Franklin D. Roosevelt As Chief Executive of the Warm Springs Foundation

FDR contracted polio in 1921 at his family's summer home Campobello. Paralyzed from the waist down at the age of 39, he spent the next three years searching for any means possible to walk again, without success. Frustrated, and with his promising political career seeming all but over, he received a letter from his New York friend, George Foster Peabody, who told him of remarkable improvements a young man with polio had made by swimming in the warm springs at his Georgia resort. FDR first came by train from Columbus, Georgia to the Meriwether Inn in Warm Springs in October 1924. Soon the success he enjoyed in the Warm Springs, being able to stand on his own and strengthened leg and hip muscles, attracted local and national publicity. Other polio survivors began arriving from all over. FDR loved Warm Springs, and in 1926 he purchased the resort for some $200,000, two-thirds of his personal fortune. He immediately began operating it and in 1927 formed The Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to do so. In July 1927, he would officially turn over the resort and facility to the Foundation. But in the interim, he was already paying its bills from the Foundation bank account.   

Autograph Letter Signed on his business letterhead, On train to N.Y., May 8, 1927, to Benjamin F. Crowley, an associate in his law firm. “Will you please send a check from the Foundation for $4,600 by mail on Tuesday, made out to ‘G.T. Curtis, Manager, or James T. Goode, Accountant,’ Warm Springs, Georgia. This will take care of bills while I am away from Warm Springs for the next ten days. Will see you next week.” FDR is rather scarce in ALS form, this being our first in a decade.     

FDR reentered politics and successfully ran for Governor of New York in 1928, leaping from being chief executive of the Foundation to chief executive of that state. Four years later he would become chief executive of the United States.