FDR's Old Healing Place
Warm Springs, Georgia
Franklin Roosevelt could always find solace at his family estate in Hyde Park, N.Y, but it was at Warm Springs, Ga., where he found inspiration. To deal with the polio he contracted in 1921, at age 39, FDR began traveling to a ramshackle health spa in Warm Springs, where water emerged from the ground year-round at 88 degrees. In 1927, he bought the old place, along with a 1,700-acre farm surrounding it. And for the last 18 years of his life, he operated the complex as a research center studying the causes of polio and the care of its victims.
FDR's commitment to Warm Springs is one of the most poignant stories in the annals of the presidency. As a wealthy American aristocrat, he could easily have afforded more secluded facilities with nicer amenities, but he insisted on mingling with the other polio patients in the spartan atmosphere of the Georgia spa, sharing with his fellow victims the exercises that seemed to work for him or regimens that seemed to help others.
Final visit. At Warm Springs, Roosevelt gained an appreciation of the nation's ills as experienced by the spa's visitors and local residents. "Down here," he told a friend, "I can't generalize the way a politician's supposed to."
In the spring of 1945, an exhausted Roosevelt went to Warm Springs for the last time. He arrived by train on March 30, his complexion gray, dark pouches under his eyes. He no longer had the energy or the desire to walk using his leg braces, crutches, or canes, allowing a Secret Service agent to maneuver him in a wheelchair. On April 12, he awoke with a terrible headache. That afternoon, he was posing for a watercolor portrait when, at 1:15, he raised his left hand and said, "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head," then slumped forward, unconscious. He died some two hours later at the simple place he had come to love.
Excerpted from From Mount Vernon to Crawford: A History of the Presidents and Their Retreats by Kenneth T. Walsh. Copyright (c) 2005 by Kenneth T. Walsh. Published by Hyperion. Available wherever books are sold.
This story appears in the May 16, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.