Fdr: American Icon Democratic Giant Led Nation Out Of The Great Depression, Was World War Ii’s Supreme Commander And Built Lasting Social Programs

With pomp and gratitude, the nation opened the FDR Memorial on Friday to ensure that future generations of Americans will remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the same reverence as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

“Today, we honor the greatest president of this great American century,” said President Clinton as he dedicated the memorial of gardens, statuary, waterfalls and inscribed walls of Dakota granite located near the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and the Washington Monument.

“Now we are surrounded by the monuments to the leaders who built our democracy,” said the president.

On a glorious spring day, Clinton was among thousands of visitors who toured the new memorial to the polio-stricken Democrat who lifted a nation out of the Great Depression, led it toward victory in World War II and left an enduring legacy of government programs such as Social Security.

“His New Deal was a good deal for many, many an American family. People nowadays don’t know what poverty was like,” said Walter F. Atwood, 76, who left his family’s hardscrabble farm in Kansas in the 1930s and spent several years working in Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Wyoming and Idaho.

“I lived on $8 a month and sent $22 a month home to my parents. We stayed in barracks, and they provided meals and clothes,” he recalled. “This memorial was a great idea, and I’m just glad they finally got it finished.”

Indeed, the first congressional calls for a memorial to honor the only president elected four times came in 1946, the year after Roosevelt died on the porch of his “Little White House” at Warm Springs, Ga. An FDR Memorial commission was set up in 1955, but the project was delayed for decades by problems with design, funding and politics.

Controversy lingered even as completion neared when disabled activists threatened to demonstrate at the dedication because the memorial does not depict the partially paralyzed president in a wheelchair. The protest was averted when Clinton asked Congress to add a suitable statue to the park-like memorial.

Outside the ceremony, a few activists in wheelchairs held placards thanking Clinton for stepping in. A couple of members of a Shalom International, a Jewish group based in Miami Beach, Fla., held signs alleging that “FDR allowed the Holocaust.”

Roosevelt had asked for a simple memorial - an engraved stone block about the size of his desk - and that monument has stood near the National Archives, largely unobserved, for half a century. But as history confirmed the greatness of the 32nd president, said Clinton, “it is right that we dedicate this memorial as a tribute to Franklin Roosevelt, to Eleanor, and to the remarkable triumphs of their generation.”

Although Clinton himself has proclaimed an end to the era of big government, on this day he lauded the federal programs that FDR began in his efforts to put America back to work during the Depression and provide a social safety net for the elderly and poor.

“The America that he built was a memorial all around us: From the Golden Gate Bridge to the Grand Coulee Dam. From Social Security to honest financial markets,” said Clinton.

“He came from privilege but he understood the aspirations of farmers and factory workers and forgotten Americans,” said Clinton. “He electrified the farms and hollows, but even more important, he electrified the nation, instilling confidence with every tilt of his head and boom of his laugh.”

An audience of dignitaries - Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, Cabinet officers, Roosevelt descendants - sat in chairs near the memorial, and a multitude stood on the grass beyond. Many had memories of FDR, of listening to his “fireside chats” or catching a glimpse of the president they have seen only in newsreels.

“When I was a boy, 8 or 10 years old, Mr. Roosevelt came though my home town of Casper, Wyoming, in that open-air touring car he used to travel in,” said Stanley Talpers. “It was during the Depression. My dad was a dentist and we never went hungry, but I can remember people coming to the back door and asking for a sandwich.”

David Roosevelt, a grandson of FDR and a member of the memorial commission, said that “era (was) surpassed perhaps only by the Civil War in its infliction of pain and travail on the people of this nation.”

“God bless you, God bless America,” Clinton told the crowd. “And may God always bless the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”