Photo of the Day: Pagoda Tree Near FDR Memorial, DC

Franklin D. Roosevelt died 70 years ago today in Warm Springs, Ga.—though you would not know it from a glance through newspapers or the cybersphere this weekend. That is in marked contrast to the anniversaries of the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, which are regularly featured all the time in the media whenever their respective dates (April 14 and November 22) roll around.

It’s a far from the intense feeling across the land in April 1945, when hundreds of thousands paid their final respects to FDR on the long funeral train journey from Warm Springs to his Hyde Park, N.Y. home.

The difference between these reactions might be described this way: the deaths of Lincoln and JFK, because they involved assassination, left America confused and traumatized; the demise of FDR left the nation bereft, the way a family would feel at the loss of a strong father.

Roosevelt’s third term (and first few months of his fourth) constituted only four years, but he aged more visibly during this point than at any other in his life. The reason, I think, was not merely the heart disease that would increasingly plague him, but the heavy weight of conducting an unprecedented two-ocean war in which thousands of young men would lose their lives. Death clung to him, as surely as we know it did for Lincoln, in the final photo of his care-lined face by Alexander Gardner.

Feeling that he could not lay down the burden of power, any more than a serviceman could neglect his duty, FDR ran for a fourth term, at a point when (as made abundantly clear in the final episode of Ken Burns’ documentary, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History), many of those who loved him dreaded the signs of his physical deterioration.

But FDR felt responsible not just for the lives of the young men (including all his sons) in harm’s way throughout the war, but the lives of those for generations to come. He had seen how, despite Woodrow Wilson’s most strenuous efforts after WWI, the attempt to prevent another global conflict had collapsed within 20 years, with even more catastrophic results. He was determined to create international structures of security that would prove better this time.

How well he succeeded may be glimpsed in this 3,800-lb, 17^th-century Japanese pagoda tree that I photographed while in Washington, D.C., a year and a half ago. The tree, a gift to the United States from the mayor of Yokahama, Japan, came to Washington in 1957, long before the opening of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial.

I have written before on the memorial concerning its statue of FDR as well as its “Forgotten Men” representation of the nation’s unemployed. But the pagoda’s placement just outside America’s tribute to its greatest 20^th-century President, next to the Tidal Basin he loved so much, seems powerfully appropriate as well, and certainly worthwhile examining.

In April 1958, the tree was dedicated in order to recognize the centennial of the peaceful relations between Japan and the United States after Commodore Matthew Perry helped open up the long closed-off Asian nation to the West in 1854. But that tree was symbolic not only of the longstanding prewar amity between the two countries, but also of what it takes to reconstitute a seemingly familiar form in an unfamiliar environment.

The pagoda embodies the Japanese ideal of balance. But when its shipment arrived in the U.S., researchers at the Library of Congress discovered that, to facilitate its transport, the tree had been shipped in five carts. Now the researchers needed not just to reassemble the whole (with no instructions enclosed, no less), but also to ensure that it could flourish in far different soil. It was not unlike the task facing FDR and the bureaucrats in his War and State Departments faced as the war drew to a close.

FDR himself would not be around for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let alone the surrender ceremonies aboard the USS Missouri. But the lawyers retained by Douglas MacArthur to write the constitution for postwar Japan had been part of FDR’s New Deal. The Asian nation they envisioned would take root not in an imperial nation, but a Western-style democracy. 

They learned what the Americans dealing with the pagoda tree would grasp in the following decade: that an organic thing, whether a landscape fixture or a nation, could be reconstituted in foreign soil, but only if reassembled with the utmost care.

Japan, like Germany, could not be allowed to re-militarize and threaten its neighbors again, FDR felt. At the same time, the country needed to be reintegrated, economically and diplomatically, back into the community of nations.

By and large, the postwar world envisioned by FDR, then carried through by Harry Truman, succeeded in its objectives—though not without tensions or ironies. Germany and Japan, with the burden of maintaining arms removed, have instead, to varying degrees, constituted economic rather than military rivals to the U.S. for long periods in the postwar era. To neutralize a GOP concern that had derailed U.S. membership in the League of Nations, the President ensured that America, as a charter member of the U.N. Security Council, would have veto power over measures—a right that the former U.S.S.R., unfortunately, had as well as a member of the council.

