Monumental correctness and the FDR Memorial

...Lincoln had to wait fifty-seven years, and Roosevelt has had to wait fifty-two years...

...The one exception is the work of George Segal—three bronzes entitled "The Appalachian Farm Couple," "The Depression Bread Line," and "The Fireside Chat...

...On April 13, 1943, two years before his death, FDR triumphantly observed at the dedication of architect John Russell Pope's Pantheoninspired Jefferson Memorial, "We judge him by the application of his philosophy to the circumstances of his life...

...Sitting by the basin, I was struck with the quietness of Washington, even during the tourist season...

...I hate war...

...Unlike the other presidential memorials in Washington, it is not going to be a site one can point out at a distance...

...Robert Graham's bronze relief of 98 • DISSENT Notebook FDR triumphantly waving his top hat at his first inaugural, which opens the memorial, like Leonard Baskin's thirty-foot relief "The Funeral Cortege," which closes it, is deftly done, but provides nothing that we haven't seen in newsreels and photos of the time...

...The rest not only fails to catch his complexity and willingness to court controversy—" I welcome their hatred," he proudly declared in 1936 of those he considered "the forces of selfishness...

...This invisibility is, however, the only aspect of his memorial that would truly please FDR...

...It captures neither the jauntiness of FDR in 1933 nor the haunting thinness of FDR at the end of his life...

...A family visiting the memorial is far more likely to take home a Fala souvenir than a copy of Joseph Lash's massive biography, Eleanor and Franklin, or a copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of the Roosevelts during World War II, No Ordinary Time...

...The effect of such omissions isn't simply misplaced tact...

...Unfortunately, what lies behind the Fala FALL • 1997...

...With the FDR Memorial, the problem is compounded by the choice of quotations...

...But there are so many of them, and they have been designed to fall so heavily on the rocks below, that they distract attention from whatever is at hand...

...The project dates back to 1946, when Congress introduced a resolution authorizing the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission...

...The newspaper photos of Clinton on crutches, towered over by a seated FDR, were moving, an implicit reminder of how much FDR had to overcome to exercise the leadership he did...

...In the case of the memorial, which has aroused intense protest from the handicapped because it failed to include a statue of FDR in his wheelchair, it is a desire that has been made still worse by the belief that these days the best way to be pleasing is with a massive blandness that converts FDR into a politically correct nineties liberal...

...But what ultimately shapes the quotations is the wish to make FDR sound like a politician attuned to the values of today's America...

...The star of the shop is FDR's Scottie, Fala...

...But a half hour later, standing on the other side of the Tidal Basin, I realized I could not see the FDR Memorial...

...Missing is the notion that FDR had to overcome severe opposition and did not hesitate to characterize the entrenched wealthy who opposed him as "money changers" and "economic royalists," bent on trying to convince the electorate that "economic slavery was nobody's business...

...If the sculpture scattered throughout the Roosevelt Memorial were powerful enough, then the message that the walls deliver might at least be neutralized...

...The memorial is by contrast noisy...

...They are typical Segal, with their emphasis on isolated men and women, worn down and made anonymous by the society around them...

...Presidential memorials have historically taken a long time to erect...

...But in the context of the 1930s, they capture the destructiveness of the Great Depression and reflect how—by virtue of his voice and the radio—FDR was able to unite people who were otherwise isolated from each other...

...It is as if one were in a museum and the descriptions on the walls took up more space than the pictures on display...

...It is hidden by the cherry trees in front of it...

...Most of all, it fails to capture the context of his life...

...They are there to provide solace to the visitor...

...It isn't, moreover, simply the right that is entitled to protest the political correctness of the memorial...

...FDR deserves a memorial that would help us remember that the same was true of him...

...Given the nature of the Washington tourist trade, the Fala shelf is a shrewd marketing idea...

...The date of the speech is left out, and so is the fact that it does not refer to World War II...

...In virtually every room there are waterfalls...

...But going through the seven-and-a-half-acre memorial— it is nearly three football fields in length— is a surprisingly unmoving experience...

...But the pathos that Segal's sculpture casts over the memorial's second room cannot undo what surrounds it...

...For liberals, too, the memorial's walls tell a misleading story...

...For FDR, that invisibility would, I think, be welcome...

...Even Maya Lin's brilliantly successful Vietnam Memorial, with its descending black granite wall, hasn't escaped criticism...

...I have seen cities destroyed...

...It was eighty-six years before Washington got his...

...It is a distortion of the moral outrage of a president who spoke openly of the "slaughters of Warsaw, Lidice, Kharov" as well as the "torture and murder by the Japanese" of noncombatants, while warning that the United States "will persevere in its efforts to rescue the victims of brutality of the Nazis and Japs...

