MONDAY: FDR learned about human suffering!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2025

Or so PBS said: "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore."

It's our favorite line from Walden. Watching the largely broken American discourse in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk hasn't been like that at all.

Yesterday, we had the good sense to exit into an earlier era when the 1994 American Experience program, FDR, was shown on a local PBS station. For that program's official site, click here.

Good lord! In 1920, at age 38, FDR was the Democratic Party nominee for vice president. After the ticket's resounding defeat, he seemed to be next in line for the Democratic presidential nod.

One year later, at age 39, the polio came. It left him paralyzed from the waist down. 

According to the PBS program, his mother wanted him to come home to Hyde Park and spend the rest of his life working on his stamps. At a time when no one could dream of being elected to office from a wheelchair, he undertook a long and arduous physical campaign designed to let him appear healthy enough, in the eyes of the world, to pursue political office. 

The result:

In 1928, he was elected governor of New York. In 1932, he was elected president. Along the way, the program related, he created the Warm Springs Foundation in rural Georgia, where he experienced this:

Janice Howe Raper, Physical Therapist: After everybody had treatment, they would all go out into what was called the "play pool," and they would play vigorous games of ball. He played with them and he was just as tough as any of the children. They loved him.

Geoffrey Ward, Biographer: Whether or not people got better at Warm Springs, they felt that they were better and they felt that with him present, anything was possible.

David McCullough [voice-over]: Warm Springs was Franklin's creation. For the rest of his life, in times of stress he would retreat to the piney woods and the warm waters. It became his second home.

Franklin loved to drive and he drove fast. He designed his car himself, with ingenious levers and pulleys so he could drive without his legs. For the first time since he was paralyzed, he felt free. Over the years, his drives through the Georgia countryside would provide him with a valuable political education.

Ben C. Fowler, Warm Springs Resident: He was interested in the people. He got out and visited with them. Even after he was president, he would slip away from his bodyguards and get out and ride the back ways and back roads and meet people, stop and talk with them. But he'd never met people like that before.

David McCullough [voice-over]: Everywhere he went he heard stories about the lack of electricity in the countryside and the exorbitant rates paid for it in town, about bad schools and low farm prices—stories that left their mark on him.

Robert Fulton Copeland, Warm Springs Resident: ...We would walk to Warm Springs just to see him just board the train. He'd come on down the—"Hello, Warm Springs. Hello, Warm Springs." That's the way—we wanted to see him greet the little town, and we walked four miles to see that...

Janice Howe Raper, Physical Therapist: After he became president, they were very, you know, polite. But they used to call him, in the early days, "Rosie," which I think was a wonderful name.

Robert Fulton Copeland, Warm Springs Resident: Everybody loved him. Go beyond like—they loved him.

Eleanor Roosevelt: I don't think he changed completely. There were certain things that were always there, but he certainly learned to understand what suffering meant in a way that he'd never known before, because he could understand how people could suffer in ways that he had not experienced. And I think that grew out of his polio experience.

As with legendary stories of the Buddha, so too here. His polio forced him beyond the cloistered life into which he'd been born. Because of "his polio experience," he learned to understand the ways people suffer in a way he'd never experienced before. 

Inevitably, we thought of Emanuel Leplin, father to one of our best friends back in high school. Like Roosevelt, he contracted polio as an adult, at age 37. As a result, he had to leave the San Francisco Symphony, where he'd been a violist. But with the help of an aide he continued to paint, directing the aide how to mix his paints, then holding the brush in his teeth.

Our friend constructed an homage to his astonishing father here. For Mr. Leplin's Wikipedia page, you can just click this. 

In all honesty, Mr. Leplin could be a tough visit! He didn't suffer fools gladly, not even if the fool in question was only 12 or 13. We recall being grilled, though we can't recall about what, but the gods favored us with a very large gift when they let us see him creating some of the paintings which can be viewed at that site.

"Go touch grass," Governor Cox has said. We don't agree with everything he has said, but we do agree with that advice, where such things are possible. (We do agree with his overall tone.)

In the literal sense, we do that every day, especially at first light. We go touch grass, and we also look at trees, occasionally voicing best wishes. But yesterday, as we recalled our enormous luck at having been grilled by Emanuel Leplin, it seemed to us, at this difficult juncture, that we were getting the chance to escape in a different way.

For the record, these are "first world" bits of luck. Children will be dying around the world today. Truth to tell, their suffering plays a very small role in our lauded American discourse.

We aren't always the people we think we are. That's even true of us Blues!