Roosevelt (4 page)

At vacation time, a Grotonian later recalled, the boys reacted to the close, monastic life of the school like sailors taking shore leave. But not Franklin. If he got into escapades, or even mischief, there is no hint of it. During short vacations he joyously threw himself back into the life of Hyde Park. Summers he spent usually at Campobello, where his greatest pleasure was in sailing his twenty-one-foot sailboat,
New Moon,
which his father had given him. He still showed little interest in girls. While he duly observed the social amenities, he spent a good deal of time evading certain girls whom he called “pills” or “elephantine.”

As the four years at Groton came to an end, Roosevelt was showing more maturity and assurance. He had gained more independence from his mother, who had frequently visited him at school. His schoolwork improved, he became a dormitory prefect and manager of the baseball nine. Some of his schoolmates considered him
self-assertive and quarrelsome. Others liked him strongly; one remembered him as “gray-eyed, cool, self-possessed, intelligent,” with the “warmest, most friendly and understanding smile.” But there is evidence that Roosevelt did not consider himself a success at Groton. He did not win the prized position of senior prefect, and he felt bitter toward the Rector for his “favoritism” in choosing others. In his senior year he still patronized the “new kids,” but he himself was a tall, gangling youth with pince-nez and with braces on his teeth.

“He was a quiet, satisfactory boy,” the Rector summed him up many years later, “of more than ordinary intelligence, taking a good position in his Form but not brilliant. Athletically he was rather too slight for success. We all liked him.”

What influence did Groton have on Roosevelt as a future politician? The question takes on special interest because Peabody made much of his eagerness to educate his boys for political leadership. Himself a graduate of Cheltenham and Cambridge, he was impressed by the fact that the English public (
i.e.,
private) schools had been recruiting stations for British leadership; Eton had supplied half a dozen prime ministers in the nineteenth century, and some cabinet meetings seemed like reunions of old Harrovians. Could Groton serve the same high purpose in America? “If some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land,” he said, “it won’t be because they have not been urged.” And he exhorted them.

Exhortation—but little else. Certainly Groton did not equip her youths with any kind of political expertness. In a democracy the indispensable political skill is facility in dealing with all sorts of people. Grotonians, one of them remarked, could “gaze fixedly two inches over the head of a slight acquaintance while they carried on a conversation.” Ten years after Groton, during his early political life, Roosevelt was still throwing his head up and looking down his nose at people. The only political skill Franklin seems to have learned at Groton was an effective debating style, but this kind of argumentation was of little use in his later political battles.

Nor was the Groton curriculum likely to quicken a boy’s interest in the politics of his own country. Languages—especially the dead languages of Greece and Rome—made up much of the program. History was European history. No course dealt directly with the United States. The Rector and most of his masters taught by rule and by rote; the students were drilled rather than educated. “I studied Sacred Studies for six years at Groton,” said one of Franklin’s schoolmates. “I never heard of Renan or of Tom Paine; and I was never told that the Old and the New Testament are full of the
most potent contradictions.” Franklin’s hundreds of letters during his four years give hardly a hint of any intellectual excitement. Classes were obstacle courses to be run.

It has been said that Roosevelt’s concern for the underprivileged was born at Groton. This is true only in a special sense. Peabody was something of a Christian Socialist. He worried about the needy, and Groton maintained a summer camp for poor boys, where Franklin sometimes helped out. But the Rector’s socialism somewhat resembled that of his Cambridge teacher Charles Kingsley, who ended up more interested in better sanitation than in economic or social reform. The Rector’s humanitarianism never went much beyond a concern for the cleanliness and morals of the masses. Franklin’s main interest in the poor was to give charity to them. As for specific public issues, Roosevelt in his debates argued for a larger navy, against the annexation of Hawaii and for the independence of the Philippines, against guaranteeing the integrity of China—taking sides that were probably assigned rather than chosen—but he displayed no interest in the developing economic and social problems of a rising industrialism at home.

