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8 Body Politics If James “Jimmy” Roosevelt prayed that fateful evening of his father ’s win at the polls, someone seemed to answer him—and most favorably . Unless the Constitution is altered, his father will go down as the nation’s only four-term president. Maybe those who knew him best were not exaggerating when they claimed that traveling, giving speeches, meeting people, and campaigning generally, truly enlivened him. When we pause to consider the physical devastation of the office on even the most physically fit presidents, Roosevelt’s twelve-year tenure of leading the nation through the Great Depression and then World War II is all the more remarkable . Clearly, his health and stamina should not have been an issue leading up to and including his run for the presidency in 1932. But it was, and as we have documented, from 1921 to 1932 there was no bigger issue in Roosevelt’s political life. That issue did not die with him on April 12, 1945; it really only commenced a lengthy and rancorous debate that again centered squarely on Roosevelt’s body. This time the debate involved how Americans wanted to remember the twentieth century’s most important president. Should a public memorial not depict Roosevelt in his wheelchair and leg braces? Or should the nation, fifty years after his death, finally admit the secret in the most public and enduring of ways? Ultimately that debate seemed to crystallize around the age-old issue of the emperor having no clothes. But this emperor was dead. Perhaps, then, the debate was more a question of whether a nation could bring itself to admit that its former leader “had no clothes.” Perhaps the nation’s “manhood” was at stake, its image of itself somehow retroactively imperiled by the publicly financed visage of a badly crippled man. The public debate over the FDR Memorial was instructive at several levels, but for us, the cultural construction of disability comes front and center. Roosevelt, after all, was not disabled by nature; his disability was not written on his body on the day that he contracted infantile paralysis. Instead , a condition must become dis-abling; it must be adjudicated in a cul- ture for any condition to be deemed as such. And so fifty years after his death, a great many Americans still clearly viewed (and view) Roosevelt’s disability as dis-abling. At the seventy-year anniversary of his first election to the presidency, we pause to consider that had Roosevelt entertained presidential aspirations in our day, he would be laughed out of the political arena. Can we see Roosevelt slogging through the slush in his wheelchair down the streets of Nashua? How would he respond to the first town hall questioner who asked him, no, commanded him, to step back from the podium and walk— unaided? What of the Gen-X, MTV voter who, instead of querying the squire about boxers or briefs, asked about his sex life with the missus? How wouldaverycynicalelectoratereacttowriterslikeEarleLookeranddoctors like E. W. Beckwith whose stated desire is to get to the truth of things? And, of course, what of the press when the candidate pulled up in a car or bus or airplane and declared, “Sorry, guys, no pictures today”? Our purported progress on the issue of disability seems nothing if not retarded when considered in the bright light of contemporary presidential electoral politics. Old politics, primarily oral politics, was what Richard Weaver might call “spacious ” politics; candidates were expected to have a zone of privacy, perhaps even secrets.1 In considering the cultural construction of disability we would do well also to distinguish among the many types of disability, especially those that are seen as dis-abling. Roosevelt, we should note, was not the first presidential candidate to have a bodily disability. Nor was he the last. The case of Sen. Bob Dole’s 1996 candidacy is particularly relevant. In her Oprahlike , prime-time walk and talk around the convention hall in San Diego, ElizabethDoledetailedinnosmalldegreetheextentofherhusband’sbadly damaged arm and shoulder. This damage was no disability; instead, the aspiring first wife deemed it her husband’s “badge of honor.” The point is clear: Being nearly mortally wounded by Nazi-fired bullets in World War II was a point of pride, a most en-abling bodily mark, a “condition” to be celebrated —and publicized. Bob Dole could also walk, a point subtly underscored by his wife’s peripatetic oration. Infantile paralysis was far from a glamorous, prime-time, culturally lauded...

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