Transcript of AutisticRealityPodcast S1E35 - Disability Rights Tour of FDR Memorial with Jim Dickson, By Alec Frazier and Autistic Reality

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ALEC FRAZIER [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Autistic Reality Podcast. Here at Autistic Reality, we believe in three levels of identity. We believe that we are all human, traveling on our journey together, and that we have much more in common than what sets us apart. We believe that we are all individuals with richly unique experiences, and finally, we believe in the importance of all other identities, whether they be gender, race, sexual orientation, ability, faith, and much, much more. Join us on this wonderful journey as we interview key players and discuss important topics. We hope this journey will be informative and fun. We are ready, nothing about us without us.

So welcome everyone to this disability rights tour of the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC. I’m here with Jim Dickson, and Jim Dickson, what is your role with the memorial?

JIM DICKSON [00:01:14] I was part of the leadership team that fought to have a statue of FDR in his wheelchair added to the Memorial. At the time, they were not going to show him as a wheelchair user.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:01:37] That’s very important, since that was a big part of his life and that’s a big part of the lives of millions of Americans and people overseas. So just as a person, when you approach the Memorial from the Tidal Basin, at the right time of year, you see a beautiful forest of cherry trees and they’re framing the Memorial, and they form a great approach to the Memorial. Then you get closer and you see what is basically this ceremonial driveway that takes you in. There’s a green with cherry trees in it that takes you into the Prologue Room. Jim, the Prologue Room is very significant to the disability cause, can you explain that?

JIM DICKSON [00:02:22] Yes. It was going to be an empty sort of plaza before the Memorial, but we wanted them, the first thing that people see is to see President Roosevelt as he was in his wheelchair. And we wanted the presentation to be lifesize, and to not be up on a pedestal, because we felt it was important that when parents bring their children to the Memorial and they take pictures, one parent can stand behind the first president who used a wheelchair and the other parent can stand behind the next president to use a wheelchair.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:03:37] And that is a pretty powerful statement. And so I understand that there is, first of all, is the statue, I’ve heard it’s like slightly larger than lifesize, or is it lifesize?

JIM DICKSON [00:03:48] It’s lifesize. FDR was a big man before, when he would stand with his braces, he was 6’3”, and always pretty muscular, but when polio came, he put a lot of time into building his upper body strength so he could lift his entire body easily with his arms. In fact, FDR designed the first therapeutic pool where people could use their upper bodies while water partially supported their weight.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:04:50] And a lot of people are using that these days.

JIM DICKSON [00:04:52] Yes. The other contribution that he made to improving the lives of people who are paralyzed is he designed the first hand controls and had them installed on his cars, so he could drive himself. He loved to go out, drive through the country, loved nature. You mentioned the cherry trees that frame the president, trees were very, very important to FDR.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:05:36] He had people plant a bunch of trees when he was governor of New York State. He did that, the Depression had already started, and he thought he could put people to work planting forests.

JIM DICKSON [00:05:46] Yes. Actually the Depression had not started, but he was governor from 28 to 32, but he did do a lot of planting, putting people to work. He also did a lot of planting, remember we had the Dust Bowl.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:06:17] Right, and we’ll get to that with the second term. And yeah, the Depression from what I understand started in 29 but it didn’t start working on it until he became President. So we’ve got on the back of the wheelchair, I always point this out to people when I take them. There’s actually a diagram of how he built his chair on the back of the wheelchair, of the statue.

JIM DICKSON [00:06:45] Yes, it was actually built, he took a kitchen chair from his home in Hyde Park, New York, put bicycle wheels on it. It was one of the designs he had that wasn’t quite as functional as it needed to be because to turn the wheelchair took a great deal of work because it did not have a set of small wheels in the front, the way most wheelchairs do now so that they can pivot on a dime. And there is (coughs) excuse me, there is now a short video, I forget, 12, 18 seconds of him being pushed in the wheelchair.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:08:02] Right, and that’s odd because they have either a copy or an original of the wheelchair in the visitors’ center and that’s a must see in my opinion, and it doesn’t have handles like most wheelchairs do.

