A Rendezvous With Destiny, Cast in Bronze

[question everything]

OCTOBER 18, 2008

A Rendezvous With Destiny, Cast in Bronze
At the FDR Memorial, Visitors See Eerie Echo Of Today's Anxieties
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
The Wall St. Journal


WASHINGTON -- The five life-sized bronze men line up, in hats and overcoats, their shoulders slumped. Outside a closed door, they wait for bread or, perhaps, a job... With financial markets in turmoil and the economy screeching to a halt, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., is taking on new meaning. These days, when visitors wander through the monument, reading FDR's words to a nation troubled by poverty and war, they see eerie parallels. They take their places in the bronze bread line and pose for photos.

The FDR memorial is a sprawling monument, broken into large outdoor areas that lead visitors through the president's four terms, from the Great Depression and the New Deal, to Pearl Harbor and the waning days of World War II. It is peopled with bronzes -- a lean farm couple, a man leaning into his radio to catch the president's fireside chat -- and engravings that convey the breadth of the public-works projects FDR embraced.

There's a tiered fountain meant to evoke the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Carved into walls of red South Dakota granite are quotations reminding visitors of both the hardship the country faced, and the comfort and hope FDR sought to provide. "Do you know what this is?" Ellen McCarthy, a 46-year-old school principal from Nesconset, N.Y., asked her sons Ian, 14, and Colm, 10, as they examined the queue of hungry men. "It's a bread line." She read the boys the words FDR spoke in 1937 at his second inaugural address: "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and 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." Her husband, Sean McCarthy, 45, worked 22 years for securities wholesalers at the New York Stock Exchange. He was on the trading floor during the Black Monday crash 21 years ago. He was on Wall Street when the planes hit the nearby World Trade Center in 2001. But he lost his job -- monitoring compliance with securities laws -- when his company shrank last year. He is still unemployed.

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Joblessness during the Great Depression hit 30% of the work force. Today, though rising, it measures just 6.1%. But banks are so nervous about the future, they're reluctant to lend to each other, let alone to regular customers. The world's credit markets have all but stopped functioning. Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 18%, the biggest percentage drop in the stock index's 112-year history. The Industrials bounced back somewhat this week, but remain 38% off of their October 2007 high of 14164.53. Nathan Adams, a National Park Service guide, said many visitors draw a connection between uncertainty today and tragedy past. As he led tourists through the memorial last weekend, he talked of bank failures, hunger and unemployment.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122426851283545161.html (subscription)

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Much more interesting that just a lone statue of FDR.

[question everything]

2. We visited the memorial earlier this year

We were not even aware of its existence. You have all the edifice of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorial and the Vietnam, Korea and WWII Memorials along the Mall. And the FDR is out of the main strip and is sprawled along the land. And we did notice that bread line and the quotation about 1/3 of the people are ill fed, etc.