"EVERY Day is Memorial Day in Washington, D.C.," said a headline in a small newspaper there. Very true. Visiting the capital's memorials and museums is a major occupation of most visitors, even of business visitors with spare hours available. A grand memorial to
Franklin RooseveltNew this year is the fourth presidential memorial. One to Franklin Delano Roosevelt has joined the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials and the Washington Monument close by the Tidal Basin and the Potomac River.
At 7.5 acres it may be the largest, but the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument seem sure to continue to draw more visitors. They are more dramatic.
Close by are the Vietnam and Korean War memorials, also more dramatic. All are very much worth visiting.
The FDR Memorial is nearly three football fields long. Granite walls, open to the skies, subdivide it into four large principal courtyards, one for each of his terms as president.
There are numerous water features, story-telling sculptures and a relative few selected FDR quotations carved on the granite walls in large, plain capital letters.
The memorial offers no cover from the elements except for a very small office and bookstore at the entrance and the restrooms at the far end.
Among the sculptures are FDR's wife, Eleanor (the first wife to be so honored), and their dog, Fala. Bronze figures titled "The Depression Breadline" and "The Appalachian Farm Couple" capture the despair of Americans that FDR spent his early presidential years trying to relieve.
Adjoining quotations say, "I see a third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-fed" and "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."
No wonder common Americans loved FDR and elected him a never-to-be-equaled four times. And little wonder that in his final presidential years all Americans followed him as he showed what the sculptor for that era tried to capture: "resoluteness and bravery in the face of cataclysmic world events," the events of World War II.
Whether to show him as the crippled polio victim he was or the gallant world leader that he became despite his handicap is still causing controversy. The major sculpture is far more than life size and vibrating with strength. It has a cloak covering his wheelchair -- properly, I believe. There is a life-size chair elsewhere in the memorial. Eleanor Roosevelt is honored in a final sculpture as our first delegate to the United Nations.
THE memorial is between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, closer to the former. A water's edge walkway connects them but the distances are not for the infirm.
One grumble about the Roosevelt site is that it replaces what used to be a popular picnic ground. There's still space to picnic, however, and future generations may get a taste of one of the most dramatic eras in American history along with their munchies.
The memorial highlights a man who was elected president by a despairing nation in 1932. He served until his death in office in April 1945 just before our final World War II victories. He led America to become, for better or worse, the most powerful nation in the world.
He said he didn't want a grand memorial. Congress correctly decided he deserves one.