Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (7 page)

His early months at Groton marked the first time he’d been away from his family circle for long, and he was predictably homesick. “Thanks very much for your letters,” he wrote his parents in late September. “The more the better.” He discovered that the other boys received edible delicacies from home. “Could you send me some grapes or other small fruit? It would be very nice.” He described his daily routine, focusing on athletics, which constituted an obsession at Groton. Every boy played every sport, or tried to. The masters—the teachers—were likewise expected to play, following Peabody’s continuing vigorous example. Autumn being football season, Franklin leaped onto the gridiron. “I played football today on the 4th twenty-two (7th eleven),” he explained in his initial letter home. “I play right halfback or fullback.” He was no standout, being light and not especially fast. But he was as determined as any of the boys, and he took pride in his battlefield wounds. “I managed to dislocate my fourth finger in a small football game,” he recounted. “I have not been able to play since, in consequence, but I shall begin again tomorrow.”

James and Sara naturally wished to know how their son’s studies proceeded. “I am all right in Latin, Greek, Science, and French; a little rusty in Algebra but not more so than the others,” he wrote. This was reassuring to his parents, but even more to Franklin. Much as in sports, the boy who hadn’t been around other boys didn’t know how he compared intellectually with his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, given his age and the Groton ethos, his status on the field mattered more to him than his standing in the classroom. But parents who paid Groton’s tuition expected academic progress reports, which Endicott Peabody religiously provided. Franklin’s first-month report showed an average of 7.79 (out of 10), with the highest marks for algebra (9.75) and English literature (8.5) and the lowest for Greek (6.75) and history (7.33). The grade report also covered personal habits; Franklin rated a perfect 10 for punctuality and 9.68 for decorum. His class rank was fourth (of nineteen). This satisfied Endicott Peabody, who summarized Franklin’s performance: “Very good. He strikes me as an intelligent and faithful scholar and a good boy.”

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT SPENT
four years at Peabody’s school, during which time his adult personality gradually emerged. Of course, it was the premise of Endicott Peabody’s pedagogy that the adult personality didn’t merely
emerge
during the Groton years but was significantly
shaped
by the Groton experience. This belief informed every aspect of Groton life, from the rigorous living conditions to the regimented daily routine. Like the other boys, Franklin was assigned a Hundred House cubicle, a space of sixty square feet containing a bed, a dresser, and a chair. The walls of the cubicle were taller than the tallest boy but stopped well short of the ceiling, thereby affording each inmate some privacy but not too much. A few hooks on the walls held what clothes didn’t fit in the dresser, but the total storage capacity was meager, requiring the boys to choose between winter clothes and lighter gear for their kit on hand. An early cold snap could leave them shivering in linen; an unseasonable warm spell had them sweating in wool.

A communal lavatory adjoined the dormitory. Most American homes at this time didn’t have piped hot water, and neither did Groton. Cold water—plenty of it—was an essential part of the routine, with each boy being required to take a cold shower every morning, for purposes of hygiene and to calm youthful spirits. In early fall and late spring, the temperature of the water could be almost comfortable, but when snow covered the hill and ice sheeted the rivers and ponds, the morning shower was decidedly bracing.

After showers and dressing, the boys filed to the dining hall for 7:30 breakfast. Chapel followed at 8:15, and then classes from 8:30 till noon. A substantial meal fueled the young scholars for two more classes, which were followed by a vigorous afternoon of organized athletics. Supper revived them sufficiently for another chapel service and for study hall, at the end of which the Reverend and Mrs. Peabody bade each boy good night, and all retired.

The regimen of the school was designed to instill self-discipline and build character. In the case of Franklin Roosevelt it definitely introduced him to a more spartan lifestyle than he had encountered before. The buildings were barely heated; during cold weather the boys wore heavy coats even indoors. On one occasion a winter gale blew open a transom in the dormitory during the night; Franklin and the other boys awoke beneath snowdrifts on their bedclothes. In spring the discomfort came from the opposite end of the thermometer. “Today is
broiling,
and
five
boys fainted in church this a.m.,” Franklin wrote his parents during a particularly warm stretch.

Groton introduced Franklin to something else he hadn’t encountered: regular outbreaks of disease. A hundred boys living close together provided a festering ground for all manner of contagions. Most were fairly innocuous: colds, influenza (“grippe”), mumps, pink eye, earaches, assorted intestinal disturbances. But other afflictions occasioned greater concern. Symptoms of scarlet fever triggered the immediate quarantine of the patients; on the occasions when this failed to stem the spread, classes were canceled and the students sent home. (A standard precaution against the import of illness from outside the school was the requirement that students bring a certificate of good health upon return from vacations.) Whooping cough could be severe or mild, but it was so common that the school sometimes ignored outbreaks and let the sufferers—including Franklin Roosevelt during the spring of his junior year—walk around whooping.

Franklin was neither sicker nor healthier than most of his classmates. The school doctor examined the boys regularly, recording their growth, muscular development, and vital signs. For reasons he didn’t explain, the physician concluded that Roosevelt had a “weak heart” and consequently should refrain from exerting himself excessively. The patient rejected the diagnosis. “I told him that he was a liar (not quite in those words),” he wrote his parents. And he blithely ignored the advice, engaging in every athletic activity imaginable—and a few, including a handball derivative called “fives,” unimagined by any save Endicott Peabody and his fellow Grotonians. Roosevelt received his share of whatever infections were going around. Sara sent him regular supplies of cod liver oil—a good source of vitamin D, although this particular aspect of its prophylactic powers wasn’t known at the time—and insisted that he take it. But he still succumbed to scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, flu, colds, and sundry other maladies.

