Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (8 page)

Amid the excitement of the marching, Roosevelt didn’t neglect his reportorial duties. Harvard’s own president, Charles Eliot, spoke loudly and often for good government, but in the current contest he had declined to endorse either McKinley or Bryan.
Crimson
rules forbade first-year reporters from interviewing Eliot, but Roosevelt, feigning ignorance, buttonholed the Harvard president anyway. Caught by surprise, Eliot blurted out his preference, and the
Crimson
carried Roosevelt’s scoop under the headline “President Eliot Declares for McKinley.” The story won Roosevelt a coveted spot on the regular staff.

The position brought greater responsibility. “I am working about six hours a day on it alone, and it is quite a strain,” he told Sara. His hard work was rewarded during the autumn of his sophomore year when he was elected to the editorial board. The choice reflected his peers’ assessment of his talents as a journalist, and perhaps the persuasive skills that would make him an effective campaigner when he turned politician. It also revealed the appreciation of his classmates that he could afford the job. One responsibility of the editors was to treat the staff to dinner and related diversion. To celebrate their election, Franklin and four other new men threw a lavish dinner, followed by an evening at the theater. “Great fun, speeches, songs, etc.,” he reported to Sara.

R
OOSEVELT’S FAMILY CONNECTIONS
grew even more valuable when Theodore Roosevelt became president upon McKinley’s assassination in September 1901. Having a cousin as governor had been a mark of distinction for Franklin; having a vice president perhaps more so (yet not necessarily, given the low esteem in which vice presidents were held in those days). But having a president in the family was truly impressive. Whether Cousin Theodore’s ascent to the apex of American politics contributed to Franklin’s election as a
Crimson
editor is impossible to know. It certainly lent luster to the family name. Yet Franklin’s diligence and flair had marked him for months, and Theodore’s inauguration probably only made a logical choice easier.

Franklin didn’t wait long to capitalize on Theodore’s new office. Alice Roosevelt, Theodore’s daughter by his deceased first wife, turned eighteen in February 1902; the occasion required that she be formally presented to society. Edith Roosevelt, the First Lady, hosted a White House debut, the first of its kind at the executive mansion and the most lavish ball there since the days of Dolley Madison almost a century before. Alice was queen of the night, with a very large court. “Three hundred beautiful and beautifully gowned young women and a body of smart young men almost as numerous practically made up the party,” the
New York Times
reported. A handful of adults were present; these conspicuously did not include the president, who at Edith’s urging or Alice’s insistence left the stage to his daughter. “The White House was filled with young people,” the
Times
reporter wrote, “and they enjoyed themselves after the manner of young people. The state apartments had been turned over to them, with no other injunction put upon them than that they would incur the great displeasure of the President if they did not make a jolly night of it. They appeared to heed this injunction.”

The guests included several Roosevelts. Franklin rode the train down from Boston on the Friday morning of the ball, took tea with one set of family friends and dinner with another. “Then to the dance, which was most glorious fun,” he told his mother. “From start to finish it was glorious…. We left at 2 a.m. and I slept till 12 on Saturday.” That afternoon he visited the new—as of 1897—home of the Library of Congress. A White House tea followed, again hosted by Edith, with Alice once more the center of attention and her father still absent. “All most interesting,” Franklin recorded. On Saturday night he attended a reception given by the Austrian ambassador, and he mingled with numerous members of the diplomatic corps. Sunday brought more of the same. “On the whole it was one of the most interesting and enjoyable three days I have ever had,” Franklin wrote Sara.

T
HIS WAS SAYING
a lot, for Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed nearly all his college days. “On Saturday I went to Beverly to the Beals, played golf that day, and on Sunday went to the Sohier’s camp on a neighboring lake for the day, returning here Monday a.m.,” he wrote from Cambridge on a Wednesday in October of his junior year. “Now (11 p.m.) I am just back from a dinner of the Massachusetts Republican Club, of 1,000 people, at which Secretary Shaw of the Treasury and Senator Lodge made most interesting addresses. Mr. Beal gave me the ticket, and it was the chance of a lifetime.” Perhaps Mr. Beal, the father of one of Roosevelt’s Harvard classmates, wished to make a Republican out of his son’s friend; perhaps he simply wanted to do a favor for the budding journalist.

Roosevelt joined several of the clubs that ruled Harvard’s extracurricular universe. The Porcellian Club, the most exclusive, snubbed him, for reasons he never learned. A black ball—literally—from any of the sixteen members sufficed to bar a prospective new member; Roosevelt received at least one in the critical vote. The rejection stung, the more so since Cousin Ted had been a Porcellian member. Later—during the First World War—Franklin remarked that his rejection was the “greatest disappointment of my life.” This may have revealed a lingering hurt; it also reflected the minor character of his failures till then. While he was at Harvard he certainly didn’t appear to dwell on his exclusion from the single stuffiest of the clubs but rather made do quite well with others. He was chosen for Alpha Delta Phi, known as the “Fly Club,” of which he became librarian; the Institute of 1770; the Signet Literary Society; the Memorial Society, which served as keeper of Harvard history and traditions; and Hasty Pudding, the student theatrical group.

