 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Sarah Pollock about her new book, FDR and American Memory. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up this month on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, February 8th at 1 p.m., David O. Stewart will share his story of how George Washington became the dominant force in the creation of the United States of America. Stewart's new book, George Washington, The Political Rise of America's Founding Father, unveils the political education that made Washington a master politician and America's most essential leader. And on Thursday, February 17th at 1 p.m., Diana Schaub will tell us about her new book, His Greatest Speeches, How Lincoln Moved the Nation. Schaub analyzes Abraham Lincoln's three most powerful speeches, placing them in historical context and explaining the brilliance behind their rhetoric. One of the noteworthy artifacts in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library is a huge paper mache sculpture of the Sphinx with FDR's head. In mythology, the Sphinx alone knew the answer to its riddle. In 1939, FDR alone knew if he would run for an unprecedented third term as president. A satiric skit featuring the sculpture played off that uncertainty. The skit so delighted FDR that he asked for the Sphinx for his presidential library. And so a classical icon met a 20th century American icon. Roosevelt carefully curated his own image, as we will learn in Sarah Pollock's book FDR in American Memory. Through radio addresses, newsreels, and photographs, he entered the lives of ordinary Americans. He projected optimism and strength, and when public took pains to mask his dependence on a wheelchair. While FDR was conscious of the image he projected for the nation and the world, he also had an eye on the future. The Roosevelt Library itself, a repository of records preserved for future study, was conceived by the president and built to his specifications. In today's author talk, we will learn more about Franklin Roosevelt and cultural memory, how he became an American icon, and what role he himself played in that process. Sarah Pollock is an assistant professor of American studies at Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society. She is the co-editor of violence and trolling on social media and embodying contagion. Now let's hear from Sarah Pollock. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome and thank you ever so much for that kind introduction. I am very honored to speak here today about my book, FDR in American Memory. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States in office between 1933 and his death in 1945, was among the first modern media presidents. He greatly expanded the White House communication efforts, holding press conferences twice a week. He cultivated an image of being friendly and very approachable, despite his decidedly patrician background and way of speaking. He smiled in photographs, which was then not yet the standard. And he was a real radio president, famous for his regular fireside chats. These radio speeches were a new phenomenon in the US and around the world. Other leaders, including earlier US presidents, had been on the radio, but usually with speeches that were addressed to a different live audience. FDR developed a real radio style. His chats were received as authentic and intimate as if he were joining the family around the fireside. Radios were new at the time, but most households had one. And the broadcasts were timed in such a way that the president could be heard around prime time in almost all of the states. Roosevelt remains one of the most popular US presidents ever. In polls, he usually comes third after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He also held the presidency longer than any other. Just over 12 years, he was reelected three times and led the US through the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War. He was a popular but also a highly controversial president because of his activist politics. He introduced the New Deal, which included a host of social security, welfare and other far-reaching federal socioeconomic programs that later came under scrutiny from the Supreme Court. He was eager long before the rest of America in the late 1930s and early 1940s to engage in the war effort in Europe in support of Great Britain and what later became the Allied forces. Roosevelt was not just a president who was transformative for American politics and the role of the United States in the world. He was also very interested in how he would go down in history. As we shall see, he did not want to be seen as arrogant or self-aggrandizing, but he most certainly occupied himself with the question how historians would later judge him. And he prepared the ground for them, so for us, to remember him in particular ways. So fast forward to 1998, 43 years after Roosevelt's death. This quotation I will read it out in a moment by historian and FDR biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. considers Franklin Roosevelt's place in history through an interesting comparison. Take a look at our present world. It is manifestly not out of Hitler's world. His thousand year right turned out to have a brief and bloody run of a dozen years. It is manifestly not Joseph Stalin's world, that ghastly world self-destructed before our eyes, nor is it Winston Churchill's world. Empire and its glories have long since vanished into history. The world we live in is Franklin Roosevelt's world. There is a lot to be said about Schlesinger's assessment of this world as Franklin Roosevelt's, but the main point that I want to make here is that Schlesinger does something that many Roosevelt's biographers have done, and that many people also outside