DATELINE: WASHINGTON : Protest, Politics and Emotion Are Built Into F.D.R. Memorial : Like other national monuments, the project has followed a bumpy road from inspiration to construction.

Erecting monuments to American icons or fallen war heroes historically has proved much like democratic government itself: Regardless of the outcome, getting there sure was ugly.

The route from inspiration to ribbon-cutting is a tortured one. First, it must be determined whether a person is significant enough to deserve a memorial--no small task in a nation of outspoken partisans. Next come decisions over how best to depict the person or event--and how much, if anything, Congress is willing to pay.

Given that bumpy course, it should come as no surprise that since the memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt was authorized by Congress 40 years ago, it has endured trial by aesthetics, economics and now--although construction is well under way--trial by politics.

The $52-million Roosevelt Memorial, to be located along the Tidal Basin near memorials to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, will be a series of four landscaped outdoor rooms linked by a common granite wall, with landscaped pathways and waterfalls. Each room represents one of Roosevelt’s terms in office.

It will feature engravings of Roosevelt quotations, a timeline and sculptures of F.D.R., Eleanor Roosevelt and ordinary Americans in the Depression and war years. Included is Los Angeles artist Robert Graham’s bas-relief commemorating Roosevelt’s social programs.

This is the memorial’s third design. The winner of the first competition in 1960 was later described by writer Tom Wolfe as “eight enormous upright abstract marble slabs that became known as ‘Instant Stonehenge.’ ”

Public controversy led to abandonment of the design. The winner of the second design contest failed review by a federal commission that oversees the artistic merit of all public building in Washington.

The current design by Lawrence Halprin won the third contest in 1974. The memorial survived eight reviews by various federal commissions and Congress before ground was broken in 1991. It is scheduled for completion in early 1997.

Yet the toughest task was winning congressional funding. For 30 years after approving the memorial, Congress did not fund it. When the money finally came, lawmakers required that $10 million of the cost be privately funded. Fund-raisers are still $5.8 million short, although the effort received a boost last month with publicity on the 50th anniversary of Roosevelt’s death.

Although most political battles have been won, advocates for the disabled complain of historical inaccuracy in the memorial’s failure to show F.D.R. using the wheelchair or canes he relied on after contracting poliomyelitis. During his lifetime, F.D.R. camouflaged his paralysis from the public, with the press’s cooperation.

The memorial commission decided that portraying Roosevelt as disabled would be historically inaccurate. “It would be revisionist history to put today’s viewpoint on that era of history,” said Dorann H. Gunderson, director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission. “It was not how he chose to have himself portrayed.”

Roosevelt family members argued that doing so also would violate F.D.R.’s wish to keep his disability private.

The memorial’s three sculptures finesse the issue by showing him seated or visible only from the waist up. The memorial’s timeline of his life does state that he contracted poliomyelitis in 1921 and “never again walked unaided.”

But disability advocates say not showing F.D.R. as disabled is the historical error. The public knew of his disability and respected him for overcoming it, says Alan Reich, president of the National Organization on Disability.

The delays and bickering are in keeping with tradition. The pattern was set by the Washington Monument, which took 70 years from proposal to completion in 1885. During its construction, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party destroyed a block of marble the Pope had donated for the monument.

The Lincoln Memorial took 55 years from proposal to completion, in 1922. Some complained that its classical design was too formal for the folksy President.

Construction of the Jefferson Memorial in the 1930s drew people who chained themselves to flowering cherry trees to protest plans to cut the trees down to make room for the monument. The memorial took a relatively speedy nine years from creation to completion in 1943.

While the Vietnam Veterans Memorial took just three years to complete, a nasty dispute erupted over whether privately raised funds were spent properly. Critics also argued that the memorial’s black, V-shaped wall dishonored veterans. More battles ensued over its location.

The protracted process of creating these monuments serves a function, Gunderson suggests. “These are heroic creations for the whole nation, and I guess this is justifiable. It must be considered and reconsidered and reconsidered, and we come up with things the whole nation can be proud of.”

Halprin, who designed San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square and a Northern California coastal development known as Sea Ranch, hopes the F.D.R. Memorial will touch people “not only intellectually but emotionally, because people’s reaction to Mr. Roosevelt was emotional.”

The monument builds in intensity, Halprin says. Its 7 1/2 acres of open rooms move from the “optimism . . . and energy” of Roosevelt’s election to the somberness of the Depression, to the crisis of World War II--conveyed by a darker tone in the wall’s deep reddish granite--to the last “triumphal” room with a large waterfall celebrating the coming of peace.

“At the end,” Halprin said, “I hope people will feel they know Mr. Roosevelt and what he stood for, that it will touch them in that way.”

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A Memorial in the Making

The 7.5-acre F.D.R. Memorial will depict the Roosevelt presidency through a series of four outdoor displays. Visitors will also wander past bronze sculptures, waterfalls and red granite carved with Roosevelt’s words.

Commander in Chief: Honors leadership during WWII.

First Lady: Salutes Eleanor Roosevelt’s contributions to White House.

F.D.R. and Labor: Honors his achievements for American labor.

Fireside chat: Remembers Depression-era leadership

Memorial will be located between the wide sweep of the Potomac River and the famous Cherry Tree Walk on the Tidal Basin. It becomes part of the kite-shaped grid of memorials planned in 1901.

Source: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Commission