He didn’t exactly ignore his studies. His courses included a full round of English, history, and government, as well as the odd philosophy and fine arts class. He passed them all, without distinction. And because he had taken several college-level courses at Groton, he completed the requirements for his bachelor’s degree by the end of his third year.

But he didn’t dream for a minute of skipping his fourth year, which he expected to be his time of social glory. In the autumn of his third year he was elected assistant managing editor of the
Crimson,
and in the spring managing editor. He could reasonably anticipate, given the paper’s traditions, making president, or editor in chief, in his fourth year, if he stayed in school. When he took his summer vacation in 1903 in Europe, on a tour of the Swiss Alps, he carried along the previous year’s editorials and read them with an eye to doing better. His preparation paid off on his return, when he was indeed elevated to the top post.

The editor of the
Crimson
wasn’t, by virtue of his office, as prominent on campus as the football captain or the stroke oar of the crew team, but he was a big man nonetheless. He certainly had a voice no other student possessed. In that era the editor wrote all the editorials (later he would share the job with an editorial board). Roosevelt took advantage of his forum to pass judgment on Harvard football, chiding the student body for insufficient support and the team for uninspired play. His latter comments provoked an angry reaction from team members. “I am glad to say the effect has been just what was wanted; it has stirred up the team by making them angry, and they are playing all the harder for it,” he congratulated himself. He weighed in on politics, urging his fellow students to join the Political Club, and the Political Club to get practical. “With such a large city as Boston close at hand, it would be easy to send in parties, under the guidance of some experienced man, which in one day could learn more than through the means of lectures.” He publicized a series of political talks, explaining that “the committee in New York which has selected the speakers hope that by arousing sufficient interest men may be induced to enter New York politics upon leaving college.”

The paper almost monopolized his time, but not quite. He played golf during the week and on Saturday afternoons shouted for the football team. “I was one of three cheer leaders in the Brown game, and felt like a d——f——, waving my arms and legs before several thousand amused spectators,” he told his mother, with poorly disguised delight. “It is a dirty job; one gets chiefly ridicule. But some poor devil has to suffer, and one can’t refuse.” He attended the Bachelors’ Ball in Boston—“which was very exclusive, very animated, and rather tipsy,” he remarked. “I got back at 6.” He went to the wedding of a fraternity brother and took upon himself the task of introducing his classmates to the mother of the bride. “Mrs. Kay was much impressed by his
savoir faire,
” the grateful groom recalled. “His charm and ease of manner were apparent in those early days.”

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT WAS
a Roosevelt before she married Franklin Roosevelt. Her father was Elliott Roosevelt, Theodore’s brother. Alice Roosevelt was a cousin. Her mother was Anna Hall Roosevelt—“one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen,” Eleanor wrote, many years after her mother died. Coming from another child of another mother, such a comment might have required discount for the bias of the excessively close. In Eleanor’s case, any discount must have been in the opposite direction, for she was not close to her mother and never identified with her in any way. Her mother was beautiful; she herself was not—certainly not by her own reckoning. And her mother inhabited a world that never warmed to Eleanor, nor Eleanor to it. “My mother belonged to that New York City society which thought itself all-important,” Eleanor said. “In that society you were kind to the poor; you did not neglect your philanthropic duties in whatever community you lived; you assisted the hospitals and did something for the needy. You accepted invitations to dine and to dance with the right people only; you lived where you would be in their midst. You thought seriously about your children’s education; you read the books that everybody read; you were familiar with good literature. In short, you conformed to the conventional pattern.”

Eleanor’s father inhabited Anna’s society but was not really of it, which may have been why Eleanor identified much more strongly with him. Or it may have been the flaws in Elliott Roosevelt’s character. Elliott was the more attractive and engaging of the two Roosevelt boys, with blond hair, handsome features, and a winning personality. But there was a crack in his character, and in the repeated poundings of sibling competition with the older and more ambitious Theodore, it opened wider and wider. Their parents sent Elliott off to Texas in his teens to recuperate from a nervous breakdown; when the boys’ father died soon after, Elliott employed his inheritance to fund a round-the-world tour. He hunted tigers in India and other beasts elsewhere, finally gaining an edge on his brother, who had yet to bag anything larger than a bear. He brought home heads, hides, and an exotic reputation, which helped sweep Anna Hall, in full bloom at nineteen, off her feet and to the altar. He loved her madly but badly, being already addicted to alcohol and becoming addicted to the opiates he ingested for pain following a riding accident that shattered his leg. He squandered what remained of his fortune and got a servant girl pregnant; she threatened a public scandal and had to be bought off by Theodore and the family.