The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  James’s unlucky plunges, it has been said, forever turned his son against successful businessmen and speculators. This is unlikely. For most of his life Roosevelt displayed no animus against moneymakers. He seemed to regard his forebears’ mishaps as joking matters. Moreover, James would not have allowed his setbacks to disturb the family home. He had a striking capacity to compartmentalize his life, moving easily from the quiet of his Hyde Park estate to the rough and tumble of the business world, and back. In later years his son would look longingly toward home at the very time he was launched on daring political ventures.

  Although they were sixth cousins, James and Sara did not meet until 1880, at the New York City home of the Theodore Roosevelts. James was fifty-two years old. His first wife had died four years earlier; their only son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt, was now twenty-six years old—the same age as Sara—and had married an Astor, a good beginning for the life he would lead as sportsman, trustee, philanthropist, and minor diplomat.

  Tall, gracious, beautiful, Sara was the product of an upper class of international scope. As a girl she had sailed to Hong Kong on a square-rigger; she had been educated abroad; she had moved in society in New York, Boston, London, and Paris. Sara was irresistibly attracted by the widower’s courtly ways, hearty good humor, and tenderness. She overcame the objections of her father, who knew and liked James as an old business associate but deemed him too old for his daughter. James Roosevelt and Sara Delano were married in October 1880. After a long tour abroad, they retired to James’s Hyde Park estate.

  The family, it has been said, is “the psychological broker of society”—the chief agent in molding people’s life habits and life attitudes. Did James and Sara Roosevelt, by design or by chance, fashion a world for their son that would encourage an interest in politics? One looks in vain for any such evidence. It was not a world of envy, ambition, or power. It was a world of benevolent authority, with class lines separating the close little family of three at the top from the nurses and governesses, and these in turn from the maids and cooks indoors, and these in turn from the stableboys and farm hands outside. It was a world with the sound and smack of the sea, carried in Sara’s rendering of the sea chanteys she had learned on the long voyage to China. It was a world of broad horizons, where Paris and London and Nauheim were familiar places one visited almost every year. Socially it was an insulated world, which looked with equal distaste on the squabbling Irish politicians in Poughkeepsie, the closefisted tradesmen in Hyde Park, the vulgar millionaires at the new resorts. It was a world with deep roots in the American past, asking nothing for the future except a gracious life and a secure estate on the banks of the Hudson.

  GROTON: EDUCATION FOR WHAT?

  Sara kept her son in this insulated world as long as she could. Under her watchful eye Franklin’s formal education began in the family; in a sense it never passed outside it. James took an active interest in the Hyde Park public school, but it probably never occurred to Sara to send Franklin there. The boy’s only taste of public school came one summer in a German Volksschule. His mother thought this “very amusing,” but doubted that he learned much. Franklin seemed to enjoy going to school with “a lot of little mickies,” as he called them.

  Sara herself gave the boy his first schooling. At six he went to a kind of kindergarten under a German governess at the house of some family friends nearby. Then began a succession of governesses and tutors at home. One of these, Mlle. Jeanne Sandoz, had a sense of social justice that probably influenced the boy to an extent. But her main job was to drill Franklin in Latin, French, German, penmanship, and arithmetic; a little European history was thrown in. Sara remained in active charge of her son’s education, and a governess either deferred to her wishes or left.

  But Franklin could not be schooled at home forever, and Sara had long before laid plans against the time when he would leave. The year after their son’s birth she and James had visited friends in Groton, Massachusetts, a small town forty miles northwest of Boston. These friends had given land nearby to a young clergyman, Endicott Peabody, to found a school for boys. Peabody’s idea attracted Sara. Resolving to keep his school small, he saw it as simply a large family, with himself as paterfamilias. The headmaster and the trustees—including Phillips Brooks, William Lawrence, and J. Pierpont Morgan—came from eminently respectable families.

  Sara clung to her son until he was fourteen. Although Peabody was reluctant to admit boys except for the whole six-year period, Franklin began school as a third former. His Hyde Park neighbor Edmund Rogers entered with him, and his nephew Taddy Roosevelt—grandson of James and his first wife—was a class ahead. When in September 1896 the Roosevelts deposited their son at Groton, Sara wrote plaintively in her diary: “It is hard to leave our darling boy. James and I feel this parting very much.”

  Here were the makings of a real trial—if not a crisis—for the fourteen-year-old boy. He was out, very late, from under his mother’s sheltering wing. He had been the center of attention, even adoration, at Hyde Park; now he was but one of 110 boys. He had had many comforts; now he lived in a cubicle, almost monastic, with a cloth curtain across the doorway, and he washed with a tin basin in soapstone sinks. At home his tempo had been his own; now he had to conform to a rigidly laid out day, from chapel in the morning to study period in the evening, and punctuality was enforced.

  Every new boy at Groton faced such problems, but Franklin had others. Joining his form in the third year, he had to break through the icy crust that his classmates put up against “new boys.” He spoke with the trace of an English accent. Having a nephew older than he was a source of embarrassment; soon he was dubbed “Uncle Frank.” Moreover, Taddy was a “queer sort of boy”—a reputation that could easily spread to a relative. Franklin, in short, was a trifle unorthodox, and unorthodoxy at Groton could encounter harsh penalties at the hands of the older boys. One of these penalties was the “bootbox”—being shoved forcibly, doubled up, into a small locker, and being left there. Another, also permitted by the faculty, was “pumping”—sixth formers would call out the name of an offender in study period, drag him quailing and shaking to a nearby lavatory, bend him face upward over a trough, and pour basins of water over his face and down his throat until he went through the sensations of drowning.

