lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2020-10-14 09:26 pm
lightreads) wrote2020-10-14 09:26 pm
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FDR's Splendid Deception by Hugh Gregory Gallagher
FDR's Splendid Deception
3/5. A brief biography of FDR's public life, with a focus on his disability and how it was concealed. An interesting concept, and a book worth writing, but also a frustrating one as you can tell the primary sources are extremely tight-lipped. That's the point, though – there was an elaborate ruse constructed around him, including literally hundreds of people, and almost none of them talked about it. Most of them didn't even want to think about it. Including FDR who, it is clear, played jolly cripple so hard he sprained something and his face got stuck that way.
I have mixed feelings about this book as a book. It is #ownvoices, if you will, which I appreciate. But it has moments of unreliability, like talking about the conspiracy of restraint that kept press photographers from taking pictures of FDR in his wheelchair, enforced when necessary by the secret service detaining people and breaking their cameras, but anyway, this completely voluntary agreement, how extraordinary. Um. Voluntary, you say? This book is also too devoted to some psychological diagnosis across the decades, but not in the way I'm interested. It will go on about how FDR's categorical inability to speak of his disability itself ruined his health (he has lots of opinions about this), but is zero percent interested in why. Why the deception and, more complexly, why so many went along with it. Not just went along, but were deeply invested. Why, to this day, the word paraplegic is so rarely applied to FDR, even though it's what he was. The answer is obviously ableism, but there's a lot of layers to that particular cake here.
3/5. A brief biography of FDR's public life, with a focus on his disability and how it was concealed. An interesting concept, and a book worth writing, but also a frustrating one as you can tell the primary sources are extremely tight-lipped. That's the point, though – there was an elaborate ruse constructed around him, including literally hundreds of people, and almost none of them talked about it. Most of them didn't even want to think about it. Including FDR who, it is clear, played jolly cripple so hard he sprained something and his face got stuck that way.
I have mixed feelings about this book as a book. It is #ownvoices, if you will, which I appreciate. But it has moments of unreliability, like talking about the conspiracy of restraint that kept press photographers from taking pictures of FDR in his wheelchair, enforced when necessary by the secret service detaining people and breaking their cameras, but anyway, this completely voluntary agreement, how extraordinary. Um. Voluntary, you say? This book is also too devoted to some psychological diagnosis across the decades, but not in the way I'm interested. It will go on about how FDR's categorical inability to speak of his disability itself ruined his health (he has lots of opinions about this), but is zero percent interested in why. Why the deception and, more complexly, why so many went along with it. Not just went along, but were deeply invested. Why, to this day, the word paraplegic is so rarely applied to FDR, even though it's what he was. The answer is obviously ableism, but there's a lot of layers to that particular cake here.
Knock, knock - I saw this on Latest Things
https://www.spineuniverse.com/conditions/chronic-pain/john-f-kennedy-s-chronic-back-pain-conflicts-revealed
and the Secret Service had already accessed the plans of FDR's wheelchair ramps, because a second Kennedy term was going to need them!
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Hugh Gallagher Gregory was also a polio paraplegic, and he later published Black Bird Fly Away about his own depression. I finally found an inter-library-loanable copy, so I'll let you know if it has any useful thoughts.
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Yeah, that's what I meant about this book being sort of #ownvoices. He went to Warm Springs, FDR's rehab facility, and did a lot of the PT FDR was instrumental in developing. It makes for some interesting perspectives, though I think sometimes it got in the way of him being a better historian. Still, all in all, I'd rather somebody with a disability wrote this book than not, obviously.
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