Back in the White House, run by Edith Wilson, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt was horrified to see the crippled president: his own sporty vigour was part of his charm. At the election of 1920, he ran as vice-presidential candidate, but the Democrats lost.* Planning his next move, in August 1921, FDR, now thirty-nine, went for a sailing holiday at his seaside house on Campobello Island, Canada, where he felt a surging ache in his muscles and spine. He collapsed with fever and paralysis. Suddenly he could not move at all, even to empty his bowels. He struggled desperately to survive, while doctors argued over the diagnosis, finally identifying polio – ‘a children’s disease’, said FDR. When the fever lifted, he was paralysed from the waist down. He almost vanished from the lives of the children. ‘This was the time of the second father,’ said his son James, ‘the father with dead legs.’
Aided by his ‘first-class temperament’, FDR focused on rebuilding himself, spending months in Florida and then searching for a cure in Warm Springs, Georgia, which he bought and turned into a hydrotherapy centre, presiding over the patients with his remarkable jovial confidence: ‘Have you been good boys and girls while Papa was away?’
FDR learned to propel himself tortuously with crutches, building powerful chest and shoulder muscles, and to stand using leg braces. But his legs remained useless and his progress was precarious. When he tried to return to his law practice, he fell in front of everyone. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said, smiling as he was helped up. ‘Give me a hand there.’ He conquered his ailment with a determination cloaked in an irresistible but inscrutable breeziness, the shallow aristocrat hardened by the grit of suffering and warmed by the empathy it engendered. Eleanor nursed but let him go, his new companions being his spin doctor Howe (who called him the Master or sometimes ‘you dumb Dutchman’) and a young secretary, ‘Missy’ LeHand, who worshipped him. Eleanor sought her own life as a campaigning liberal, and was taught public speaking by Howe.
‘I believe someday,’ Howe told Eleanor, ‘Franklin will be president.’ As FDR struggled to rebuild himself, the Wilsonian peace in Europe was already falling apart. It looked as if Germany, if not much of Europe, was about to fall to the Bolsheviks.
In Russia, the withdrawal of German forces sparked a ferocious civil and ethnic war, but Lenin, a master pragmatist, defeated his challengers one by one, then launched a reconquest of the Romanov empire. Moving the capital of his Soviet state (named after the revolutionary councils that had sprung up in most Russian cities and were now used as a figleaf for his dictatorship) to Moscow, he commissioned Trotsky to muster a new Red Army and an ascetic Polish nobleman, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to form a secret police, the Cheka, to liquidate enemies.
Lenin’s enemies were not imaginary: in August 1918, he just survived a coup by his own radical allies; and he was shot during a speech but survived. His Reds fought for survival against conservative Whites. National revolutionaries declared independence for Georgia, Ukraine, Finland and Poland, along with Estonia and the Baltics. Ill-coordinated and insubstantial interventions by America, Britain, France and Japan contributed to the shattering of the ex-tsarist empire. But Trotsky, holding the central, most populous region, conscripting five million men by 1921, enforcing strict command, managed to defeat each enemy separately.*
All sides deployed ingenious cruelties on a massive scale: twelve million people perished. While the Whites offered no land to the peasants and a new Russian empire, Lenin rallied workers, bamboozled the peasants and offered national autonomy to the minorities. Lenin abandoned Finland and the Baltics but fought for the Ukraine, essential for his new state as the producer of a third of Russia’s grain, two-thirds of its coal and most of its steel.* In April 1920, Marshal Piłsudski, agreeing with the Ukrainian hetman Petliura to create aligned Polish and Ukrainian states similar to a new Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, invaded Ukraine, taking Kyiv that May. Lenin counter-attacked. Kyiv fell in June. Once Ukraine was controlled by Moscow, Poland and Germany were next.
As Lenin fought for Ukraine, German Communists tried to seize power in Berlin and occupied Munich, but the president Ebert appeased German soldiers, telling them, ‘You were undefeated.’ Ebert allied with the army and paramilitary freebooters, the Freikorps, who killed Marxist leaders in Berlin, then in April 1919 retook Munich, killing 600.*
