Man of Destiny

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  On the surface, the fourteen-year-old Franklin would seem ill equipped to deal with Groton’s social environment. In September 1896, he stood only five feet, three inches tall and weighed about one hundred pounds. Entering the school in the third rather than the first form, he and one other new boy, Jimmy Goodwin, were interlopers who had to make their way among the fifteen others who had enrolled at age twelve and already formed firm relationships.8

  In letters to his mother and father (a weekly requirement at the school), Franklin was lighthearted. The first set the tone: “Dear Mommerr & Popperr, I am getting on finely both mentally and physically.” Subsequent missives hit the same note time and again. Franklin knew they expected him to be a little man. He also was surely aware of the precariousness of his father’s health and determined not to be a source of stress for either parent.9

  He coped with his outsider status, probably more out of instinct than conscious design, by discerning what those around him expected and acting accordingly. Once some fourth formers armed with hockey sticks cornered him, ordered him to dance, and began jabbing at his ankles. With hardly a hesitation, he performed vigorously and nimbly with a big smile on his face, seeming to enjoy the experience. After a few minutes, the bullies moved on.10

  Franklin was never boxed or pumped. Neither was he especially popular. A poor athlete, he did not make the first-string football squad and rarely played in interscholastic games. At his father’s insistence, he took some boxing lessons, went two rounds against another boy with whom he had a dispute, and was judged the loser. In his junior year, he was appointed assistant manager of the baseball team, and as a senior he served as manager. The position, which carried the duties of laying out the field and looking after the equipment, qualified him for an athletic ribbon.11

  He competed seriously only in a silly and dangerous competition called “the High Kick,” which required boys to kick at a tin pan hanging from the gymnasium ceiling, throwing themselves into the air and falling backward onto the floor. Franklin won the competition for smaller students during his first year. “At every kick,” he reported to his mother and father, “I landed on my neck on the left side so the result is that the whole left side of my body is sore and my left arm is a little swollen.” His parents do not seem to have been pleased. Nevertheless, he competed again the following year, finished second, and took away a sore elbow. Over his four years at Groton, he would suffer one minor injury after another, mostly from athletics.12

  Sent to Groton with earnest entreaties to follow the rules faithfully and work hard, he was slow to understand that a determined effort to win the Punctuality Award did not earn him the goodwill of his classmates. Nor did a perfect behavior record for his first eight months. He finally got the point. He wrote to his parents on May 14, 1897, that he had worked off his first offense. “I am very glad I got it, as I was thought to have no school-spirit before.” The artfully constructed sentence, transforming classmates’ judgment about his personal spirit into one about his “school spirit,” displayed developing manipulative skills.13

  Eleanor Roosevelt recalled many years later that Franklin had said he had always felt an outsider at Groton. In her mind, he had never quite erased the traumas of separation from parents, adjustment to a challenging environment, and redefinition of his identity. Perhaps so, but more likely Franklin simply found his level in the new society into which he had been thrown. His life at Groton was neither entirely satisfactory nor miserable. As all boys do, he complained from time to time about the alleged arbitrariness of his teachers; occasionally he even expressed bitterness toward the rector. Yet in later years he thought the Groton experience a positive one and expressed nothing but veneration for Reverend Peabody. He insisted on sending all four of his sons there, entering each in the first form at the prescribed age of twelve.14

  He was a superior student, never at the top of his class but close to it, and a strong participant in the junior and senior debating clubs. A surviving draft of an argument against annexing Hawaii, written just before his sixteenth birthday in January 1898, is impressive and literate. By then he had gained enough confidence to assume what fellow latecomer Jimmy Goodwin characterized as “an independent, cocky manner” and a tendency to be “very argumentative and sarcastic.” He participated in the school’s Missionary Society, assisting an elderly Negro woman who lived near the school, playing the organ at its services, and helping with a summer camp it ran for underprivileged boys. He also wrote a few insubstantial articles for the school magazine, The Grotonian. During his senior year, he landed a juicy supporting role in the sixth-form play.15

  As a fifth former, Franklin was appointed a school mail clerk with the informal and inelegant title “mail nigger.” The coveted job gave him the privilege of breakfasting with Reverend Peabody twice each term. In his final year, he was a dormitory prefect, by all accounts much admired by his younger charges. The rector gave him special recognition in the form of a spacious single study and living quarters. Much to his annoyance and strong resentment, however, Peabody did not name him a “senior prefect.”

