After the commission charged with the job of approving a memorial to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed that designs would not feature FDR's cigarette holder or Eleanor Roosevelt's customary fur piece, controversy erupted when it became clear that in none of the designs for the memorial's three statues would FDR, crippled by polio since 1921, be shown in a wheelchair.

When the monument opened, the Washington Post reported that the monument's Braille letters were too large to be legible. One blind visitor complained that "the dots are about five times normal size." Sculptor Robert Graham defended his work: "My concept of that piece was to have Braille as a kind of invitation to touch, more than anything.... Nothing is life-size in the piece, so you very much have to adjust yourself to the scale."

[Ed.: The proposed design for the World War II Memorial also received criticism for bearing too close a resemblance to the monumental plans of Nazi architect Albert Speer.]

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