In one way, at least, Groton failed the future politician completely. Politics to Peabody was a kind of crusade in which Grotonian knight-errants, presumably dressed in Eton collars, would charge eagerly into the political arena and clash noisily with the forces of evil. Politics must be “purified,” he told Franklin and his schoolmates. But his exhortations ignored the cruel questions facing the American politician bent on success. Never lie, the Rector said—without taking up the further question whether in politics lies are sometimes necessary to reach “good” ends. Never compromise with evil, the Rector said—without arguing whether politicians must work with corrupt forces to carry out popular mandates. Peabody’s goals were good ones for a humanitarian politician, but his artless homilies were simply irrelevant to the harsh lesson of American politics, the lesson Lincoln Steffens finally learned, that “honesty is not enough,” that effective politics in a democracy requires knowledge, courage, will power, humor, leadership.

To be sure, Peabody was struggling with an old and formidable problem. For at least two millenniums societies have struggled with the problem of discovering and educating political talent. In Greece, in the spirit of Paideia, young men were tested to see who possessed the essential qualities of leadership—common sense, intellectual capacity, devotion to the public welfare. For centuries printing presses flooded Europe with books on how princes should be educated and how rulers should behave—Machiavelli’s
Prince
is the best-known example. The English public schools educated generation after generation for political leadership. Groton and other
American private schools borrowed Etonian and Harrovian forms, just as they aped the athleticism of Greece and the monasticism of the middle ages. But they borrowed only forms—and the forms were meaningless in a different culture, in the unique democratic politics of America.

“I count it among the blessings of my life that it was given to me in formative years to have the privilege of your guiding hand,” Roosevelt wrote to Peabody forty years after he graduated from Groton. The Rector came to stand as a unique personal compound of Christian ideals. Groton, too, became a bundle of precious memories—memories of walking to town for cider and apples, of youthful voices floating across the soft May evenings, of the sun streaming through the chapel windows, of the Rector stabbing the air with taut fingers as he strove to drive home his simple precepts. Peabody and the school helped shape Roosevelt’s basic attitudes toward social problems, but they throw little light on the emergence of Roosevelt as a politician. None of his political battles was won on the playing fields of Groton.

“My dearest Mama and Papa,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote home in September 1900, “Here I am, in Cambridge and in twelve hours I shall be a full registered member of the Class of 1904.” His room looked as if it had been “struck by sheet Lightning,” his sitting room lacked curtains and carpets, the bed looked “inhabitable”—but he was happy. He was about to become a Harvard man.

The transition from Groton was an easy one. Many of his old classmates were entering Harvard with him. He immediately began eating at a Groton table rather than in one of the large common dining halls. Some evenings he went to Sanborn’s billiard parlor where he could see most of the “Groton, St. Marks, St. Pauls and Pomfret fellows.” His roommate, Lathrop Brown, was a Grotonian. Together they shared a suite of rooms in Westmorly Court, amidst Harvard’s “Gold Coast” of high-priced dormitories and select clubs.

Unlike Groton, Harvard was not isolated from the world. Across the Charles River lay Boston, basking in its golden afternoon. The “Hub of the Universe,” the “Athens of America” boasted of its Brahmin families, of its Bulfinch State House, of the Athenaeum, its outstanding private library, and—now that it was getting used to her—of beer-drinking, Buddha-worshiping Mrs. Jack Gardner, whose fabled art palace was opened in young Roosevelt’s junior year. For this Boston, Harvard was a kind of genteel brain trust. The relation between city and gown was a close but not always happy one. Boston, said a Harvard historian, was a “social leech”
on the college; Beacon Hill hostesses—“Boston mammas,” he called them—wanted to entertain Harvard’s “appetizing young men” and balked all efforts to make a “social democracy” of the college.

Roosevelt was immediately engaged on the Boston-Cambridge social circuit. With Proper Bostonians he got along very well; their families, while socially far grander, were much like those he had known at Hyde Park: rich, wellborn, and inbred. Hardly a week went by during his four years at Harvard that he did not conduct a round of social calls, duly handing his card to formidable butlers. “My dress-suit looked like a dream and was much admired,” he reported home. His height, his almost-handsome head—hair parted in the middle, close-in, deep-set eyes, long, lean nose and chin, sensitive lips—his ready smile, no longer showing braces, his easy ways, stood him in good stead.