  Groton had its disappointments, none of them horrendous, even if they may have seemed so at the time. It also delivered small triumphs. His admission to Harvard was a given; he easily passed entrance examinations that allowed him to skip freshman requirements and in effect enter as a sophomore. He graduated near the top of his form scholastically and received the Latin Prize, an honor accompanied by a forty-volume set of Shakespeare’s works. Whatever his inner turmoil, he was to outward appearances a confident, self-possessed young man. He wrote to his parents during his last days as a student at Groton, “I can hardly wait to see you but feel awfully to be leaving here for good.”16

  Groton had given Franklin a first-rate education and instilled in him a degree of self-discipline that it seems he had not possessed before. Above all, it introduced a pampered boy to the experience of living and coping in a society of peers. He had managed the challenge well, developing a competitive personality and establishing himself as an achiever. He left the school as an ambitious young man determined to achieve recognition at his next stop. One of his teachers, the much respected Reverend Sherrard Billings, considered him a person of almost infinite promise. A few years later, he wrote to his former student, then probably a senior at Harvard or a first-year law student, “I pray with all my heart that men will say of you that he was a man sent from God to help the world in its dire need. I have faith to believe that years hence as they look back men will say just that.”17

  At eighteen years old, a still slim Franklin had reached his adult height of six feet and achieved a sense of himself as an independent personality. An early indication of this had come in 1897 at the end of his first year away from home. Bamie Roosevelt had invited him to spend the Fourth of July weekend at the Oyster Bay, Long Island, home of her brother Theodore. For some reason his mother disapproved and declined for him. His response was curt: “As you told me I could make my own plans and as Helen [Rosy’s daughter] writes me there is to be a large party & lots of fun on the 4th, I shall try to arrange it with Cousin B. next Wednesday. Please don’t make any more arrangements for my future happiness.” His brief stay with his famous cousin was a memorable experience.18

  A year later, Theodore Roosevelt, having done what he could as assistant secretary of the navy to take the United States into war with Spain, became a military hero as commander of a volunteer regiment, then won the Republican nomination for governor of New York. Mr. James, abandoning his Democratic allegiance, openly supported his cousin’s victorious campaign. During his last year at Groton, Franklin, given a vision prescription for nearsightedness, ordered pince-nez eyeglasses identical to those affected by the new governor. TR would be his hero for the next decade and an exemplar in many ways for his entire life.19

  Theodore and Franklin possessed commonalities in their personal histories beyond their family name. Both were raised and
influenced by fathers who overlaid their wealth and social status with a commitment to philanthropy and public responsibility. Both were expected in some fashion to be public leaders. Both would choose politics as their vocation. In the summer of 1897, no one could predict that Theodore Roosevelt would become president of the United States. Almost everyone, however, could agree that he was a man to watch. His charm, vigor, delight in the exercise of power, and professed devotion to good government and the interests of middle-class America all surely excited Franklin. TR’s subsequent presidency—marked by struggles against “malefactors of great wealth” at home, strong assertions of American power abroad, a consummate mastery of public relations, and a willingness to stretch presidential power—would give Franklin a template for his own tenure in the White House.

  By the time he left Groton, Franklin was confident and emotionally self-sufficient. His letters, still at times punctuated by a wisecrack, assumed the tone of communications written by someone older. His recreational reading was substantial and mature in content. At fifteen and sixteen, he was especially interested in Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s works on the relationship between naval power and national greatness. Fascinated with ships, he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of sea vessels. During his extended summer vacations at Campobello, he enjoyed nothing more than sailing his small yacht in the sometimes treacherous waters that surrounded the island. He also became an avid golfer, laid out a course, established the Campobello golf club, and served as its secretary.20

  During his years at Groton, he faced one ominous development. His father’s health declined noticeably despite the annual trips to Germany. Photographed holding his one-year-old son on his shoulder in early 1883, James Roosevelt had looked strong, smooth-faced, and younger than his years. A decade and a half later, photos taken by Franklin revealed a tired, wrinkled, elderly man in the late stages of congestive heart failure. Warren Delano had died in January 1898. It was increasingly apparent that James would not long survive him. By the summer of 1900, his health was so precarious that he and Sara decided not to make the trip to Groton for Franklin’s graduation. In December 1900, as Franklin was nearing the end of his first semester at Harvard, his father’s condition worsened. He rushed to New York, where his parents were staying at their hotel apartment. James died there in the early hours of December 8 with Sara, Rosy, and Franklin at his bedside. A special train, filled with mourners, took his remains to Hyde Park, where he was interred alongside his first wife at St. James Church.

  James Roosevelt’s estate amounted to just over $713,000, equivalent to between $15 and $20 million a century later. After taxes and expenses, Sara, Rosy, and Franklin each received approximately $229,000. James’s will placed Franklin’s portion in a trust fund until he reached the age of twenty-one and established a similar fund for Sara (who had already inherited $1.3 million from her father). The will left Springwood and about half of the surrounding property to her for her lifetime, providing that upon her death it would pass to Franklin. Rosy received the house he and his wife had long used and the surrounding property.21

  Franklin, eight weeks short of his nineteenth birthday, was now the man of the family. He was also rich. The workers at Hyde Park would soon begin calling him “Mr. Franklin.” From this point on, he would be the male representative of the family whose benefactions had meant much to the community and to his father’s beloved St. James Church.

