I. Row, Row, Row with Roosevelt
Now’s the time for everyone to cheer
For election day is drawing near,
Put your cares away
Let’s view a brighter day
And win with a man we all revere…
On the afternoon of August 27, 1932, one hundred thousand people excitedly thronged to the parade ground in Sea Girt, New Jersey to meet the Democratic presidential candidate, New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As the brightly colored crowd of New Jersey Democrats milled about awaiting the governor, airplanes circled and festive aerial bombs burst overhead. Amid the clamor, one song rang loud and clear as the band played it again and again: the official campaign song, “Row, Row, Row With Roosevelt”:
Come on and Row, Row, Row with Roosevelt,
On the Good Ship U.S.A.
Sail with Franklin D. to victory
and to real prosperity.He’s honest, he’s strong and he’s steady,
A chip off the block that gave us TEDDY
Come on and Row, Row, Row with Roosevelt,
On the Good Ship U.S.A!
Singing broke into cheering as Roosevelt mounted the stage. He spoke about repealing Prohibition and railed against Herbert Hoover for “attempting to conceal” his position on the issue. “In the last analysis, my friends,” he said, “the prohibition issue comes down to a question of faith and confidence in leadership and in the words of leaders.”[1] Yet Roosevelt was concealing issues of his own. Since 1921, he had been paralyzed below the waist but kept up an elaborate public ruse of recovery, fitness, and normalcy. Roosevelt bowed to social constructions of disability, realizing that if he were “disabled” in the public perception, he could never be in power. In his 1932 campaign, Roosevelt reinforced rigid constructions of “ability” by denying any suggestion of disability and projecting the illusion of a normatively fit physicality as a principal reason for electing him president. He counted on the fact that voters would have confidence in his body, his words, and the words that they heard about him from official sources. In this context, the campaign song “Row, Row, Row with Roosevelt,” and others like it, played a crucial textual role. Campaign songs reinforced discourses of ability, masked disability, and rhetorically created an ideal electable presidential body in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign.
“Row, Row, Row with Roosevelt” was the “Official Democratic Campaign Song,” issued in 1932 by the stage and screen division of the National Democratic Committee.[2] It debuted on August 19, 1932,[3] just before a nationwide tour in which Roosevelt put his body before the electorate to show them that he was physically fit for office. Over the next few months, bands and singers performed the song at many of Roosevelt’s rallies and events.[4] The song, a march, could be played at public gatherings or in the home; the sheet music was arranged for piano and included tuning for a ukulele. The song’s lyrics constructed a Roosevelt whose physical prowess promised good leadership and economic recovery. He was rowing, athletic, vigorous. “Row with Roosevelt” implied that the Democratic candidate was more than strong enough to row alone but invited the listener to row with him. It blatantly stated, “he’s honest, he’s strong and he’s steady,” dispelling any fears that he was disabled and connecting physical to moral strength. “A chip off the block that gave us Teddy” emphasized Roosevelt’s political and familial credentials. It also invoked Theodore Roosevelt’s obsession with physical fitness and imbued Franklin with Teddy’s bodily robustness. The song connected athleticism to good leadership: rowing meant being able to steer the “Good Ship U.S.A.,” the metaphorical ship of state. The ship metaphor also hinted at Roosevelt’s experience in the Navy, implying that he had done physically strenuous service for the nation. The victory in “Sail with Franklin D. to victory and to real prosperity” was not just an electoral victory but also a long-term triumph for a nation longing for economic recovery. The outcome of a healthy economy was implicitly linked to Roosevelt’s own health and strength, his ability to “row” there. “Row, Row, Row, with Roosevelt” brought the candidate’s body to the fore as an indicator of leadership and a primary reason to elect him. It completely obscured Roosevelt’s physical difference by constructing his body as normatively fit. By avoiding any reference to his polio-impaired body, Roosevelt’s campaign song reinforced the cultural assumption that “disability” was deviant and that physical fitness was the source of all “ability,” particularly the ability to lead.