of historical scholarship tend to do still. Namely, he understands Franklin Roosevelt as an embodiment of America in the 20th century. Indeed, he understands Franklin Roosevelt as embodiment of America's exemplary position in the world. We live in Franklin Roosevelt's world. Now, of course, there's a lot to say about this and a lot also to disagree with. And also, of course, even if it was Roosevelt's world in 1998, one can wonder whether it still is in 2022. However, I am not going to go into that debate. The question I want to address here today is why is FDR such an attractive embodiment of the United States even decades after his presidency? To answer that question, I will take you along to a few FDR memorials and other sites that remember and represent it. And because he is, after all, as said, an embodiment of the US, I will also zoom in particularly on how his body is represented, or rather, as we shall see, how his body is often not represented at all. This is one of the most famous photos of Franklin Roosevelt. I'm sure you've seen it before. It was taken by Roosevelt's distant cousin, friend and confidant, Margaret Sucley, in 1941. The little girl is Sucley's granddaughter and the dog is Fowler, one of the most famous presidential dogs in American history. Although there are very few other photos, there are a couple of other photos of FDR in his wheelchair. This is actually the only one that is well-known and widely disseminated. In part because of the child and the dog, but perhaps also to some extent, because of the wheelchair, FDR here looks as he was often perceived based on radio talks as friendly, authentic and safe. FDR had had an illness in 1920, which left him unable to use his legs. At the time, it was understood as adult onset polio, but it may also have been another disease, probably Guillain-Barre syndrome. And invalids or polios, as they were called at the time, rarely played an active role in politics after becoming disabled. Many people were institutionalized, or if they were from wealthy families, as FDR was, they would retire from the public sphere to their own private estate. Roosevelt's mother wished and expected him to do that, but he was not going to let go of his budding political career and developed a variety of ways to pass as non-disabled. For instance, he developed the ability to walk a few yards using a cane and the help of an aide or a family member. Speaking electrons that he used always had to be screwed to the floor so that he could speak in a standing position while leaning on his arms. He was very rarely seen using a wheelchair, never in public, and to make this possible, he had a kind of gentlemen's agreement with the press that they would not photograph him in his wheelchair, or for instance, while he was lifted in or out of his cars by aid. So at the time, Americans knew that FDR had had polio, but they did not have a mental or photographic image of him as a wheelchair user. The popularity of the photo you see here dates from after his death. And the fact that FDR did not wish to be portrayed full body and that doing so involved a great deal of strategizing may have been part of his fondness for radio. In any case, he was not fond of being portrayed in that particular way. So I mean full body in sculptures or photos. But that doesn't mean, of course, that he was uninterested in being represented at all. Here you see a photo of the first FDR memorial that was erected in 1965. And there's a famous anecdote told by one of Roosevelt's close friends, Felix Frankfurter, nominated by FDR to the Supreme Court in 1939, who remembered that Roosevelt had told him that if any memorial would be erected in his memory, he wanted only a small and simple monument. Frankfurter recalls Roosevelt's wishes. Roosevelt, according to Frankfurter, wanted a memorial to be placed in the center of that green plot. That green plot, by the way, is in front of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. And it should be, FDR said, a block about the size of this, putting his hands on the desk. And then he said, I don't care what it's made of, whether limestone or granite or whatnot, but I wanted to be plain without any ornamentation with the simple carving in memory of. Here you see the plaque of that. In 1965, so 20 years after Roosevelt's death, this monument was actually erected and the plaque in front of it tells you the story that I've told you just from Felix Frankfurter. And I think it's striking to note that Roosevelt was more focused on this particular, was so focused on this particular place for a monument. He clearly did not want a sculpture showing his body, but he did wish to be associated with the National Archives. In other words, he absolutely did want to be remembered, not primarily via representations of his physique, but rather through his archival trace. And it was quite typical for Roosevelt to have expressed such a modest wish or a seemingly modest wish while at the same time, he was actually doing something that has often been construed as clearly self-aggrandizing. Around the time that he chatted with Frankfurter about the kind of monument he wanted to be honored with after his death, he was engaged in building the first ever presidential library and museum for the public on the grounds of his own private estate in Hyde Park, New York. As a museum and archive dedicated to the study of an education about Franklin D. Roosevelt, the library has often been read as a massive memorial in its own right. Shortly after the plans for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library have become known, the Chicago Tribune indeed published a cartoon that portrayed FDR as Santa leaving a library in a Christmas stocking labeled to President Roosevelt from