Videos

WARM SPRINGS (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

60 minutes, produced 2005 by HBO.

WARM SPRINGS is a true but little-known story about the physical and spiritual evolution of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

Left a paraplegic from polio at the age of 39, in 1921, WARM SPRINGS follows Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he seeks out a "miracle" cure in the backwoods of rural Georgia. As his wife Eleanor takes up the mantle of the public Roosevelt, Franklin battles the stigma of polio and encounters those affected not just by disability, but by poverty, illiteracy and racism. In time he comes to learn that though he may never walk again, he can still lead. In the health spa Warm Springs, with help from a devoted therapist and eventually, his chief aide and wife, a future four-term president finds his personal and political soul.

WARM SPRINGS is an inspiring true story of adversity faced and overcome. It chronicles the trials and ultimate triumphs of a privileged man whose life veers unexpectedly off course, only to find that the detour becomes the source of his greatness.

In 1921, before he had run for either governor of New York or president, 39-year- old Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a future of unlimited success. But that same year he contracted polio, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. At the time there was no known cause or cure for polio. The practice at that time was to hide anyone with the disability away from the public eye. Many believed that if a person contracted polio, it was due to a moral failing - and God was punishing them.

WARM SPRINGS follows Roosevelt's story from the heady times before he contracted polio through the initial phases of his affliction, subsequent despair, and eventual rebirth. Roosevelt found hope after hearing about a young polio victim who learned to walk again after swimming in the waters of a health spa near Atlanta, Georgia. He moved to Warm Springs in 1924, and his initial cynicism about the pitiable patients was gradually replaced by empathy, optimism and inspiration. There he found the will to head back to public life. Four years later, Roosevelt won the first of four elected terms as president.

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