But on the athletic field his physique failed him. As at Groton he wanted desperately to make good in a big sport. He weighed only 146 pounds, however, and he was not athletically skillful. Trying out for end on the freshman football team, he lasted only two weeks. There was consolation in winning the captaincy of one of the scrub teams after the first day of practice. He also worked hard for crew—but here again he could rise no higher than stroke on intramural teams.

Roosevelt made up for his athletic frustrations by plunging into extracurricular activities. He was pleased at being elected secretary of the Freshman Glee Club. Most important was the
Crimson.
The day he reported home that he had “left” the freshman team he added that he was trying out for the undergraduate daily, “& if I work hard for two years I may be made an editor.” Work he did—often several hours a day—and in his junior year he won the top post of editor in chief. Luck, or connections, played a part; upon calling Cousin Theodore Roosevelt in Boston to ask to see him, Franklin discovered that the vice-president was to lecture in a Harvard course and thereby he won a scoop for his paper. But his success was due mainly to doggedness.

Obviously Roosevelt wanted to make good at Harvard. What was the source of this ambition? Doubtless it lay largely in his anxiety to gain the respect of his classmates in general, and of the social elite in particular. Throughout his college career Roosevelt was a joiner. But some organizations one did not join—one was asked.

The club system that Roosevelt encountered at Harvard was one of the most harshly exclusive in the country. Sophomores were first sifted out by the “Hasty Pudding,” which gave special social prominence to the first group chosen. Then came the real test—election to one of the “final” clubs. At one time affiliated with national fraternities, the chapters at Harvard had not enjoyed brotherhood with
provincials in Ohio and points west and had gladly given up their charters. They had become a direct link between Harvard and Boston society. Behind their elegantly dowdy exteriors few activities of any importance went on; the important thing was to belong to them, not to be active in them.

Delightedly Franklin entered the social lists. “I am about to be slaughtered, but quite happy, nevertheless,” he wrote home after hearing that he had been picked for a sophomore club. As a Roosevelt and as a Grotonian, he was almost sure of membership in a final club. But which one? At the top of the hierarchy stood Porcellian, which years before had tapped Cousin Theodore. Franklin made a high-ranking club, the Fly, but was passed over by Porcellian. This blow gave him something of an inferiority complex, according to Eleanor Roosevelt; it was the bitterest moment of his life, according to another relative. Evidence is conflicting on this point, but one thing is certain: social acceptance was of crucial importance to the young Roosevelt.

There was time for classes too. Roosevelt took the liberal arts course; his program included English and French literature, Latin, geology, paleontology, fine arts, and public speaking; but he concentrated on the social sciences, enrolling in a dozen history courses and in several courses each in government and economics. These were European history, English history, American history, American government, constitutional government, tendencies of American legislation, international law, currency legislation, economics of transportation, of banking, and of corporations. As at Groton he was only a fair student, attaining a “gentleman C” average. He had anticipated several courses at Groton, however, and hence was able to meet his requirements for a bachelor’s degree in three years. He stayed a fourth year at Harvard in order to edit the
Crimson
, registering in the graduate school, but he did not take his courses too seriously and was not granted a master of arts degree.

During much of the college year he saw his mother frequently. James Roosevelt died at the age of seventy-two, during his son’s freshman year, after a long struggle with heart disease. “I wonder how I lived when he left me,” Sara said afterward. She managed to endure one lonely winter at Hyde Park; after that she took an apartment in Boston only a few miles from her son. Franklin’s relation with her was close but relaxed. He dealt with her tactfully and affectionately and made a brave effort to shoulder some of the responsibilities of Hyde Park and Campobello. He saw a good deal of his mother during the summers, which took the old easy pattern. Following his freshman and junior years he made trips to Europe, touring the Norwegian coast, Germany, Switzerland, France, and
England. But these trips left time for golf, tennis, and sailing at Campobello.