THE majestic Washington Mall, designed by a Frenchman, Pierre L'Enfant, got its fourth and probably last presidential monument this week. The 7 acre Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial joins those of Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson beside the east bank of the Potomac, 52 years after his death. The occasion has unleashed a flood of FDR nostalgia.
It also has unleashed controversy over whether the president, who was stricken with polio, should be shown in his wheelchair or not. There was an outcry from disabled persons organisations when the memorial, depicting FDRs four terms from 1932 to 1945, did not show him in his wheelchair. But many others pointed out that he went to extraordinary lengths not to appear disabled to the American people and this should be reflected in his memorial.
The Roosevelt family itself is divided over the matter. Of the 25 descendants, 16 are in favour of an additional statue showing him in a wheelchair. But his eldest grandchild, Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves, wrote in the New York Times: "To have FDR seated in a wheelchair, as if he spent more than the tiniest fraction of his waking day in it, would be totally misleading." She has proposed that the monument show a "weather resistant metal replica of the simple chair on wheels FDR used for brief moments only to travel short distances".
President Clinton, temporarily on crutches following his fall entered the controversy on the side of the disabled lobby and has asked Congress to pass a law allowing an extra statue, showing a handicapped FDR, to be added to the monument.
Eleanor Roosevelt has her statue in one of the four outdoor rooms and is the first First Lady to be thus commemorated. The columnist, Mary McGrory, points out that political correctness is at work in not showing Eleanor wearing her famous fox fur or FDR with his cigarette holder.
The monument is actually a small park through which visitors can stroll past four roofless rooms, each with a waterfall and inscriptions of FDR's more famous phrases, such as "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny" and "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself".
FDR himself did not want such a striking memorial on the Mall with such giants as Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson. Four years before his death in 1945, he called the Supreme Court justice, Felix Frankfurter, to his office to give him instructions. According to Frankfurter's diary, FDR just wanted a block of stone about the size of his desk in the green plot in front of the National Archives building with the words, "In memory of..."
Such a monument was erected there in 1965, but for 20 years after his death, a commission had been working on a plan for a more grandiose structure on the Mall. The plan ran into trouble, however. In 1960, the judges' first choice in the competition for a suitable design was ridiculed as "Instant Stonehenge" because of its upright slabs.
Six years later, a pinwheel arrangement of triangular stone pieces was rejected. In 1974, the choice fell on a landscape architect from San Francisco, Lawrence Halprin, and he worked on the plans for 20 years before construction began in 1994.
At times it seemed as if it would be abandoned as Congress balked at the increasing costs. But a plea from a Roosevelt era congressman dying of cancer, Claude Pepper, extracted $6 million in 1989 to get the work started. The final cost is $43 million in public money with $10 million having to be raised in private funding.
One of the principal donors is a Washington philanthropist, Peter Kolver, who, at only 44, was not born in the Roosevelt years but who says he understands why older Americans cherish their memories of FDR.
As a man who has paid $500,000 out of his own pocket he is entitled to the last word.
"What memory is more important to the country than winning World War II and overcoming the greatest financial disaster the country had? A man who can't get out of his chair but beats Adolf Hitler, a man who takes a country from a 15th military power in the world to the mightiest military power in the history of man, who electrified the country, gave us schools and dams and even football stadiums, the National Airport, Fort Knox... so many of the things you see and touch and feel in this country. That's why there is such an appeal."