JIM DICKSON [00:08:19] Right, right. Again, it doesn’t have push handles in the back and it doesn’t have arms. He had such upper body strength that he could you know, put his arm on a desk and leverage himself up.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:08:48] Right. So, in the bookstore, I’ve checked for a wonderful book that you recommended to me. Unfortunately the bookstore no longer carries it, but I urge everyone to check it out. That is “Splendid Deception.” Can you tell us about that?

JIM DICKSON [00:09:04] Yes. It was written by Hugh Gallagher, also a polio, who had a tremendous, several careers actually. “Splendid Deception” is a short-ish biography of FDR from the point of view of his being a wheelchair user. It was very important in bringing together the coalition that was successful in creating the wheelchair statue. In fact, the little anecdote I told about taking a picture of the first president and the next president, that was Hugh’s language, and his idea. We came up with it one day when we were saying we need a concise, powerful, emotional statement on how we want this statue to be presented.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:10:25] Right, and FDR was somewhat of a perfectionist. I’ve been to Spring Wood in Hyde Park, his house, and there’s this interesting set of notes he wrote his doctor. You see, FDR liked to think of his legs as being the same size, turns out everybody’s legs, one’s shorter than the other, that’s just how the human body is built, and he was disturbed by the fact that one of his braces was slightly longer than the other one. He was a bit of a perfectionist. Now this is quote on the wall behind the wheelchair, and then we can move to first term. It’s by Eleanor Roosevelt, and it says “Franklin’s illness gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out of the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons, infinite patience and neverending persistence,” and it’s also in Braille below the quote, at wheelchair height I might add.

JIM DICKSON [00:11:24] Yes. During his lifetime, predates the active disability rights world, movement, and it was their feeling that he had to hide his being paralyzed. Now people knew he had had polio, and that quote from Eleanor is about the only time she in writing ever commented on his being paralyzed.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:12:16] She was a very strong person too, and we’ll get to her in the fourth term room. Now there is also in the bookshop, there is in the foyer to the bookshop, there’s an official dedication panel, and then there is a display near the entrance where you can run your fingers over a smaller facsimile of the dedication panel and over the panel’s contents in Braille.

JIM DICKSON [00:12:43] Yes. We at the National Organization on Disability had organized a coalition that fought for and demanded that there be a statue of him in a wheelchair which at the time was the first statue of any human being in a wheelchair. Often in life, you have to be careful what you ask for because when we won and they said, “All right, we’ll put a statue there. Go out and raise the millions of dollars to put the statue up,” and these plaques commemorate the very generous donors who contributed so that we could have the statue.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:13:44] Yep. That’s good. Now we are going, it’s important to recognize contributors, now we are going to move to the first term room. Now every single room has a fountain, and the fountain is themed on a major theme of the room. The first term room is titled “The Great Depression.” Can you tell us some of what was going on with the country at the time?

JIM DICKSON [00:14:10] Yeah. Well, 25% of the population was unemployed. The water in the first room, a little waterfall, is there to symbolize the Tennessee Valley Authority.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:14:33] No, that’s in the second term room, I think. The first room is a straight drop like the economy. The steps are in the second room.

JIM DICKSON [00:14:43] Okay, thanks. The water is there, water was very important to FDR. He loved to be out on the ocean. He had been Undersecretary of the Navy during World War One, and there’s also a clever artistic and practical function of the waterfalls, which, the Memorial is underneath one of the flight patterns for National Airport, and the water, the falls are there to create a pleasant background sound masking the overflight of airplanes, of jets when the wind is in a certain direction.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:15:44] Correct, and as I mentioned for you listeners, the first term room fountain is a straight drop, and from the explanation, it says that it symbolizes the crash of the economy that led to the Great Depression. It is a straight cascade downward, that’s what that fountain is. Now in terms of the first term room, there’s a seal that’s carved over the ceremonial entrance and there are a number of quotes. One of the primary quotes is, everybody knows this one, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and that’s from his first inaugural. There’s also a relief under that quote. Do you have anything to say about that?

JIM DICKSON [00:16:32] I don’t remember which relief—

ALEC FRAZIER [00:16:33] The relief is of FDR waving to the jubilant crowd as he passes by in his car, open top car.