...Three years later, on May 2, 1997, the memorial was opened to the public in a ceremony in which President Clinton, on crutches as a result of a fall, stood in front of a statue of FDR and observed, "My fellow Americans, every time you think of Franklin Roosevelt, put aside your doubts, become more American like him...

...I want it to be plain, without any ornamentation," he said...

...For FDR the waiting has added little, however, except a price tag of forty-eight million dollars...

...In 1978, his plan was approved by both the FDR Memorial Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts, and finally in 1994 the building was begun by the William V. Walsh Construction Company of Rockville, Maryland...

...What we get in a room ostensibly dealing with FDR in the 1940s is a passage from a 1936 campaign speech he gave in Chautauqua, New York, in which he observed of World War I: "I have seen the dead in the mud...

...The presentation of FDR as war president, as Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post have argued, is typical of the memorial's sensibility...

...In the case of the newest Washington monument, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, nothing is more apparent than our difficulty in finding the right form to memorialize a president...

...The FDR Memorial, triangled between the two, seemed to be in a perfect location...

...The core of the memorial consists of a series of twelve-foot-high granite walls that divide it into four open-air rooms that correspond to each of FDR's terms...

...But rather than contesting the sensibility of the memorial's walls, the sculpture harmonizes with it...

...10017 FALL • 1997...

...It's simply big, and paired as it is with a smaller sculpture of Fala, it ends up being folksy...

...It is these walls, adorned with quotations from FDR and constructed from six thousand tons of carnelian granite (enough to erect an eighty-story building), that guide the visitor through the memorial and spell out its character, despite the fact that the work of different sculptors—Robert Graham, George Segal, Neil Estern, and Leonard Baskin—is featured in each room...

...But in such applying we come to understand that his life was given for those deeper values that persist throughout all time...

...ARE YOU MOVING...

...Here one can buy The Official Fala Coloring Book, The True Story of Fala, Fala the White House Dog pins, and the Fala, FDR's Friend, backpack...

...We carefully did not deal with the question of Nazism or fascism or any one country," Halprin told the press on the day the memorial opened...

...The commission became official in 1955, and in 1959 Congress formally approved a site in West Potomac Park for the memorial...

...They give a sense that for the New Deal to succeed all FDR had to do was rouse voter compassion for the one-third of a nation that was "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished...

...Four years before he died, he told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that he would be happy with a memorial the size of his desk...

...The key to what awaits the visitor is reflected in the gift shop, a one-story building in front of the memorial's entrance...

...Even the statue that has drawn the most attention, Neil Estern's ninefoot sculpture of a seated FDR, is strangely bland...

...There was Egyptian obelisk (the Washington Monument), traditional classic (the Jefferson Memorial), and standard equestrian (St...

...Then in 1974, after several design competitions, San Francisco architect Lawrence Halprin was chosen to design the memorial...

...I visited the memorial on a hot June Saturday, and to cool off I walked down to the Tidal Basin to rest under the Japanese cherry trees...

...The result is that by the time one gets to the end and encounters Estern's statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, looking like a Norman Rockwell grandmother, it is a relief to be done...

...As I sat beneath the cherry trees and stared across the Tidal Basin, I could see the Washington Monument on my left and the Jefferson Memorial on my right...

...They include those every school child learns: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny...

...Designer Lawrence Halprin has acknowledged that the omissions here, as in the decision to avoid Roosevelt's characterization of the attack on Pearl Harbor as "a date that will live in infamy," were motivated by a sensitivity toward former enemies...

...Second-class publications are not forwarded by your Post Office, but returned (at senders' expense) to be repackaged and reshipped: . . . Three postage payments, for us, plus weeks of delay To avoid this, and help DISSENT, please notify us one month in advance of your change of address...

...97 Notebook marketing strategy is also what lies behind the aesthetics of the memorial: an excessive desire to please...

...Gaudens's William Tecumseh Sherman...

...Despite its broad acceptance by Vietnam veterans and their families, critics have forced her stark memorial to share space with a flagpole and statues of infantrymen and female nurses...

...But in the age of postmodernism, the old monuments won't do...

...Except for the one next to a wall dealing with the Tennessee Valley Authority, they don't, however, have any direct historical link to FDR's life...

...The problem is that there is no consensus on what to substitute for the monument design we have relied on for most of our history...

...They seem dated, if not trite...

...The sense of being dwarfed and guided by the walls is set from the start, and no matter how hard one tries, there is no escaping their dominance...

...Franklin Roosevelt was in essence the father of modern America, and as much as anyone, he established the politics of social caring that nowadays represents us at our best...

...Send both old and new addresses to: DISSENT, 521 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y...