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Chapter One "Wheelchair Bound" and "The Poster Child" "HOPE FOR THE CRIPPLED"wasthename of a postage stamp issued in 1970, said Judith E. Heumann, current Assistant Secretary ofthe u.S. Department ofEducation and quadriplegic wheelchair user, in her 1980 testimony to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.! The stamp pictured "a person seatedin a wheelchair rising to a standing position [that] indicated what people thought of a disabled individual in a wheelchair.... You are not considered to be a whole person; however, once you are in this standing position-that is normality ." In January 1999, the nation saw another image on their TV screens. Defending President Clinton from impeachment, the President's ChiefCounsel Charles Rufftook center stage in the Senate chambers in his wheelchair. How have our images of people with disabilities (until recently called "the disabled") changed in the last fifty years? FDR, the "Cured Cripple" The ability to stand and to walk was unnecessary for Franklin Delano Roosevelt-who had contracted polio eleven years before he was elected to his first of four terms as President-to be one ofthe most significant political figures of the twentieth century. Yet both the nation and the man had an obsession with the myth of his total recovery . FOR had to be seen, and had to see himself, as a "cured cripple,"2 not a person diminished by disability. As his wife Eleanor observed, however, the disability may have been a "blessing in disguise,"3 steeling and sensitizing the man. According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: The paralysis that crippled his body expanded his mind and his sensibilities. After what Eleanor called his "trial by fire," he seemed less arrogant, less smug, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting. He returned from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater selfknowledge . "There had been a plowing up of his nature," Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed. "The man emerged completely warmhearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of profound philosophical concepts." No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand.4 The extent to which the public was aware ofRoosevelt's disabilityvaried widely. While 2 CHAPTER ONE for many people with disabilities FDR engendered faith in their own possibilities, the general public preferred not to see their President's physical impairment. Although some did not know, others refused to learn, and still others refused to tell that the President was disabled. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describes her father 's experience: In the 30'S my father, a D.C. police detective, traveled to the Deep South to bring back a prisoner for trial. As he waited at the railroad station to come home, some nasty-looking vagrants surrounded him. "You're from Washington," one said to him. "Do you see the President?" "Yes," replied my father, who worked on protective details for President Roosevelt. "There are some ugly rumors going around that the President is a cripple," the bum growled. "We're going to kill any man says that's true." "The President," my father lied pleasantly, "is a fine, athletic man" [which unbeknownst to Dowd or her father had some element of truth since Roosevelt swam frequently].5 Of the many who were cognizant of the President's contraction of polio, only a privileged few knew the degree to which it limited his mobility. The continuing public self-deception regarding Roosevelt's disability is dramatically illustrated by the decision to create a Washington, D.C., memorial depicting FDR as though he were not a wheelchair user. Karl E. Meyer in the New York Times "Editorial Notebook" indicated that "there will be no visual reminder of this fact [Roosevelt 's inability to stand unassisted] in the FDR memorial due to be dedicated next spring [1997]. On the contrary, he is to be shown standing tall in one of the three sculptures planned for the seven-acre site on the banks of the Potomac."6 Although Meyer's article was critical ofthis alteration of the truth about FDR, two letters to the editor expose the persistent public unwillingness to confront the reality of Roosevelt 's disability: Roosevelt's being crippled was hardly what made him one of our greatest Presidents. Memorials exaggerate in visual terms the features of those paid this granite homage. Wouldn't representing him in a wheelchair have the effect ofoverplaying...

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