Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

Mar-a-Lago. It’s a magical place. Bedecked in marble colonnades and crystal chandeliers, the so-called Winter White House affords members of the 1 percent an opportunity to brush shoulders with the president’s senior advisers and Cabinet members and even, on occasion, to capture a glimpse of national security deliberations that ordinarily occur in the White House Situation Room. On Friday, when President Donald Trump hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping at his resort for a “very difficult” summit, this unusual marriage of private and public space will find its ultimate consummation.

The particular spectacle of Mar-a-Lago drives the president’s liberal opponents mad, but Trump is by no means the first American president to decamp often for “winter” or “southern” White Houses. Ulysses S. Grant frequented Long Branch, New Jersey, where his family kept a summer cottage. Woodrow Wilson also preferred the Jersey Shore; his staff worked out of an office building in Asbury Park during many of the summer months. Harry Truman traveled often to Key West, where a modest naval officer’s home served as his “Little White House.” Teddy Roosevelt had Sagamore Hill; John Kennedy, his family’s compounds in Palm Beach and Hyannis Port; and Ronald Reagan, his California ranch.


Only one other president’s executive outpost, however, was also his own private resort. That distinction falls to Franklin Roosevelt, who built a sprawling facility in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he regularly escaped the pressures of Washington, D.C.

In some ways Warm Springs wasn’t so different from Mar-a-Lago. Both compounds had swimming pools, a golf course, a dining hall and private quarters for the president. Both became the weekend nerve center of the federal government. Both relied on contributions from wealthy individuals.

There, however, the similarities end.

FDR built his club to care for people stricken by polio—many of them poor, and most of them children; he reveled in their companionship. Warm Springs was where FDR developed a deep and abiding empathy with those who had been left behind by life, and in some ways, it was the birthplace of his liberal outlook.

Trump, on the other hand, charges wealthy guests $200,000 for the opportunity to commingle with his very wealthy inner circle. His club seems to celebrate the privilege of those born or arrived to lots of money—an ethos that has come to characterize his short tenure in office as well. Morally and ideologically, the two resorts couldn’t be more different, and they represent two very different presidencies. It’s the New Deal vs. Make America Great Again.



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Franklin Roosevelt first happened upon Warm Springs in October 1924. Three years earlier, the former assistant secretary of the Navy and Democratic vice presidential nominee contracted polio, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. The impoverished Southern town was “not much beyond the horse-and-buggy stage” remembered the manager of the town’s one decrepit hotel. But like other polio victims, FDR hoped that its warm spring waters would help him regain use of his legs. It was a dream to which he clung for the remainder of his life.

Though he did not overcome his paralysis, Warm Springs helped a deeply depressed Roosevelt regain his confidence. His frequent presence at the hotel gained national attention, and soon the crumbling resort attracted other polio patients who similarly hoped that its warm waters would aid their recovery. Biographers generally agree that by his personal struggle, and through his intimate contact with other disease victims, FDR—formerly a callow man of no outward liberal conviction—came to develop a deep sense of empathy with people less fortunate than himself.

In 1926, Roosevelt purchased the aging Meriwether Inn—including the main hotel, 3,000 acres of undeveloped land, several crumbling cottages, a large pond, and several warm spring pools—for just over $200,000, a sum representing roughly two-thirds of his personal trust (his mother, Sara, still retained most of the family’s real estate and investments). It was a decision that deeply distressed both his wife, Eleanor, and Sara, who for perhaps the only time in their fraught association agreed: Franklin was squandering his children’s legacy. It didn’t help that the Roosevelts’ personal cabin was so threadbare that Eleanor could “look through the cracks and see daylight.”

But FDR had grand designs. He poured money into the endeavor, upgrading the facilities and hiring a medical staff to work with polio patients. It was both a real resort and a recovery center. “Our rate is $42 a week,” roughly $600 in today’s money, Roosevelt informed a fellow disease victim. “This includes board, lodging, medical and therapeutic treatment, pool charges, etc.—in fact, everything except your traveling expenses and cigarette money.” Of course, those who could pay did. Those who couldn’t did not. The future president established a fund to cover costs for indigent patients, and when the fund ran dry, he instructed the resort’s staff to send the bills directly to his home in Hyde Park, New York.

