ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 30, 1996 TAG: 9604300111
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
HE LED THE NATION from a wheelchair, and disabled people today could be inspired to see that fact displayed, an advocacy group says.
When he was alive, Franklin D. Roosevelt strove mightily to keep people from seeing him in his wheelchair. Now, more than half a century after his death, he is still succeeding.
A 7.5-acre memorial to the four-term president under construction along the Potomac River will include three sculptures of him, but none will portray his disability.
In an outdoor exhibit longer than two football fields, the only mention of his handicap will be one line on a chronology, stating: ``1921, Stricken with poliomyelitis - He never again walked unaided.''
The deliberate omission of any visual reminder of FDR's handicap has sparked a protest from a group of disabled people who call it a distortion of history that robs disabled people today and in the future of the inspiration FDR could offer.
After scraping together the $10,000 price of admission, the National Organization on Disability plans to send its wheelchair-using chairman to a fund-raising event tonight at the White House to make his case personally to President Clinton and other backers of the memorial.
``It's a blatant historical distortion,'' said Michael Deland, chairman of the group and a former environmental adviser to President Bush. ``It's important to people in wheelchairs. For the 49 million Americans who have disabilities, there is no greater role model than FDR.
``It would be unconscionable if schoolchildren were to go through that memorial and not know that he led the nation from a wheelchair.''
Moreover, Deland said, the memorial will gloss over one of Roosevelt's most significant accomplishments: keeping his disability from the public eye while winning four presidential elections and leading the nation out of the Depression and through World War II.
``He was a sophisticated enough politician to know the country wasn't ready to elect a president from a wheelchair,'' Deland said.
Reporters and photographers of the era willingly kept the secret that Roosevelt could not walk without heavy braces and help. Of more than 125,000 photos of FDR at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., only one shows him in his wheelchair.
Roosevelt's ability to prosper despite his disability was an integral part of his life, one critics of the memorial say should be part of the story told today. Deland noted that Winston Churchill praised FDR's courage and perseverance in a speech to the British House of Commons, and that a statue of FDR leaning on a cane (historically inaccurate because he needed support on both sides) stands in London.
Dorann Gunderson, executive director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission, said it would be historically inaccurate to make a public display of something FDR himself hid in his lifetime.
``Those who question the lack of an image of President Roosevelt using a wheelchair or a cane and braces ignore the history this monument was developed to reflect,'' Gunderson said.
``A historical monument should not attempt to revise the record.''
Roosevelt himself never wanted a big memorial at all. Four years before he died in 1945, he told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that he only wanted a memorial the size of his desk.
``I want it to be plain, without any ornamentation, with the simple carving, `In Memory Of...'''
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB