In Retrospect. . . : The fight over the FDR memorial is about more than a wheelchair. Historical correctness is at the fore.

When Jim Dickson was 7 years old and learned he had an affliction that erodes the retina and would leave him blind for life, his mother told him: “Remember, President Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. If he could be president with polio, you can do anything you want to.”

Dickson, a 50-year-old political activist, never forgot those words. And they are one reason he has led a campaign on behalf of disabled Americans that has cast a cloud of controversy over Friday’s dedication here of a memorial 50 years in the making to the president who was Dickson’s boyhood inspiration.

Last week, as the federal commission that has sponsored the $48-million project staged a press tour of the sprawling 7 1/2-acre site just off the Capital Mall, Dickson and his black Lab guide dog were on hand to promote his demand for inclusion of a statue depicting FDR in a wheelchair.

“We’ve got to stay in their face,” he said.

He already has won a striking though still incomplete victory: a promise from President Clinton to back legislation to add such a statue to the memorial. But Dickson and his allies in the FDR in a Wheelchair Campaign want further assurances that their goal will become a reality. As a result, they are still threatening to disrupt Friday’s ceremonies.

Noting the 50-year process involved in erecting the FDR memorial, he said, “We don’t want to wait another 50 years for our statue.”

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Whatever the outcome of their struggle, this controversy--like other disputes that have surrounded recent exhibits and memorials in the nation’s capital and elsewhere--raises fundamental questions about the uses of history in contemporary U.S. society.

“A lot of historians are persuaded that standards change over the time,” said William Truettner, a curator at the National Museum of American Art in Washington. For example, he noted, “They believe that whatever way we viewed the West in the 19th century is no longer exactly true for today.”

Truettner speaks from experience: His museum’s 1991 exhibit on the American West came under fire because it accompanied traditional paintings glorifying the nation’s expansion across the continent with a critical assessment of that movement’s cost to Native Americans.

Many historians may have been pleased, “but some people [were] very much upset by that,” Truettner said. “They want continuity because continuity is reassuring.”

In the case of the FDR memorial, this conflict reaches beyond the furor over whether it should include a depiction of Roosevelt’s crippling disability (which he sought to conceal during his presidency), to the contradiction between the shining promises of his rhetoric and the disappointing reality of his performance in such areas as civil rights and civil liberties.

Roosevelt scholar William Leuchtenburg, who helped select the FDR quotes carved on the carnelian granite walls that encompass the memorial, notes that Roosevelt won the plaudits of civil rights leaders by becoming the first president to publicly denounce lynching, then rampant in the South.

Yet Roosevelt refused their pleas to go the next step and make an all-out fight for federal anti-lynching legislation. Practical politics intruded: Roosevelt’s electoral base rested on the then-solidly Democratic South, and he needed the backing of powerful Southern congressional leaders to push through New Deal economic reforms.

Many traditional historians argue that any presidential memorial should accentuate the positive.

“If you create a tribute to George Washington, you are not going to show the times when his battlefield strategy was poor,” Leuchtenburg said.

But revisionist scholars take a different view. “I don’t think the proper attitude of people toward a past leader should be one of unalloyed adulation,” contends James Loewen, a sociologist at Washington’s Catholic University and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” Loewen argues that memorials that leave out the negative lose credibility.

“People aren’t going to come away from the FDR memorial believing that FDR is without blemish,” he said. “They are going to come away believing that the FDR memorial is not a place to think about FDR seriously. And that’s a shame.”

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Moreover, the memorial seems to offer itself as a target for potential critics because of its open-ended approach: Its nine sculptural ensembles seek to memorialize not only Roosevelt himself but, in the words of the commission, “an entire generation of Americans who endured the Great Depression and emerged victorious from World War II.”

But capturing the experience of an entire generation in one memorial is a daunting task, concedes Lawrence Halprin, the San Francisco landscape architect who designed the tribute to FDR. “There were some things we couldn’t include and were beyond our capacity to include,” he said.

“I think what you have here is a situation not unlike the conflict over Enola Gay,” said UCLA historian Joyce Appleby, referring to the 1995 controversy over the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s commemoration of the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. The exhibit was drastically revised because of complaints it was overly sympathetic to the Japanese.

“It’s very difficult to mix commemoration and probing analysis of an historic event,” she added. “I suppose the best you could hope for in a presidential monument is that it not deliberately distort truth.”

But some critics think the FDR memorial tampers with the truth, if not deliberately then by omission. And while the protesters may be focusing on the disability issue, scholars come back to the race issue.

When all the work on the project is finished over the next few weeks, inscribed on one wall will be a sentence from a 1936 speech Roosevelt gave at Washington’s Howard University, comments his admirers say reflects his position on race relations. “Among American citizens there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races,” Roosevelt said at the time.

But scholars note that such lofty sentiments hardly square with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which Roosevelt sanctioned, or the second-class status of black Americans throughout most of the country, which he did little to combat. Neither experience is alluded to in the memorial.

Stanford University historian Barton J. Bernstein said that if it were up to him, references to the treatment of the Japanese and the discrimination against blacks would be part of the memorial.

“But,” he said, “I would also have the voting statistics on blacks,” showing that most departed from their then-traditional allegiance to the Republican Party to vote for Roosevelt because of the economic benefits the New Deal brought them.

“When we have memorials for gents who have been gone for half a century or more, we have a right as a society to believe that this celebration should capture their complexity,” Bernstein said.

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The parklike memorial is organized in four sections, each representing one of FDR’s terms. In addition to two sculptures of Roosevelt--as well as one of his famed dog, Fala--groups of life-size figurines depict Depression victims in a bread line and a man seated near a radio, presumably listening to one of FDR’s celebrated fireside chats. A 30-foot-long bas relief depicts the ceremonial procession that marked the transport of his body to its grave in Hyde Park, N.Y., in 1945.

The first step toward building the memorial occurred in 1946 when a resolution authorizing the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission was introduced in Congress. But it was not until 1959 that Congress passed a law reserving a site for the memorial and providing for a design competition. Further delay ensued because early designs were rejected.

Halprin was selected for the task in 1974. But securing the money for the project--$5 million of which was raised privately, with the rest coming from the federal government--prolonged the process further.

Given both its tortuous path to completion and the controversy the memorial has stirred, it at the least represents an unwitting tribute to FDR’s political instincts.

When he was alive, he said he wanted no memorial bigger than his desk. In 1965, a desk-size block was installed near the National Archives in downtown Washington.

It does not attract much attention. But on the other hand, no one has ever threatened to demonstrate against it.