bought the centre and turned it into a polio rehabilitation institute. Nor was FDR willing to be known as disabled. He judged, probably rightly, that the public would not be willing to accept a political leader who had a major impairment. So FDR made strenuous efforts, detailed in Hugh Gallagher’s book FDR’s Splendid Deception, to conceal the truth about his disability. For example, out of 35,000 photographs of FDR, only two show him in his wheelchair. Nor is there any newsreel footage, or even political cartoons depicting him as disabled. He did not use the wheelchair in public, nor even crutches. He wore callipers, lent on his aides, and laboriously swung his legs to make it appear that he was walking. His determination to conceal the truth, according to Gallagher, took a severe physical and emotional toll on him over the next twenty years.

However, FDR’s relationship with disability was not simply about denial. He bought the Warm Springs resort and turned it into a polio rehabilitation centre. FDR built “the Little White House”, an accessible holiday home in Warm Springs: he also drove a hand-controlled car. He loved to drive around his Georgia neighbourhood, meeting ordinary men and women. As a person, he was intuitive, not rationalist – no Thomas Jefferson – and had simple tastes, according to Gallagher, who argues that “His paralysis softened the handsome patrician, made him approachable, more human. His physical weakness was something people of every class could understand. At some level of consciousness, perhaps, FDR’s paralysis served him a link with ordinary men and women.” Famous for his dog, Fala, and his broadcast “Fireside chats”, FDR was able to develop the common touch.

Roosevelt also set up the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and helped raise huge amounts of money, particularly with the development of the March of Dimes campaign from 1937. Among the beneficiaries of research funds was Jonas Salk, who went on to develop the polio vaccine.

It was the depths of the Depression – with 25% unemployment and a 50% fall in industrial output since 1929 - when in 1932, disabled FDR won the Democratic nomination and subsequently the Presidency of the United States. In his acceptance speech, he said “I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.” He had succeeded by bringing together trades unions, poor whites, Jews, Italians, Poles, African-Americans and Southerners together with the traditional Democrat supporters. As he famously said, in the middle of the banking crisis which heralded his inauguration, “All we have to fear is fear itself”.

As President, Roosevelt was extraordinarily interventionist by American standards past and present. For example, he regulated the banks and other parts of the private sector, and used government money to pay the unemployed construct dams and buildings for the Public Works Administration. Vast government enterprises were created and gold was bought back from citizens by the US Treasury. FDR also repealed Prohibition. No wonder he was so easily re-elected for a second term, with unemployment having fallen from 25% to 14%, and the creation of Social Security payments – such as pensions – and Federal rights to belong to a union, to take strike action, and undertake collective bargaining. In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR argued that economic rights were like a second Bill of Rights: by today’s standards, he resembles a European social democrat, rather than any conventional American politician.

At the beginning of the war, FDR gave Britain moral and economic support, and began a covert correspondence with Winston Churchill. From 1940, he rapidly built up the US armed forces. First, 50 older destroyers were given to Britain, followed by the 1941 Lend Lease agreement, contributing $50 billion to the Allies, to be repaid after the war. He told the American people that he wanted USA to be the Arsenal for Democracy, using his charisma to counter the strong isolationist tendency in US politics. He was elected to a third term – against all previous tradition – promising to do all he could to keep USA out of the conflict.

After Pearl Harbor, war was unavoidable. FDR left the administration of the war to his generals. From 1943, he played the key diplomatic role, at the conferences with Churchill in Cairo, and with Churchill and Stalin in Tehran and finally Yalta. Although Stalin backed FDR’s plan for the United Nations, FDR failed to understand his true ambitions to create Soviet-backed authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe.

FDR’s health had been in decline since 1940. Part of the problem was that he gave up his daily exercise routine during the war: he stopped standing up, and was wheeled around everywhere. After years of struggle, physical and political, he was also depressed and lonely. By 1944 he was very ill. Stress and smoking, added to his neurological problems, resulted in heart disease. Nevertheless, he was elected President for a fourth time, with Harry Truman as his Vice-President. On March 29, just before the founding conference of the United Nations, FDR died from a stroke.

Barely a month later came the declaration of Victory in Europe. As the New York Times wrote at the time: "Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House". But FDR should not be seen as a superhuman leader. He was an ordinary human being, struggling with a disability which perhaps taught him compassion and humility, who achieved remarkable things.

Further reading

Hugh Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, 1985.