S
ARA’S SOLICITUDE
reflected not merely the concern any mother feels for her child but also Sara’s understanding that the Roosevelts weren’t the most robust of physical specimens. Franklin’s father, James, continued to decline during Franklin’s teenage years; during the autumn of 1900 James’s condition grew alarming. Sara arranged for the two of them to winter in South Carolina, but he became too sick to travel. She regularly informed Franklin of his father’s condition; Franklin responded with worried remonstrance. “
Make Papa rest,
” he wrote in mid-November. When James rallied, Franklin took excessive encouragement. “I am so glad Papa is really better,” he remarked the day after Thanksgiving. “I only hope he will be absolutely well again in a few days.”

Probably Sara wasn’t telling Franklin the whole story; she must have known a full recovery was impossible. And in fact this rally gave way to a relapse. “I am too distressed about Papa and cannot understand why he does not improve more quickly,” Roosevelt wrote in early December. Only days later he received word to hurry to New York City, where James was staying at a hotel between visits to his doctors. On December 8, 1900, Franklin’s father died.

Franklin remained with his mother throughout the holidays. And during the following year he observed a sort of mourning by using stationery bordered in black. But otherwise his father’s passing appeared to affect him fairly little. He had never known his father except as an old man, and one who was often sick. In many respects James was more a grandfather than a father to his younger son. An eagerly athletic boy like Franklin had difficulty seeing himself in James.

The chief emotional effect of James’s death was to reinforce the bond between Franklin and Sara. Always her only son, Franklin now became the only man in her life. She doted on him as never before; without James to care for at Hyde Park, she rented a house in Boston during winters to be closer to him. James left Franklin a modest inheritance, but the bulk of the estate went to Sara. Sara supported Franklin and did so in what she judged his best interests. But it was
her
judgment, not his, that counted. And she no longer had to heed James’s opinion in the matter.

Even as his father’s death made Franklin more dependent on Sara financially, it also made him feel more responsible for Sara emotionally. Until now James had provided an outlet for Sara’s emotions; with James gone that function fell entirely to Franklin. He grew solicitous of her in ways he hadn’t been before; when she became upset he was the one who soothed her. The bond between mother and son, already strong, grew stronger.

2.

F
RANKLIN GRADUATED FROM
G
ROTON IN THE SPRING OF
1900
AND
enrolled that fall at Harvard, down the road in Cambridge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Harvard aspired to intellectual eminence, but social standing still counted for more among the undergraduates than academic achievement. Boys from wealthy families inhabited the “Gold Coast” along Mt. Auburn Street, living in large apartments, dining in expensive eating houses, and gathering in exclusive clubs. Boys from poorer families lived across Massachusetts Avenue in the drab, crowded dormitories of the Yard. The two castes mingled in the lecture halls, but outside the classrooms they rarely encountered each other.

Roosevelt, naturally, was a Gold Coaster. He lived at Westmorly Court, a prime property, in a four-room apartment he shared with Lathrop Brown, another Grotonian. “The sitting room is large enough for two desks, and the bedrooms and bath light and airy,” he wrote home. “The ceilings are very high.” The suite was bare when Roosevelt arrived. “The rooms look as if struck by sheet lightning, the sitting room having the chairs and tables but no curtains or carpets…. The bed is in place in my room, and it looks inhabitable, but one trunk is the sole piece of furniture of Lathrop’s room.” The apartment perked up when Sara sent carpet and curtains, and Roosevelt and Brown put pictures on the walls. A rented piano completed the décor and provided a focus for entertaining.

Roosevelt’s circle widened at Harvard. “On Monday I went to a ‘Beer Night’ in a Senior’s room,” he noted. “It is a regular institution by which a senior has a few of his classmen and about 20 Freshmen in to his room in order to get them acquainted with each other.” Sports played a socializing role at Harvard as they had at Groton, and Roosevelt threw himself into the games. He was realistic about his prospects for football. “There are still over 100 candidates”—or about a quarter of the freshman class—“for the ’04 team, and I shan’t make it, but possibly a scrub team.” The scrubs were where he wound up, yet he enjoyed the distinction of being elected captain of one of the eight scrub squads. “It is the only one composed wholly of Freshmen, and I am the only Freshman captain.”

He joined the school newspaper. Like the football team, the
Crimson
required tryouts; cub reporters who made the grade could hope to rise to editorial ranks. Roosevelt discovered in himself a certain flair for reporting. He wrote easily, and he could talk his way into information that eluded his rivals. His first weeks at Harvard were the last weeks of the 1900 presidential campaign; the campaign evoked great interest on the Harvard campus, with most of the students, doubtless following the lead of their fathers, supporting Republicans William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt against Democrats William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson. “Last night there was a grand torch-light Republican parade of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” Franklin wrote home. Franklin joined the Republicans for the festivities. “We wore red caps and gowns and marched by classes into Boston and through all the principal streets, about eight miles in all. The crowds to see it were huge all along the route, and we were dead tired at the end.”