As governor of New York and as president, Roosevelt retired frequently to Warm Springs, where in 1933 he built a modest home—“astonishingly small and simple,” the New York Times later observed—for a cost of under $9,000 (just under $175,000 in 2017 dollars). A ranch house that “could easily have been built by a struggling insurance salesman or an accountant,” it had just three small bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a study. Yet it was there that the president, often in the company of his chief advisers, “made decisions that affected the world,” both during the Great Depression and World War II.

FDR rejoiced in his role as the host-in-chief at Warm Springs. He rode around the grounds and into the small town in his specially outfitted Model T, with hand controls substituting for gas and brake pedals. On Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving evenings, he presided gleefully over dinners in the main dining hall, surrounded by smiling polio victims—many of them children. He swam with the other guests, broke bread with them and invited them back for reunions. Cocktail hour on the veranda of his cottage was normally reserved for White House staff, though when foreign diplomats or American politicians visited, they, too, were included.

Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest White House aide, described a typical retreat in the late 1930s. The president slept late and took breakfast in bed at 8:30. An hour later, Hopkins arrived to discuss overnight developments. The two men would consult by telephone with the State Department. Other assistants would amble in and out with briefings. At noon, FDR, Hopkins and Missy LeHand, the president’s secretary and confidante, would take luncheon alone at the cottage (“the service incidentally is as bad as the food”). Roosevelt would then survey the property, chat with guests, and return to his “Little White House” by 4:30 to dictate letters and telegrams. Cocktails began around 6, and dinner followed at 7, after which FDR retired to his study with his beloved stamp collection while LeHand and Hopkins played Chinese checkers in the living room. By 10, Roosevelt was asleep. It was a comforting routine that afforded him rest from the pressures of office.

Roosevelt’s original intention was to operate two endeavors: the hotel and recovery center for polio patients, and a proper, for-profit resort for wealthy vacationers who would (like members of Mar-a-Lago) pay steep membership fees, build their own “cottages” on reserved land, and enjoy access to luxury dining facilities, a 3,000-acre shooting reserve, riding trails and stables, and a golf course. The for-profit business would subsidize the polio treatment center. That plan never came fully to fruition—Roosevelt would have greater projects on which to focus in the coming decade and a half—though FDR did commission the construction of a nine-hole golf course.

Instead, in 1927 Roosevelt chartered the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, which over the coming decade gradually purchased the property and facilities—thus replenishing FDR’s personal fortune—and invested in new capital improvements, health care and rehabilitative services, and subsidies for poor patients. As governor of New York and even as president, Roosevelt personally solicited donations for the foundation from wealthy Americans. Edsel Ford, the auto company scion, wrote a $25,000 check, a transaction that today might raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest.



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Much like FDR, Trump appears to enjoy the pageantry associated with operating the vacation resort that he bought well before his election to the presidency. He plays golf with Mar-a-Lago members and the club pro. Greets guests in the main dining room. Presides over Thanksgiving dinner. Poses for photographs with a smiling bride and groom whose wedding fortunately overlaps with a presidential weekend visit.

But therein ends any similarity between presidents Roosevelt and Trump.

Warm Springs was where Roosevelt learned, figuratively, how to walk a mile in the shoes of someone less fortunate, even as he struggled—and failed—to walk by the power of his own legs. It was the place where he could be himself; he could use his wheelchair in the presence of other polio victims, who did not expect him to keep up the arduous and painful artifice of “walking” with locked, steel leg braces, his arms supported by guard rails or body men. He sunk his fortune into the endeavor and welcomed children whose parents could not afford to pay $42 each week for care and lodging. When he solicited funds from wealthy donors, he did so to keep the doors open.

By contrast, Mar-a-Lago is a playground for the wealthy—where Trump, the son of an outer-borough developer of middle-class housing tracts, revels in the adulation of the country’s privileged and elite. Its opulence screams money, power and entitlement. Membership costs $200,000 each year, and the proceeds benefit the Trump family directly.

In effect, one might say that the difference between Warm Springs and Mar-a-Lago embodies the difference between two administrations, one of which endeavored to provide a safety net to the country’s most vulnerable citizens, the other of which celebrates the avarice and enrichment of a small, privileged few. Mar-a-Lago may be grander in physical scale than FDR’s Little White House at Warm Springs. But it’s smaller in both heart and spirit.