JIM DICKSON [00:16:47] FDR could stand with braces on his legs. And he had a bar installed across the back of the front seat, so he could lever himself up with one arm, and then he would be holding onto the bar, you can’t see the bar, ‘cause it was below the level of the open car line, but that way he could wave, smile, people could see him.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:17:23] Correct, I also heard that there’s a trick he used when he was at parties, both at Spring Wood and the White House. He knew that he couldn’t walk among the guests, so what he would do is he’d sort of install, it’s kind of like a bicycle seat and he installed it behind the bar, and he would bartend and keep up with the guests that way.

JIM DICKSON [00:17:44] Yes, yep. He called late afternoon, cocktail time, the children’s hour. And while he did not drink very heavily, he was known for mixing very strong drinks and giving it to his guests.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:18:08] I might also add, that seems almost like a trick from LBJ’s, Lyndon Baynes Johnson’s toolbox because if your guests are political guests and they’re inebriated, they may be more agreeable to your suggestions.

JIM DICKSON [00:18:24] (laughs) Right.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:18:25] Okay, so the first term room is pretty plain, but then we head into the second term room which is possibly the most, the significant room in the Memorial. Now I found that even the garbage cans in this Memorial are designed to fit the theme with stone covers, and also there are plenty of benches for seating.

JIM DICKSON [00:18:55] Yes, and one of the nicer statues is a seated person listening to a big old fashioned radio. In the 1930s, there was no such thing as a pocket radio or a portable radio or a radio on your cellphone. Radios were pieces of furniture, and FDR used what he called fireside chats to speak directly to the American public, and the statue depicts a person listening to the President as he explained major issues.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:19:52] Now in one of his fireside chats, he said, “I’ll never forget that I live in a house owned by the American people, and that I have been given their trust,” and that particular chat was interesting because he had decided that to support his New Deal Administration, he actually needed to expand the size of the West Wing, and he needed to justify it to the people because that was a significant financial expenditure when we were drowning in debt. So he did very much realize that he was a tenant of the people, he was a servant of the people, and there are two more statues in that front part of the second room. There is a rural couple and there is a breadline. Any comments about that?

JIM DICKSON [00:20:41] Well, it’s interesting to note that in the breadline, they’re all men, because in the 1920s and 30s, it was primarily men who worked, before the women’s movement. World War Two of course did a fair amount to bring women into the workplace, but again, 25% of the workforce was unemployed and standing in a breadline was how a person got food for himself and the family.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:21:33] Correct, and that was in the cities. Now in the country, we were undergoing a horrible drought and lots of unwise planting had taken place where we hadn’t established a good root system, and there was actually a gentleman who worked for the forestry service I think, the only one who realized what had caused the Dust Bowl, that there was nothing anchoring the soil down, and he did something very smart. He looked at his weather charts and then he decided to testify to Congress on a certain day. And then as he was testifying to Congress, a thick cloud of dust came into the chamber and coated everything, and he said, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the state of Oklahoma.”

JIM DICKSON [00:22:22] And to this day, if you drive through the midwest, you will notice by farmhouses that are scattered, a little cluster. First there’ll be trees planted around the farmhouse, but there’ll also be windbreaks planted, an acre, half acre of trees that were in many places planted with federal funds as part of FDR’s fight against the Depression.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:23:11] Right, and I wanted to give a little shoutout to the Colorado State Historic Museum, in Denver. They built a new museum about five, 10 years ago, and it is amazing. They have, you can sit in a theater that looks like you’re in a cabin on the prairie, and they actually have the Dust Bowl happen while you’re in there, it’s a very moving sensory experience. So he came to office and he said, let’s see if I can pull up this quote, he said, “I see one third of the nation ill clothed, ill housed, ill fed,” something along those lines?

JIM DICKSON [00:23:56] Yes.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:22:57] And so the next part of the second term room has that TVA fountain. Tell us about the TVA and the fountain.

