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Geoffrey Champion Ward (born 1940) is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written.
When the polio virus attacked FDR’s body at Campobello in August 1921, he lost use of his hands, arms, and legs, as well as control over vital functions.
The Hills were among 51,391 guests who traipsed across the White House lawn that year, and Geoffrey C. Ward, a Roosevelt historian and trustee of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum,...
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Crippled by polio, FDR took great pains to manage public perception of his disability. But the Secret Service likely never saw the tourist in the crowd with a film camera.
Film footage from 1935 offers a rare glimpse of President Franklin D. Roosevelt walking, in a show of extreme effort that he went to great lengths to hide from the public eye.
Fred Hill of New York was attending the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House with his family on April 22, 1935, when he used his movie camera to capture the moment Roosevelt emerged from the White House onto the South Portico. In the short, silent film Hill shot that day, Roosevelt, who usually used a wheelchair after being stricken with polio some 14 years earlier, can be seen walking painstakingly along the portico with the assistance of his bodyguard, before stopping at the railing of the balcony to wave to the crowd.
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York released the black-and-white 16-mm film footage this week after it was donated by Hill’s grandson, Richard Hill of Reno, Nevada. “I’ve kind of jealously guarded this stuff,” Richard Hill told the Washington Post. But now, he said, it “needs to go where it belongs . . . It’s an important part of history that almost got away.”
As a 39-year-old rising politician, Roosevelt first showed symptoms of infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis, at his family’s beloved Campobello Island retreat in New Brunswick, Canada, in the summer of 1921. At the time, there was no known cure for polio, and it often led to full or partial paralysis. After his diagnosis, Roosevelt withdrew from public life for a time to rehabilitate at his home in Hyde Park, New York, and also traveled to work with physiotherapists at Warm Springs, Georgia. When the resort there was struggling financially, Roosevelt bought the place for $200,000 and turned it into a rehab facility for himself and other polio sufferers.
After Roosevelt resumed his political career, winning the governorship of New York in 1928 and the presidency for the first time in 1932, he took great pains to manage public perception of his disability. Strict White House rules prevented people from taking pictures of or filming him either in his wheelchair or being helped in and out of cars. Roosevelt also worked very hard to develop a way of walking by using heavy leg braces and a cane, and leaning on someone else’s arm—a struggle he also did not want to be preserved on film.
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- Sarah Pruitt
Sep 12, 2014 · Geoffrey C. Ward had to cut away from watching a presidential news conference to talk to a reporter about “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” the new Ken Burns documentary series he wrote.
Jan 1, 2013 · Geoffrey Ward, another historian with a history of polio himself, viewed F.D.R.'s work with polio residents of Warm Springs as pioneering in the application of rehabilitation techniques, and the acknowledgment of the need for treatment of the emotional and psychological aspects of the conditions within rehabilitation [3].
Oct 31, 2003 · Why should we think that they couldn't recognize polio, which they saw all the time?" said Geoffrey C. Ward, a historian who wrote a two-volume biography of Roosevelt's pre-presidential years.
