OMH 3: The other FDR Memorial

The National Archives sits on the Via Touristica between Pennsylvania and Independence, and preaches “Freedom! Liberty! America!” with all the subtlety of Brett Favre’s data plan. You walk in under a frieze gods and angels, and if you’re lucky, you exit from the largest bronze doors in the world. Inside, the Rotunda is more cathedral than museum. As you stare at the documents — err, “Charters of Freedom” — the Founding Fathers watch o’er you not as 18th Century bourgeois lawyers, but as philosopher-kings modeled, how subtly, on Rafael’s “School of Athens,” though they may as well be the closest thing a secular government has to a Sistine Chapel. In his image, George Washington created you.

Outside, though, the Archives grounds hold DC’s most disproportionately unostentatious monument, one where subtlety and (for a while) personal preference overwhelmed that American disposition to honor a currency-worthy president as an Olympian deity. Lincoln and Jefferson, meet the block.

That monument, a block with six words, was for 32 years all the capital had to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yes, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one who since 1997 has sat at the nouveau 7.5 acre monument on cherry-blossom landscape across the Tidal Basin, the “I hate war” guy who beat Hitler, the “Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races” guy that built the Japanese internment camps, the “I see a third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished” guy that ordered the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the “we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world, at peace” guy that ignited the Manhattan Project.

Say what you want for Roosevelt, he arrived in an isolationist, Greatly Depressed country and left it a superpower with the Atomic Bomb. Nearing eighty years since his first election, he’s far enough in the past for armchair (or talk show) historians to demonize or lionize.

For a city, and a building, where the fortuitous can become legend, the legend can become statue, and statue can become an “I love liberty” tourist’s Mount Olympus, the austere Roosevelt memorial is strikingly, and reassuringly, simple. Unlike the landscaped architecture across the Tidal Basin, you're not guided, taught or preached to. In the block's simplicity, your mind can wander to demonization, deification, or somewhere between – a blank slab on which to draw your own conclusions.