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The political machinations between Earle Looker and Franklin Roosevelt were doubtless successful; many of Liberty Magazine’s readers were likely convinced that Roosevelt was a healthy, vigorous man with nothing to hide about his disability. But not all were. As the primary season drew near, the whispering campaign again kicked into high gear. The whispering, of course, was tied directly to Roosevelt’s presidential aspirations . As Time reported, “One sure evidence of Governor Roosevelt’s lead toward the nomination was the recent spread of unfavorable stories about his health.”1 Drawing largely on his experiences from the 1928 gubernatorial race, Roosevelt did not take the whispering campaign lying down. Instead, as we document in this chapter and the next, he opted for the one method over which he had direct control: showing his body to the nation’s electorate. If Jim Farley could not quell the whispering interpersonally, if Earle Looker could not stop it in one of the nation’s largest circulation magazines, and if Louis Howe could not put a halt to the rumors and innuendo through his voluminous correspondence, Roosevelt, as was often the case, would take the issue directly to the people, thereby effectively asking them to make a judgment about his fitness for office. With seven years and more of careful preparation, he no doubt felt confident of his body, of what it could not do and what it could. He also had four years of carefully scripted deception behind him in Albany. But Roosevelt’s problems as 1932 dawned were not strictly physical. He also had rhetorical problems: Howe, Col. Edward M. House, and Samuel I. Rosenman were simply not writing very good speeches for the candidate. As was his penchant, Roosevelt went to the universities for help, in this case seeking out a Columbia University political scientist by the name of Raymond Moley. Moley, an Olmsted Falls, Ohio, native, would prove to be a terrific rhetorician, as Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address, among other writings, would attest. Moley had no doubt heard the whispering about Roosevelt’s health. Perhaps he had initially been inclined to believe some of it, as a letter to his 6 A New Deal and a New Body sister Nell suggests. He wrote, “The stories about his illness and its effect upon him are the bunk. Nobody in public life since T. R. [Theodore Roosevelt ] has been so robust, so buoyantly and blatantly healthful as this fellow . He is full of animal spirits. . . . The man’s energy and vitality are astounding.”2 Moley’s face-to-face meeting with the governor had revealed the whispering to be “bunk”; it was a lesson in perception, in embodied conversation, that he would not forget during the campaign. Moley’s optimistic note to his sister was without question influenced by the intoxicating elixir he had experienced in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s first national campaign speech, delivered on April 7: the generally wellreceived “forgotten man” oration. It was Moley’s first major rhetorical effort in what would prove to be a highly successful partnership. Roosevelt began the speech by reminding his listeners that fifteen years earlier, he had answered the call to public duty during World War I and that the “whole Nation mobilized for war, economic, industrial, social, and military resources gathered into a vast unit . . . the scales of ten million men equipped with physical needs and sustained by the realization that behind them were the united efforts of 110,000,000 human beings.” “In my calm judgment,” announced Roosevelt, “the Nation faces today a more grave emergency than in 1917.”3 The call was clear. The great mobilization of World War I was now needed to combat the Great Depression. Roosevelt, like his idol Wilson before him, would lead this impressive mobilization. The grounding of the call to action lay in the symbolic figure of the forgotten man. “These unhappy times,” continued Roosevelt, “call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from bottom up . . . put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”4 Unlike Napoleon, who “lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry,” Roosevelt positioned himself as the responsible head of a people’s army, the champion of average citizens, who were the real sufferers of the depression.5 Roosevelt proposed a pragmatic solution against what he called the...

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