The president's two bodies: Stagings and restagings of FDR and the new deal body politic

American Art

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 33-57

  Stein, Sally ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34249370789     PISSN: 10739300     EISSN: 15496503     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Though many photographs of FDR are reproduced repeatedly, I have encountered this picture in just one publication, Stefan Lorant's The Glorious Burden: The American Presidency (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). 600. Lorant placed the photograph in the context of FDR's first presidential campaign in an electoral survey that proceeded in strict chronological fashion, implicitly dating the portrait to 1932. But Lorant's picture collection, now deposited in the archives of the International Center for Photography (ICP), New York City, includes the photograph with the verso identification, "603849/Warm Springs, Ga./home of Franklin D. Roosevelt/10-5-28" and a "Wide World Photos" stamp. My thanks to Brian Wallis and Kristen Lubben for help in securing the photograph.
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (1651; repr. New York: Penguin, 1968), 228.
3. Irene J. Winter notes a close correlation of the divine body with concepts of divine kingship in Mesopotamia, imbricating admiration and inspiration; Winter, "Sex, Rhetoric, and the Public Monument: The Alluring Body of Naram-Sin of Agade," in Sexuality in Ancient Art, ed. Natalie B. Kampen (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 11-26. The ritual of standing before the electorate is copiously illustrated in Lorant, Glorious Burden.
4. For an implicit comparison, see Martin Loiperdinger, Rudolf Herz, and Ulrich Pohlmann, eds., Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografte und Film (Munich, Germany: Piper, 1995).
5. For the various positions adopted to manage and interpret FDR's image, see Geoffrey C. "Ward, A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 732-94;
6. Ward acknowledges a debt to the discussion of FDR's image problem in the first study to frankly examine the effects of his illness, Hugh Gregory Gallagher's FDR's Splendid Deception (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985).
7. On the "log cabin" effect, see Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 97, 106.
8. On the mirror stage, see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1979), 1-7.
9. In support of his contention that the July 25, 1931, report in Liberty was a "cooked-up affair," Gallagher notes that author Earle D. Looker, a Republican who was close to the family, had on previous occasions ghostwritten articles for FDR; Gallagher, Splendid Deception, 84.
10. Kim Nielsen, "Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness," in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2001), 269.
11. The sole group photograph I have found shows Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt with four children in wheelchairs; he is the only patient sitting in a chair not obviously a wheelchair; see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946), facing 110.
12. In nearly all photos of FDR delivering speeches while standing, one hand grips the lectern. As Gallagher explains, his speaking appearances were elaborately stage-managed. Advance planning minimized the distance he would be visible to press and public before reaching a podium. To cover that distance, FDR leaned on trusted attendants while slowly advancing by throwing one stiffly braced leg in front of the other; Gallagher, Splendid Deception, 64-66, 93-95.
13. An émigré photographer discovered on his first professional visit to the White House in 1936 that FDR when not appearing in public was "wheeled around the White House" and that candid cameras were "forbidden around the president"; see Lucien Aigner (New York: International Center for Photography, 1979). 21-23.
14. For Time's blunt description of the president-elect and readers' responses, see Time, December 5, 1932, 9; January 2, 1933, 2-4; and January 16, 1933, 2.
15. One revealing photograph of FDR in a wheelchair, shot from behind by his doctor and confidant, was first published in Gallagher's Splendid Deception. On White House supervision of photographers, see Gallagher, 93-94.
16. The offending publication was one of a dozen "snapshots" laid out album-style in Life, August 16, 1937, 26-27.
17. See annotated typescript of speech in Joseph Alsop, FDK, 1882-1945: A Centenary Remembrance (New York: Viking, 1982), 115.
18. Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1929-1941 (New York: Norton, 1992), 289.
19. On the tradition of the half-length portrait connoting divine or semi-divine status, see Rona Goffen, Icon and Vision: The Half-Length Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1976), 76.
20. For Shahn's mural, see Frances K. Pohl, "Constructing History: A Mural by Ben Shahn," Arts Magazine, September 1987, 36-40;
21. and Diana Linden, "Ben Shahn, the Four Freedoms, and the SS St. Louis," American Jewish History 86 (December 1998): 419-40.
22. The relatively novel use of color photography to portray FDR appears on the cover of Time's first issue of 1933, the same issue that acknowledges the public protests provoked by the magazine's description of his "shriveled legs." See the cover of Time, January 2, 1933, with the credit line, "Photographed in Natural Color by O. J. Jordan." Whether intended or not, the use of a color head shot constitutes a form of apology or "making up" for the earlier description.
23. A print of Arcimboldo's Summer (1563) is plate 5 in Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s catalogue to the 1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, On his wit, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "The Allegories and Their Meaning," in The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the 16th to the 20th Century, ed. Pontus Hulten (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 89-110.
24. On the "corpus mysticum," see Ernst Kantarowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval-Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), 193-272.
25. Kantarowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 424-44.
26. For images of physical dependency that coincided with FDR's emergence on the national political scene, see also Charles MacCauley's "A Message of Hope," NewYork Mirror, July 4, 1932,
27. and Carey Cassius Orr's "The Crop Outlook," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 6, 1932, 1.
