I was ready, very ready, to like the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. After all, I love memorials, and I deeply admire Roosevelt. How disappointing that the memorial to the greatest president of this century is a failure.
It works, mind you, as a public space. Families will frolic in its pools and waterfalls. Kids will ride the statue of Roosevelt's dog Fala. Lovers will appreciate its nooks and crannies.As a memorial, however, it is an embarrassment. First, there is the question of scale. It is massive, grossly out of proportion not just with its local environment (a bucolic setting among baseball fields on the Tidal Basin) but even with its monumental neighbors, Jefferson and Lincoln nearby. Roosevelt is 7 1/2 acres. You could put 12 Jeffersons inside it.
It goes on forever through four vast, free-form, open-air "rooms" consisting of massive 12-foot granite walls adorned with quotations from FDR and the occasional sculpture or frieze. A reporter at the site told me it looked like a monument to public housing.
Then you read some of the selected writings on the walls and your heart sinks at this memorial's "aching political correctness" (to quote columnist Mary McGrory).
FDR was a great liberal. But he was not a '90s liberal. He was a great friend of the working man and the poor, for example, but he was no great friend of the snail darter. Yet one of the first FDR quotations you encounter is this one: "The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men."
A curious selection coming from a man whose immense public works projects moved more water than anyone since Moses. Sure there was the Civilian Conservation Corps. But FDR the environmentalist? This is the author of the Tennessee Valley Authority. This is the builder of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams. His Fort Peck Dam in Montana is still the fourth largest in the world. This the father of the Pick-Sloan plan that so radically altered the Missouri River that American Rivers, the conservation group, lists it as the most endangered river in America today.
This little environmental spin in "room" 1 (four rooms for four terms) is your first hint that an ideological agenda lurks here, and it is not necessarily FDR's. Most egregious is the enormous inscription in room 3, the war years. It is a diatribe against war and it ends, in huge letters, with "I hate war."
"I hate war" is repeated on another set of granite blocks. It is the only quotation in the memorial that actually appears twice.
What an odd way to remember the greatest warrior president in American history. He may have hated war - who doesn't? - yet, against much pacifist resistance, he tried methodically to maneuver his country into it. And once in the war, he conducted it with a determination and ferocity rarely seen in human history.
This is the man who built the atomic bomb and (with Churchill) leveled Dresden. "I hate war"? Why, in the '40s he called himself "Dr. Win the War."
And what is the "I hate war" quotation doing in Room 3, devoted to his third term? It is taken from a speech given in his first term, long before Anschluss, Munich and the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Missing from Room 3 - missing from the whole FDR Memorial - is a somewhat less obscure line actually delivered in his third term: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy . . .." In the '90s, you see, we are too sensitive to offend, even the infamous.
And then there is the obligatory civil rights quote: "We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background."
The citation is misleading in two ways. It is taken from a letter to the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born. Although today the phrase "civil rights" connotes the advancement of African-Americans, FDR was clearly talking here about the rights of immigrants, not blacks. The modern visitor would be fooled.
Second, for all of FDR's good works, he was no pioneer on civil rights. So dependent was he on the political support of Southern segregationists that he refused even to endorse a federal anti-lynching bill. Desegregation in America (of the armed forces, for example) had to await his successor.
FDR revived a nation, reconceived its government, bequeathed a social safety net and then vanquished the most radical evil of this century. You would think the memorializers would be satisfied with so prodigious a legacy. They weren't. They felt compelled to make him an environmentalist anti-war champion of civil rights, too. What a pity.