JIM DICKSON [00:24:08] The Tennessee Valley Authority was a major federal program designed to both put people to work for construction, but to also harness the water of the Tennessee River in order to make for better farming and it was one of the big jobs programs that FDR got through Congress in order to put people back to work.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:24:55] Now there is a stereotype that is not quite true about people in the Tennessee Valley, in Appalachia as being unintelligent and uninformed. That stereotype actually has its basis in the time before the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, when people were just in that area, it’s not that they were wantonly stupid but they didn’t have access to resources and to learning, and with the Tennessee Valley Authority and electricity, they all of the sudden had a better economy and they could go to school and they could learn and they could listen to the radio and they could be better educated. And the good things, the benefits that that program did to that area were incalculable.

JIM DICKSON [00:25:45] Prior to the TVA, rural Tennessee, other parts of Alabama, Kentucky, did not have any electricity. It’s also worth noting that President Lyndon Johnson went to work in the early days of the New Deal and one of the things that he, President Johnson did is bring electricity to rural east Texas.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:26:30] Yes, now there is, this fountain is staggered like steps like a hydroelectric dam, and across from the fountain is a series of columns and a wall with impressions, and you’ll notice that each of the columns is like an old wax seal in the day of the Sumerians. If you were to roll it along the impressions on the wall, it would make a mold. Tell us about that.

JIM DICKSON [00:27:01] I’m having a senior moment here.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:27:03] Sorry, it is the social programs mural.

JIM DICKSON [00:27:06] Ah. Right. The murals depict the various programs. They were often called alphabet soup programs. So there was the TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority, there was the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, which did the tree planting in, which also made some of the very first hiking trails through our beautiful national parks. There were programs for farmers, there were programs for artists.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:27:52] The Works Progress Administration.

JIM DICKSON [00:27:53] The Works Progress Administration built roads, schools, libraries, bridges.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:28:03] Now there are a few points of injustice to the disability community in the memorial and the social programs panels along the wall are unfortunately one of them. Feel free to jump in here if you want to.

JIM DICKSON [00:28:23] Yeah, they said that they were Brailled, but it does not, it’s not readable braille. First of all, very often on a couple of the panels, you have to be nearly six feet tall to be able to reach up to touch the braille. The braille is not, braille is a series of six dots, combinations of them, dot one is A, dot two is B, but it’s important that the dots be felt in relationship to each other, and the artist distorted the spaces and also made the dots much bigger than braille.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:29:16] That’s really unfortunate. Now, from just for guests to know, there is an open fence between that area. The rest of the Memorial is closed off from the rest of the Tidal Basin, it’s pretty insular, but there’s an open fence between that part of the second term room and the baseball fields nearby, and that is to symbolize the community that the New Deal built and the feelings of hope that it gave people. So if you have no comments on that then we can move to, let’s see, there is a quote at the closing of the second term room, and that quote has a lot of meaning especially today. “We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember than any oppression, any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.” And then we go, I’m actually pulling up photo albums of the rooms here so that I know what I’m talking about. Then there is the third term room, which is the second World War, and the first thing you see in there is a pile of big blocks with scattered words that say “I hate war” on it.

JIM DICKSON [00:30:50] Right, and the blocks depict the rubble that war causes when it destroys property.  

ALEC FRAZIER [00:31:01] Right, and there is, and as we mentioned, FDR had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that was before he lost his legs and he had this very powerful quote. Forgive me, you know Jim, this memorial moves me so much that usually at least once when I walk through it, I’m moved to tears by what this man did.

JIM DICKSON [00:31:23] Me too.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:31:24] We should not underestimate, this man saved the country from economic collapse and then helped save the world from tyranny.

