I've pasted it in below.
At 11:35 PM 01/22/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Do not miss Rosemarie's piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the
>inscription chosen (and how it was chosen) for the new addtion to the FDR
>memorial. Simi
From the issue dated January 26, 2001
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i20/20b01101.htm
The FDR Memorial: Who Speaks From the Wheelchair?
By ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON
As public spaces transformed into collective stories, memorials are
inherently controversial. Didactic narratives about who we
are and what we believe, they span generations and vast differences in
hu-man perceptions, bringing to light all sorts of divisions
in the national "we." One of those divides has occurred between a group of
scholars in disability studies and the designers of the
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. The five-year struggle
over the collective story told by the F.D.R.
memorial ended only this month, when President Clinton dedicated an
addition to the memorial. The controversy -- and,
unfortunately, its not entirely satisfactory conclusion -- tells us much
about disability in American culture, about disability studies,
and about ourselves.
Even before its dedication, on May 2, 1997, the memorial had splintered the
national "we." The original monument consisted of
four granite-walled outdoor "rooms," which narrated F.D.R.'s presidency
with inscriptions of his own words and with nine
bronze bas-reliefs and statues, representing scenes of his presidency, all
intermingled with pools, waterfalls, and greenery.
The segment of the American "we" representing disability-rights activists
and scholars in disability studies had wanted to avoid
repeating the persistent stereotypes of disability -- the ones that tell us
that disability is a shameful personal problem relegated to
the private realm of charity and medicine, but inappropriate in the public
sphere.
We had wanted the memorial to tell the story of a man who was both disabled
by polio and president of the United States for
12 years; to claim F.D.R. as a disabled public figure who represented not
just the 15 percent of the U.S. population who have
disabilities, but everyone, since we will all become disabled if we live
long enough. The memorial's present and future audiences,
we had argued, would consist of people whose consciousness had been
transformed by civil-rights movements that included the
disability-rights movement, and by legislation like the Americans With
Disabilities Act, the landmark law that mandates full
integration of people with disabilities into American society.
But the only statue that even remotely referred to F.D.R.'s disability
showed him seated, covered by a cape, on a chair with
small wheels barely peeking out. The threat of protests by disability
activists at the memorial's dedication convinced President
Clinton to seek an addition, and the designers agreed -- the first time
that an existing national memorial was to be changed.
Maya Lin's controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial was augmented with
representational figures of soldiers, but those
traditionally heroic statues only flank, rather than fundamentally change,
the somber black-granite slab and the space of
meditation and mourning it creates.
The bold mandate to reimagine F.D.R. as at once heroic and disabled has now
been realized. A new "room" at the entrance to
the present memorial contains a simple, life-size bronze statue depicting
Roosevelt seated in his wheelchair, wearing his
trademark rumpled suit, pince-nez, and fedora. It differs from the regal,
robed, larger-than-life figure represented in the third
room, where the ample cloak erases and denies the mark of his disability.
The new statue witnesses the simple humanity of the
great leader and registers it as the universality of disability. It also
marks today's historical moment, when disability defined as a
civil-rights issue is superseding disability as a medical or charitable issue.
Yet the controversy continues, because the story that the new "room" of the
F.D.R. memorial tells is still fraught with
contradiction. At issue is the phrasing of the words inscribed on the
granite wall behind the new statue of F.D.R. A group of us
from the field of disability studies had been invited to recommend
potential quotations, from which the designers were to choose
an inscription. As historians and literary critics who traffic in words, we
relished the chance to influence the way that people
present and future would understand disability. The memorial's other
inscriptions are illustrious words that enrich the story told
by the spaces and the statues. F.D.R.'s eloquent verbal commitments to
equality are literally set in stone, shaping the story of his
presidency and of the nation itself. One powerful quotation reads, "We must
scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties
of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any
oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge
designed to attack our civilization." We wanted the new addition to
continue the theme of equal rights that is the hallmark of
both the disability-rights movement and the F.D.R. memorial.
We had a story about disability that we wanted the new room to tell. We
sought to offer a quotation as crisp, powerful, and
unambiguous as the bold "I hate war" chiseled into the wall above the
tumbled stones that suggest the blasted buildings of World
War II while creating a majestic waterfall that implies transcendence.
F.D.R.'s strategy in the Depression had been to alter the environment to
meet the needs of the people. That was parallel, we
reasoned, to the idea that people with disabilities need a material
situation that accommodates the differences of their bodies or
minds. So we looked for a quotation to convey the idea that political
equality and access to the workplace for people with
disabilities requires a leveling of the playing field -- both literally, in
the case of wheelchair users like F.D.R., and metaphorically,
for those of us who need other accommodations to be fully integrated into
the public sphere.
We also wanted to tell the story of a determined man who used a wheelchair,
and whose use of it influenced the world around
him. As scholars in disability studies, we examine disability as a cultural
concept that shapes history, belief, art, literature, and
other aspects of culture. We saw F.D.R. as someone whose disability shaped
him and who, in turn, shaped his own world and
the world that has come after. We looked for a quotation telling that story
about disability while eschewing stereotypical stories
about courageous people who overcame their disabilities or found serenity
through suffering.
Enough of those oppressive narratives dominate public thought and circulate
in telethons, fiction, and sentimental tracts. The
F.D.R. memorial should offer up an accomplished leader, not a cheerful or
chastened cripple.
To provide criteria for selecting the inscription in the new room, we
suggested three themes that should be emphasized, and
three that should be avoided. We sought a quotation, first of all, that
would advance the idea that disability is integral to a
person's character and life experience, rather than a defect to be
eliminated. Second, we wanted a quotation suggesting that the
experience of disability can enrich a life, foster leadership, and create a
sense of community. Third, in keeping with the human
scale of the statue, we searched for words hinting that F.D.R.'s disability
made him an accessible -- rather than a lofty -- hero.
In other words, we recommended that any new inscription present disability
as a common, yet influential, human experience,
one that can be integrated into a meaningful and full life.
Conversely, we argued that the quotation should avoid the stereotypical
narrative that disability is a tragic experience to be
overcome. Discrimination, more than impairment, is what people with
disabilities have to surmount. Our second caveat was
more complex: In keeping with our conviction that disability should be
viewed as a political issue of rights and access, we
intended to circumvent the idea that disability is simply a matter of
having an individual impairment to contend with. Recasting
social attitudes and removing environmental barriers are more important for
improving the lives of people with disabilities than
are their own spunk, saintliness, iron will, or the generosity of others.
Third -- the most subtle point to convey -- we strove to
dispel the pervasive attitude that disabled people warrant attention only
to provide lessons or inspirations to others. We wanted
to focus on how F.D.R. himself experienced disability, rather than turn him
into a homily for the nondisabled that inspires pity
and admiration -- or gratitude that they are not themselves disabled.
Gracing the humble but commanding statue of a disabled F.D.R. with a
quotation that could do all of that political and cultural
work was challenging. After reviewing more than 100 possibilities,
consulting with other scholars and disability activists, and, at
times, disagreeing among ourselves, we offered a unanimous recommendation
to the designers, trusting that they would
understand and support our criteria: "We know that equality of individual
ability has never existed and never will, but we do
insist that equality of opportunity still must be sought." Combined with
the image of a U.S. president using a wheelchair, those
words sent the unequivocal message that disability is an issue of equal
opportunity.
To our dismay, however, the designers and the other people advising them
selected an inscription for the new room of the
F.D.R. memorial that has exactly the effect we'd hoped to avoid.
Disregarding our recommendation, they instead used a
quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt: "Franklin's illness gave him strength and
courage he had not had before. He had to think out
the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons --
infinite patience and never-ending persistence." That quotation is
compelling, and it even fulfills some of our criteria, because it
interprets F.D.R.'s disability as a positive influence on his life.
Indeed, we had offered it along with several others as a possible addition
that might augment our recommended choice. But we
did not want it to be the only story of disability that the memorial would
tell.
Alone, Eleanor Roosevelt's words undermine disability-rights goals. To
begin with, we believe that F.D.R. should speak for
himself. Too often, others have spoken for and about people with
disabilities. In the old way of understanding disability people
with disabilities were silenced while the authority to define them and to
narrate their experience was appropriated by medical
experts, service providers, or family members. Having another person speak
for F.D.R. repeats the humiliating experience of
being ignored that people with disabilities often endure. A quotation from
his wife also reinforces the myth that F.D.R. denied his
disability -- especially since nowhere else in the memorial do quotations
from anyone but him appear.
