Fdr Memorial To Be Dedicated

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said he wanted a simple memorial “about the size of my desk.” He’s getting one that sprawls across 7.5 acres, costs $48 million, and features waterfalls, bronze statues and enough granite to construct a 80-story building.

On Friday, President Clinton will dedicate the FDR Memorial beside the Tidal Basin, honoring a Democratic predecessor who gave hope to a downtrodden populace during the Great Depression and led a determined nation toward victory in World War II.

Completion of the memorial to the only president elected to four terms comes more than half a century after his death in 1945 and four decades after Congress passed the law creating the FDR Memorial Commission, but amid continuing controversy over the absence of a statue depicting the polio-stricken Roosevelt in his wheelchair.

More than 600 protesters will demonstrate at the dedication, promised Jim Dickson, director of the “FDR in a Wheelchair Campaign” of the National Organization on Disability.

“Some of us are prepared to be arrested,” he warned, decrying a design that supports “a notion that disability is something shameful, something to be hidden, and memorials are supposed to be uplifting. They felt, ‘How could you be uplifting and show a cripple?”’

The memorial park commemorating FDR’s presidency from 1933 to 1945 is located along the scenic Cherry Tree Walk, across the Tidal Basin from the Jefferson Memorial and about a 10-minute walk from the Lincoln Memorial.

Inside the wooded memorial are four outdoor granite gallery rooms, one for each of FDR’s presidential terms. The walls are inscribed with FDR’s famous quotes, including his pledge of “a New Deal for the American people” and his reassurance that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

There is a sculpture of FDR and his wife, Eleanor. With her husband’s encouragement, Mrs. Roosevelt “created what we know as the office of the First Lady, sharing in the presidential partnership as well as becoming a leader in her own right, developing her own political agenda,” said Phil Rulon, a history professor at Northern Arizona University and associate editor of the Presidential Studies Quarterly.