DATE: Tuesday, May 6, 1997                  TAG: 9705060001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

ROOSEVELT'S RICHNESS CAN'T BE CAPTURED IN BRONZE ACTIVISTS FOR THE DISABLED WANT A STATUE SHOWING FDR IN HIS WHEELCHAIR ADDED TO THE FDR MEMORIAL JUST DEDICATED IN WASHINGTON.

There was a time when a few of Franklin D. Roosevelt's enemies publicly railed at ``that cripple in the White House.'' These were calls from the wild.

Nowadays the demand that FDR be perceived as an invalid comes from activists for the disabled. They want a statue showing FDR in his wheelchair added to the FDR Memorial just dedicated in Washington.

President Clinton says he will ask Congress for a decree although a memorial statue already depicts the only four-term president caped and seated - the way he presented himself except when by force of will be stood on braces to deliver speeches.

But millions of future visitors to the memorial will have no memory of the Roosevelt who cloaked his disability: If a bronze wheelchair offers the disabled even more inspiration from a triumphant life, who would begrudge them?

Besides, that's how FDR got about from age 39 when stricken by polio after a strenuous day of sailing, swimming, running and fighting a forest fire. Finally, there's no doubt that his paralysis - or his coping with it - made him, as his uncle Frederic A. Delano thought, ``a twice born man.''

In The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that two members of FDR's Cabinet, Frances Perkins and Henry Morgenthau Jr., thought that ``suffering had purged him of frivolity and arrogance, enlarging his compassion and deepening his understanding.''

On the other hand, the aristocratic Ivy Leaguer who became the champion of the dispossessed didn't come to the struggle empty-handed. His valet, Irvin McDuffie, said that when Roosevelt was ill ``he complained as little as any man I ever saw. . . . He could throw off anything.''

Including, it developed, any appearance of being disabled. Most knew he was crippled but few noticed. They remember the grin, the gusto, the cape, the cigarette holder, the bantering and biting humor, the buoyancy. And, also, the jauntiness, the jaw, the imperturbability, the optimism, the confidence and the rhetoric which, even before Churchill's rang out, demonstrated the power of one compelling voice.

The richness of Roosevelt's qualities is far too great to be captured in bronze, however arranged, just as the flag is too much to be captured in cloth.

* * * * As the prime architect of interventionist government, FDR is constantly second-guessed. Big government will mess up volunteerism, wrote Tony Snow on this page the other day, just as it messed up the civil rights movement which had already ``succeeded without government aid or encouragement.''

Snow's history is home-cooked and seasoned to taste. It says: ``Uncle Sam got into the act after the tide of public opinion had turned - and then, the government messed things up.''

Gee whillikers! If it had been known at the time that Jim Crow had just up and quit oppressing people, that blacks were free to vote and cross the color line in schools, the workplace and the armed services, decades of struggle and strife could have been avoided. So could have been the executive orders, legislative acts and court decrees that, in the real world, were required to unhorse Jim Crow.

Government bumbles and sometimes bungles, but its tendency to grow has sprung from sources as various and as broad as the country. President Lyndon Johnson pushed a noble and, in some particulars, grandiose ``war on poverty,'' but that effort owed its conception to philanthropic pursuits of the Ford Foundation. Or, put another way, to the profits of the free market that we are now urged to believe is efficacious in all things. Had it been, of course, there would have been no catastrophic collapse of the economy, no ``big guvmint,'' and, very likely, no four-term president to memorialize. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

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