Roosevelt (5 page)

Roosevelt’s activities at Harvard spilled over into many fields. At the suggestion of a Boston bookseller he began a collection, starting with Americana in general, narrowing this down to “ships” and finally to United States warships. He became head librarian of the Fly Club, but his duties were light. He continued his charitable activities, teaching occasionally at a club for poor boys in Boston. He even led the cheers at a football game, though he “felt like a D … F … waiving my arms & legs before several thousand amused spectators!” But much of his college career is summed up in a line written to his mother: “… am doing a little studying, a little riding & a few party calls.”

Half a century before Roosevelt finished Harvard, Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents, had entered there. The Harvard of his day, Adams said later, was a mild and liberal school which sent young men into the world as respectable citizens. But “leaders of men it never tried to make. … It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.” Much had happened to the college since Adams’s years there, especially during Charles W. Eliot’s presidency, but the remark aptly states Harvard’s effect on Franklin Roosevelt.

His courses seemed admirably suited for educating a future statesman, but they lacked meaningful content. Roosevelt’s government courses, for example, stressed constitutional formalities and legal abstractions rather than political realities. His program, Roosevelt himself complained, was “like an electric lamp that hasn’t any wire.” He wanted a “practical idea of the workings of a political system—of the machinery of primary, caucus, election and legislature.” His first course in government was taught by one of the dullest lecturers in Harvard’s history.

The fault was not merely that of the college. Roosevelt was largely indifferent to his studies—and might have been indifferent even if the courses had been far more exciting. Not one of his letters home reflects interest in the intellectual side of Harvard beyond meeting course requirements and cramming for examinations. When a myopic lecturer bored him he had no compunction, along with most of the rest of the class, in escaping from the hall by a rear window and stealing down the fire escape.

Certainly the doctrines taught Roosevelt at Harvard had little relation to the views of the politician of the 1930’s. The man
who as president would dominate Congress and try to “pack” the Supreme Court learned in college about the eternal verity of a nice and fixed balance among the branches of government. The man who as president would try “crazy” economic experiments and currency schemes received a solid grounding in classical economics (“I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong,” he said later). The man who would be called the “master political psychologist of his time” took no psychology and quit his only philosophy course after three weeks. He might have learned a good deal about the role of the West in American history and politics from Frederick Jackson Turner, but he missed the first six weeks of Turner’s lectures.

His professors ranged from extreme right wing to moderately liberal. He became close friends with only one of them, a handsome socialite economics teacher named Abram Piatt Andrew, who later went into politics and won appointment as assistant secretary of the treasury under Taft. Abbott Lawrence Lowell might have taught him something about practical politics—Lowell had won office as member of the Boston School Committee though neither party would nominate him for a second term—but Roosevelt seems to have had only occasional contact with him. Lowell and at least two others of Roosevelt’s teachers who were still alive during his presidency would later hotly oppose most of the New Deal.

What was Roosevelt’s own social outlook during his college days? To the extent that he had one, it was a mixture of political conservatism, economic orthodoxy, and anti-imperialism, steeped in a fuzzy altruism and wide ignorance. “Yes, Harvard has sought to uplift the Negro,” he wrote in his junior year, “if you like, has sought to make a man out of a semi-beast.” After Theodore Roosevelt helped settle the great coal strike of 1902 Franklin criticized his cousin for interfering in the affair and for his “tendency to make the executive power stronger than the Houses of Congress.” Although he had heard the great historian Edward Channing debunk hero worship and historical humbug, Roosevelt as a senior wrote a most adulatory and inaccurate essay on Alexander Hamilton. On the other hand, he helped establish a “Boer Relief Fund,” and in a thesis on the Roosevelt family before the Revolution he lauded his forebears for their “very democratic spirit” and their sense of responsibility.