JIM DICKSON [00:31:35] FDR led the world out of the Depression and to victory in World War Two from his wheelchair.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:31:49] That is very important. Now he said, “I have seen war. I have seen war on land and see. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

JIM DICKSON [00:32:14] Yes, and you will notice that the statue of FDR that is across front his, he is looking at the rubble and his face on that statue is pretty grim.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:32:39] Yeah, so before we get to that statue which has a very interesting story to it, there is a fountain, and the fountain is filled with rubble. As I mentioned, all the fountains in this memorial have themes, and the theme of this fountain is destruction. Okay, so it actually symbolizes the ruined cities of Europe and Asia. I do have to mention because I’m sensitive to other people, I’ve seen photos of what the Allies did to areas that were not at at all involved in war production, and I would feel remiss if I didn’t voice my deep apologies to people who we bombed into the Stone Age for no reason. You know, cities like Dresden that were cultural areas that were—

JIM DICKSON [00:33:37] And in Japan, you know, every city in Japan was firebombed and heavily damaged or totally destroyed before we dropped the nuclear weapons on two of those cities.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:34:00] Correct. Now the statue of FDR in his wheelchair and before we get to that proper, there is a companion he has. He has his dog Fala, and that is noteworthy because it is the only statue of a presidential pet in a memorial.

JIM DICKSON [00:34:20] Yes. Fala was a Scottie dog, and FDR would often speak about his dog and the dog had the run of the White House.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:34:38] Yes, and also I should mention that FDR traveled abroad significantly to go to conferences with the other Allied leaders, and he had this cool railway built in his plane. His plane had a very funny name, it was called the Sacred Cow, and it was the first official presidential plane, and he had a railing built along the hallway so that he could say hello to the pilots and run from his quarters to the cockpit. He also had an elevator built in the belly of the plane so he could come straight from the ground into the plane. So, there is—

JIM DICKSON [00:35:21] This statue was important to our fight. They had been telling us, oh, the statue, he’s sitting in a chair with wheels, but if you look at the statue, you cannot see any of the wheels. The only way you can see a wheel is if you go up on the pedestal, go to the back of the statue, bend down and look underneath it, and you can then see a wheel.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:35:58] And that’s certainly not accessible to people in wheelchairs, and there’s also from what I understand a bit of a lobbying controversy. You said you were passing notes to people under doors in the Senate?

JIM DICKSON [00:36:11] Yes. We, as part of the campaign, we, when the independent living centers were in town for a conference, a group of us went up to the Senate office where the Memorial Commission was housed, and being movement people, we were chanting and singing and as we came up to the doors, they closed them, at which point we began to write notes explaining why it was important to people with disabilities to show the president as he was, and we were slipping the notes under the door when the Capitol Police came and said, well, now you’re going to have to leave or we’ll arrest you. We had expected something like this, we made a decision as a group, we were not gonna be arrested, and we turned around and left, and as we were leaving, a gentleman came walking very rapidly from behind us through the group. One of my colleagues said, “Jim, that’s Senator Inouye of Hawaii,” who was the chair of the commission to create the memorial, himself a war hero, himself a person who had lost an arm in the war. So we spoke to the senator and there were about 15 of us, particularly the individuals who used wheelchairs explained to the senator why it was important to them, what their story was. Several of them as they talked got tears in their eyes. He listened, nodded, and that was all he said, but as a sign of a kind of great man that Senator Inouye was, he eventually totally reversed his position. He had said that if they ever built a statue of me, I want them to show me with two arms. But by the end of our yearlong struggle, he became a supporter of depicting President Roosevelt in his wheelchair. This statue that does not show his wheelchair, again in the way they sort of half hid everything, if you look carefully at his legs, you will notice a ridge running down the outside of the legs. That is the braces that FDR wore outside his pants that were painted black like his pants, and that could be locked so he could stand. FDR developed a system where he could appear to be walking. He would use a cane in one arm with one hand, and then his son or an aide who was strong would cock an arm and FDR would literally swing himself between that person’s arm and the cane using gravity and his stomach muscles to swing out a leg and appear to be able to walk. The Secret Service would have to bolt the rostrum that he would speak from down because otherwise him being such a big man as he was leaning on it, it would topple over. We had a key victory in relationship to this statue. It was being built at a foundry in New York, and the Commission had planned an unveiling of the statue to be a champagne and caviar brunch for the world’s art and historic press to see the unveiling of the statue. That was scheduled for 11:00 in the morning. The disability community in the area showed up at 9:00 with 200 people, signs, don’t hide his disability, disability is part of life, FDR used a wheelchair just like me, and they decided they had to cancel the unveiling because the art press, some of them would not cross our picket line.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:42:33] Now there is a quote behind the statues of FDR and Fala. This quote is very relevant at any time but it is especially relevant today. It says, “They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.” And I want everybody to think about that. Now make sure if you go to that room to rub the top of Fala’s head for good luck. There’s also a pointer finger of the statue of FDR which people tend to rub for good luck. So then we go onto the fourth term room which is really two rooms, a fourth term room and a concluding room. So when you’re there you see a still pool. The rest of them were fountains, this is a still pool with a mural, a relief mural of FDR’s funeral procession.

