Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Shangri‐La: foreshadowing the Independent Living Movement in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1926–1945

Abstract

American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is well known to have disguised and minimized his disability in his role as a political leader. Less well known is the remarkable nature of the colony he established for people with disabilities from polio in Warm Springs, Georgia in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The colony at Warm Springs represents a unique historical community in which disability was not stigmatized; where people with disabilities controlled their own resources and their own lives; and where the medical model of disability was repudiated. As such, the Warm Springs community represents a remarkable period and place in disability history that warrants continued study. New evidence drawn from the archives of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York and the personal scrapbooks of former residents of the Warm Springs colony provides further support for the theory that FDR’s Warm Springs colony represented an early precursor to the philosophies and values promoted by the Independent Living Movement that emerged 50 years later. The Warm Springs colony offered an unprecedented approach to rehabilitation and independent living for people with disabilities from polio in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and because of this provides an invaluable lesson from history that deserves ongoing attention.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, for the award of a 2003 Beeke–Levy Fellowship, which provided the necessary support for conducting research in the national archives there. Enormous thanks are also given to Mike Shadix, librarian and archivist at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Georgia, for all of his help and guidance in this research. I am particularly grateful to George Moore and Lynn Longbottom Rice, residents of the Warm Springs rehabilitation community when they were children, for their interest in and assistance with my ongoing research on this remarkable place and its people.