FDR and Hyde Park Memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt to be enlarged by public subscription and forever maintained at government expense. FDR Santa in the cartoon says, won't he be surprised? Bless his heart. And the cartoon is titled, he did his shopping early. This is perhaps an overly cynical take by the Chicago Tribune on the Roosevelt Presidential Library project. After all, it does make sense to keep presidential archival records together at one site and also to make them accessible as one coherent collection to the public. This also conveys a deeply democratic view of presidential accountability to the people and to future historians. Earlier presidents archives have in fact become woefully scattered and lost even and FDR's Presidential Library Initiative was taken up as a best practice and embedded in federal law in 1955 so that each presidency now gets a dedicated presidential library where usually the records are managed by the National Archives and the museum is managed by private nonprofit foundations. Nevertheless, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum directed next to the Roosevelt's family Springwood Home on the same estate where FDR and Eleanor were later buried also helped to build a representation, I would say, of Roosevelt that is not figurative, not of his body, but it's nevertheless both very personal and not at all particularly modest. But for a larger Roosevelt Memorials were also still in the pipeline. After decades of failed attempts to design and create a large Roosevelt Memorial near the Washington Mall, this design that you see here was finally approved. Previous attempts had failed in large parts because designers were weary of including images or sculptures of FDR's body. But eventually the brief for the Memorial was that it was to be a landscaped solution that would harmonize with the beauty of the existing park-like setting that water be a significant element of the Memorial environment, but no major structure dominate the site that mind you an image or images of Roosevelt were appropriate and the recreational area be retained. Landscape architect Lawrence Halperin designed the winning entry, which you see here in 1974. It consisted of a series of four outdoor rooms, each one dedicated to one of Roosevelt's four terms as president, as well as to the four freedoms. The Memorial is almost, I would say, an outdoor museum full of sculptures portraying not just Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, but also many common Americans in settings typical of the era. And I'll show you some of those images. These are photos that I took on site. So here you can see some of those settings, a man listening to a radio, farmers in front of their home, people waiting in a bread line, figurative representations in short of the people whom FDR helped and who he wanted to be associated with. And as you can see, these figures are life-sized and the setting invites audience participation here at the end of the bread line, you see, for example, my husband joining the line. And this is actually a very educational and experiential presentation. It offers a kind of identification with the past through participation as if this were, in fact, a museum rather than a memorial. But there is also a sculpture of FDR himself at the memorial, which was highly contested in the years before its dedication. The main point of contestation was whether or not FDR should be presented here in a wheelchair. The designer and members of the Roosevelt family said, no, arguing that FDR himself never let himself be seen in a wheelchair by the public at large. However, by the 1990s, the fact that Roosevelt had been a wheelchair user had become one of the best known trivia about him, among other things, because of the photo that I showed you at the start of this, and also as a result of the many films and documentaries in which he is portrayed as a wheelchair user. Indeed, in part, as a result of Hugh Gallagher's famous book, FDR Splendid Deception, published in 1986, his wheelchair had become one of Roosevelt's most celebrated stage props, I would say. A symbol for his fight for the emancipation of those undervalued and underrepresented in American society. And so it is no surprise that the national organization for the disabled, which had championed FDR as an exemplary case of self-emancipation by disabled people for years, protested the representation of Roosevelt at the FDR Memorial, where he was silently represented as non-disabled, which is as you see here, right? So you see in the previous picture you saw Michael Deland, the president of the lobby group, next to two noteworthy protest signs. One says, don't hide FDR's source of strength, about which I will say more in a minute. The other one shows above in the top left-hand corner. Here shows the photo that I also shared with you at the start of this talk. What happened between 1945 and 1995 effectively is that FDR's wheelchair kept carefully out of sight by him, rolled onto the stage of collective memory as a symbol for FDR strength in rescuing the American economy and solidifying America's place in the world as the arsenal of democracy during the war. So Halperin, when conflict arose, initially tried to fix it, but it didn't stop things by adding wheels to FDR's chair in the sculpture already created. When I went to see them, I knew they were there, and I still had a hard time finding them. On the photo below, I have put my shoe next to one of the wheels for proportion. Of course, this is not now a wheelchair. It is nothing like the kinds of supportive devices that FDR in real life needed. It does not undo the erasure of disability at all. The lobby for the disabled were furious about this seemingly gratuitous