The spring is 88 degrees Fahrenheit, year round. My own personal favorite water temperature is 86, but I could live with 88.
Roosevelt discovered this place in 1924 and died here on April 12, 1945. He was having his portrait painted. The picture is still here. It’s called the “unfinished portrait”.
FDR made 41 trips to this place. He thought the warm water was helping to rehabilitate his legs from the polio he had contracted. He spent the bulk of his personal fortune purchasing the springs and establishing a rehabilitation center for children here.
The small rustic cottage was called “the little White House”. The sentry booth for the company of marine guards is nearby. Thirteen of the marines who guarded him here died in WWII. Four of them died on Iwo Jima, securing a base for crippled B-29s.
The cottage is very small. It has four twin beds in three bedrooms, a small kitchen and a living room filled with books. There are martini glasses in the pantry. The chair he died in is in the living room.
In early 1941, Roosevelt made his “four freedoms” speech”. The freedoms from want and fear went a little beyond the ideas laid down in The Constitution.
“In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.
The second is Freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way - everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”
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