A Monumental Man
FDR chiseled features defined an American epoch
By Gerald Parshall
Franklin Roosevelt made no small plans—except for his own commemoration. The first Roosevelt memorial, now all but forgotten, was installed outside the National Archives building in 1965. A marble slab about the size of Roosevelt’s desk; it was scaled to its subject’s wishes. The new Roosevelt memorial now being completed in Washington is scaled to its subject’s significance: Some 4,500 tons of granite went into it. Designer Lawrence Halprin laid out a wall that meanders over 7.5 acres, forming four outdoor rooms, each devoted to one of FDR’S terms in the White House and each open on one side to a stunning vista of the Tidal Basin. Waterfalls, reflecting pools, and sculptures are set along what is likely to become one of the most popular walks in the nation’s capitol The entry building contains a photograph of FDR in his wheelchair and a replica of the chair itself. The memorial’s time line includes these words: “1921, STRICKEN
WITH POLIOMYEUTIS—HE NEVER AGAIN WALKED UNAIDED.” But because no statue depicts him in his wheelchair the dedication ceremony on May 2 faces a threatened protest by the disabled. Controversy often surrounded Roosevelt in life; his spirit should feel right at home.
THE POWER OF HIS SMILE
Today, we carry the face of Franklin Roosevelt in our pockets and purses -it is stamped on more than 18 billion dimes. From 1933 to1945, Americans carried it in their hearts. It was stamped on their consciousness, looking out from every newspaper and newsreel, FDR’s smile as bright as the headlight on a steam locomotive. Roosevelt’s portrait hung in bus stations, in barber shops, in kitchens, in parlors, in Dust Bowl shacks—and in Winston Churchill’s bedchamber in wartime London. It was the face of hope and freedom for the masses. Even among the “economic royalists,” the haters of “that man in the White House,” the portrait could stir emotion—as a dartboard.
In 1911, when the 28-year-old Roosevelt was newly elected to the New York Senate, the New York Times found him “a young man with the finely chiseled face of a Roman patrician” who “could make a fortune on the stage and set the matinee girl’s heart throbbing with subtle and happy emotion.” Tammany Hall Democrats, however, weren’t swooning. They noted the freshman’s habit of tossing his head back and peering down his nose (on which he wore pince-nez like Theodore Roosevelt, a fifth cousin) and read in it a squire’s disdain for grubby city boys. The quirk persisted, but acquired a new meaning decades later, when FDR wrestled with unprecedented domestic and foreign crises. His upturned chin and eyes, along with his cigarette holder, itself tilted toward the heavens, became symbols of indomitable determination to triumph over adversity— his own and the country’s.
It was, indeed, the face of a great actor, a living sculpture continuously reshaped by the artist. The knowing twinkle. The arched eyebrow. The eloquent grimace. Roosevelt was a master of misdirection. He could lie without blinking, disarm enemies with infectious bonhomie, and make a bore feel like the most fascinating fellow on Earth. Officials with rival agendas often came away from the Oval Office equally sure that they alone had the president’s ear. “Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,” FDR once confided to a cabinet member. Idealism and duplicity fused behind his smile, buttressing one another like the two sides of a Roosevelt dime.
THE WARMTH OF HIS WORDS
He was one of the greatest orators of his time but suffered from stage fright. While he waited on the dais, Franklin Roosevelt fidgeted, shuffled the pages of his speech, chain-smoked, and doused the butterflies in his stomach with gulps of water. At last, they let him start—”My friends…” In a New York minute, his nervousness was gone and the audience under his spell. His voice— languid one moment, theatrical the next—dripped with Groton, Harvard, and centuries of blue blood. Yet no president has ever communicated better with ordinary people.
A Roosevelt speech sounded spontaneous, straight from the heart, effortless—effects that took much effort to achieve. Some speeches went through a dozen drafts, with speech writers laboring at the big table in the Cabinet Room until 3 a.m. Roosevelt then revised mercilessly—shortening sentences, substituting words with fewer syllables, polishing similes—until his own muscular style emerged. Sometimes, he wrote a speech entirely by himself. He used a yellow legal pad to draft his first inaugural address, which rang with one of the most effective buck-up lines in history: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He dictated to his secretary most of the Pearl Harbor message he delivered to Congress. He edited himself, changing “a date which will live in world history” to “a date which will live in infamy.”