gesture, and they threatened, in fact, to disturb the dedication ceremony by then-president Bill Clinton, and eventually a compromise was achieved. The memorial wood was the compromise to the future be expanded by an anti-room, a pro-loak to FDR's story, so a fifth room, in a sense, in which the disability and the wheelchair would be made visible. And at the memorial's dedication ceremony in 1997, President Bill Clinton did give explicit attention to it. Clinton effectively framed Roosevelt's disability as the source of his strength. He suggested that surviving polio made FDR tough and self-reliant, as well as humble and compassionate, that it was a condition that uniquely enabled him to be a good president in hard times. He said, it was that faith in his own extraordinary potential that enabled him to guide his country from a wheelchair. And from that wheelchair, and a few halting steps, leaning on his son's arm or those of trusted aides, he lifted a great people back to their feet and set America to march again toward its destiny. Of course, as with the Schlesinger quotation at the start of this talk, I do not mean to say that Clinton was right in framing FDR as strengthened by polio, or able to lift a great people back to their feet as a result of having had polio. I doubt that was the case at all, and it seems impossible to know. But I do think that you can see here what I set out to argue. Roosevelt is represented here by Clinton as an embodiment of America, as a personification of what is possible in the ideal America that he, like FDR, envisaged. And you also see many other Roosevelt biographers make the same kind of gesture whereby, in fact, the disability becomes something that's almost transferred, or the disability is FDRs, but the strength that he supposedly took from that is transferred on to the nation, which also, of course, in the 1930s was in many ways down and had to be lifted back to its feet. And that is, Clinton's implies here that Roosevelt was able to do that because he had learned to deal with disability. Overcoming disability in the sort of, which, of course, is a somewhat problematic idea that disability, which arguably is more than anything, that natural variation between human bodies is something to be overcome. So, yeah, as I said, Clinton continued the same line of thought when he later, four years later, came back to the FDR Memorial to dedicate the newly built prologue to the memorial. And you can see here on the slide that he's, that does portray Roosevelt explicitly in his wheelchair, the kind of wheelchair he, in fact, did use. I also think it used, it portrays his glasses. I, and Clinton on that occasion said by showing President Roosevelt as he was, we show the world that we have faith, that in America you are measured for what you are and what you have achieved and not for what you have lost. So what I think is interesting about this is that, that is, this frame is clearly not, clearly didn't apply at the time when FDR was president, right, that when he was president, he by his own estimation absolutely needed to come across as non-disabled or at least able to walk with some help and not as a wheelchair user. And in fact, older people in his world didn't think it was possible at all to be politically active if you weren't able to walk. And Clinton in a sense here, sort of after the fact, spurred by the lobby for the disabled, reframes FDR's disability as proof of the fact that this is, this need not be a problem in America. And so I think that there's a very interesting change between how FDR managed his own image, his own public image, which as you'll remember was very much more connected to, you know, his remembering his archival records and remembering, you know, his Springwood home. And his library, so the spaces that he came from. So also personal closely linked to himself but not focused on his physique, including his radio talks, which obviously didn't represent his body in a visual way. And yet in a sense, both these representations of Roosevelt as a kind of champion of disability and of generally, you know, minorities that needed at the time in 1940s, definitely more representation, more visibility, more emancipation. That is that sort of political notion remains actually connected to him in different ways. First by, you know, making the disability entirely invisible, acting as if it's not there. And then later by showing it and making it itself a symbol for what FDR did and how FDR was able to embody American culture, the American spirit, a particular US American self-image. And so it's, my conclusion would be that Roosevelt's polio experience, or his having survived that, is reminiscent or symbolic of a kind of American grand narrative of becoming stronger through being tried. And since then, Roosevelt is, and actually also before, also in the 1980s and 90s, but these are two movies, posters from two movies, both about 10 years old, Hyde Park on Hudson with Bill Murray as FDR and FDR American Badass, that's a much smaller production. But those are both films from 2012 that very explicitly focus actually on the wheelchair narrative and how the wheelchair actually was the tool, the device that enabled Roosevelt to address the Great Depression and win the war. And I think you can see that nicely. That's why I included that poster here. The wheelchair is actually the sort of tank, the sort of future oriented tool that FDR uses to, to fight the Nazis. So I wanna thank you very much for your attention. And you can order the book if you're interested at Johns Hopkins University Press. If you go to the website and you can get a 30% discount if you use the code H-T-W-N. So use the code H-T-W-N for a discount from Johns Hopkins University Press. Thank you ever so much.