(2 of 2)
Leave Roosevelt out of a wheelchair. But not by saying, condescendingly, Well, he lived in a benighted time; let's make a concession to the attitudes he had to accommodate. After all, Roosevelt's deception did not reflect the attitudes just of his constituents. It reflected his own attitude to his disability. It is not just that he never discussed his paralysis with the voters. He never discussed it with his mother.
The critics say that to fail to portray F.D.R. in a wheelchair is to give in to his false--i.e., nonmodern--consciousness about disability. On the contrary. It is to celebrate his ethos of bold denial.
Denial is not in great favor today. It is considered unhealthy, an almost cowardly psychic constriction. The mantra today is that all must be dealt with, talked out, coped with, opened up, faced squarely.
This may work for some. But it has become something of a religion. And if its priests are so correct about the joys of catharsis and the perils of denial, how do they explain how the champion denier of our century, Franklin Roosevelt, lived such a splendid life?
Roosevelt's denial of his disability was more than just a denial of crushing adversity, more than a jaunty, smiling, damn-the-torpedoes refusal to dwell upon--indeed, fully acknowledge--his physical reality. It was a denial of self, a strange notion for us living in this confessional age when self--self-exploration, self-expression, self-love--is paramount. Roosevelt's life had a grand outer directedness. He was not searching for the inner Franklin. He was reaching for a new America. It was the outer Franklin he cultivated, and it is that Franklin, the one who saved his country, that we honor and remember.
At a time like ours, when every cultural cue is an incitement to self-revelation, we can use a solitary monument to reticence. Leave F.D.R. as he is.