We are in a grand vacation home on Campobello Island off the coast of Northern Maine.

It is the early morning of August 11, 1921, and a 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt is awakening to horrible,

painful aches throughout his body.

At first, he supposed it was fatigue and stiffness from all the swimming and sailing, the usual activities here on the island.

But now the symptoms and a worsening fever were debilitating.

The viral contagion he'd contracted, polio myelitis, polio, would overtake him that summer,

eventually paralyzing his legs and altering the course of his life forever.

But it would also change the course of the United States and the world. Hi everybody welcome to American history.

I'm Don Wildman.

One interesting way to view American history is as a long series of before and afters.

There is pre-revolution and post, the antebellum period and then the civil war.

There is American neutrality in World War II and then there's Pearl Harbor.

It's part of the fabric of this nation that there is one thing, rather definitely, and

then there is another.

And when that pivot happens, sadly, more often than not, it's paid for in human suffering, if not outright tragedy.

But this phenomenon is not so much the case with American political leadership.

American leaders tend to exist in one camp or the other,

conservative or liberal most generally,

and for better or worse, their service to a certain cause is rewarded by re-election, by a voting

constituency that sees them sticking to their guns and digging in their heels.

But in the case of one giant of American governance,

one of our greatest presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

...