JIM DICKSON [00:43:49] If you will notice the way they shaped the wall and you go down a ramp, and this is the quietest part of the Memorial in tribute to FDR’s funeral.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:44:09] Right, and when he died, Hitler was in his last days and he thought that it would be a great turnaround in war, but that is the genius of American democracy. When Truman took over, we still ended up winning that conflict and you will see that there’s a still pool and there’s the funeral procession and it symbolizes the death of the president. Now the president was at Warm Springs at the time. He had a home in Warm Springs. Want to tell us about that home?

JIM DICKSON [00:44:44] Warm Springs was a hot pools, you know, natural hot water, warm water, which FDR had discovered as part of a treatment for himself. He created a foundation there so that persons who were recovering from polio could go at no cost, communicate, learn from each other, work to recover as much physical function as they could. And in fact he left half of his personal fortune to the Warm Springs Foundation, which exists today both as a treatment center and a research center.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:45:49] Now, at one of these places, forgive me, I don’t know where exactly, there is a memorial to the pioneers who helped us to beat polio and it lists a number of doctors but it also lists a number of laymen who were responsible for the elimination of polio, and he is one of the laymen. And he started the March of Dimes. Want to tell us about that?

JIM DICKSON [00:46:14] Yes, well during FDR’s first term, people wanted to celebrate it and they came up with the idea of a march of dimes to find a cure for polio. And amazingly, schoolchildren, I remember as a child, getting a card and collecting dimes and mailing it in, and the first March of Dimes held to celebrate FDR’s birthday, there were fancy balls where high-priced donors could go, but FDR wanted something that everybody could do, and you could actually mail your dimes to the White House. And the White House then turned them over to the charity which eventually found through Dr. Jonas Salk a shot that every kid in the United States got in the 1950s to prevent polio.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:47:38] Now FDR also used those funds from the dimes to build the White House swimming pool, the old White House swimming pool. Nowadays, it’s been covered over and is the press briefing room, but he was a very avid swimmer and let’s see, and then so we—

JIM DICKSON [00:47:58] I would just add that it’s probable he caught polio while swimming, either in a lake in New York where there was a boys’ camp for inner city kids or off of a family boat anchored off of the summer vacation home.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:48:26] Right, he supposedly caught it at an island, I think it’s called Campabello in northeastern states, and that island, you know, his family legacy has personally contributed things, his family contributed the land for the United Nations and his family contributed that island as a site for peace conferences, international peace conferences. So that is a good segue to what we’re going to now. We are now going to the only official statue of a first lady in a memorial. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, was actually FDR’s cousin, and she became the first United States Delegate to the United Nations after the war. Do you want to talk about Eleanor?

JIM DICKSON [00:49:25] Yes, she led the fight for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the founding document for the United States, very similar to our Declaration of Independence. She was FDR’s political partner. He, in running for governor, Eleanor did a lot of the traveling, did a lot of the organizing of the activists who worked on his various elections. She in some ways

ALEC FRAZIER [00:50:21] She traveled everywhere.

JIM DICKSON [00:50:22] Yep, she traveled everywhere. She wrote a daily newspaper column while she was in the White House. She

ALEC FRAZIER [00:50:33] She had her own staff.

JIM DICKSON [00:50:34] She had her own staff, was very committed to ending segregation, ending poverty.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:50:52] You had mentioned employment of women earlier. I should note that FDR appointed Francis Perkins to be Secretary of Labor, and that was unheard of, a woman in a cabinet position.