  Sara accepted widowhood easily and graciously. Only forty-six and quite a catch for an eligible widower, she seems never to have contemplated remarriage. As she entered into the traditional six months of deep mourning, she had the consolation of Franklin. She now focused the affection and emotional dependence previously divided between husband and son entirely on him. Her greatest happiness, she told her son a month after his father’s death, was “in thinking of you and of his pride in you.”22

  James’s wish, expressed in his will, that Franklin should exist “under the influence of his mother” reinforced her strong controlling instincts. She tried too hard for a time, actually taking rooms in Boston to be close to him for much of the school year, yet seeing little of him all the same. He accepted her devotion smoothly while keeping his distance. His affection for his mother and need for her love were genuine, but so was his determination to assert his independence and achieve a transition to manhood. In the end, it would be he, not she, who controlled the relationship.23

  The Harvard that Franklin Roosevelt entered in 1900 was both a finishing school for the sons of the social elite and the incubator of a meritocratic leadership class for the nation. President Charles Eliot, in his address to the freshman class of more than five hundred men, made a point of denouncing the “common error” that only moneyed young men attended Harvard; still, more than half the students came from families of above-average income. A full 7 percent were Jewish, many from prosperous families of northern European extraction. On campus, the class distinctions between the entitled rich and aspiring strivers were palpable.

  The secondary institution most heavily represented among the newcomers was an elite public school, Boston Latin, which trained talented children of all classes. About 40 percent of Roosevelt’s classmates had graduated from that or similar institutions, but they did not have a lot of visibility on campus. Harvard had the nation’s richest system of scholarships, but the holders had to grind out top-quality work in order to maintain their financial aid. They might also be employed part-time. Many lived in Harvard Yard’s decrepit dormitories, which were hardly a step above the mean tenements of lower-working-class Boston. With hard work and frugality, they might graduate with high marks, establish themselves in honorable professions, and move a rung or two up the social ladder. Harvard’s Franklin Roosevelts paid them little heed as they glided through their classes, content with gentlemen’s Cs, participated in a social whirl, and provided leadership in student activities.24

  Roosevelt and a Groton friend, Jake Brown, leased a two-bedroom apartment on the off-campus “Gold Coast.” They decorated their quarters with beer steins, Groton and Harvard pennants, and school athletic photos. All but two members of Roosevelt’s Groton class entered Harvard with him that September. They gathered daily for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a private dining hall at a designated Groton table. They also socialized with graduates of St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, and other elite establishments. Franklin, like most of his comrades, learned to smoke cigarettes and appreciate good whiskey. It was all “great fun.”25

  Becoming a big man on campus in such circles required distinction in extracurricular pursuits. Roosevelt tried out for several and displayed slender talent at most. Franklin’s playing weight of just under 150 pounds disqualified him from serious consideration for the football squad. That fall, he captained an intramural scrub team aptly named “the Missing Links.” He also sang with the freshman glee club and was elected its secretary. During his second semester, he acted as captain of the third-string crew in one of the private rowing clubs. He would work his way up to second string before dropping out after his second year.26

  By then he was spending most of his energy on the campus newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. His first application to join its staff in the fall of 1900 was rebuffed, but he came back in February 1901 with a real scoop. He had learned that cousin Theodore, now vice president elect of the United States, had agreed to speak, without prior publicity, to A. Lawrence Lowell’s class in constitutional government. After the Crimson broke the story on the morning of the event, an estimated 2,000 people mobbed the small theater in which the class was held. A few months later, Franklin was elected one of five new Crimson editors for the coming year.27

  During his first semester at Harvard, Franklin had supported Theodore’s vice presidential candidacy enthusiastically, right down to joining the university’s Republican club and participating in an eight-mile march through Boston. He was doubtless elated at the Republican victory, and not simply for reasons o
f family. The Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, struck both him and his father as a simpleminded prairie populist willing to destroy the national currency for the alleged benefit of downtrodden farmers. The following September, Franklin and his mother returned from a European vacation to discover that President William McKinley had succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. Cousin Ted was now the nation’s president.28

  Franklin had pressed for the European trip to avoid facing the usual vacation period at Campobello without Mr. James. He and Sara, accompanied by a cousin, Teddy Robinson, steamed to Hamburg on the German liner Deutschland. (Two years later, Robinson, a nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, would marry Rosy Roosevelt’s daughter, Helen.) There, in what Sara may well have planned as a matchmaking exercise, they linked up with Mrs. Alfred Pell and her tall, attractive daughter Frances, with whom Franklin had studied ornithology a few years earlier.

  The quintet embarked for a leisurely sail up the Norwegian coast on the luxurious cruising yacht Prinzessin Victoria Luise. Their vessel entered the port of Molde to find anchored there the Hohenzollern, the royal yacht of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. His imperial majesty accepted the captain’s invitation to tea, impressing the officers and passengers with his unsmiling, fiercely authoritarian demeanor. Franklin and Frances joined several other passengers in a visit to the Hohenzollern. Upon his return, Franklin cheerfully presented to his mother a pencil lifted from the kaiser’s desk and bearing royal tooth marks.29