The President's Two Bodies

Abstract

To what extent does a political leader's good standing derive from such conventional signs of power as his capacity to physically stand erect before the public? This article considers the exceptional case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) whose national political career followed a debilitating illness in middle age that left him unable to walk or even stand without external support. It demonstrates that the politician was relatively forthright about his impairment during his tenure as governor of New York and the early stages of his bid for presidency. But public aversion to such facts shaped the subsequent representation of his condition. The article considers the varied ways the president's body was kept under wraps—hidden or shielded from public scrutiny—during the Depression and New Deal. By cataloguing these semiotic strategies, it considers the substitutions that best naturalized the public's limited view of the president, usually restricted to head, shoulders, arms, and hands.The second half of the essay examines extended efforts following Roosevelt's death in 1945 to erect a public memorial in Washington, D.C.—including three successive proposals that each sought to refer to FDR's body without particularizing it. Only at the end of the twentieth century was there a challenge to that avoidance, directed at the nearly completed memorial designed by Lawrence Halprin that featured a heavily cloaked depiction of FDR. That challenge, attesting to the rise of a national disability rights movement, produced an additional sculptural depiction of FDR, this time plainly seated in a wheelchair. The article concludes by questioning if it is only coincidence that the resulting sculptural doubling recalls an earlier dualism informing funereal depiction of leaders of both church and state in the late medieval and early modern era.