Perhaps the best measure of Roosevelt’s views at Harvard lies in his
Crimson
editorials. In the fall, obsessed by football problems, he wrote indignant editorials about weak cheering at the games, smoking in the grandstand, lack of enthusiasm by the spectators, poor spirit in the team. When winter came he moved right on to problems of winter sports. Interspersed were editorials on matters that have occupied student editors for decades: inadequate fire protection in the dormitories, the need for board walks, overly congested college calendars, and the like. He went to some pains to
draw attention to political speakers at the university. He showed absolutely no interest in matters outside Harvard.

Roosevelt met little success in campus politics. When in his freshman year some of the “outlanders” in the class broke the Groton grip on the class presidency, Roosevelt was on the sidelines. Senior year he was nominated for the prized office of class marshal but lost out at the hands of an organized slate. He did win office, however, as permanent chairman of the class committee, thanks largely to his prominence as editor of the
Crimson.
But he showed none of the political craft at Harvard that Herbert Hoover had displayed ten years earlier at Stanford in leading the “barbarians” in a triumphant attack on fraternity control of the campus.

About the time Roosevelt was at Harvard a Tammany district boss named George Washington Plunkitt, seated on his favorite bootblack stand, was explaining how to get ahead in politics. You must study human nature, he said, not books—they were just a hindrance. “If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to unlearn all you learned.” The secret? “You have to go among the people, see them and be seen.” Roosevelt’s early education violated all Plunkitt’s time-tested precepts. Yet the young man from Hyde Park would vanquish the Plunkitts in the years to come. How he stuck to boyhood ideals nurtured at Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard, and tried to realize these ideals by plunging into the rough and tumble of American politics was to be the theme of the life ahead.

I
T IS A STRIKING
fact that some of the great popular leaders of our time have risen to power from outside the national “heartland.” Lloyd George came not from England but from Wales, Hitler not from Prussia but from Austria, Stalin not from Mother Russia but from Georgia, MacDonald not from England but from northern Scotland, just as Napoleon earlier was not a Frenchman but a Corsican. In a geographical sense Roosevelt was no outlander, but in a cultural sense he was. His shift from Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard to New York City was a journey between two worlds—from the class-bound gentility of home and school to the bustling, bawling urban America of the 1900’s.

This urban America was in economic and political ferment. Between the time young Franklin Roosevelt first looked out at side-wheelers straining against the Hudson current and the time on that June day in 1904 when he sat in cap and gown on the commencement platform, important changes had taken place. In that year an economist found that two mammoth groups—the Morgan and the Rockefeller combinations—had come to “constitute the heart of the business and commercial life of the nation.” In the four years that Roosevelt studied classical economics at Harvard, over 150 trusts had been formed. Ten of these combinations were capitalized at one hundred million dollars or more; trusts were pyramiding into supertrusts. Despite depressions, despite the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, despite populist and socialist attacks, the capitalists bore their power with bland assurance.

The system had not gone unchallenged. In 1896 young William Jennings Bryan, his face impassioned under the prairie sun, his voice in turn imploring, commanding, lashing out, had aroused the West against Wall Street and the forces of gold. But the challenge had come to naught. Outwardly unruffled, William McKinley had sat the campaign out on his front porch. The Boy Orator lost every electoral vote in the East, every county in New England. Four years later he did even worse. To many Easterners Bryanism seemed a far-off western trouble, supported in the East only by the
flotsam and jetsam of the larger cities. To Franklin Roosevelt, starting at Groton in the middle of Bryan’s first campaign and at Harvard during his second, it meant nothing: the cries of the Bryanites were muffled by the academic walls around him.

But in the early 1900’s things were different. Suddenly—overnight, it seemed later—the intoxicating aroma of reform was everywhere. A host of pushing, sharp-eyed journalists began reporting on the ills of twentieth-century America. These ills had little to do with the stale complaints of horny-handed farmers or grubby socialists. These evils were hurting respectable people too. Patent medicines, it was revealed, were often poisonous—and they could kill anyone. Life insurance companies gambled with other people’s money—including that of the middle class. Canned goods on sale just around the corner at the grocery store might be filthy or even poisonous. Courts were crooked; the Senate was corrupt. And in many a city the black trail of wrongdoing, the muckrakers reported, ran straight from fat madams and grafting policemen through politicians and mayors to churchgoing traction magnates and utility executives.

