ALS, signed "Franklin D. Roosevelt," one page, 8.5 x 11, personal letterhead, March 19, 1926. Handwritten letter from his houseboat, the Larooco, "Off Florida Coast," sent to his old friend and colleague Albert V. DeRoode, commenting on his condition following his bout with polio. In full: "I never heard of your lady friend in my life! Don't send her any more $50 bills! I am down here on a small boat & the legs are greatly improved. I get around now with no brace on right knee & hope to get rid of the other this summer—When I get back about May 1 do come in & see me at 55 Liberty St." In fine condition.
The recipient, Albert V. DeRoode (1880-1949), was a classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt's at Harvard, becoming a lawyer specializing in civil service cases. For a short time, DeRoode was a junior partner in Marvin, Hooker & Roosevelt, FDR's first law firm. He later served as secretary of the Civil Service Reform Association. DeRoode died on April 12, 1949, four years to the day after FDR died.
DeRoode was a longtime friend and confidant of FDR's. While at Harvard in 1900, DeRoode let Roosevelt take credit for 'scooping' the nation's news media in reporting that the school's venerable president, Charles W. Eliot, was supporting William McKinley in that year's presidential election—a topic he had refused to publicly discuss. It was not until 1931 that Roosevelt revealed to Michael E. Hennessy, author of 'Four Decades of Massachusetts Politics, 1890-1935,' that 'the real man who got that scoop was Albert DeRoode, now a lawyer in New York City, and he should have the credit and not I.' Roosevelt's intriguing and emphatic opening to this letter—"I never heard of your lady friend in my life! Don't send her any more $50 bills!"—suggests that an alleged mistress was extorting DeRoode for cash to cover up the story. DeRoode, who might have known of FDR's infidelities—we now know that Roosevelt was having affairs with his wife's personal secretary, Lucy Mercer, and his own secretary, Missy LeHand—might have felt obliged to comply.
Interestingly, this letter was written from the houseboat that FDR had purchased in 1924, the Larooco, while enjoying a brief respite off the Florida coast. In Elliott Roosevelt's 1973 book, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park, he writes of seeing 27-year-old Missy LeHand aboard the boat: 'I remember being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat in a wicker chair in the main stateroom, holding her in his sun-browned arms.' According to Elliott, everyone within the family—including Eleanor—knew of their affair, and accepted Missy's intimacy with FDR.
Roosevelt had purchased the boat as a means to escape New York's cold winters, believing that warm water and warm air would help him walk again. He had visited Warm Springs, Georgia, for the first time in 1924, where he found that immersion in the area's mineral-rich warm water was one of the few things that provided relief from his polio-induced paralysis. It was during this 1926 winter trip aboard the Larooco that FDR began to seriously contemplate purchasing Warm Springs to develop as a world-class polio treatment center. On February 24, 1926, he met with Warm Springs property owners William Hart and Charles S. Peabody, and, according to Roosevelt's Larooco log entry, 'we began talking over the…purchase of Georgia Warm Springs.' FDR's last cruise on the Larooco ended on March 27th, eight days after this letter. The log's entry: 'Completed all final arrangements and said farewell to the good old boat. Elliott and I left on the evening train for Warm Springs.' In September, 1926, FDR added a postscript to the log, telling of a 'violent hurricane' which 'swept the East Coast of Florida.' The Larooco, moored on the Fort Lauderdale River, was swept inland, destroyed, and subsequently sold for scrap.
On April 29, 1926, Roosevelt tapped into the majority of his personal fortune to purchase Warm Springs—for $200,000, he bought the springs themselves, the existing hotel and cottages, and approximately 1200 acres of surrounding countryside. He renovated the old resort into the Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, partnering with friend and philanthropist Basil O'Connor to establish a foundation to provide for the treatment of fellow polio victims. In all, Roosevelt visited Warm Springs 42 times from 1924 until his death there on April 12, 1945. In spite of his frequent convalescence and rehabilitation efforts, Roosevelt would never walk again unaided, relying on a wheelchair and leg braces for mobility.
Autograph letters by Roosevelt are generally scarce, and those mentioning his polio-induced paralysis are exceedingly so. Many Americans were not even aware of Roosevelt's disability—from the time he reentered the political stage after contracting polio, he insisted that reporters not write about his affliction and his public appearances were carefully choreographed to avoid any appearance of weakness. As such, few photographs of him using wheelchairs or leg braces exist, and any mention of his infirmity is remarkably rare.
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