Even as President Clinton officially opened the Franklin Roosevelt memorial last Friday in Washington, the great controversy raged: the memorial contains no statue of F.D.R. in a wheelchair. Should it?
The arguments pro and con are by now well known. One side points out that when a man has over 35,000 photographs taken of him and exactly two show him in a wheelchair, we can fairly conclude that he was intent upon concealing his disability. How odd, then, to honor a man by portraying him precisely opposite to the way he wanted to be seen.
The other side argues that Roosevelt was merely reflecting the prejudices of his time. He needed to hide his disability to achieve high office. Had he lived today, he would wear his wheels proudly.
I myself made the first argument in a column last June. On reflection, however, the whole debate seems to miss the point. The very question of what Roosevelt would have wanted makes no sense. It depends on which Roosevelt. If the real Roosevelt, President of the United States, 1933-45, the answer is obvious: He would not--he did not--want his "splendid deception" undone.
And if by Roosevelt we mean Roosevelt today, i.e., a Roosevelt who had absorbed all the self-revelatory cultural conventions of our time, well then, of course he would bare everything. He would go on Oprah, indeed not just in a wheelchair but hand in hand with Lucy Mercer.
The point is not what some imaginary F.D.R. would want, a question both indeterminate and unanswerable. The point is, Which of these competing ideals--the restraint and reticence of the historical F.D.R., vs. the self-revelation and display of today's politicians that we would impute to a contemporary F.D.R.--do we want to honor in a great national monument?
I vote for reticence. The current statue--F.D.R. in his wooden kitchen chair with casters, a great cape hiding the tiny wheels from all but the most observant visitor--captures perfectly Roosevelt's cloaking of his disability. At a time when our politicians are "stricken with self-pity and given to sniveling" (to quote Mary McGrory), what a balm is Roosevelt's attitude of defiant and dignified denial.
This is an age in which both the Speaker of the House and the President of the United States cannot resist, in dramatic televised addresses, making pointed reference to their latest bereavement. This is an age in which the Vice President, in consecutive convention speeches, makes lachrymose use, first, of a son's accident, then of a sister's death. (Noted one mordant wit: At this rate, his wife had better not walk near any plateglass windows.) In such an age, we can use the example of a man who through four presidential terms dealt with the agony of a nation while keeping his own agonies to himself.
In an age in which every celebrity finds it necessary to bare his soul and open her closet, we need a monument to a man who would have disdained such displays. Why, even poor Bob Dole found himself going up and down America for months talking about how reluctant he was to talk about the war injuries he could not stop talking about.
Such is the style of the '90s. Fine. But who dares argue that it can match Roosevelt's for nobility? It is not just that we have no right to impose our sensibility on Roosevelt. We should be ashamed to.