  But Franklin Roosevelt was never bootboxed, never pumped—and he won the Punctuality Prize his second year. He got few black marks from his masters; indeed, he was almost relieved when he did, “as I was thought to have no school-spirit before.” If the boys called him Uncle Frank, “I would sooner be Uncle Frank, than Nephew Rosy as they have been calling Taddy!” Franklin quickly sided with the dominant majority, not the rebellious few. He was a bit contemptuous of the “new kids” who arrived at school. “The Biddle [Moncure] boy is quite crazy, fresh and stupid, he has been boot-boxed once and threatened to be pumped several times,” he reported with relish.

  If stresses and strains were concealed behind this easy adaptability, they found no reflection in Franklin’s chatty letters to his parents. “I am getting on finely both mentally and physically,” he wrote in his first letter home. He conformed fully with Groton mores—he played intramural football on a fourth-string eleven, happily endured numerous scrapes, bruises, and lacerations, cheered himself hoarse at varsity football games, sang in the choir, got into little mischief, criticized the food, and begged for goodies from home. “He strikes me as an intelligent & faithful scholar, & a good boy,” Peabody reported to the parents.

  How explain this smooth passage from home to school? The reason in part was that Franklin found himself among boys of the same social-economic class that he had known in Hyde Park. His shift was geographical, not social. Of the other boys in his form, nine were from New York City, seven from Boston, two from Philadelphia. Blagden, Chadwick, Greenough, Peabody, Ramsford, Thayer—the names in his form, including his own, were those of wealthy, socially established families from a few centers on or near the eastern seaboard. A random sa
mpling of Groton classes during the early years, according to one authority, showed that over 90 per cent of the boys were from families listed in social registers.

  Another reason was the Rector. Doubtless Peabody came to serve as something of a substitute for Franklin’s own father, who was entering his seventies and ailing. This remarkable headmaster seems to have put the stamp of his personality on every Grotonian, and not least on young Roosevelt.

  A large, vigorous, uncomplicated man with blond hair and an athletic frame, Peabody was thirty-nine when Franklin arrived at Groton. He was a dull teacher, a stuffy preacher, and he had little interest in intellectualism, religious or otherwise. An autocrat, he had a withering “look” that could quell the most bumptious boy. “You know,” Averell Harriman once said to his father, “he would be an awful bully if he weren’t such a terrible Christian.” When a defiant boy told the headmaster in front of the school that he had been unfair, Peabody gave him six black marks and told him that “obedience comes before all else.” Peabody believed in religion, character, athletics, and scholarship, seemingly in that order. “Instinctively he trusted a football-player more than a non-football-player, just as the boys did,” according to his biographer. He was as puritanical as his forefathers, forbidding the boys to skate on Sunday, chiding Groton alumni for their moral lapses long after they had left the fold.

  But Peabody had big virtues that dwarfed his failings. His sense of dedication and warmth of personality enveloped the whole school. He knew precisely what he wanted—to cultivate “manly Christian character, having regard to [the] moral and physical as well as intellectual development” of his charges, and he was the living embodiment of these purposes. Striding solidly through classrooms, in his blue suit, starched collar, and white bow tie, or taking part energetically in the boys’ games, he dominated the campus and personified the lusty Christianity in which he believed. The boys loved and feared him; they could not ignore him. One alumnus, otherwise critical of the Rector, said that from Peabody the boys learned determination and to be unafraid.

  Roosevelt needed this kind of example. Despite the easy transition from Hyde Park, at times he felt insecure and uncertain of himself at Groton. Often he feared that he would not pass examinations. He submitted a story to the school magazine; “there is precious little chance of its being accepted,” he wrote home.

  Actually, Franklin’s occasional feelings of inadequacy were not without cause: he had much to feel inadequate about. Despite his excellent tutoring at home as a child and his oral facility, his grades in his first years at Groton averaged about C (D was failing), and in the later years he brought them up barely to the B level. Despite his enthusiastic participation in football, baseball, hockey, golf, tennis—Peabody required group sports for all boys and merely tolerated individual sports—he was distinguished in nothing but the “high kick.” In this he set a school record—significant only because his successful kicks of over seven feet meant landing painfully on his left side and arm, and suggested an intense drive on Franklin’s part to excel in some arena.

  Franklin’s life at Groton followed an inexorable routine: chapel and classes took up the morning, sports the afternoon, and chapel and study hall the evening, until the boys, all in Eton collars, blue suits, and pumps, filed past the Peabodys, shook hands, and said good night. Autumns were filled with football excitement; then came the Christmas season, with the unforgettable reading of Dickens’s Christmas Carol by the Rector’s father. In winter the short afternoons were taken up with coasting, tobogganing, and skiing. With spring came boating, swimming, golf, and drilling for the Memorial Day parade. Absorbed in this routine, Groton had little interest in the outside world. The dramatic events of 1898, however, broke through with a thunderous roar. Franklin was immensely excited by the war with Spain. Indeed, he and two boys planned to decamp from Groton in a pieman’s cart and enlist, but at the crucial moment he came down ingloriously with scarlet fever.

  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.