Campaign songs were widespread in presidential contests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Often sung at campaign rallies, they were important in holding the interest of crowds, emphasizing issues, developing enthusiasm, and satirizing opponents. [5] Though the use of campaign songs declined over the course of the twentieth century,[6] in the 1932 campaign, songs were still prevalent and important. Roosevelt had promised a “new deal” but was consistently vague about the details.[7] His other official campaign song “Happy Days Are Here Again” projected the optimism and hope that swept him to victory. His extensive travelling and many campaign stops were particularly conducive to rallies and the singing of songs. In addition, campaign songs were still widespread in the music publishing industry. The sheet music archives at New York’s Lincoln Center alone hold at least eight Roosevelt songs composed for the 1932 election.
This paper examines the complex role of campaign songs by offering a close reading of those songs’ texts in the context of the other texts and actions through which Roosevelt rhetorically constructed his body in the 1932 campaign. I take the following perspectives and assumptions from disability theory: that disability is constructed and that the normative able body does not represent a physical reality but rather a cultural product. This paper will join the body of scholarship that examines how bodily norms played into Roosevelt’s election and presidency; its innovation will be in examining how songs as popular cultural forms worked to produce these norms. Section 1 provides an analysis of “Row, Row, Row with Roosevelt (On The Good Ship U.S.A.),” which suggests that the Democratic Party and the candidate himself sought to officially portray Roosevelt as physically fit and used rhetoric that connected this robustness to good leadership and economic recovery. Section 2 will provide background on Roosevelt’s life and career, demonstrating that ideals of physical fitness were always important to him and describing how Roosevelt developed his disability. It will go on to explain how disability is socially constructed and apply this to how Roosevelt constructed his ability in the public eye as he reentered the world of politics. Section 3 will detail how Roosevelt hid his disability and projected an ideal bodily norm through action and rhetoric in the 1932 campaign. Finally, Section 4 will conclude the paper with an analysis of an unofficial campaign song, “The Roosevelt Glide,” to show how Roosevelt’s supporters accepted and reinforced his construction of the normative body, and the 1933 song “Roosevelt, Garner, and Me” to show how Roosevelt’s conceptions of ability and disability continued into his presidency and shaped his policy.
II. Life, Fitness and Disability
As a youth, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw his fair share of disability but was also surrounded by his society’s norms of health and vigor. Born into the upstate New York aristocracy, Roosevelt was an only child, insulated by his family’s wealth and love. Starting when Franklin was nine, his father suffered a series of heart attacks that left him an invalid. Franklin responded to his father’s illness by projecting a charming, cheerful demeanor, a practice he would continue when faced with his own disability. At boarding school, he did poorly at athletics and thus was a social outsider. He made up for this at Harvard by running for class office and becoming the editor of the student newspaper. Throughout his youth, Franklin’s idol was his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt.[8] The latter was famous for his bodily strength and robustness as well as his obsession with physical fitness. Though a weak and asthmatic child, Theodore had made himself strong through weightlifting, boxing, and outdoor expeditions, and later imposed his standards of fitness upon everyone. Theodore’s studies of Darwin convinced him that fitness was the key to the future of the human race and the nation.[9] Franklin admired his cousin, emulated his mannerisms, and sought to follow his trajectory to power.
