Roosevelt's Gimpy Legs

Matthew Yglesias is raggin’ on Jonah Goldberg about pictures of FDR and his bum legs. Jonah says (link):

There were more than 35,000 pictures of FDR taken. Two show him in a wheelchair. Why? Because the press almost unanimously agreed that — despite the huge news value — depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort. The few dissenting photographers from that consensus were routinely blocked or deliberately jostled by the senior photographers so as to shield FDR from embarrassment and the public from its "right to know."

Matt says (link):

Okay, this is a subject I know virtually nothing about. I do, however, know that FDR became president in 1933 after winning the 1932 election. The war in Europe didn't begin until 1939, and the United States didn't enter the war until 1941. Under the circumstances, that "depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort" can't be the primary reason nobody ever did it.

Since I am older than Matt and Jonah cumulatively, I feel entitled to play the age card here again. I’ll stipulate that 1939>1932, but I think Matt may miss the point. I’m pretty sure I learned about Roosevelt’s gimpy legs while I was at Camp Mi-Te-Na on Half Moon Lake in Alton, NH. That would have been about 1944—i.e., smack in the middle of the war. I was told that they would hide his wheelchair behind the podium and that two of his sons would lift him up so that he would appear to be standing, and that at the end of his talk he would collapse back into his chair again. I was told that this was important because we didn’t want folks to know that he was a cripple during a war (how much of a secret it could have been if it was gossip among eight-year-olds—that is a matter for another day).

Anyway, it seems perfectly consistent to say that people thought it would be “bad for the war effort” during the war, even if it might have been “bad for some other reason” before the war started.

A propos of not much, there is a great picture of Mussolini at the podium —I guess I saw it in the Dennis Mack Smith biography—taken from behind, so you can see that he is standing on a milk crate. Little squirt.

Fn.: Hey, it’s still there! And they have an alumni weekend (link)!