Capitol Ideas: A hook to the past

DES MOINES - High on a wall of the ground floor in the Iowa Capitol building is an unlikely historical marker that mostly goes unnoticed by tourists and Statehouse regulars alike. It is a metal hook embedded in the wall bearing witness to the fact that FDR was once here.

In the throes of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to the Capitol in September 1936 for a historic meeting with elected officials from drought-affected states - including his 1936 Republican presidential rival Kansas Gov. Alfred 'Alf” Landon - to discuss relief efforts from a devastating heat wave that followed one of the coldest winters on record.

Stock Critical Past film footage of the event that was posted on YouTube shows the presidential motorcade arriving at the Capitol's west entrance; Roosevelt, Landon and various governors and senators gathered in then-Iowa Gov. Clyde Herring's formal office; Landon leaving via the Capitol's west steps; and Roosevelt being whisked by car under what at the time was tight security to Des Moines's downtown train station, where he is seen standing and waving goodbye from a departing presidential rail car.

Craig Cronbaugh, director of the Legislative Information Office, has assembled a minute-long clip that he has posted on LIO's Facebook page that incorporates the video and a still photo of the assembled group and closes with a shot of the hook that still graces the Capitol wall.

Cronbaugh said his research indicates the hook was part of an elaborate effort to hang a series of canvas sheets using wires stretching from the Capitol's ground-floor west entrance to the elevator that formed a makeshift tunnel to shield the public and the press from the sight of the paralytic U.S. president being shuttled around in a wheelchair.

A Wikipedia post on FDR's paralytic illness indicates that the president's public appearances were choreographed to avoid press coverage of his arrivals or departures, and it was taboo at the time to refer to his disability.

So, Cronbaugh said, areas of the Capitol were converted temporarily in such a way as to get the president to Herring's first-floor office for the meeting and back to his car with minimal public access. The embedded hook is lasting testament and one of the only remaining vestiges of the presidential visit.

The historic footage is only one of a number of interesting factoids about Iowa's Capitol building and the state's history that Cronbaugh has assembled as LIO director. Other items include video presentations of the Capitol's glass floor in the middle of the first-floor rotunda and the USS Iowa battleship, which is reproduced in replica model in a Capitol display case.

There also are books on the 1904 Statehouse fire, 1913 extension and reconstruction work on the state Capitol grounds and an in-depth look at the Iowa Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument south of the Capitol building.

A number of items are for sale for nominal prices at the ground-floor alcove, where visitors can arrange guided tours of the building or shop for Iowa-related curios. The items are worth a look the next time you're at the Capitol.