Striving to embody the physical ideal was an important step in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s own path. He attended Columbia Law School, passed the bar exam, practiced law for several years in New York, and married his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905. He won a state senate seat in 1910 and was reelected in 1912, with the help of his new adviser, the journalist Louis M. Howe. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy and he helped run the department efficiently through World War I. As assistant secretary, Roosevelt was denied the chance to serve actively in the war but he insisted on traveling to Europe to inspect naval operations firsthand. After meeting with heads of state, striking out on his own to explore the front, and helping soldiers fire artillery, Roosevelt convinced himself he had seen battle. He even asked to be included on a memorial at his old boarding school for the sons who had served.[10] Roosevelt sought to project youth, vitality, and heroism, partly to advance his political career. With his enhanced reputation and famous name, Roosevelt secured the vice-presidential nomination in 1920 with Ohio governor James Cox but the Democratic ticket lost to the Harding-Coolidge Republican ticket. In 1921, he returned to private life, forming a legal partnership in New York and focusing on his political future. At that time, he was a fit and handsome man, who wanted people to know it.[11]
On August 10, 1921, after an active day at his summer home on Campobello Island, Roosevelt went to bed with a fever. The next day, his legs were in excruciating pain, and within five days, he could no longer move them. After weeks of uncertainty about his condition, a doctor finally diagnosed him with infantile paralysis, or polio. Howe, Roosevelt’s adviser for the past decade, was among the first to know of the diagnosis and he immediately recognized the political implications. “I’m not going to mention the word paralysis unless I have to,” he said. “If it’s printed, we’re sunk. Franklin’s career is kaput, finished.”[12] He knew the power of the public’s perceptions of disability.
As Rosemarie Thomson describes in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, disability is socially constructed. This social construction can also be defined as “the complex processes by which all forms of corporeal diversity acquire cultural meanings undergirding a hierarchy of bodily traits that determines the distribution of privilege, status, and power.” “Able-bodiedness” and “disability” are not “self-evident physical conditions.” Rather, the “physically disabled” are “produced by way of legal, medical, political, cultural, and literary narratives that comprise an exclusionary discourse.” The disabled body becomes “a repository for social anxieties about such troubling concerns as vulnerability, control, and identity.” Thus, disability is “not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.”[13]
In the United States of Roosevelt’s time, from the turn of the century to the 1930s, society’s construction of able and desirable bodies excluded many people from social favor and the disabled figure was seen as the deviant “other.” Immigration laws rejected immigrants deemed mentally or physically “defective.” Federal policies categorized all people with disabilities as “unemployable” and ineligible for federal benefits.[14] Those in power invested the disabled figure with their social fears and anxieties. Polio was particularly stigmatized, associated with “guilty carriers” such as slum-dwelling immigrants and the poor. Many people believed, based on early medical studies, that polio weakened the mind as well as the body.[15] Roosevelt could not escape these associations. Furthermore, in the 1920s, visibly handicapped people were socially outcast and often kept at home, out of public sight.[16] Yet Roosevelt sought a profession in a highly visible field, where careers were made and broken by public perception. His future depended on the public’s and his peers’ impressions of him as a man. Politics was a male field, and a man’s worth, according to the era’s norms, was based on the integrity of his body. As Anthony Rotundo illustrates, by 1920 the “physical ideal of masculinity” reigned supreme in the United States; men associated “their bodies with their sense of self and their manhood.”[17] To be electable, Roosevelt had to embody this ideal man, which meant having a strong body. In order to advance his political career, Roosevelt would have to bow to and reinforce social constructions of disability and bodily norms.
As Roosevelt attempted to recuperate and reenter the world of politics, he manipulated his public image as much as possible to avoid recognition of his disability and to construct himself as a normal, healthy man. Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe tell this story in FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability. In August, while FDR was bedridden, unable to move his legs, control his bowels, use his arms, or even sit up in bed, the New York Times reported that he had merely caught a heavy cold and was slowly recovering. The Roosevelts lied about Franklin’s condition to many of their family members and Howe was responsible for controlling the news media.[18] In September, the news got out that he was ill of polio but his doctor told the press, “You can definitely say that he will not be crippled,” though privately, the evidence was to the contrary.[19] His leg muscles would never improve, though by August 1922 his back and arm muscles were stronger, and he could even swim. In his many letters, FDR depicted himself as healthy and vital, recovering but “entirely normal.”[20] The Washington Star reported in October 1924 that he was “greatly improved” and “prepared to enter the heat of political battle.”[21]
That year, he served as campaign manager for Al Smith’s presidential campaign, and appeared on crutches to deliver the nominating speech. In 1928, Smith convinced him to run for governor of New York. By that time, Roosevelt had learned to give the appearance of walking by dragging his feet and swinging his hips to move his legs, while braces kept his legs in place. In his 1928 campaign, he attempted to present himself as normatively healthy. He rode all over the state in an open-canopied car, standing (by holding a metal bar) at each stop to deliver a speech. His campaign material alluded to his “active career,” “splendid energy,” and naval service.[22] Howe and his staff scrutinized newspapers and diligently corrected “false” reports so that the press dutifully picked up this portrayal.[23] Roosevelt won the governorship. He had successfully presented himself as able-bodied, catering to and reinforcing the power structures of physicality. In his 1930 reelection campaign and throughout his governorship, Roosevelt continued to carefully construct the public perception of his body, in preparation for his next great challenge: the presidential campaign.