28. The recurrent depiction of physically depleted bodies in the New Deal photography of Dorothea Lange has multiple resonances, since she also had been stricken with polio, with less severe consequences. Still this private issue only surfaces prominently in her photography after FDR becomes a national figure: see Stein, "Peculiar Grace."
29. The elimination of props and ramps was noted first by Gallagher, 208-9 and in the signature of photographic documentation between 142-43.
30. John W. Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), 173-76;
31. Sue A. Kohler, The Commission of Fine Arts: A Brief History, 1910-1995 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), 66-74.
32. Justice Felix Frankfurter, "What FDR Wanted," Atlantic Monthly, March 1961, 39-40. A modest memorial executed largely according to this plan was installed in the mid-1960s (after the first major memorial plan stalled in 1962).
33. As quoted in Thomas H. Creighton's The Architecture of Monuments (New York: Reinhold, 1962), 21-22. Over five hundred plans were submitted, nearly half of which are reproduced in Creighton's book.
34. On the evolution of the project, see David Dillon, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Designed by Lawrence Halprin (Washington, D.C.: Spacemaker Press, 1998), 27.
35. See Architectural Forum, January-February 1967. 124.
36. Isabelle Heyman, "Marcel Breuer and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial," Journal of the Society of Architectural-Historians 54 (December 1995): 446-58.
37. Breuer is quoted in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Art in America, July-August 1967, 51.
38. On its influence, see Heyman, "Marcel Breuer and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial," 456-57.
39. The characterization of the plan's stealthy low profile is from Phyllis Tuchman,"The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial," in Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 84.
40. A portrait of Halprin studying FDR photographs and photocopies tacked to his wall is reproduced in Lawrence Halprin, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997), 25,
41. On the political basis for Estern's inclusion on the team of sculptors, see Dillon, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, 37.
42. A photograph of the unrealized Baskin maquette of Roosevelt in a standing position appears in Tuchnian, "The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial," 99.
43. For a selection of such letters and an introduction that notes the surge of unsolicited letters to the Roosevelt White House, see Robert S. McElvaine, ed., Down and Out in the Great. Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man" (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983).
44. The report of Estern's sculptural intentions appears in the detailed children's book, Kelli Peduzzi, Shaping a President: Sculpting for the Roosevelt Memorial (Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1997), 8.
45. Halprin, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, 107.
46. For the Scottish terrier's symbolic forbears, see Erwin Panofsky, "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait," Burlington Magazine 64 (1934): 117-27,
47. and Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of van Eyck's Double Portrait (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), 112-15 Thanks to Laurie Monahan for reminding me that FDR's Scottie is virtually identical to the dog in the Arnolfini portrait.
48. Former Democratic speechwriter Robert Sherwood recalled "a great deal of extremely ugly whispering about the state of Roosevelt's health" during his last presidential campaign against Thomas Dewey. By mid-September, Republicans had introduced the health issue, officially questioning whether FDR forgot his dog on a military visit to the Aleutians, requiring that a plane be sent to retrieve Fala. There were official denials to these charges of extravagance covering up incompetence, but the president provided the most effective response. Addressing a Teamster's Union assembly September 23, 1944, he charged that the Republicans were hostile to animals as well as labor. The current rumors, he allowed, were objectionable not for his sake but for Fala, "who has not been the same dog since." See Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 820-22;
49. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 92;
50. and New York Times coverage September 14, 24, and 25, 1944. Levin described his problems with earlier maquettes of Estern's portrayal of FDR in an August 1999 telephone interview with the author, and explained why he suggested including Fala.
51. For a history of this new civil rights movement, see Joseph P. Schapiro's No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: New York Times Books, 1993);
52. for a sense of the diversity of that movement-in-formation, see Lennard Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997)
53. and Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History,
54. See also John Duffy, "Franklin Roosevelt: Ambiguous Symbol for Disabled Americans," Midwest Quarterly 21 (Autumn 1987): 113-35.
55. Deland is quoted in Meghan Mutchler, "Roosevelt's Disability an Issue at Memorial," New York Times, April 10, 1995, A8.
56. See Mutchler, "Roosevelt's Disability," and C. Todd Stephenson, "Depicting Disability: The Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.," Social Education 60 (September 1996): 299-300.
57. Charles Krauthammer, "FDR in a Wheelchair? No," Washington Post, June 14, 1996, A25;
58. Sandy Grady, "Memorial shouldn't put FDR in wheelchair," San Jose Mercury News, April 27, 1997, 3C;
59. see also "Memorialize F.D.R., Not His Disability," letter to editor from William J. Rochelle 3D, New York Times, April 13, 1995, A14.
60. On Clinton's announcement, see San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 1997, 8.
61. Quote is from Congressional Record, May 1, 1997, 41.
62. "Babbitt Announces Appointment of FDR Memorial Committee: The Committee Will Help Determine How an Addition to the Memorial Will Show that FDR Used a Wheelchair," U.S. Department of the Interior press release, September 12, 1997.
63. The second sculptural rendering was installed just as the Americans with Disabilities Act was delimited by the Supreme Court; see David E. Rosenbaum, "Ruling on Disability Rights Called a Blow by Advocates," New York Times, February 22, 2001, A20.
64. See Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 250-60;
65. and James E. Young, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1993).
66. Kantarowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 263-88.
67. Barton J. Bernstein, Toward, a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American, History (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 263-88.
68. Young, Holocaust Memorials, xii.