Roosevelt held two press conferences a week right in the Oval Office. Relaxed and jocular, he gently decreed what could and could not be printed. He talked to reporters, John Dos Passos remembered, in a fatherly voice “like the voice of a principal in a first-rate boy’s school.” Likewise, Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” on the radio reverberated with paternal intimacy. He had a flair for homely analogies, such as equating Lend-Lease aid to Britain with loaning your neighbor a garden hose to put out a house fire. Who wouldn’t do that? Speaking into the microphone, he gestured and smiled as if the audience would somehow sense what it could not see. Millions shushed the children and turned up the radio. They ached for leadership and “Doctor New Deal”— soon to become “Doctor Win the War”—was making a house call.
THE SPLENDOR OF HIS STRIDE
At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, Franklin Roosevelt fell down as he moved across the podium to address the delegates. He was quickly pulled up again, his withered legs bruised but unbroken. No newspaper stories or radio reports mentioned this incident—and for good reason. It hadn’t happened. America was in denial. Prejudice against “cripples” was widespread. The nation wanted no reminders that it was following a man who could not walk.
From the earliest days of the polio that ravaged his legs in 1921, denial had been Roosevelt’s way of coping. He spoke of his infirmity with no one not even with members of his family. For seven years, almost every day, he took his crutches tried—and failed—to reach the end of his Hyde Park driveway. He could not walk. But how he ran. Campaigning animatedly from open cars and the rear platform of trains, he was elected governor o New York twice and president of the United States four times. No crutches were seen and no wheel chair. His steel leg braces were painted black to blend with his socks; he wore extra long trousers The Secret Service built ramps all over Washington, D.C., to give his limousine close access to his destinations. FDR jerkily “walked” the final distance by holding onto one of his sons with his left arm and supporting his right side with a cane. Newsreel cameras stopped; press photographers took a breather. If an amateur was spotted attempting to get a picture the Secret Service swiftly closed in and exposed the film.
“FDR’s splendid deception,” historian Hugh Gallagher dubbed the little conspiracy in his book of that title. It worked so well that most Americans never knew of Roosevelt’s disability, or they repressed what they did know. Such was the national amnesia, cartoonist even drew him jumping. FDR dropped the ruse for only one group. Military amputee wards were filled with men brooding about what fate had done to their futures. A high official sometimes came calling. The severely wounded GIs recognized the visitor immediately—no face was more famous—and his arrival brought an exhilarating revelation. Down the aisles came the nemesis of Hitler and Hirohito, his wheelchair in full view and looking like a royal chariot.
THE MAINSPRING OF HIS MIND
When the British monarch visited America in 1939, Franklin Roosevelt greeted him with unaccustomed familiarity. He served him hot dogs at a Hyde Park picnic and addressed him not as “your majesty, but as “George.” “Why don’t my ministers talk to me as the president did tonight?” an enchanted George VI remarked to a member of his entourage. “I felt exactly as though a father were giving me his most careful and wise advice.” It was Roosevelt’s genius to treat kings like commoners and commoners like kings. And both loved him for it.
His monumental self-assurance was bred in the bone. His mother, Sara, had reared him, her only child, to believe he had a fixed place in the center of the cosmos like other Roosevelts. She —and the example set by cousin Theodore— imparted another formative lesson: Privileged people have a duty to do good. Noblesse oblige, Christianity, and the golden rule made up the moral core of the aristocrat who became both the Democrat of the century and the democrat of the century,
Critics called him a socialist and a “traitor to his class.” History would call him the savior of capitalism, the pragmatist who saved free enterprise from very possibly disappearing into the abyss and taking democracy with it. It seemed evident to him that only government could curb or cushion the worst excesses of industrialism. But, at bottom, he was less a thinker than a doer. Luckily, like gardeners and governesses, intellectuals could be hired. Roosevelt hired a brain trust and pumped it for ideas to which he applied this test: Will it work? If one program belly-flopped, he cheerfully tried another. “A second-class intellect,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pegged him. “But a first-class temperament.”
For all his amiability, FDR knew with Machiavelli that self-seekers abound this side of paradise. Navigating perilous domestic and foreign waters by dead reckoning, he often felt compelled to be a shameless schemer. He hid his intentions, manipulated people, set aides to contrary tasks—all to keep control of the game in trustworthy hands (his own). Charm and high purposes palliated the pure ether of his arrogance. Franklin Roosevelt was hip-deep in the muck of politics and power, but his eyes were always on the stars.
Source: U.S. News & World Report, April 28, 1997, pp. 59-61, 64.