III. Ability and the 1932 Campaign
Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign was complex but it is certain that he would not have won had he not convinced the public that he was physically fit to be president. Hoover and others tried to undermine the Democratic nominee by trumpeting his bad health. However, FDR countered with a campaign designed to prove his ability. His rhetoric of fitness extended to the seminal issues of the election year and the decade: the Great Depression and nursing the country’s economy back to health. Thus, Roosevelt won the election partly by appealing to and reinforcing social constructions of ability and disability. By denying his corporeal reality and pretending physical fitness through the rhetoric of visual presentations, speeches, and songs, FDR made a statement about what bodies should be or do. He reinforced the idea that paralysis is a disability by operating under the assumption that, if the public knew the truth of his paralysis, he would be unelectable. He created narratives that comprised an exclusionary discourse, as per Thomson’s definition of disability construction,[24] when he projected an ideal body that was fit, active, and in his discourse, therefore electable. Thus, Roosevelt reinforced the hierarchy of traits that determines the distribution of privilege, status, and power as he shaped public perceptions to reach the country’s highest office.
Roosevelt employed textual and visual cues to draw attention to his supposedly healthy body. To begin with, he dramatically proved his fitness when he accepted the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On July 2, 1932, he flew to the convention to become the first candidate ever to receive his nomination in person, intentionally underscoring his physical presence and honesty. In his speech accepting the nomination, he began by apologizing for his late arrival at the convention, emphasizing the strong winds he had encountered on his plane ride and saying he was “thankful for my Navy training.”[25] Throughout this famous “New Deal” acceptance speech, he used bodily metaphors to cast himself as a vigorous national leader. He began with walking imagery: “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s uninterrupted march along the path of real progress.” He then positioned himself as the leader of that march: “Our indomitable leader [Woodrow Wilson] is no longer with us, but there still survives today his spirit. Many of his captains, thank God, are still with us.” He urged his audience to physically “Go into the home of the factory worker. He knows why goods do not move. Go into the home of the farmer. He knows how the tariff has helped to ruin him.” Roosevelt made politics personal and embodied, and implied that he had been into all these homes himself. “I know something about taxes,” he said, because “for three years I have been going up and down this country.”[26] Roosevelt used the rhetoric of ability, and the media followed suit. Covering the speech, the New York Times acclaimed his “dash and vigor,” and the New York Journal called him a “virile figure, physically strong…with an eagerness to fight.”[27]
Despite these efforts, however, a whispering campaign about Roosevelt’s bad health threatened to undercut him. The president of one Democratic women’s league exemplified the doubters when she stated, “This candidate, while mentally qualified for the presidency, is entirely unfit physically.”[28] Hoover’s supporters warned against throwing out a strong man in favor of “a man who cannot rise from his chair unassisted.”[29] Roosevelt’s disability was even more a textual and perceptual problem than a physical one. To prove (or rather, project) fitness, the Roosevelt campaign deployed two main pieces of “evidence.” The first was a $500,000 life insurance policy issued to him in 1930, along with a report testifying to his health. The DNCC distributed a flier entitled “Half a Million Life Insurance” that emphasized the policy and Roosevelt’s clean bill of health.[30] The second piece of evidence was an investigative report in Liberty Magazine, a widely read weekly publication, entitled “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Physically Fit to Be President?” Roosevelt enlisted family friend Earle Looker to write the article, published in July 1931, and a 1932 book, This Man Roosevelt, that reinforced the article’s findings. Looker claimed to be an impartial outsider and to have challenged Roosevelt to submit to lengthy observation and medical examination. He “observed” that Roosevelt walked steadily and without fatigue, using braces only to ensure his knees locked properly (while other accounts confirm that he could walk only slowly, with difficulty, and not without assistance).[31] The supposedly objective doctor’s reports, in fact paid for by Roosevelt, said the candidate was healthy and that the “progressive recovery of power in the legs” would continue. Looker concluded, “He is physically fit to be President.”[32] The life insurance policy and medical examinations featured prominently even in the official “Campaign Book of the Democratic Party Candidates and Issues 1932.”[33] In a campaign full of issues, the social issue of disability was one of the most important. Roosevelt continued to shore up the “able” norm in order to project himself as eminently electable.
Roosevelt further proved his ability by showing his body across the country in a train campaign from Albany to the West Coast and back, starting on September 12, 1932. He delivered fifty-six speeches in twenty days but as Houck and Kiewe argue, “the function of these speeches was not necessarily policy; Roosevelt would rarely say more than a sentence or two about a specific issue.” The main purpose was instead to “go through the terribly arduous process of strapping on his heavy leg braces” and to “‘walk’ to the back platform of the last car and allow the hundreds, many times thousands, of people assembled to see him.”[34] According to consultants out west, Roosevelt’s campaign achieved its objective: audiences remarked that “he appeared in splendid physical condition” and marveled that he had recovered “in such a complete manner.”[35] The press toed the party line, mostly due to the influence of Howe, Roosevelt’s close adviser and a former newspaperman. The press reported that Roosevelt was a “dynamo” thriving on a fast pace, “whose abounding vitality …made the whispers of his crippled and invalid condition barely audible.”[36]
Even in discussing the main policy issue of his campaign, the depressed U.S. economy, Roosevelt used physical metaphors, showing how important the body was to him and his supporters. In his first national campaign speech delivered in April 1932, he urged economic measures that “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” These strong citizens physically supported the entire economy. To combat their unemployment, “a real economic cure must go to the killing of the bacteria in the system rather than to the treatment of external symptoms.”[37] In his first major policy address in September, on agriculture, he asserted that agricultural reform would provide a “remedy” for the economy, where Hoover had only prescribed “drugs.” [38] The railroad industry, he said in another speech, was also suffering from an “epidemic,” which he could cure by bureaucratic “coordination.”[39] In his last address of the campaign trip, he argued that “the attack on poverty is not very unlike the attack on disease,” that people were not at fault for being infected, and that progressive cures constituted a “path of social justice.” “We cannot go back,” he repeated. “There are a lot of new steps to take.”[40] Roosevelt positioned himself as doctor to the nation and thereby removed himself from being seen as a patient. Instead, he was the physically and mentally strong leader who would lead the disabled nation back into the normative condition of prosperity. He embodied the possibility of renewed economic health. In his final major campaign address, broadcasted live from Madison Square Garden on November 7, 1932, he said as much: “Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him satisfactory embodiment… I seek only to be the humble emblem of this restoration of America.”[41]
IV. The Roosevelt Glide
The next day, Roosevelt was elected president, proving that he was successful at disseminating his desired image of physical power and leadership. Unofficial campaign songs are further proof that FDR’s discourse of ability was effective. “The Roosevelt Glide,” [42] which publicized Roosevelt with a dance step, showed that he was successful in his efforts to obscure his disability and acted as part of this obfuscation by projecting a clear image of mobility. This song not only spread a distinct message about Roosevelt’s body but also directly affected the physical body of the singer or dancer, implicating him or her in Roosevelt’s restrictive construction of normativity. With a bouncy, syncopated beat, to the tune of a ukulele or piano, the song began:
Better go get your honey
Just pocket your money
You’re in for a wonderful time
No need for a moon,
Just plenty of room
Here’s real fun in any old clime.