JIM DICKSON [00:51:05] Right, and when FDR was first elected, only men were allowed to be part of the press corps that covered the White house. Eleanor thought that’s ridiculous, her first step was she created her regular press conference and only allowed women to cover it, and that then led to women being allowed into presidential, into the presidential press corps.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:51:47] Also I should note that when we were there in the past in 2011, a number of the queer identified members of the internship class had their pictures taken with Eleanor because Eleanor was at least bisexual and there are actually stories of her having affairs with people. He did too, he also had affairs in the White House, and it was that sort of accepting one’s alternate partners with quiet dignity. They were both working a lot, and when he died, he was in Warm Springs, and he was having his portrait painted and I forget where that’s displayed, but that unfinished portrait is still on display. And he suddenly said, “I feel the most terrific pain in the back of my head,” and he slumped over, and he died from a cerebral hemorrhage.

JIM DICKSON [00:52:51] In this memorial, it is the only reference, in this fourth room, is the only reference to FDR having, not being able to walk. It is put on a flight of stairs which was at best insensitive. It is a chronology of his life and one of the steps says he never walked unaided again. That would’ve been the only reference to the fact that he worked and lived out of a wheelchair.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:53:53] Now there have been studies since then where they’ve looked at his symptoms and they’ve run them past the diagnostic criteria of polio and then they’ve also run them through the diagnostic criteria of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and there’s now a general consensus in the medical community that he actually had Guillain-Barre Syndrome because he actually meets a lot more of the criteria of that than polio. But the point is not what he had, the point is that he still managed to fix the entire world while not being able to move half his body. Now there is another fountain which is a combination of all of the fountains. It has the steep falls of the Great Depression fountain, it has the steps of the New Deal fountain, it has the crashes of the war fountain and it has the stillness of the funeral fountain, and that fountain is beautiful. Now from what I understand, they were originally going to allow people to wade in these fountains. Why didn’t they?

JIM DICKSON [00:55:13] Public health reasons essentially. When they were developing the fountains, they said Washington is hot in the summer, it’d be great to let kids play in the fountains, but for public health reasons they never allowed that.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:55:38] Correct. Now there is a final wall with his four freedoms, which I think we should all try to live up to everyday: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

JIM DICKSON [00:56:02] And I would say that the freedom from fear and his statement, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” is most probably an awareness that came from having his disability and his experience with that, because those of us with disabilities know that it’s fear that is much more debilitating and that can paralyze action much more so than any physical disorder.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:56:56] Well that is certainly true and if you, fear is way more disabling. You’ve gotta tell yourself that you can do something instead of what you can’t do. Now I have autism, and I have a number of other things like OCD and bipolar and for those of you finishing this memorial tour, I would recommend you go to the Jefferson Memorial, because according to current-day scholars, Jefferson almost certainly had autism and it impacted his everyday life, but we can talk about that on another podcast. So Jim, was there any other things you wanted to let us know about this memorial?

JIM DICKSON [00:57:46] I just would encourage people to visit it, think about it. It is a wonderful tribute to a great husband and wife team, and to the values that as Americans we all strive to live by. Thank you very much.

ALEC FRAZIER [00:58:23] Thank you Jim, and as I said, in 2011, it’s been an honor listening to you. I do view this not only as the FDR Memorial, but at present I view it as the memorial to the disability spirit in this country and thank you for helping to embody that spirit.

JIM DICKSON [00:58:38] Glad to do it. Be well.

(upbeat music)

ANNOUNCER [00:58:39] Thank you for listening to the Autistic Reality Podcast. Autistic Reality is a sole proprietorship corporation focusing on disability and human rights advocacy as well as writing, editing, photography, and pop culture criticism. You can find out more at www.nothingaboutuswithoutus.net. We’re on Facebook at facebook.com/autisticreality and on twitter as @AutisticReality. In addition, we have an immense gallery of photos on Flickr under Autistic Reality. Start at the Collections page for easier browsing. And Alec’s new book, “Veni Vidi Autism,” second edition, is available on Amazon. You can also find his pop culture endeavors and posts on Facebook at /VeniVidiAutism. Once again, thank you for listening, we’ll see you again soon.