WASHINGTON -- After more than 40 years of rancorous debate over funding and design, the $52 million Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is finally under construction here.
The project will commemorate some of the late president's most celebrated achievements, including the launching of the New Deal and leading the nation out of the Great Depression and through World War II.
"It will be unlike anything Washington has seen before," says Dorann H. Gunderson, executive director of the FDR Memorial Commission, "where a visitor can experience something different each time."
Shortly before his death in 1945, Mr. Roosevelt told his friend, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, that if a memorial was to be dedicated to him he wanted it to be simple, no larger than his desk, and placed near the National Archives. Today in Washington a small white granite block sits on that spot on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Mr. Roosevelt's legions of admirers, however, believed his stature demanded a more lofty monument, thus the elaborate memorial now going up next to the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park.
The construction schedule calls for the FDR memorial to join those of three other American presidents -- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln -- in the fall of 1996. The Roosevelt commission expects it to become one of the city's major attractions.
Much of the memorial's 40-year history was spent deciding how the project should look. In 1975, after the FDR Memorial Commission considered and then rejected several designs, San Francisco-based architect Lawrence Halprin came up with a concept that, after modification, worked for the commission, the Roosevelt family and Congress.
Mr. Halprin's plans are neither typical nor traditional.
Blending open space with the natural terrain, it will be more park-like than most other Washington memorials.
The 7.5-acre site will include four outdoor galleries, representing FDR's four terms in office. Fifteen sculptures will fill the galleries. Most prominent will be a seated FDR with his cape drawn about him, as he often appeared during World War II. His dog Fala, a constant companion, appears at his feet, ready to greet visitors.
A bronze sculpture will recognize Eleanor Roosevelt for her efforts as a champion of women's rights and for her work on behalf of minorities and the poor. It will be the first presidential memorial honoring a first lady.
Other sculptures include the presidential seal, a breadline symbolic of the Great Depression and a man listening to one of Roosevelt's fireside chats.
"He started out in a Depression, he went through a war," Mr. Halprin said at the ground-breaking ceremony last October. "How could you capture that with one image?"
The trees, shrubs and flowers around the FDR Memorial will create what Ms. Gunderson of the FDR commission calls "a living memorial that will change with each season."
Mr. Halprin is importing pink carnelion granite walls from Minnesota and South Dakota. The walls, 12 feet tall and 850 feet long, will line the ridge between the Potomac River and the Tidal Basin.
More than 30 inscriptions from some of Mr. Roosevelt's most famous speeches and fireside chats will line the walls, including a relief depicting his New Deal legislation.
In a time of fiscal austerity, the memorial may seem extravagant. But the $52 million pricetag on the Roosevelt Memorial is about average for projects of similar scope. The National Park Service estimates that if built today, the Washington Monument would cost $63 million, the Lincoln Memorial $59 million and the Jefferson Memorial $42 million.
It has been a long and rocky road for the Roosevelt Memorial. In 1955, Congress created the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Commission to oversee the design and construction of a memorial to the 32nd president. By 1959, the commission had reserved the site in West Potomac Park and began the first competitions for the memorial's design.
L That's when the seemingly endless delays seem to have begun.
Author and social critic Tom Wolfe recalled the dispute in a 1982 Washington Post article focusing on another design controversy then flaring, the one over the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial:
"The public," wrote Mr. Wolfe, "was waiting for some classic FDR... Roosevelt with his great leonine head thrown back, his prognathous grin and cigarette holder, his cape with the silk frogging...and what the public got was eight enormous upright abstract marble slabs that became known as 'Instant Stonehenge.'
That design, approved by a panel of art experts in 1960, set loose roars of outrage through Congress and the Roosevelt family. More controversy followed with two other rejected designs.
Ms. Gunderson remains diplomatic in her assessment of the early plans, calling them simply "inappropriate" and "incompatible with other monuments."
Many of Washington's monuments and historic sites have been plagued by disputes and red tape, Ms. Gunderson says.
"It's not unusual," she says, referring to the delays. "In the history of major memorials there is a great deal of debate, discussion and procrastination."
"If you look about two-thirds of the way up the Washington Monument, you can see a change in color that shows where construction stopped" so Congress could contemplate their efforts. The bickering over whether to finish the monument lasted more than 30 years, she says.
Securing funding for the FDR Memorial has been as problemati as deciding on a design. Although designs were approved in the late 1970s, Congress did not appropriate money for the project until more than a decade later, when the late Claude Pepper, a Florida Democratic congressman, was named chairman of the FDR Memorial Commission.
As a young congressman in the 1930s, Mr. Pepper was a fervent Roosevelt ally during the early years of the New Deal. He remained a loyal supporter through Mr. Roosevelt's 12 years as president, from 1933 to 1945.
According to Ms. Gunderson, Mr. Pepper reactivated and energized the commission. He was so motivated by his work, she recalls, that one of his last public acts was to leave his hospital bed to testify before the House Appropriations Committee on the memorial's long-overdue funding.
Congress began saving for their $42 million share of the $52 million project soon after. Mr. Clinton set aside the final $5 million this year. The FDR Memorial Commission is raising the additional $10 million through private donations. They have raised nearly $3.6 million in cash and pledges so far.
The memorial promises to capture the leadership and inspiration Mr. Roosevelt provided as commander-in-chief, however, there will be no images depicting one of his greatest achievements -- rising to power despite partial paralysis from polio, at a time when disabilities were often hidden from the public.
Some people feel that by excluding images of Mr. Roosevelt's crippling polio, the memorial ignores a significant part of his life.
Speed Davis, acting executive director of the National Council on Disability, says that ignoring Mr. Roosevelt's disability makes no sense in today's society and is not historically accurate.
"He couldn't hide it from the people he interacted with everyday, from Stalin on down," he says. "He was an effective world leader despite his disability and could serve as a role model to others today."
At Mr. Roosevelt's request, he was rarely photographed in his wheelchair or wearing leg braces, and a sympathetic press complied with his wishes.
According to Ray Teichman, supervisory archivist at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., there are only a few photos that indicate any paralysis in their collection of about 125,000.
Teichman says that Mr. Roosevelt neither hid nor promoted his disability. "It was a different time. He didn't draw attention to it the way we do today."
Ms. Gunderson says the commission is portraying Mr. Roosevelt as they believe believe he would have wanted and how David B. Roosevelt, FDR's grandson and a member of the commission, requested.