Let’s all dance,Do the ROOSEVELT GLIDE,
Let’s all prance,
Try this wonderful stride,
For when the band plays
This new rhythmical lay,
You are going to sway
It just gets you that way.
Shove your feet to this melody sweet;
With a smile, dance away every mile
Better turn off the heat
Put some ice on your feet
For you’ll soon do the ROOSEVELT GLIDE.
Though this may seem a throwaway novelty song, when analyzed in the context of Roosevelt’s ability rhetoric, it reveals how Roosevelt and his supporters constructed norms of ability and electability. The title, “The Roosevelt Glide,” implied that Roosevelt himself originated the dance, and collapsed the distinction between the dancer and the candidate. It made the dancer’s body a stand-in for Roosevelt’s, thereby constructing the candidate as physically adept. Roosevelt could “prance,” “stride,” “shove his feet,” and “with a smile, dance away every mile.” This song reinforced the cultural rule that able and electable bodies had to be active and mobile, a rule that Roosevelt followed and fortified throughout his campaign. It also expanded this norm to the electorate, specifically Roosevelt’s supporters. First, the song co-opted and controlled the body of the dancer or listener, making him or her one of Roosevelt’s followers. When the band played, the listener was “going to sway” no matter what. He would then become part of a community of supporters, each of them physically connected to Roosevelt and to each other through the medium of music: “Let’s all dance, do the Roosevelt glide.” This community was normative and exclusive. The song constructed a norm comprised only of people who could dance and prance; everyone else was not even considered. The normative able body radiated fitness, movement, musicality, and effortlessness. Anxieties were banished from this able body – “Just pocket your money/ You’re in for a wonderful time” – the able body could work, make money, survive, smile, dance, and even enjoy itself. Here, the implied “other,” the disabled body, became the receptacle for cultural anxieties about being unable to work and survive in the Depression era. The disabled invalid stood for people’s fears of powerlessness, while the ideal body was one with strength and agency. Thus, during his 1932 campaign, Roosevelt led and his supporters followed in constructing exclusionary discourse, foregrounding fitness, and denying disability.
Roosevelt’s conceptions of ability and disability continued into his presidency and shaped his policies. “Roosevelt, Garner, and Me,”[43] a song written in 1933 to celebrate the new president’s victory, demonstrated how his campaign promises and peoples’ hopes for his presidency were intimately connected to the idea of the able body. The song enlisted everyone in the country in the process of constructing a normative able body, and foreshadowed how important physical fitness would be in Roosevelt’s administration and his vision for the country, particularly in New Deal Works Progress Administration programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Eddie Cantor, a vaudeville, Broadway, film, and radio star, performed the song and wrote many of the verses. He exaggeratedly enumerated all the wonderful things that would happen with Roosevelt in office:
Our troubles are over, We’ll soon be in clover,
With ROOSEVELT, GARNER AND ME.
Since We’ve been elected, the country’s protected,
By ROOSEVELT, GARNER AND ME.
Forget all the past with its woes and its tears,
Let’s drink to a future of wonderful years.
Now this is no moonshine, We’re gonna have sunshine,
With ROOSEVELT, GARNER AND ME.We’ll all have positions, and better conditions,
With ROOSEVELT, GARNER AND ME.
The pots will be stewing, The breweries brewing,
That’s something I’ll guarantee
Just look at that smile on your old Uncle Sam,
He knows that he’s sure of his eggs and his ham;
There’ll be happy headlines, There’ll be no more breadlines,
With ROOSEVELT, GARNER AND ME.
