A Sculptor of History and the Present

WASHINGTON — In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, this nation was desperate. A quarter of the country was out of work. Millions were hungry. Farmers aimed guns at creditors to keep their land. The banking system simply ceased to function. The Communist Party staged hunger marches.

It was terrifying. A revolution seemed possible. The Great Depression had been underway for four years. It was worldwide, and times had only gotten worse.

And then came Roosevelt: buoyant, charming, optimistic, cheerful, resourceful, energetic, with a rich, reassuring voice and a jaunty smile, a battered fedora and a cigarette holder cockily held between his teeth.

He took the oath and boldly asserted: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

And the country took heart.

FDR went on to be reelected for three more terms, the only president elected to more than two. In the 12 years before he died in office, he took the country through its greatest domestic crisis since the Civil War and forged the alliance that defeated fascism.

And now, 52 years after his passing, America honors this man Roosevelt with a garden memorial, close to the Potomac, of trees and moving water and stone bearing the words that roused the country. It was dedicated Friday, with President Clinton--the first president born after FDR’s death--calling his predecessor “the greatest president of this great American century.”

Thousands of spectators gathered at the entrance to the memorial where carved in granite are Roosevelt’s words: “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

Roosevelt was the most important president of the 20th century, as deeply loved and as bitterly hated as Lincoln the century before.

His conservative critics said he had seized unconstitutional power. They accused him of taking America toward socialism. The rich, through clenched teeth, called him a traitor to his class. Reformers and radicals on the left decried his caution and his devotion to capitalism.

And as German armies blitzkrieged Europe in the late 1930s and Japan invaded Asian neighbors, Roosevelt was denounced anew. Isolationists said he had connived to sucker the country into a war that was none of its business. Interventionists said he was timid about shoring up Britain, France and China in their darkest hours.

Roosevelt’s unexpected death on the verge of victory in 1945--in the 83rd day of his fourth term--touched the nation as had the death of no president since Lincoln. In 1948, a poll of historians listed only three presidents as “great”--Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Another historians’ poll this year agreed.

Before Roosevelt, Washington was a sleepy capital with little impact on the everyday life of a large nation.

Before Roosevelt, the federal government was indifferent to the plight of the poor. It did not concern itself with the hours, wages and working conditions of Americans or provide for them in their old age. Roosevelt’s New Deal gave America the government it has now.

And the man who did it was a patrician. The only child of a distant father and a domineering mother, he studied under tutors and governesses until he was 14 and was a shy boarding school student and an indifferent scholar at Harvard.

A fifth cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, he dropped out of law school and, over his mother’s objections, married a distant cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt. He dabbled in business, got elected a state senator and served as undersecretary of the Navy in World War I. In 1920, the Democrats nominated him, at age 38, for vice president.

The ticket lost, but the dashing Roosevelt was seen as a rising star.

Then polio struck. He was vacationing with his five children on Canada’s Campobello Island in 1921. Within two days, “my left leg lagged,” he recalled later. “Presently, it refused to work, and then the other.” He would never walk again unaided.

He fought back with endless hours of exercise. He regained use of his hands. Heavy steel braces allowed him to stand. But his political career seemed over.

Roosevelt found relief in the restorative mineral waters of Warm Springs, Ga., an old resort that he bought and that provided low-cost treatment for his fellow victims--”the polios,” he called them.

His mother wanted him to retire, but with the encouragement of Eleanor, he made a spectacular reappearance in 1924: Leaning heavily on a son, he painfully struggled down the aisle to the podium of the Democratic convention to nominate New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith for president.

Four years later, Smith persuaded Roosevelt to run for the governorship. He won, ran a progressive administration and won again.

Still, some thought him a lightweight. Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”

No one thought that way after he defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover and took charge. In Roosevelt’s first 100 days, Congress passed 15 major laws. The legislation reopened banks, provided relief for the jobless, insured bank deposits and created the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring electricity, work and water to seven impoverished Southern states.

One law created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put half a million young men to work planting trees, fighting erosion, protecting wildlife, developing parks, restoring historical sites and building dams--and offering the dignity of work.

In those 100 days, Roosevelt held 30 news conferences, delivered two “fireside chats” on the radio and sent 15 messages to Congress, asking for new laws. In 1935, he got Social Security through Congress, giving ordinary people a measure of financial security in old age, infirmity and unemployment--probably the single most popular program ever enacted.

If something did not work, Roosevelt would try something else. Through it all, he governed from a wheelchair, but made great efforts to conceal his disability. Many were barely aware of it.

“He may have become president even if he hadn’t contracted polio,” one historian said, “but with the disability he became more compassionate, made more widespread contacts, concentrated on his priorities and learned to bide his time before making a crucial decision.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, doing what no first lady ever had done, went everywhere, serving as FDR’s eyes and ears. A consummate politician and an uncompromising humanitarian, she pestered him ceaselessly with the social problems--of blacks, of women, of workers, of children--that she had observed.

Roosevelt cherished Eleanor for her wisdom, but he turned to his wife’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, for emotional sustenance, forever straining his marriage.

He was wily. He played one aide against another. His denunciation of “economic royalists” smacked of class warfare. He was disorganized.

His acute political judgment failed him in 1937 when he tried to “pack the court,” adding as many as six new justices to a nine-man Supreme Court that had overturned New Deal laws, one after another. Congress slapped him down.

Dependent on Southern support in Congress, he ignored the racism in American law and society. He sanctioned the wartime detention of 110,000 people of Japanese descent. He ignored pleas to save European Jewry from the Holocaust. He was arrogantly indifferent toward his three vice presidents, not even informing Harry Truman about work on the atom bomb. A dying man, he ran for a fourth term that he was too infirm to serve.

But he led!

He connived to find ways to ship tons of arms to Britain and China before the country entered the war, against the advice of military leaders and the opposition of the isolationists.

After Pearl Harbor, he laid out breathtaking mobilization plans--one-year production goals of 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns.

On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt was in his Little White House in Warm Springs, sitting for a portrait, when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

The entire nation mourned; thousands waited through the night to glimpse the funeral train on its 800-mile trip to Washington. He had held office so long that many could not imagine anyone else in the job.

The Warm Springs portrait remained unfinished, hazy. But his legacy is in fine focus: a compassionate, activist government.

That’s his monument too: He gave America a new deal.