The Nation's Pulse: Monumental Ignorance
Terzian, Philip
THE NATION'S PULSE by Philip Terzian Monumental Ignorance W ash ington, the city of grand boulevards and soaring monuments to nonentities, has just welcomed into its midst a new memorial —bigger...
...Their authority is a memorandum that was found, in 1965, among Felix Frankfurter's papers in which FDR is supposed to have expressed his idea on the subject...
...This will surely appeal to casual visitors: Parents can let their children loose on the The FDR Memorial has precious little to do with one of the most dashing of American presidents...
...46 July 1997 • The American Spectator grounds to run around and jump on the statue of Fala, Roosevelt's Scottish terrier...
...And what a disappointment it is...
...FDR was just as capable of false modesty as anyone, and certainly must have known that another shrine, of infinitely greater tonnage, was apt to be proposed...
...and, as a Democratic president in the 1930's and '40's, was beholden in Congress to the segregationists of his party...
...The best thing anyone can say about the colossal new Reagan federal building in downtown Washington is that it looks like something designed and built in the Roosevelt era...
...Pei's grandiose, bunker-like JFK Library on Boston Harbor...
...The American Spectator July 1997 47...
...Some have argued that FDR saw it as a kind of folly from an English country estate, a sleek pavilion at the other end of the Mall from the White House, visible from his second-floor window...
...I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs...
...Of all the memorable things Roosevelt ever said publicly in the struggle against global tyranny—the arsenal of democracy, a date which will live in infamy, the hand that held the dagger the only words considered fit to be included in the monument (indeed, repeated twice) are his preposterous remarks, on a flood-inspection tour in 1936, that "I have seen war on land and sea...
...he welcomed the opportunity to expand American power, and prosecuted the war with a zeal and belligerence that fortified the Allies until victory was won...
...He was elected to office four times...
...Fifty-two years after his death, the specter of Franklin Roosevelt still drives the founder of the Cato Institute to pronounce him a "lousy president," and prompts Dick Armey, who knows better, to tell reporters that he can't think of anything good to say about FDR...
...It is bad enough that our anti-heroic epoch has seen fit to reduce a giant to pygmy status...
...Instead of ascending a staircase and being bowled over by grandeur—the standard Lincoln Memorial experience—visitors are invited to stroll about a seven-and-a-half-acre theme park, with rough-hewn granite boulders, grassy knolls, random sculpture, undulating pools of water, and symbolic waterfalls...
...The Jefferson Memorial, yet another Roosevelt project, was opened on Jefferson's two-hundredth birthday...
...In FDR's case, however, delay has proved fatal: The new Roosevelt memorial is very much a product of our times, not his, and seeks, as bad history does, to judge him by the standards of a world he wouldn't recognize...
...But it seems authentic, if for no other reason than it bears such a close resemblance to Roosevelt's grave—which he also designed...
...The problem, however, is that the quotation is taken from a speech to the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, an6 44 Alas, the Roosevelt memorial was designed in the Carter era and built in the age of Clinton...
...The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on...
...Both inspired bitter, sometimes savage, opposition in their day...
...When he entered the White House in 1933, the Romanian army was larger than our own...
...As an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, I say this with considerable regret...
...Which is too bad, really, for Rooseveles taste in architecture was decidedly traditional and surprisingly successful...
...Indeed, the tone of the memorial is curiously elegiac, as if in mourning for the world he so urgently transformed: There is a bleak sculpture of three men standing in a bread line, a morbid bas-relief of mourners following FDR's cortege, images of citizens in misfortune and despair...
...As assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, he was several thousand miles from any men with blood running from their wounds, or coughing out their gassed lungs...
...I have seen the agony of mothers and wives...
...He led the nation through two great national crises, and left America and its government very different from when he began...
...A plain marble block was all he wanted, engraved with his name and dates, set in a tiny triangular park behind the National Archives, facing Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Now, Franklin D. Roosevelt was many things, and delighted in appearing to be something he was not, or saying one thing while meaning another...
...And the curious, twisted pattern of the fingers on FDR's right hand is easily explained: In the photograph on which the statue is based, FDR's hand is waving his characteristic cigarette and holder, both neatly excised from the final monument plans...
...I have seen blood running from the wounded...
...PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...He was a skillful politician, to be sure, but above all a dynamic leader, whose style and mastery inspired such disparate figures as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan...
...His views were the conventional attitudes of the day: He approved the separation of the races in the armed forces, and (along with Harry Truman of Missouri) declined to support an anti-lynching bill in the Senate...
...I have seen the dead in the mud...
...A las, the Roosevelt memorial was designed in the Carter era and built in the age of Clinton...
...Even today, the debates in Congress and the states about the size, scope, and character of government are based on principles and precepts he laid down...
...Indeed, Roosevelt and Reagan shared an important trait...
...Contemporary visitors would naturally assume that the allusion to "civil rights" must pertain to black people, as if FDR were calling from the dead to bless affirmative action...
...More insidious is the political agenda...
...One section, for example, features the following sentence: "We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background...
...Or compare his blueprint for the comfortable, Dutch-style FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York, with I.M...
...But what has any of this to do with Franklin Roosevelt...
...Even if you don't believe, as I do, that Roosevelt was the greatest president of the twentieth century (followed by his distant cousin Theodore), he was certainly the most important, for good or ill...
...I have seen children starving...
...There is no sign of the ardor and gaiety, the sheer enthusiasm and joy, which he brought to the presidency—and which sustained the nation through the Depression years, inspired the world in the war against Nazi evil, and has served as a model for successors ever since...
...Roosevelt was not dragged into fighting...
...Of course, as presidential monuments go, fifty-two years is not a long time...
...Only this: That FDR, whose father was born during the administration of John Quincy Adams, was not just a great liberal president, but a 1997-style liberal as well, thoroughly up-to-date and doctrinally sound...
...The fox stole that Eleanor Roosevelt habitually wore—with a dead head dangling over her shoulder—was removed from her statue's model at the behest of animal rights organizations...
...17 Roosevelt was referring to the civil rights and liberties of recent immigrants, not African Americans...
...FDR, as Eleanor ruefully noted, was a great humanitarian but no champion of the Negro race...
...The Washington Monument was begun a half century after the General's death, and not finished till the late 188o's...
...I hate war...
...The discreet, neo-classical Jefferson Memorial was largely of his own invention...
...Still, he was no doubt reluctant to emulate Douglas MacArthur and arrange his own mausoleum...
...when he died, in 1945, the United States was the world's greatest power, which it remains...
...But a pacifist he wasn't...
...But from 1914 on he was an ardent interventionist, much to the despair of his pacifist boss, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and the irritation of Woodrow Wilson...
...Of course, this is a second-hand version of Roosevelt's notion, transcribed by one of American history's greatest courtiers...
...There is only a theme park, with interactive gift shop, to teach us that even the greatest of presidents are victims of admirers who don't know much about them...
...the memorial plainly misrepresents Roosevelt as well...
...Selected" is the operative word here...
...and joggers will splash themselves thankfully on their way back to work...
...but both acted and reacted with such gallantry and self-possession — seemingly taunting their detractors with good humor—that they left them muttering in the dust...
...The memorial grounds are divided into four outdoor sections, each representing one presidential term, and the grim, granite dividing walls are plastered with selected quotations...
...As president, FDR was one of the few Americans who clearly recognized the menace of Hitler in the years leading up to World War II, and was frustrated by the nation's resolute neutrality, reflected in the laws Congress readily adopted...
...Even the silliest forms of political correctness are observed...
...Some critics of the new memorial have complained that its very existence violates Roosevelt's wishes...
...None of this is in evidence at the Roosevelt monument, and visitors are left with a picture of a plaintive, reluctant politician who would rather be conserving natural resources than building Grand Coulee Dam, or defending democracy, or waving his cigarette holder at his adversaries...
...The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated by Warren G. Harding some fifty-seven years after the death of Father Abraham...
...Even worse, however, is the memorial's treatment of FDR as war president...
...For no matter how you view these things, an FDR monument was inevitable...
...It is to Roosevelt's great credit that he ultimately defied Congress, and misled the American people, by engaging in an "undeclared war" in the North Atlantic, secretly bolstering the British and provoking the Germans—actions which would lead to impeachment nowadays...
...THE NATION'S PULSE by Philip Terzian Monumental Ignorance W ash ington, the city of grand boulevards and soaring monuments to nonentities, has just welcomed into its midst a new memorial —bigger and more expensive and ambitious than most—to one who really deserves commemoration...
...Roosevelt may well have anticipated the problem...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
