Reading the body in the text: FDR's 1932 speech to the democratic national convention

Abstract

Roosevelt's disability, coupled with popular reactions to it, informs a reading of two pivotal events that transpired on July 2, 1932: Roosevelt's precedent breaking flight to the Democratic National Convention and his acceptance speech. While the flight drew the nation's attention to his ostensibly healthy body, the speech, by subtly inculcating references to his body, functioned to obfuscate and even deny the extent of Roosevelt's disability. Such bodily allusions also cast Herbert Hoover and other Republican leaders as physically unfit to lead the nation. Incorporating both the visual and the verbal, the “drama that Roosevelt so carefully staged” can be productively read as a rhetorical event, scripted to call attention to his healthy body.