The misanthrope's corner - design of the memorial for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Column

National Review, July 1, 1996 by Florence King

I WISH baby boomers would stop telling me what I remember about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ever since the wheelchair controversy erupted over his planned memorial, a chorus of know-it-all media goslings has been saying, "People of his time didn't know he couldn't walk."

Of course we knew. We saw photos and newsreels of him clinging to the arm of one of his sons, usually James, with his other hand gripping a cane. We saw pictures of him seated with his leg braces visible around his ankles and bulking squarishly under his trousers at the knees. True, we never saw him in a wheelchair, but we didn't have to. It was an era of starch and vests; "foundation garments" and "best dresses." Common sense, born of our own experience, told us that when his public day was done he removed the heavy braces and slipped into something more comfortable: in his case, a wheelchair.

Only the most benighted optimist would have thought FDR able to walk. Those were the days of annual polio epidemics, and we knew all too well what they presaged. Members of the post-Salk generation can't begin to imagine what life was like then: the ever-present worry, the dread of summer, the suspicions surrounding swimming, the panic that arose over a child's slightest sign of lassitude. Polio was a national obsession and a seasonal monomania, fed by newsreels and picture spreads in Life of paralyzed victims in wheelchairs and iron lungs. No one ever seemed to recover, so if they couldn't walk, it followed that FDR couldn't either. If the White House had decided to spell it out in a press release, we would have received it with universal bemusement: Why are they telling us what we already know?

The most inarguable proof that we knew has never been mentioned by media boomers. They must have heard about it, but they probably put it out of their minds as the politically correct are wont to do. It was something men used to say whenever the subject turned to Eleanor Roosevelt: "If he could stand up, he'd knock her down!"

The debate over whether FDR's memorial should show him in a wheelchair is drawing comments that say nothing about the Thirties and Forties and everything about the Nineties. A sampling from the pro-wheelchair contingent:

Doris Kearns Goodwin: "Roosevelt's polio made his special relationship with the American people possible."

Christopher Roosevelt, grandson: "His disability gave him his character."

Maureen Dowd: "It is perverse not to celebrate Roosevelt for the remarkable effort it took simply to get out of bed every day."

Hugh Gallagher, polio victim and author of FDR's Splendid Deception: "They are trying to steal our hero from us."

Michael Deland, wheelchairman of the National Organization on Disability, says that not showing FDR in a wheelchair is "misusing history."

A Harris poll of those unswayable independent thinkers known as the American people found that 73 per cent favor a memorial with "visible recognition of FDR's disabilities."

Roosevelt's special relationship with the American people sprang from something that pre-dated his affliction, was unaffected by it, and would be viewed as intolerable today: his absolute superiority and blessings on all fronts.

He was better than we were, and we all knew it and felt safe because of it. He may have governed for the Common Man but he never pretended to be one, and we relished his aristocratic flair and the patrician assurance that flowed from him. We loved it that he was rich and had an estate on the Hudson. We loved it that he was so handsome, and we loved his having what we called "that voice" because it so unmistakably proclaimed his advantages. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: you can hear it in the voice; not just money, but background and breeding, the caste superiority that people crave in a leader whether they know it or not. We were the last generation of Americans to know it, and the last to get it. The Kennedys tried but the reek of the parvenu was on them, and we knew that, too.

The always wise Somerset Maugham wrote: "It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive." Roosevelt's character was shaped not by polio but by his Roman matron of a mother -- "Ole Miz Roosevelt," as approving Southerners called her -- who devoted her entire life to him. A man sure of his mother's love is girded for the battle of life, said Freud, but our feminist age regards Sara Delano Roosevelt as perverse.

MEANWHILE, real perversity flourishes. We live in a society that worships weakness, though its promoters carefully call it "vulnerability." Any kind of weakness will do -- physical, mental, moral, social -- as long as it advances the twisted notion that the unhalt, unlame, unstupid, unvulgar, unpoor, and uncriminal are somehow not playing fair.

We talk incessantly of "heros" and seem to have a plentiful supply, but they're a far cry from Horatius at the Bridge. Ours is the age of the passive hero. Get yourself taken hostage, shot out of the sky, buried in an avalanche, trapped on a runaway roller coaster, or wander off and fall in a hole, and you are sure to end up on the morning shows as the latest hero, having done nothing but been in the wrong place at the wrong time or blundered into a situation that an earlier America associated with Dagwood Bumstead.