Most of all, in order to eradicate the virus of nationalistic, race-based militarism, FDR was forced to create the modern American national-security state—an apparatus based on secrecy (in this case, the Manhattan Project that would climax in the dropping of the atomic bomb).

None of this negates, however, the value of the collective security system that FDR created. In foreign as in domestic policy, he believed in “bold, persistent experimentation”: “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” 

Nor did he believe, despite his enjoyment of power, that his example alone would be enough to maintain international order. As he told Congress upon his return from Yalta, in a quote that appears on one of the walls of his memorial today: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation….It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.”

Photo of the Day: The Nation’s ‘Forgotten Men,’ at the FDR Memorial, DC

I already have written one post about the FDR Memorial, back in April. But, with the Ken Burns multi-part documentary bringing renewed attention this week to the nation’s 32^nd President (as well as wife Eleanor and fifth cousin Theodore), it seemed appropriate to revisit that site in the nation’s capital now.

The photo here, which I took last November on a visit to Washington,  is a portion of a statue in the open-air “Room 2” of the sprawling site. “The Breadline,” created by sculptor George Segal,  stands next to two of the more famous passages from Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address. His never-ending attention to the “forgotten man” is worth bearing in mind today, when such individuals are so conveniently—no, criminally—left by the wayside by those in power who are beholden to the special interests:

“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."

“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 too little."

I hope that the Burns specials lead more Americans--especially the young--down to this site, as well as to Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park. I can think of few places I'd rather be at the height of autumn than the latter beautiful upstate New York landmark.

Photo of the Day: Fearless Captain of the Ship of State

I snapped this photo of the statue of our 32^nd President when I visited the Franklin D.Roosevelt Memorial while in Washington last November. It’s taken me a while to write about the experience, but now seems as appropriate a time as any. After all, on this date in 1945, Americans woke up with the fearful certainty that the ebullient leader who told them they had nothing to fear but fear itself would not lead them through challenges every bit as great as those he had steered them through over the last 12 years.

Had he not succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12 sixty-nine years ago today, FDR would have delivered a Jefferson Day address with the climax, “Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” The invincible belief in a nation that could meet all difficulties was characteristic of the man. As much as anything, he would have been annoyed that his death removed any chance to link further with Thomas Jefferson, another patrician with faith in the common man.

FDR had told Associate Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that the only memorial he wanted should be no bigger than “a block about the size of [this desk] . . . in the center of that green plot in front of the [National] Archives Building.” For a half-century after his death, Americans made do with that. But, when his memorial opened in 1997, they had a structure that acted as a counterpart to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the Pantheon-style temple of freedom across the Tidal Basin that FDR had dedicated to his idol.

One might argue that the FDR Memorial would serve as an invaluable teaching device for the young. (Judging from the giddy teens I saw that day in November at the memorial, they hadn’t absorbed much education yet.)

However, adults might have needed that instruction just as much. The true scandal of the last three decades is that adults forgot why Roosevelt had created so many programs in the first place: to provide economic security to a population at the mercy of capitalists with the mature judgment of riverboat gamblers.

FDR would prove a better steward of the nation’s financial stewards than these men. The location of his memorial on the Tidal Basin would have pleased him more than anything else about the tribute. From childhood, his Hyde Park, N.Y., home gave him a breathtaking view of the Hudson River. The sense of beauty and peace he desired for the world as much as himself is created by the sounds of flowing water heard throughout the Tidal Basin memorial. (In fact, Lawrence Halprin consciously designed it this way, to soften the sound of arriving and departing planes from across the Potomac River.)

The jaunty FDR of the first two terms—head frequently reared back in laughter, a cigarette always ready—is nowhere to be seen in the sculpture by Neil Estern that I photographed. It is hard to be making decisions every day that could be sending young men to their deaths, as a wartime President must do. The Roosevelt of this memorial, like his real-life counterpart, still possesses concern and vision, but all this knowledge has clearly aged him.

But the FDR of this statue remains intent on pulling the country through this latest storm. In his much-loved “naval cape,” he knows the stakes involved, but he’s up to the challenge, ready to inspire not just his countrymen but his also ally across the ocean, another former naval administrator, Winston Churchill, who would hang in his study a letter from the American President quoting these lines from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

“Sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”