In this song, Roosevelt affected the citizen’s body more directly as president than he did as a candidate in “The Roosevelt Glide.” He had direct power over their work and their diets. He even influenced their fertility: further verses predicted, “Fond couples will pair off,/ From bachelorhood swear off,” “There’s gonna be spooning,/ And more honeymooning,” and “To each happy marriage,/ We’ll donate a carriage.” However, Roosevelt was not the only one in control. The first-person voice, the repetition of “we,” and the refrain “Roosevelt, Garner and Me” put the singer and listener into the presidential team. It indicated that Roosevelt’s supporters felt that his election gave them increased agency and control over their own lives, particularly their own bodies. However, this sense of control was constructed around a highly restrictive bodily norm. The song culminated with this final verse:
It’s healthy to diet,
We’re all gonna try it,
In nineteen thirty and three.
We may not be stars of the stage or the screen,
But we should have shapes that are fit to be seen;
As much as we’re able,
We’ll out-Gable Gable
With Roosevelt, Garner and me
Though posed partly in jest, this exhortation resonated with Roosevelt’s projected ideals of bodily fitness. Furthermore, it brought everyone into the public sphere along with him, to be scrutinized and defined by the public gaze. Celebrities like Clark Gable, Eddie Cantor, and Roosevelt himself represented and imposed upon the public the idea of the normative body: fit, whole, beautiful, and able. This ideal body was essential to constructing the new, ideal, New Deal United States. FDR made this clear in his Works Progress Administration, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), his favorite New Deal program. President Roosevelt declared that the CCC’s most valuable contribution to the nation was its work turning boys into men.[44] Forestry News Digest, describing the CCC upon its founding in spring 1933, said that taking boys from city streets, putting them in the outdoors, and “exercising them with seven hours of work a day is making new men physically of these boys.” One CCC official expressed the organization’s vision of fitness and citizenship: “It takes a healthy body... a clear eye, a strong constitution to stand the strain of managing a business or running a state or nation.” Malformed bodies were vessels for anxieties about social division, radicalism, emasculation, urbanization, and unemployment.[45] Normatively strong bodies, by contrast, represented assurances of rebuilding, fighting for, and leading the nation. For Roosevelt, reshaping bodies was a crucial part of reforming the nation.
Subsuming physical difference and labeling it “disability” was essential to Roosevelt’s social and political project of national unification. It began with Roosevelt’s own body and his construction of ability and disability in the 1932 campaign. Campaign songs, along with speeches and appearances, served as essential texts in constructing his exclusionary discourse. These songs demonstrate how Roosevelt strove to present a persona that conformed to the physical ideals of his time and in doing so reinforced strict rules about what able and electable bodies should be and do. As the electorate rowed with Roosevelt, did the Roosevelt glide, and stood by his side in the public eye, they saw him as a man whose leadership power stemmed largely from his physical prowess. But they did not see the real Roosevelt. His deception about his disability meant that a rigid bodily norm would continue to go unchallenged and would become an integral part of public policy during his administration. The cultural construction of bodily norms has undergone many changes since then but it remains a central process in establishing hierarchies and consolidating power. Popular texts such as songs, often overlooked in academic analysis, can continue to provide key clues to the construction of this power.
Notes
- [1] “Statement of President ‘Was Made to Mislead,’ Governor Asserts,” New York Times, August 28, 1932.
- [2] Eddie Dowling and J. Fred Coots, “Row, Row, Row With Roosevelt (On The Good Ship U.S.A.),” (Cleveland: Sam Fox Publishing. Co., 1932). Sheet Music Collection, Political Songs, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, NY.
- [3] “Writes Roosevelt Song,” New York Times, August 20, 1932.
- [4] “Statement of President ‘Was Made to Mislead,’ Governor Asserts,” New York Times, August 28, 1932; “Better Days Ahead, Roosevelt Asserts,” New York Times, October 28, 1932.
- [5] Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., s.v. “Campaign Songs,” http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3401800653&v=2.1&u=columbiau... (accessed November 17, 2011).
- [6] David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 13th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), Chapter 32, 22.
- [7] Ibid, Chapter 33, 4.
