TWO
I have always been a great believer in heredity.
—SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT was born late in the evening of January 30, 1882. Sara was in labor twenty-six hours and narrowly survived an overdose of chloroform administered by a solicitous country doctor. That night, in the diary Sara kept, James wrote, “At quarter to nine my Sallie had a splendid large baby boy. He weighs 10 lbs., without clothes.”1 For the next two months the baby went unnamed as James and Sara delicately struggled for control. Roosevelt tradition dictated the boy be named Isaac. By naming Rosy after himself twenty-eight years earlier, James had disrupted that tradition. He now wished to restore it by naming the baby in honor of his father. Sara, who was expected to defer to her husband’s wishes, declined to do so in naming her son. She detested the name Isaac. Before the child was born she had decided that if it were a boy, he would be named for her father: Warren Delano Roosevelt. The toing and froing continued through February. Eventually James gave way. His commitment to Roosevelt tradition was no match for Sara’s determination.2
Sara’s father was delighted. The baby, he wrote, was “a beautiful little fellow—well and strong and well-behaved—with a good-shaped head of the Delano type.”3 But there was a problem. A brother of Sara’s had recently lost a young son who had been named Warren Delano IV. Out of sympathy, Sara agreed it would be untimely to name her baby Warren as well. “We are disappointed, and so is Papa,” she wrote, “but of course there is nothing to say.”4 As an alternative, Sara proposed to name the baby for her favorite uncle, Franklin Delano, who had married Laura Astor and lived a few miles north at a baronial estate known as Steen Valetje in Barrytown. Her father worried that some might think the name was selected “with an idea of possible advantage” since Uncle Frank and Aunt Laura were childless, but Sara brushed the objection aside.5
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was christened on March 20, 1882, at a small family ceremony in the chapel of Hyde Park’s St. James’ Episcopal Church. Nelly Blodgett, one of Sara’s closest friends since childhood, was godmother. There were two godfathers: Will Forbes, Sara’s brother-in-law (Dora’s husband), and Elliott Roosevelt, the younger brother of Sara’s friend Bamie and TR, and soon to be the father of Eleanor. Had he lived, Elliott, in addition to being Franklin’s godfather, would also have become his father-in-law.
The world appeared remarkably peaceful when FDR was christened. The “Concert of Europe,” in place since the Napoleonic wars, provided unprecedented international stability. Christianity, capitalism, and colonialism cemented the cohesion of the Great Powers. German unity had been achieved by Bismarck without rending the fabric of consensus, and few shed a tear for the demise of the papacy’s temporal authority in Italy. In Britain, Queen Victoria ruled majestically in the fifth decade of her seemingly endless reign. Emperor Franz Josef was well into his fourth decade on the Hapsburg throne; Republican France appeared to have found its footing; and north of the U.S. border a newly autonomous Dominion of Canada greeted the United States as a full-fledged North American partner.
Beneath the veneer of calm, passions stirred uneasily—a dangerous portent of what lay ahead. In 1881 President James Garfield and Czar Alexander II of Russia were both victims of political violence: Garfield slain at the hand of a madman in Washington; Alexander killed by a terrorist bomb on the streets of Saint Petersburg. The rapid pace of industrialization, the dislocation of families from rural to urban settings, massive immigration, unspeakable working conditions, labor unrest, and pestilential slums darkened the horizon.
This was a time of enormous growth in the United States. The population, which stood at 35 million at the close of the Civil War, had jumped to 53 million—a 51 percent increase in little more than fifteen years. The American birthrate, 39.8 per thousand in 1882, was almost twice that of Great Britain and three times that of France. Immigration had soared to 800,000 people annually. In the year of FDR’s birth, more than a quarter of a million potential new citizens arrived from Germany and an almost equal number from Scandinavia and the British Isles.6
America’s gross domestic product (GDP) had doubled since 1865 and was now the largest in the world: one third larger than Britain’s, twice that of France, and three times as great as Germany.7 The production of steel, less than twenty thousand tons in 1867, totaled almost 2 million tons in 1882. Coal production had tripled. On the negative side, more than five hundred miners lost their lives in deep-pit accidents each year.8
Within a decade of FDR’s birth, the electric light, the telephone, and the automobile were invented. The continent would be spanned by not one but six transcontinental railroads. This was the age of Social Darwinism and robber barons: Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, and William Vanderbilt in transportation; the steel trust of Andrew Carnegie; John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil; and the mother of all trusts, the great sugar trust of Henry Havemeyer. Chester Arthur was in the White House, the Republicans controlled the House, the Democrats the Senate, and civil service reform, a belated reaction to the assassination of President Garfield, was just around the corner.