These revelations were not buried in obscure Marxist journals or in populist weeklies. Mass-circulation magazines—
Collier’s
,
McClure’s
,
American
,
Cosmopolitan—
screamed them forth. Time was when a magazine “was very ca’ming to the mind,” said Mr. Dooley, the Archey Road philosopher-bartender. “But now whin I pick me fav-rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivirything has gone wrong.” Reformism stirred not only bartenders but barbers, housewives, ministers, professors, young people.

Muckraking was well under way when Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in 1904. During the next six years the revolt of the American conscience, as Frederick Lewis Allen called it, came into full tide. These years Roosevelt spent in New York, first as a student at Columbia Law School, then as a young lawyer. He could not have been in a more strategic place to absorb the atmosphere of reform. For the New York of the 1900’s embodied both the portent and promise of the time: it was the city of a million immigrants, of the unspeakable Hell’s Kitchen, of Tammany and Boss Murphy, of corruption on a colossal scale, but it was also headquarters for most of the muckraking magazines, the seat of numerous reform movements, the place where Cousin Theodore had been a swaggering police commissioner and unsuccessful candidate for mayor.

How much effect did this environment have on Roosevelt? The direct and immediate impact was not profound; as in the past, Roosevelt tended to be sensitive to people rather than doctrines. But the ultimate, indirect impact was important. In the long run Roosevelt could no more escape the pervasive atmosphere of reformism than he could shut out the air around him. And there
were two people who served as vital links between the new America and himself. Significantly they were both members of his social class, and both members of his family.

On one occasion when he was five years old Franklin Roosevelt cavorted around his nursery floor with Eleanor Roosevelt on his back; she was then two years old and a member of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts. But they met only occasionally during following years. The first member of the Oyster Bay branch to make an impression on Franklin was his fifth cousin Theodore.

Twenty-four years older than Franklin, Theodore was always just far enough ahead of him to assume heroic proportions in the boy’s eyes. During Franklin’s childhood “Cousin Theodore” or “Uncle Ted” was out West capturing desperadoes. While Franklin was at Groton, Theodore was successively in New York bossing the police, in Washington helping run the navy, a hero in the war with Spain, and then governor of New York. The Rough Rider loved to impart his energetic fervor to youth. “For a man merely to be good is not enough,” he told his admiring cousin and a dazzled audience of Grotonians, his teeth and spectacles gleaming, “he must be shrewd and he must be courageous.”

Theodore met the Groton ideal perfectly: he was a bold crusader for “clean government,” against corruption, graft, and obvious types of political sin. As governor of New York he attacked the bosses, and they were delighted to help ease him out of the state and into the vice-presidency. Who could anticipate a crazed anarchist’s bullet? Another boss—the head of the Republican party—was aghast. “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia,” Mark Hanna exclaimed. “Now, look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States!” And to T.R. he wrote, “Go slow.”

“I shall go slow,” the President had answered. But physically and temperamentally he seemed unable to go slow. Seven months after taking office he demanded dissolution of the Northern Securities Company in the face of J. P. Morgan’s suave reply that if the company had done anything wrong “send your man [the attorney general] to my man and they can fix it up.” In the following years the President advocated workmen’s compensation and child-labor laws, pure food and drug laws, stronger national regulation of railroads, income and inheritance taxes, sweeping conservation measures. To be sure, he was not a consistent or thoroughgoing reformer. As a student of reform has said, “He could be brutally militaristic,
evasive about trusts, compromising on social legislation, purblind to the merits of reformers who did not equate reform with Theodore Roosevelt.” But he dramatized reform, and even gave it an air of respectability.