Welcome to our expert interview. I'm here today with Sara. Sara, perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself. >> Thank you, yes, I'm Sara Polak. I teach American studies at Leiden University and my PhD is on FDR as a cultural icon in American memory. Which is what we'll talk about. >> So how would you describe Franklin Roosevelt's behavior in public? >> He was, for his time, certainly very, seemingly at least, informal president. He was seen as somehow intimate or personal, spontaneous. He was for instance, one of the first to smile in photographs. Which was thought unusual or unfitting for a president. And he was not the first president actually to appear on radio, but he was the first to hold these very informal, or The Fireside Chats, they were known as. So people would sit around their radio as around a fire, and he would explain the political situation to them in a way that people perceived as very persona, very relatable. Did Franklin Roosevelt want to leave something behind for future generations? >> Yes,I think so. I think every political leader does things to some extent, about how they all go down in history. >> But I think FDR particularly, was very astute about negotiating the modern media age that was evolving. And he was better than, and many presidents or leaders in general leave memoirs. Roosevelt couldn't do that because he died in office obviously. >> Eleanor did write some autobiographies that could in part, also be read as his memoirs to some extent. But mainly, most importantly, what he did was leave the FDR presidential libraries. A library containing his archives, his collections, to the public, ever since then President had left such libraries. It has indeed become federal law to do so. So, yeah, and I think that was a very consciously future minded step that he takes, and there's also clip that illustrates a clip of FDR opening his own library. >> The Franklin D Roosevelt era, is dedicated to the nation by the President himself. >> And this latest edition to the archives of America is dedicated at a moment when government by themselves, is being attacked everywhere. >> It is not for proof, it any proof is needed, that our confidence in the future of democracy has not diminished in this nation and will not diminish. [APPLAUSE] >> Do you think Franklin succeeded with his idea of his own legacy? >> Yes, definitely. And some of the themes that he sort of proposed or projected into for future memory, also worked out precisely the way he set them up if you like. And some developed in different directions, but most of them actually do still remember him in a positive way. He, one important example, I think, is his wheelchair, he was as you know, wheelchair bound due to adult onset polio, and as president he very much tried not to be seen in his wheelchair. He wasn't photographed usually in his wheelchair. He had sort of an act in which he walked to the rostrum with one crutch and holding one person's arm. So he clearly tried to keep his disability out of the public view, whereas in the way it's remembered, the wheelchair is actually extremely prominent. If you see a movie about the Second World War in t he U.S., and you see a guy in a wheelchair come in, most viewers know that this must be Roosevelt, because of the wheelchair. It's become almost one of the best known trivia about him. And so that is also actually the focus of my study, is really cultural memories, so not so much what, necessarily historically happened precisely but rather people in the present choose to remembered, choose to focus on. And the wheelchair is an example of one thing that became very prominent in memory, even if it wasn't in how, in how Roosevelt was perceived historically in his time. And there's also a clip of that. From Michael Bay's 2001 movie Pearl Harbor, and in this clip, Roosevelt actually gets up out of his wheel chair which he wasn't technically able to do. >> How I wonder, every hour of my life, why God put me into this chair. But when I see defeat in the eyes of my countrymen, in your eyes, right now, I start to think that maybe he brought me down for times like these, when we all need to remind who we truly are. That we will not give up or give in. >> Mr President, with all respect sir, what you're asking can't be done. [SOUND] Mr. President. >> Head back George, get back. Do not tell me, it can't be done. Yeah, so as you can see in this clip, the wheelchair is actually used as kind of a symbol for how FDR at this time through his own disability, became particularly well suited to deal with this national American crisis at the time of Pearl Harbor in 1941. so the wheelchair sort of comes to symbolize something that it probably never did at the time, but that's a kind of a trope that's become very popular in the late 20th, early 21st Century. Bill Clinton, for instance, used it when he opened the FDR memorial in Washington, DC in 1997, and he said at the opening from that wheelchair. He lifted a great people back to their feet and said, America, to march again toward its destiny. Thank you very much Sarah thanks for joining us on the Roosevelt [INAUDIBLE]. >> Thank you.