The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is on the Tidal basin near the national
mall, on the cherry tree walk. Open 24/7, but there are staff people there from
8 AM to midnight.
The memorial constists of four outdoor rooms, one for each term of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's office, With sculptures depicting him - there is a 10-foot
statue of him in a wheeled chair (not a wheelchair, a wheeled chair), and a
bas-relief of him in a car during his first inaugural.
In the first room is a sculpture by Tom Hardy of the presidential seal like
at his first inaugural. The following quotes are inscribed in the first room:
"No country however rich can afford the waste of it’s
human resources. The demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest
extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our order - I pledge you,
I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American People"
"Among American citizens there should be no forgotten men and
no forgotten races, The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."
The second room is more dreary, and is supposed to portray feelings of despair
that many people of that time felt. There's a scuplture with five columns commemorating
FDR's new deal legislation.
In the second room are the following quotes.
"Man and nature must work hand in hand- the throwing out of
balance of the resources of nature, throws out of balance also the lives of
men"
"In these days of difficulty, we Americans everywhere must
chose the path of social justice, the path of faith, the path of hope and
the path of love between our fellow man"
"I never forget that I live in a house owned by all American
people and that I have been given their trust"
"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"
"I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used
in simple work…more importantly however, than the material gains, will
be the moral and spiritual value of such work"
Between the second and third rooms there's a grassy area marking the time period
of World War II. That passage has the inscriptions:
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties
of our citizens what ever their back rounds. We must remember that any oppression,
any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization"
"We must be the great arsenal of democracy".
The third room has a sculpture of Roosevelt in a wheeled chair by his dog Fala.
it was supposed to be a wheelchair but instead they just gave him a regular
chair with wheels at the base of the legs. The third room has the following
quotes:
"We have faith that future generations will know that here,
in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good
will found a way to unite and destroy the forces of ignorance and intolerance
and slavery and war"
"They who seek to establish systems of government based on
the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call
this new order. This is not new and it is not order"
"I have seen war, I have seen war on land and on sea. I have
seen the 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"
The final room has a waterfall into a bunch of pools, and this room is supposed
to signify Roosevelt's death and the peace that came after World War II. There
is a sculpture of his funeral procession, and another sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt.
This sculpture of [Eleanor Roosevelt[ by Neil Estern makes the FDR memorial the
first to honor a first lady. Finally, the fourth room has the inscriptions:
"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our
doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong active faith"
"The structure of world peace can not be the mark of one man,
one party or one nation. It must be a peace that rests on the co-operative
effort of the whole world"
"Freedom of speech, freedom of worship. Freedom from want,
freedom from fear"