Even more important, to have the first two words a visitor encounters at
the memorial be "Franklin's illness" presents disability in
a way that doubly violates the spirit of equality. "Illness" is a synonym
for impairment, a term that disability scholars and activists
use to denote functional limitation. "Disability," on the other hand, is a
term we use to describe the system of representation that
produces discriminatory attitudes and barriers to full integration. In
essence, "impairment" and "illness" are about bodily
differences, whereas "disability" is about the social and political context
in which our bodies operate. The distinction is much the
same as the one that scholars often draw between "sex" and "gender."
"Illness" locates the story of disability in hospitals and
rehabilitation centers. We want the story of disability to be placed in
independent-living centers. To object to "illness" is not to
fault Eleanor Roosevelt for being politically incorrect; rather, it is to
suggest that the way we view disability in 2001 and beyond
has changed from the way it was imagined in 1949. After all, a memorial
should not simply replicate the past, but use history to
create a future vision.
"Franklin's illness" also personalizes rather than politicizes disability.
While the quotation the designers propose is certainly
moving, it tells the stereotypical, apolitical story of disability as an
individual catastrophe, psychological adjustment, and moral
chastening. Impairment is a private problem that an individual must
overcome, not a public problem of environmental and
attitudinal barriers that can be removed through legislation, policy, and
education. Moreover, opening with this quotation places
the F.D.R. memorial in the genre of public works intended for collective
grieving -- like war memorials, the AIDS Memorial
Quilt, the Oklahoma City National Memorial, or plaques for sailors lost at sea.
In our debate with the designers, they asserted that their quotation would
make F.D.R. "very personal, very accessible." But
they confused their intent to humanize F.D.R. with personalizing his
disability. The inscription that now flanks the statue
encourages visitors to respond with sympathy, admiration, and charity
rather than with support for equal access and integration.
A more effective way to humanize F.D.R. would be to suggest that his
impairment reinforced his commitment to the universal
mandate for "equality of opportunity," a point to which our recommended
quotation alludes.
The designers also mistakenly justified the choice of their text on
aesthetic grounds. The story of "Franklin's illness" as well as of
his "strength," "courage," "patience," and "persistence" would create an
aesthetically differentiated and inspirational space, they
argued in commenting on our recommendation. The new room was to be a
"prologue." In reality, that suggests separating the
personal story of disability from the political content of the memorial's
other rooms. The quotation clings to the stubborn
stereotypes of disability that still feel comfortable to many Americans,
simply because those ideas are so easily recognizable. A
wheelchair-using F.D.R., spoken about by others, is segregated within his
own memorial. That denies the political work of
disability-rights activists and scholars, who have sought to eliminate
precisely such segregation.
Many of us in disability studies wish to register our dissent from the
choice of the inscription for the new room of the F.D.R.
memorial. Pleased as we are with the statue itself, we worry that this
memorial to our first markedly disabled president ultimately
replicates the segregation and privatization of disability. The inscription
undermines the work of disability-rights advocates who
worked so hard to make the new room a reality. It tells the story that
disability is separate from politics -- a personal problem
rather than a public political struggle.
In the year 2001, we are on the cultural cusp of a new way to understand
disability. The memorial's figures, spaces, and,
particularly, its words implicitly instruct visitors in how they should
imagine disability. In the controversy over the F.D.R.
memorial, our evolving national narrative of disability was played out as a
quarrel between aesthetics and politics. But
underneath, the disagreement was a struggle between familiar old stories
and bold new ones, between moving stories about
personal suffering and empowering ones about social equality. While the
designers of the F.D.R. memorial have laudably
affirmed disability with the depiction of the president using a wheelchair,
they did not succeed in rewriting the story of disability
in terms that will resonate for future generations.
The addition to the F.D.R. memorial suggests two conflicting stories:
yesterday's story of disability as a personal failing
overcome by individual effort, and today's and tomorrow's story of
disability as an issue of civil rights, integration, and diversity.
Our national disability politics has come a long way since the 1930's.
Shouldn't our national aesthetics now take up the challenge
to transform the meaning of disability?
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is an associate professor of English at Howard
University.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Page: B11
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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