I have been a professional historian all my adult life and know that it is often sentiment that guides us to take on any research project and it is often an emotional commitment  that keeps us motivated through the tedious accumulation of  information needed to write history . Having said that, I confess that I only review books that am glad I read. Theo Lippman, Jr. ‘s The Squire of Warm Springs is well researched, restrained and objective. But he also manages to be inspiring.  The focus is narrow: Franklin Roosevelt’s relationship with Georgia and its people.

In that context, this is also a history of the battle against polio in America told from the perspective of FDR, whose struggle with a permanently debilitating illness led to  the creation of the Warm Springs Foundation, an institution that not only helped hundreds, perhaps thousands of people come to terms with a crippling disease (there is no cure). The foundation of this story is the influences that informed Roosevelt’s view of the South as a crippled part of the nation, exploited by corporations and imprisoned economically by an addiction to growing cotton.

Out of this, with the help of many like-minded people (“Brains Trusters” and FDR’s farmer neighbors in Georgia), Roosevelt fashioned many legislative efforts to help both the South and farmers in general.  His Georgia experience suggested that the big electric power companies were overcharging and failing in their responsibility to extend electric power to rural areas, holding the South back economically.  The massive Tennessee Valley hydroelectric projects were one result of this awareness. Roosevelt’s perspective on this was shaped by his association with ordinary Georgia country folk. The patrician New Yorker, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is transformed by his battle with a terrible disease and is opened to the influence of ordinary people from many walks of life.  

FDR was very vocal in condemning the lack of educational opportunities in the South, for rural boys and girls-especially those reliant on underfunded rural schools. The southern adulation of demagogic politicians FDR attributed to the lack of education in the South.  The Georgia FDR knew intimately from his experience as a part-time Georgia farmer fueled his support for efforts to stem the tide of urbanization. Georgia emerges in this account as a prisoner of its own nativism, resistant to outside influences, hostile toward possibilities that would have made for a better South.

Roosevelt’s passive racism is discussed frankly. The president was after all a product of his own times. And, though his wife Eleanor took on the crusade for racial justice, FDR never really made it his own.  Still it is obvious that Roosevelt’s affectionate relations with Blacks in Georgia essentially mirrored the experience of many Georgians, Black and white.  Racism was often tempered by affectionate relationships.

I read this book when it was first published in 1977, motivated by the fact that one of my distant cousins was involved in the development of the Warms Springs therapeutic effort. Dr. Neal Kitchens was also the mayor of Warm Springs (he led the effort that resulted in changing the little towns name from “Bullochville” to “Warm Springs”).

The popular physician claimed to be on close terms with FDR. He told a newspaper reporter as well as townspeople that he had been instrumental in getting FDR to reenter politics after his bout with polio. I have found this difficult to confirm, and it is not mentioned in Lippman’s book (or other published memoirs of the period) , but there is no denying that Dr. Kitchens, who had been trained in hydro- therapeutic medicine (a great fad in the late nineteenth century), encouraged FDR and others to develop a resort and therapy community at Warm Springs.

Dramatic events inspired me to revisit Lippman’s account. Georgia was a one -party state in FDR’s time, and was solidly Democratic when I read this book for the first time in the 1970’s. In 1976. the country had just elected a Georgia Democrat, Jimmy Carter, president. Of course, Georgia remains a one-party state today, only now it is solidly Republican. The Republican Party caught the Democrats in swimming and stole all their clothes-that is, they took on the conservative policies of the old southern Democrats.  

And, I had a personal motive to revisit Lippman’s book.  In the 1990’s my son was a client at the Warm Springs Rehabilitation Center, operated by the state of Georgia. Polio was at that time an all but forgotten illness because of the discovery of a vaccine in the 1950’s. The facility had become a center where people dealing with a great variety of physical difficulties could live in a structured environment, while learning how to successfully function in society, especially through employment and self- support.

A Georgia native myself,  I had lost my very earliest childhood friend to the polio epidemic of the early 1950’s and this young boy too had been a patient at Warm Springs.  Today, visits to Warm Springs have become a pilgrimage of sorts for me. 

Rereading The Squire of Warm Springs was a sentimental journey for me.  It has been that and more. The courage and humanity of Franklin Roosevelt remains an inspiration to me. Warm Springs symbolizes a more hopeful past, a past in which our nation was largely unified in fighting fascism, disease and poverty.   History without sentiment is powerless to influence anyone.  The levening in this story is Roosevelt’s tender and practical friendship for the people he knew at Warm Springs -and their affection for a president who was courageous and optimistic.