Few of the worries of American life intruded at Springwood. FDR grew up in a privileged, carefree environment of comfort and security. “In thinking back to my earliest days,” he said many years later, “I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things both in respect to places and people. Up to the age of seven, Hyde Park was the center of the world.”9
Families as wealthy as the Roosevelts usually entrusted newborn babies to the care of experienced nurses and old family retainers. Not Sara. As soon as she recovered from childbirth, she insisted on doing everything herself: “Every mother ought to learn to care for her own baby, whether she can afford to delegate the task to someone or not.” And although a wet nurse was available, Sara nursed Franklin for almost a year.10
Mittie Roosevelt, who had introduced James to Sara two years before, spent a week at Hyde Park in June 1882. To her son Elliott she wrote, “I held your dear little godson and enjoyed him intensely. He is such a fair, sweet, cunning little bright five-months-old darling baby.… Sallie [is] devoted and looks so very lovely with him, like a Murillo Madonna and infant.”11
Sara was determined to raise Franklin as a Delano—which meant to raise him as she had been raised under the benign discipline of her father. When the Roosevelts made their first pilgrimage to the Delano ancestral home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, FDR was placed in the same hooded cradle in which his grandfather had slept seventy-three years earlier. Warren Delano eventually had seventeen grandchildren, yet none of the others was ever permitted such indulgence.12
Because of Franklin’s difficult birth, Sara was advised to avoid a second and possibly fatal pregnancy. The Roosevelts, like many couples in the nineteenth century faced with a similar problem, adopted abstinence as a remedy, and from time to time that led to marital tension.13 Sara, still young and energetic, found solace arranging and organizing the life of her little son. No moment of Franklin’s day was unscheduled or unsupervised. Awake at seven. Breakfast at eight. Lessons until eleven. Lunch at noon. More lessons until four. Two hours of play followed by supper at six and bed by eight. It was the formula her father had imposed on the large Delano brood, and Sara instinctively adopted it. It was a loving regimen but a regimen nonetheless. A less tractable child might have rebelled, but Franklin never did.14
Initially, FDR was schooled at home by Sara. At six he attended an impromptu kindergarten on a neighboring estate. Then began a series of governesses and tutors at home. FDR was drilled in Latin, French, German, penmanship, arithmetic, and history. Sara organized the study plan, and a tutor either deferred to her wishes or departed. One of the most gifted tutors was a young Swiss woman named Jeanne Rosat-Sandoz, who, in addition to drilling Franklin in modern languages, attempted to instill a sense of social responsibility. Mlle. Sandoz believed in economic reform and the Social Gospel; she did her utmost to arouse in FDR a concern for those less fortunate. Years later Roosevelt wrote her from the White House, “I have often thought that it was you, more than anyone else, who laid the foundation for my education.”15
Learning at home deprived FDR of the rough-and-tumble of public school, but it saved him from inept or mediocre teaching. His mind was continually challenged. While public school children his age were learning their ABCs in English, he was mastering them simultaneously in French and German. At the age of six his German was such that he could write his mother auf Deutsch:
[TRANSLATION]
Dear Mama!
I will show you, that I can already write in German. But I shall try always to improve it, so that you will be really pleased. Now I want to ask you to write me in German script and language.
Your loving son Franklin D.R.16
Sara was determined to keep her son from being spoiled by too much attention yet at the same time wanted to show her affection. “We never subjected the boy to a lot of don’ts,” she wrote. “While certain rules established for his well being had to be rigidly observed, we were never strict merely for the sake of being strict. In fact, we took a secret pride in the fact that Franklin instinctively never seemed to require that kind of handling.”17
James, already in his mid-fifties when FDR was born, was content to leave the disciplining to his wife. Little Franklin was his partner, his inseparable companion with whom he rode, hunted, and sailed. Looking back at her own childhood, Sara noted that “Franklin never knew what it meant to have the kind of respect for his father that is composed of equal parts of awe and fear. The regard in which he held him, amounting to worship, grew out of a companionship that was based on his ability to see things eye to eye, and his father’s never-failing understanding of the little problems that seem so grave to a child.”18
Like many an only child, FDR spent most of his time in the company of adults, and it was assumed he would act like an adult. Sara believed that children “had pretty much the same thoughts as adults” but lacked the vocabulary to express them. To remedy that she read aloud to Franklin daily. Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Little Lord Fauntleroy were favorites. The downside of being captivated by Little Lord Fauntleroy was that Sara kept Franklin in dresses and long curls until he was five. Then he graduated to kilts and full Scottish regalia. Not until he was nearly eight did he wear pants in the form of miniature sailor suits Sara purchased in London. Staying at Algonac one weekend, he proudly wrote his father, “Mama left this morning, and I am to have my bath alone.” He was then almost nine and evidently had never taken a bath by himself before.19
Another consequence of living on a rural estate under the close supervision of his parents was that FDR had few playmates. Occasionally small visitors were invited for the day, but none was permitted to stay overnight. The young, well-bred Whitney sisters were invited several times. Many years later, when both sisters had grown old, their parents died within weeks of each other, subjecting them to a double inheritance tax. The sisters had long since lost touch with their former playmate, but Isabel, the older, a stouthearted Republican, swallowed her pride and wrote to FDR in the White House, asking for an appointment. The president, who relished meeting old acquaintances, agreed to see her and listened patiently to her grievance. Roosevelt said he was terribly sorry, but it was a New York law and even the president could not change it. Isabel rose angrily and shook her cane. “You were always a nasty little boy, and now you are a nasty old man.”20
The birth of a son did not deflect the Roosevelts from their annual journey to Europe. On Easter morning 1885 the family, including three-year-old Franklin, were returning from England on their favorite White Star liner, the Germanic. Suddenly a violent storm arose, plunging the ship into total darkness. As wave after wave broke over the bow, the vessel began to founder. In their cabin on the main deck, the Roosevelts feared the worst.
“We seem to be going down,” said Sara.
“It does look like it,” James replied.
When the water in their cabin became ankle-deep, they prepared to abandon ship. “I never get frightened and I was not then,” Sara remembered. She took her fur coat from its hook and wrapped it around Franklin. “Poor little boy,” she told James. “If he must go down, he is going down warm.” Miraculously, Germanic remained afloat. The water never reached its boilers, the storm subsided, and the ship limped back to Liverpool for repairs.21
Travel was an integral part of FDR’s childhood. In 1887, when he was five, his parents spent the winter in Washington, D.C. James was heavily invested in a syndicate to construct a sea-level canal across Nicaragua linking the Atlantic and Pacific, in direct competition with the French effort of Ferdinand de Lesseps in Panama. The purpose of the trip was to enlist the support of Congress and the Cleveland administration in negotiations with Nicaragua. The Roosevelts rented the fashionable town house of the Belgian minister at 1211 K Street N.W. and entered the Washington scene with gusto. “Every one is charming to us,” wrote Sara. “Even Franklin knows everybody.”22
Several times the Roosevelts visited the Clevelands in the White House. James had contributed generously to Cleveland’s gubernatorial campaign in New York and even more lavishly to his 1884 presidential run. The president pressed James to accept a diplomatic post, preferably as minister to Holland, but James declined. He did, however, secure for Rosy an appointment as first secretary to the American legation in Vienna. Rosy too was a loyal Democrat, had given handsomely to the Cleveland campaign, and could pay most embassy expenses from his wife’s fortune. James objected to Rosy’s frivolous lifestyle in New York and convinced Cleveland that an appointment overseas would be beneficial.
Before leaving Washington in the spring, James and five-year-old Franklin called on the president to say good-bye. James found Cleveland more careworn than ever. At the close of the interview the massive Cleveland, a great walrus of a man, put his hand on FDR’s tiny head: “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”23
Many years later Sara was asked if she had thought her son would ever become president. “Never,” she answered. “The highest ideal I could hold up before our boy [was] to grow to be like his father: straight and honorable, just and kind.”24
In addition to their annual sojourns in Europe, the Roosevelts spent almost every summer on Campobello, a slender, rockbound island in Canadian waters off the coast of Maine. James and Sara were so taken with the invigorating sea air and the congenial social life that in 1883, a year and a half after Franklin was born, they bought four acres and built a summer home. “Sometimes,” Sara wrote, “James sails with some of the gentlemen and then I work or read German or French aloud with several people here who care for these languages.”25 Franklin learned to sail at Campobello, navigating the rocks and tides and treacherous currents of the Bay of Fundy. And it was at Campobello that he began to dream of Annapolis and a naval career. “I’ve always liked the navy,” he said shortly after becoming assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913. “In fact I only missed by a week going to Annapolis. I would have done so, only my parents objected.”26 It was James, not Sara, who objected. For Sara, FDR’s love of the sea was natural. “The Delanos have always been associated with the sea, and I have always been a great believer in heredity,” she said.27 The Roosevelts, on the other hand, were a landlocked clan, and James wanted Franklin trained to take over the family’s business affairs.
As country gentry had done for generations, FDR learned to ride at an early age. At two he was sitting atop a pet donkey in the Roosevelt paddock; at four he was riding out each morning with his father to oversee the estate; at six he was given his own Welsh pony, Debby, on the understanding he care for her himself. He was also held responsible for the care for his dog: initially a spitz puppy; then a huge St. Bernard named Nardo, followed by an even larger Newfoundland called Monk, and finally a red Irish Setter whose full name was Mr. Marksman. Caring for the pets was designed to instill responsibility, but as Roosevelt remembered, it was a herculean task.28
As a child Roosevelt collected stamps and developed a passionate interest in ornithology. At the age of ten he was given his mother’s already formidable postage stamp collection, which she had started when she was five and her father was in China. Over the years FDR would tend it meticulously, eventually amassing a collection of well over a million stamps mounted in 150 matching albums. Admiral Ross McIntire, the White House physician, estimated that Roosevelt spent well over two thousand hours while he was president tending his collection.29 Franklin’s impressive collection of stuffed birds, all of which he shot himself, is still displayed in glass cases in the entrance hall at Hyde Park. His grandfather Delano rewarded his attainments as an ornithologist with a life membership in the Natural History Museum of New York. FDR often referred to the occasion on which the certificate was presented to him as the greatest thrill of his early life.30
The Roosevelts were serious about religion but took the Episcopal faith for granted. Young Franklin was expected to attend Sunday service at St. James’, and he did so without objection. In that sense his belief was instinctive. Nevertheless, he remained committed to his boyhood church until his death, serving first as junior vestryman, then as vestryman, and finally as senior warden. After he became president, vestry meetings were usually held at Springwood and would often extend into the early morning hours.31
Religious faith provided one of the sources of FDR’s unflagging optimism. Deep down he possessed serene confidence in the divine purpose of the universe. He was convinced that however bad things might be at the moment, they were bound to come out all right if he remained patient and put his faith in God. Once asked by Eleanor whether he believed everything he had learned in church, Roosevelt replied that he had never really thought about it. “I think it is just as well not to think about things like that too much.”32
On November 1, 1890, James suffered a mild heart attack. He lived ten more years but became increasingly frail. The impact on Franklin was severe. James had always been his active companion, but less and less would that be the case. Instead, he was someone to care for and look after. That brought Franklin and Sara even closer together. Before 1890, European travel had been a pleasant diversion for the Roosevelts. After James’s heart attack they considered it a necessity. The warm mineral baths at Bad Nauheim were thought to be particularly beneficial for heart patients. James and Sara first went there in 1891; they returned five times in the next seven years. James believed intently in the healing powers of the baths, and Sara and Franklin came to share his enthusiasm—which may help explain FDR’s subsequent attachment to the mineral waters at Warm Springs.
It was in Bad Nauheim that FDR attended school for the first time. Remembering her own experience in Dresden and Celle, Sara insisted that nine-year-old Franklin be enrolled in the local Volksschule to improve his German. Proud of his ability to cope in a foreign setting, Roosevelt enjoyed it immensely. “I go to the public school with a lot of little mickies,” he wrote his young cousins in America. “We have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic … and I like it very much.”33 His German schoolmaster, Christian Bommersheim, remembered FDR as a child in a blue sailor suit. “His parents put him in my class [and] he impressed me very quickly as an unusually bright young fellow. He had such an engaging manner, and he was always so polite that he was soon one of the most popular children in the school.”34
In the summer of 1896, in Bad Nauheim with his parents once again, FDR went on a cycling tour of Germany with his tutor. Each of them had an allowance of four marks a day, which meant they lived largely on bread and cheese and slept in small country inns or farmers’ houses. Several times the pair were arrested for minor traffic infractions, and each time Franklin, whose command of German was excellent, talked their way out of a fine. In the autumn FDR would be entering Groton, and as a final treat his parents took him to Bayreuth for Wagner’s Ring Festival. “Franklin really appreciated it far more than I thought he would,” Sara wrote her sister Dora. “He was most attentive and rapt during the long acts and always sorry to leave, never for a moment bored or tired.”35
America’s confidence in FDR depended on Roosevelt’s incredible confidence in himself, and that traced in large measure to the comfort and security of his childhood. As his daughter, Anna, put it, “Granny [Sara] was a martinet, but she gave father the assurance he needed to prevail over adversity. Seldom has a young child been more constantly attended and incessantly approved by his mother.”36
FDR’s mind was developing. He read rapidly and retained facts easily, a trait that would become more pronounced in the years ahead. He was fluent in French and German and already possessed an uncanny ability to assimilate what he observed. But Roosevelt was not a reflective thinker, nor an original thinker. He learned by doing. And the extensive traveling he did with his parents—he went to Europe eight times in his first fourteen years—exposed him to a wider range of experience than most boys his age. He was small for his age—five feet three, 105 pounds—but his physical growth had yet to begin. All in all, he looked forward to entering Groton—two years late, as it were, most boys entering at the age of twelve.
After the safe harbor of Springwood, Groton was a challenge for Roosevelt. For fourteen years he had been the center of attention of two doting parents. Now he was one of 110 adolescent boys living in an almost monastic setting. Each new boy faced such problems, but for Franklin they were compounded, entering as he was in third year, without any real experience of organized schooling. If he was concerned, he did not show it. “I am getting on finely both mentally and physically,” he reported in his first letter home.37
The founder and headmaster of Groton was the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a man of immense personal magnetism, who had studied for the ministry in England and the Episcopal Theological Seminary at Cambridge, Massachusetts. His first church was at Tombstone in the Arizona Territory at the time of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, just after the shoot-out at the OK Corral. A large, vigorous, uncomplicated man with the build of an athlete, Peabody fit right in on the frontier. “Our parson,” clucked the Tombstone Epitaph, “doesn’t flirt with the girls, doesn’t drink beer behind the door, and when it comes to baseball, he’s a daisy.”38
But Peabody’s overriding desire was to create a church-affiliated boarding school for the sons of America’s establishment. In 1883, with the financial assistance of family friends, including J. P. Morgan, Peabody realized his dream and founded Groton on ninety acres of donated farmland thirty-five miles north of Boston. The school was small: six classes of not more than twenty boys each. Tuition was $500 a year. That was about twice what the average American family had to live on.39 And there were no scholarships. Morgan served on the board of trustees, as did Phillips Brooks, the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, and William Lawrence, dean of the Episcopal Theological Seminary. The contrast between the rawness of Tombstone and the refinement of Groton seems extreme, yet there is no better measure of the breadth of Peabody’s character.
Groton’s purpose, as the rector saw it, was to cultivate “manly Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development.” He believed in religion, character, athletics, and scholarship—roughly in that order. And character was formed by discipline and obedience. Especially obedience. “You know,” Averell Harriman (Groton ’09) once said to his father, the rector “would be an awful bully if he weren’t such a terrible Christian.”40
Groton was an immediate success and within ten years had become the most exclusive school in America. Wealthy fathers, disgusted with the soft living their offspring enjoyed, flocked to send their sons to a school where boys would be trained not only intellectually but morally and physically as well. Some of the most successful men in the country had never been to college, but they were good judges of character, and they recognized that Peabody was their type of man. They welcomed the opportunity to place their sons under his care.
Life at Groton was Spartan. Each boy lived in a six-by-ten-foot cubicle with a bed, bureau, rug, and chair. All were standard issue. There was no closet, wall hangings were prohibited, and there was a curtain instead of a door because Peabody frowned upon too much privacy. Mornings began at 6:45 with an icy shower in a communal washroom. Breakfast, chapel, and three morning classes followed with clockwork precision. Dinner, the main meal, was served at noon, followed by two afternoon classes and athletics. Another frigid shower, the evening meal (for which official school dress was required), chapel, and study hall, following which the Rector and Mrs. Peabody shook the hand of each boy and wished him good night.
Despite his pampered upbringing, FDR adjusted handily to the rigor of Groton. Twice a week for the next four years he wrote to his parents, and never once did he complain about his experience. In a sense, except for the cold showers, he was substituting one disciplined regime for another. Autumns were filled with football excitement, edging on to the Christmas season, culminating in the unforgettable reading of Dickens’s Christmas Carol by the rector’s father.41 In winter, skating and sledding substituted for team sports; with spring came baseball, tennis, swimming, and golf. At vacation time most boys reacted like sailors on shore leave. Franklin was an exception. If he got into mischief, there is no record of it. School vacations were invariably spent at Hyde Park. Summers he usually went to Campobello, where he enjoyed nothing so much as sailing his twenty-one-foot knockabout, New Moon, which his father had given him.
Groton’s curriculum was classical, taught with great attention to detail. Peabody himself taught sacred studies and set the tone of the school. He saw Groton as a large family with the rector as paterfamilias. Leading the school athletic teams, Peabody personified the muscular Christianity in which he believed. Football was his favorite. To Yale coach Walter Camp he wrote, “I am convinced that football is of profound importance for the moral even more than for the physical development of the boys.”42 As one graduate put it, the boys loved him and feared him, and from him they learned determination and to be unafraid. Roosevelt said the influence of Peabody and his wife meant more to him than that of any other people, “next to my father and mother.”43
FDR had little difficulty academically. He had been well prepared and within a month of his arrival stood fourth in a class of nineteen, a position he more or less maintained. As Peabody recalled, Roosevelt “was a quiet, satisfactory boy of more than ordinary intelligence, taking a good position in his form but not brilliant. Athletically he was too slight for success. We all liked him.”44 Athletic success was central to real distinction at Groton, and, as Peabody noted, FDR was too small. He was also inexperienced, never having played a team sport before. He was assigned to the second worst of eight football teams and the worst baseball squad, but his enthusiasm never wilted. When hit in the stomach by a line drive, he wrote his parents that it was “to the great annoyance of that intricate organ, and to the great delight of all present.”45 In his final year Roosevelt won a school letter as equipment manager of the baseball team. He also won the Latin and Punctuality Prizes and was a dormitory prefect and a member of the school choir and the debating society.
FDR’s four years at Groton provided a transition from the snuggery of familial warmth at Hyde Park. He accepted Peabody’s premises and made them his own: competition is healthy, success comes from effort, reward is based on performance, religious observance and moral probity are indispensable to a productive life. “Playing the game” came naturally to FDR. When graduation came, he was sorry to leave. “What a joyful yet sad day this has been,” Franklin wrote his parents. “Scarce a boy but wishes he were a 1st former again.”46
In one sense, Roosevelt never left Groton. The experience was indelible. “More than forty years ago,” he wrote to the old rector in 1940, “you said, in a sermon in the Old Chapel, something about not losing boyhood ideals in later life. Those were Groton ideals—taught by you—I try not to forget—and your words are still with me and with hundreds of others of ‘us boys.’ ”47
FDR entered Harvard in the autumn of 1900, along with sixteen of his eighteen Groton classmates. The university was rigidly stratified in those years. Students from socially prestigious families, most of whom had attended East Coast private schools, lived off campus in sumptuous residence halls on Mt. Auburn Street known as the Gold Coast. Young men who were less well-off, usually high school graduates from middle- and working-class backgrounds, made do with considerably more modest accommodations in university housing within the Yard. Roosevelt, together with his Groton classmate Lathrop Brown, took a three-room corner suite in Westmorly Court, the newest of the Gold Coast edifices, and with Sara’s help furnished it in an opulent style so firmly prohibited by Rector Peabody. By Harvard standards, FDR’s $400-a-year suite was luxurious. He and Brown lived there for the next four years, surrounded by fellow Grotonians and other preppies.
Only rarely did men from the Gold Coast and the Yard interact. Except for friendships that grew out of common interests in the classroom or on the athletic field, there were few opportunities for students of different backgrounds to come into social contact. Professors decried the division of the campus, and Endicott Peabody railed against “the gap between Mt. Auburn Street and the Yard,” yet not until the development of the house system in the mid-1920s did Harvard achieve anything approaching social integration of the student body.48
Under President Charles W. Eliot, appointed in 1869 and still in firm control when Roosevelt entered, Harvard stood in the vanguard of university reform. Scholarship, not “teaching,” became the order of the day. Education was defined exclusively in intellectual terms and had little concern for character development or the protection of private morality. Faculty were appointed on the basis of their research, and students, after a few required courses in the first year, were free to enroll in whatever they wished. Eliot believed a student could choose his courses better than anyone else and that all nonvocational subjects had equal value. He also believed students should make their choice based on the professor teaching the course, not the course description.49
Harvard’s emphasis on intellectual advancement attracted brilliant scholars. William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Josiah Royce held chairs in philosophy; the great Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge adorned the English Department along with George Pierce Baker, founder of the “47 Workshop” for playwrights, and Charles Townsend Copeland, the matchless “Copey” for generations of Harvardians. In the newly established Government Department, A. Lawrence Lowell held forth; Frank W. Taussig lectured in economics; Nathaniel Shaler, the nation’s preeminent geologist, headed the Lawrence Scientific School; and Christopher Columbus Langdell was dean of law.
For students, the elective system and its corollary, voluntary attendance at classes, were enormously liberating. FDR and his Groton classmates had taken the equivalent of the required freshman courses during their sixth-form year and therefore were allowed to skip the mandatory curriculum entirely. Not only did that mean they could graduate in three years instead of four, but they could choose whatever courses they wished. Roosevelt hewed closely to fact-heavy courses in economics, government, and history. “I took economics courses in college for four years and everything I was taught was wrong,” the president quipped in 1941.50 FDR took his studies seriously—unlike many Gold Coast habitués he took no “football courses”—and though he won no honors, he was never in academic difficulty. Thanks to the elective system, he avoided courses in philosophy and theory, which might have meant trouble. Throughout his life Roosevelt remained mystified by abstract thought, and Harvard did nothing to lessen that.
In late autumn of his first year, FDR received disturbing news from Hyde Park. His father had suffered a severe heart attack. Then a second one. Sara took James to their New York apartment so he might be nearer his doctors, but his health continued to deteriorate. On December 8, with his family at his bedside, James died. “All is over,” Sara wrote in her diary. “At 2:20 he merely slept away. Dr. Ely was in the apartment and called, but it was too late. As I write these words I wonder how I lived when he left me.”51 James left an estate of roughly $600,000, or slightly less than $14 million in today’s currency. Franklin and Rosy were each provided a trust fund, with Springwood passing to Sara. Two years before, on the death of her own father, Sara and her siblings had each inherited $1.3 million from the Delano fortune. That would amount to more than $28 million now, and it became the primary source of FDR’s family wealth.
Roosevelt spent the spring of 1901 in close touch with Sara. That summer, with the memory of James hanging heavily, they chose not to return to Campobello but to travel to Europe. The Roosevelts spent ten weeks abroad, returning in late September just in time for FDR to return to college. First, it was off to the fjords of Norway on the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s elegant cruise ship Princessin Victoria Luise—and a chance encounter near the Arctic Circle with the kaiser, William II, who invited them aboard his yacht. Sara found the emperor impressive and energetic but not so kind as she remembered his grandfather, William I, whom she had once seen in Paris. Later they visited Dresden so Sara might show Franklin where she had lived and gone to school as a child. They spent a week with Aunt Laura Astor Delano, Uncle Frank’s widow, at the Beau Rivage on the shore of Lake Geneva. In Zurich they stayed at the same hotel in which Sara had stayed on her honeymoon. In Paris, their last stop, they learned that President William McKinley had been shot while visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Twelve days later, as they passed the Nantucket lightship on their way home, they received the news by megaphone: “President McKinley died last Saturday.” Cousin Theodore was president of the United States.52
Back at Cambridge, FDR threw himself into a round of frenetic activity. After a grueling competition in freshman year, he had been elected to the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate newspaper. For the next three years, the Crimsonwould be his central interest, often requiring four to six hours a day to ready the paper for publication. Along with membership on the editorial board went prestige and responsibility. Franklin gloried in both. He represented the paper at the Yale bicentennial celebration, an occasion notable in retrospect for the presence on the platform of President Theodore Roosevelt, Princeton president Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. In his third year, Roosevelt was elected managing editor of the Crimson and worked even harder. Administrative responsibility came naturally. He handled the staff adroitly and was always able to cajole crusty Cambridge printers into opening the forms and remaking a page for last-minute submissions by tardy college journalists. “In his geniality was a kind of frictionless command,” his co-editor, W. Russell Bowie, recalled.53
At the end of his third year, Roosevelt was elected editor-in-chief (president) of the Crimson. He took his degree in June, but remained for a fourth year to discharge his editorial responsibilities. His professors advised him to enter graduate school. “Great fight in my mind between it and Law School, but latter too much with outside duties,” FDR recorded in his diary.54 That fall he enrolled as a graduate student in history but had no intention of pursuing a degree. “The paper takes every moment of time,” he informed his mother in early October.55 As Arthur Schlesinger noted, editing the Crimson crowned FDR’s Harvard career. Both at the time and in retrospect, it was extremely important to him.56 In later years he enjoyed joking with reporters that he was a former newspaperman. Visiting Portland, Oregon, as the assistant secretary of the Navy in 1914, he told a press photographer that he too had been “a reporter in Boston ten or twelve years” before and had often lined folks up for the camera.57
Sara, meanwhile, found life at Springwood oppressive without James. “I try to keep busy, but it is all hard,” she confided to her diary the following spring.58 Sara stepped into James’s role—managing the estate, supervising the workmen, handling business affairs—and for the most part made do. FDR returned to Springwood for Christmas, but in contrast to previous years the celebration was muted. In January the social season accelerated. On the first weekend in the new year, Franklin journeyed to Washington to attend the gala coming-out party given by TR and his wife, Edith, for their daughter, Alice, at the White House. It was the premier social event of the season. FDR spent three crowded days in Washington attending formal dinners, a reception at the Austrian Embassy, and the dance itself, held in the East Room. There was also tea with Cousin Theodore, lunch at Cousin Bamie’s house on N Street, and a second private talk with the president. “One of the most interesting and enjoyable three days I have ever had,” Franklin wrote Sara.59
FDR returned to Cambridge, and soon afterward Sara joined him. The winter at Hyde Park had become too melancholy. She took an apartment in Boston and discreetly joined the social and cultural life of the city. Sara wanted to be “near enough to the University to be on hand should [Franklin] want me and far enough removed not to interfere with his college life.”60 Franklin seemed delighted. He came frequently to dine and sometimes spent the night. The following winter Sara returned to Boston for another three months. She participated vicariously in FDR’s success and cushioned whatever disappointment came his way. “His father and I always expected a great deal of Franklin,” she once said. “After all, he had many advantages that other boys did not have.”61
Socially, FDR’s dance card at Harvard was fuller than most. He kept a horse and a runabout, and there was scarcely a weekend when he was not attending a dinner or a party somewhere in the Boston area.62 He was not admitted to Porcellian, the most prestigious of the final clubs, but he did make Fly (Alpha Delta Phi) and Hasty Pudding, served as librarian of each, and began his lifelong habit of collecting naval Americana. Years later, with typical hyperbole, he told a distant relative that his failure to make Porcellian was “the greatest disappointment he ever had.”63 Yet, as his roommate, Lathrop Brown, noted, “Franklin was not a typical club man of his generation. He had more on his mind than sitting in the Club’s front window, doing nothing but criticizing the passers-by. His not ‘making’ the Porcellian meant only that he was free of any possible restraining influences of a lot of delightful people who thought that the world belonged to them and who did not want to change anything in it.”64
Roosevelt received his degree from Harvard in 1903. But in the tradition of the Ivy League he was always a member of the Class of ’04. At graduation he was elected permanent chairman of the class committee, the linchpin of alumni affairs. Roosevelt won no prizes and did not make Phi Beta Kappa, yet he had prospered intellectually. His university experience imparted renewed confidence and enhanced the innate optimism that James and Sara had so carefully nourished. As one biographer has written, “At Groton, Roosevelt learned to get along with his contemporaries; at Harvard he learned to lead them.”65