Shortly after noon on that Tuesday, FDR steadied himself behind a lectern along the Tidal Basin and reintroduced a national radio audience to a faded historical figure. Wartime shortages would postpone a bronze casting of Jefferson for four more years. It was artist Rudulph Evans’ prototype, painted brown for the occasion. The Marines had placed it at the feet of a 19½-foot statue of its author. Marine cordon stood 24-hour watch over one of the dearest of national treasures, the handwritten, signed parchment, sealed in a bulletproof case. A military detail had to be sent to retrieve it from its secret location, the U.S. Organizers of the event wanted to display the original Declaration of Independence, except that it had been removed from the capital in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, according to the National Park Service account. Wartime weighed on public spirits and complicated just about every aspect of a ceremony intended to lift them. Twenty-mile-per-hour winds pressed on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inside the grandstand when he dedicated the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, as did the national mood. The Jefferson Progression How historians keep changing their view of the founder
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