- [8] Alan Brinkley, “Roosevelt, Franklin Delano,” American National Biography Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), http://www.anb.org/articles/06/06-00567.html (accessed November 18, 2011).
- [9] David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt's Social Darwinism and Views on Imperialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 1 (January-March 1965): 103-118, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708402 (accessed November 18, 2011).
- [10] Joseph Persico, “FDR Sees the Elephant,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (July 1, 2008): 28-35, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2011).
- [11] Brinkley.
- [12] Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 13-16.
- [13] Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6. For more on the social construction of disability and how it relates to citizenship and politics, see Emily Russell, Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 1-22.
- [14] Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 103, 132.
- [15] Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 21, 29.
- [16] Houck and Kiewe, 17. See also Susan Schweik, Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Schweik analyzes a widespread series of U.S. municipal laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that made it a misdemeanor for people who were crippled, maimed, “or in any way deformed” to expose themselves to public view on streets or in public places.
- [17] Anthony Rotundo, “Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770-1920,” Journal of Social History 16, no. 4 (Summer 1983): 23-38, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786989 (accessed November 18, 2011).
- [18] Houck and Kiewe, 19.
- [19] Ibid, 24.
- [20] Ibid, 27.
- [21] Washington Star, Oct. 29, 1924, qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 31.
- [22] Ibid, 41-45.
- [23] Ibid, 57.
- [24] Thomson, 6.
- [25] “‘I Pledge You – I Pledge Myself to a New Deal for the American People’: The Governor Accepts the Nomination for the Presidency, Chicago, Ill., July 2, 1932,” qtd. in Houke and Kiewe, 87.
- [26] Ibid, 87-90.
- [27] “Mr. Roosevelt’s Speech,” New York Times, July 4, 1932, and Claude G. Bowers, “The Battle Flag Unfurled, New York Journal, July 5, 1932, qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 92.
- [28] Jesse W. Nicholson, quoted in “Prohibition,” Time, Apr. 27, 1931, qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 65.
- [29] James H. MacLafferty, diary entry of July 22, 1942, qtd in Houck and Kiewe, 93.
- [30] Houck and Kiewe, 96.
- [31] Ibid, 67-75.
- [32] Earle Looker, This Man Roosevelt (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932), qtd, in Houck and Kiewe, 75.
- [33] Houck and Kiewe, 96.
- [34] Ibid, 97.
- [35] M.L. Wilson [consultant] to Raymond Moley, Sept. 21, 1932, qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 107.
- [36] Robert Barry, “9,000 Miles with Franklin D. Roosevelt,” The Democratic Bulletin, November 1932, and The Times (London), Nov. 5, 1932, qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 108-9.
- [37] “The ‘Forgotten Man’ Speech, Radio Address, Albany, NY, April 7, 1932,” qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 78.
- [38] “‘A Restored and Rehabilitated Agriculture’: Campaign Address on the Farm Problem in Topeka, Kans., September 14, 1932,” qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 103.
- [39] “‘The Railroad Mesh is the Warp on Which Our Economic Web is Largely Fashioned’: Campaign Address on Railroads at Salt Lake City, Utah, September 17, 1942,” qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 103.
- [40] “Address of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, Naval Armory, Belle Isle Bridge, Detroit, Michigan, October 2, 1932,” qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 105.
- [41] “‘I Believe That the Best Interests of the Country Require a Change in Administration’: Campaign Address at Madison Square Garden, New York City, November 5, 1932,” qtd. in Houck and Kiewe, 111.
- [42] Hertha A. Stein and Vic Lewis, “The Roosevelt Glide,” (Ft. Wayne: Wayne Music Publishers, 1932). Sheet Music Collection, Political Songs, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, NY.
- [43] Al Lewis and Al Sherman, “Roosevelt, Garner and Me,” (New York: Irving Berlin, Inc. Music Publishers, 1933).
- [44] Bryant Simon, “‘New Men in Body and Soul’: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Transformation of Male Bodies and the Body Politic,” in Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia J. Scharff (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 82.
- [45] Ibid, 80-97.
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