--- title: The Myth of Roosevelt's Wheelchair | TIME description: Roosevelt Historian Matthew Pressman debunks the myth around the newly discovered footage of FDR in his wheelchair. canonical: https://time.com/video/QzmyWKIR/ og:title: The Myth of Roosevelt's Wheelchair og:description: Roosevelt Historian Matthew Pressman debunks the myth around the newly discovered footage of FDR in his wheelchair. og:url: https://time.com/video/QzmyWKIR/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/QzmyWKIR/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Myth of Roosevelt's Wheelchair twitter:description: Roosevelt Historian Matthew Pressman debunks the myth around the newly discovered footage of FDR in his wheelchair. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/QzmyWKIR/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Myth of Roosevelt's Wheelchair > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Myth of Roosevelt's Wheelchair [Watch (HLS stream): The Myth of Roosevelt's Wheelchair](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/QzmyWKIR.m3u8) (2:09)  _Published 2013-07-12. Roosevelt Historian Matthew Pressman debunks the myth around the newly discovered footage of FDR in his wheelchair._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:38 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Love & Money: Myths About Couples and Credit](/video/bxzh8jaw/) ### Love & Money: Myths About Couples and Credit [Roosevelts: Able-Bodied](/video/qxdcBKsy/) ### Roosevelts: Able-Bodied [FDR in a Wheelchair](/video/6xxq0Zkm/) ### FDR in a Wheelchair --- ## Transcript >> He is being pushed in his wheelchair at Pearl Harbor back in 1944. You can see his hat. >> This recently discovered film clip of President Franklin D. Roosevelt being pushed in a wheelchair has become an object of considerable public interest. >> Rare footage of President Franklin Roosevelt showing the disability he kept secret from the American people. >> An NBC Nightly new report on the discovery stated that there was a gentleman's agreement between FDR and the press corps to hide the extent of his disability. This notion of a gentleman's agreement has long been the conventional historical wisdom, but it's not accurate. As the newspaper industry journal editor and publisher reported in 1936, if secret service agents saw a photographer taking a picture of Roosevelt, say, getting out of his car, it would seize the camera and tear up the film. A 1946 survey of the White House Photography Corps confirmed this, finding that anyone the secret service caught taking banned photographs had " their cameras emptied, their films exposed to sunlight, or their plates smashed ." The supposed gentleman's agreement was even less binding to some period's most powerful publishers who opposed Roosevelt politically. In 1937, Henry Luce's Life Magazine published a photo spread which included this shot of Roosevelt in a wheelchair. It's taken from a distance, but the caption clearly states that this is President Roosevelt. It is true that mentions of Roosevelt's wheelchair in the press were extremely rare. Mostly, news coverage depicted him as someone who had courageous triumphed over polio. This was the image that FDR and his advisers wished to project and they largely succeeded, but the myth of the gentleman's agreement between the press and FDR persisted over time. Its likely source is our tendency to romanticize the past as a simpler time. 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