During his lifetime, FDR tried to hide the fact that he couldn’t walk. But thanks to the relentless pressure of disabled activists, his “splendid deception,” as one historian called it, will be unmasked. Showing perhaps more sensitivity to the politics of the moment than to historical nuance, President Clinton last week announced that he would back legislation requiring the Roosevelt Memorial to display a statue of the late president sitting in a wheelchair. His intervention gave Washington a respite from its periodic battles over the proper way to celebrate the national heritage. That is, until the next fight breaks out.
Memorializing FDR would appear to be a straightforward proposition. So, too, would erecting a monument to the great war FDR helped win. In the year 2000, a World War II memorial is scheduled to open on the Washington Mall, not far from FDR’s memorial. Both the man and the war were fairly unambiguous high points in American history. Their monuments should serve to remind us of an era of unified purpose and grand design. But the struggles to build the FDR and World War II memorials tell as much about the interest-group politics of today as they do about past glories.
Building monuments has never been a simple undertaking in Washington. During the construction of the Washington Monument, which took much of the 19th century to complete, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party tried to blow up a marble block donated by the pope. FDR himself did not want a massive memorial. A block of marble “about the size of my desk” would do, he said. The first two designs were duds (critic Tom Wolfe described one as “Instant Stonehenge”), and for three decades Congress failed to provide any funding. Finally, the $48 million FDR memorial–four open-air rooms depicting him at various stages of his life–is ready to be dedicated in a 7i-acre park between the Tidal Basin and the Potomac. Because FDR used leg braces to stand in public and rarely revealed his disability, none of the three statues of FDR show him in a wheelchair. The polio that left him unable to walk for the last 23 years of his life is only briefly mentioned. As a result, scores of wheelchair activists announced they planned to be arrested for trying to disrupt the dedication ceremony. Adding up the disabled vote and eager to avoid a messy confrontation, Clinton stepped in at the last moment. If FDR “were alive today,” Clinton declared, “he would insist on being shown in his wheelchair.” In order to keep the pressure on Congress, the disabled activists were still threatening at the weekend to demonstrate.
Visual conversation: The World War II memorial is not as far along as FDR’s, but its progress promises to be just as fractious. Some architects have sniffed that the design unveiled last winter –a plaza flanked by twin crescents of 40-foot-high columns in front of two giant earth berms–looks like something Mussolini might have commissioned. Others protest that the site is all wrong. The memorial will sit astride the Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Sen. Bob Kerrey says the memorial would ruin the sightlines and disrupt the magnificent sweep of the Mall. Thomas Jefferson scholar Joseph Ellis (“American Sphinx”) protested on The New York Times op-ed page that the memorial would interrupt the visual “conversation” between Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson, whose monuments create an “American Trinity.”
The constant second-guessing is a little exasperating–except that the critics do have some good points. FDR may have wanted to hide his disability, but the courage he showed in overcoming polio should be made plain to see. World War II was huge and monstrous, but that doesn’t mean its memorial should be. The colonnade could be scaled down to fit the tranquillity of the setting–or moved to a better site. That may require splitting the difference, but FDR, who had to make many life-and-death compromises during World War II, would have understood.
