Wasn't It Great?

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If you can lure them away from the International Spy Museum, the new Madame Tussauds and the West Elm store, a great place to dump your visiting tourists -- even on a bracingly cold afternoon, even when the fountains are switched off for winter -- is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, just to watch what they do.

Does it strike them as a sobering, noble monument to ideas and words? Or is it a huge, bleak bore?

Do they race through its contemplative maze, glancing at the sculptures and somber stone, or do they take time to read its many all-caps inscriptions of some of the words Roosevelt spoke during the country's most calamitous economic times?

No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. That's FDR talking in his second Fireside Chat on Government and Modern Capitalism, in September 1934. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.

By now you know what your visitors are up to instead: They are over by the sculptor George Segal's life-size "Depression Bread Line," where five cast-bronze, downtrodden men in hats and rumpled overcoats wait by a door for government assistance.

Tourists like to stand behind the last man and make a goofy face while they have their pictures taken. Look at me, I'm in the bread line! ( Everybody's done it -- it's poverty as hi-larious sight gag, devoid of any hubris. The more plump the tourist, the better the contrast.) Other tourists prefer to stand by and take enormous pleasure in disapproving of the insensitivity, in a tone of voice not entirely unlike Bart Simpson's grandpa:

Why, in my day . . .

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Let's cheer you up a bit, maybe. Let's drive to Arthurdale, W.Va., 220 miles northwest of Washington.

In 1934, Arthurdale was a social experiment -- a town built from scratch by the government, to lift unemployed miners and their families out of the some of the worst living conditions the Depression had to offer.

As you drive on a recent Friday afternoon down Route 7 along Deckers Creek, the talk-radio station from Pittsburgh fades in and out, with some dude on a tear about the House approving the president's stimulus package, about government interference with free markets. The sky above is gray, releasing a soft spittle of icy rain. The world is black and white again.