Memorial Should Display FDR’s Disability, Groups Say

A $55-million memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt should clearly show that the 32nd president couldn’t walk on his own, advocates for the disabled said last week.

The memorial, under construction between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, includes a garden and three sculptures that will show Roosevelt from above the waist. None will depict him standing.

“It would be unconscionable for schoolchildren to go through it and have no sense that this president led this country from his wheelchair,” said Michael Deland, chairman of the National Organization on Disability.

The organization also released copies of letters from former President Bush and from relatives of Roosevelt who support including the disability in the public memorial, scheduled to open next spring.

Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921 at age 39 and was paralyzed below the waist. He died in 1945 at age 63.

Messages left for the FDR Memorial Commission were not returned.

The sculptures are to show Roosevelt from the shoulders up, waving from a car during one of his four inaugurations, and seated beside a dog with his trademark cape draped over his legs.

An accompanying exhibit will explain his inability to walk unaided after being stricken with polio, the memorial committee has said.

Roosevelt didn’t want to be photographed in a wheelchair. But advocates said he sometimes allowed the public to see that he was disabled.

Deland and others suggested that a statue of a standing Roosevelt, possibly wearing leg braces, be included in the memorial, or that wheels be added to the chair on one of the sculptures under construction.

They also noted changing attitudes toward people with disabilities since Roosevelt’s time and suggested he would have agreed with them.

“Roosevelt was, above all, a man who understood his country,” said noted presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin. “If he were able to come back today, he would want that statue to reflect those changing times.”