The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  To be sure, Peabody was struggling with an old and formidable problem. For at least two millenniums societies have struggled with the problem of discovering and educating political talent. In Greece, in the spirit of Paideia, young men were tested to see who possessed the essential qualities of leadership—common sense, intellectual capacity, devotion to the public welfare. For centuries printing presses flooded Europe with books on how princes should be educated and how rulers should behave—Machiavelli’s Prince is the best-known example. The English public schools educated generation after generation for political leadership. Groton and other American private schools borrowed Etonian and Harrovian forms, just as they aped the athleticism of Greece and the monasticism of the middle ages. But they borrowed only forms—and the forms were meaningless in a different culture, in the unique democratic politics of America.

  “I count it among the blessings of my life that it was given to me in formative years to have the privilege of your guiding hand,” Roosevelt wrote to Peabody forty years after he graduated from Groton. The Rector came to stand as a unique personal compound of Christian ideals. Groton, too, became a bundle of precious memories—memories of walking to town for cider and apples, of youthful voices floating across the soft May evenings, of the sun streaming through the chapel windows, of the Rector stabbing the air with taut fingers as he strove to drive home his simple precepts. Peabody and the school helped shape Roosevelt’s basic attitudes toward social problems, but they throw little light on the emergence of Roosevelt as a politician. None of his political battles was won on the playing fields of Groton.

  HARVARD: THE GOLD COAST

  “My dearest Mama and Papa,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote home in September 1900, “Here I am, in Cambridge and in twelve hours I shall be a full registered member of the Class of 1904.” His room looked as if it had been “struck by sheet Lightning,” his sitting room lacked curtains and carpets, the bed looked “inhabitable”—but he was happy. He was about to become a Harvard man.

  The transition from Groton was an easy one. Many of his old classmates were entering Harvard with him. He immediately began eating at a Groton table rather than in one of the large common dining halls. Some evenings he went to Sanborn’s billiard parlor where he could see most of the “Groton, St. Marks, St. Pauls and Pomfret fellows.” His roommate, Lathrop Brown, was a Grotonian. Together they shared a suite of rooms in Westmorly Court, amidst Harvard’s “Gold Coast” of high-priced dormitories and select clubs.

  Unlike Groton, Harvard was not isolated from the world. Across the Charles River lay Boston, basking in its golden afternoon. The “Hub of the Universe,” the “Athens of America” boasted of its Brahmin families, of its Bulfinch State House, of the Athenaeum, its outstanding private library, and—now that it was getting used to her—of beer-drinking, Buddha-worshiping Mrs. Jack Gardner, whose fabled art palace was opened in young Roosevelt’s junior year. For this Boston, Harvard was a kind of genteel brain trust. The relation between city and gown was a close but not always happy one. Boston, said a Harvard historian, was a “social leech” on the college; Beacon Hill hostesses—“Boston mammas,” he called them—wanted to entertain Harvard’s “appetizing young men” and balked all efforts to make a “social democracy” of the college.

  Roosevelt was immediately engaged on the Boston-Cambridge social circuit. With Proper Bostonians he got along very well; their families, while socially far grander, were much like those he had known at Hyde Park: rich, wellborn, and inbred. Hardly a week went by during his four years at Harvard that he did not conduct a round of social calls, duly handing his card to formidable butlers. “My dress-suit looked like a dream and was much admired,” he reported home. His height, his almost-handsome head—hair parted in the middle, close-in, deep-set eyes, long, lean nose and chin, sensitive lips—his ready smile, no longer showing braces, his easy ways, stood him in good stead.

  But on the athletic field his physique failed him. As at Groton he wanted desperately to make good in a big sport. He weighed only 146 pounds, however, and he was not athletically skillful. Trying out for end on the freshman football team, he lasted only two weeks. There was consolation in winning the captaincy of one of the scrub teams after the first day of practice. He also worked hard for crew—but here again he could rise no higher than stroke on intramural teams.

  Roosevelt made up for his athletic frustrations by plunging into extracurricular activities. He was pleased at being elected secretary of the Freshman Glee Club. Most important was the Crimson. The day he reported home that he had “left” the freshman team he added that he was trying out for the undergraduate daily, “& if I work hard for two years I may be made an editor.” Work he did—often several hours a day—and in his junior year he won the top post of editor in chief. Luck, or connections, played a part; upon calling Cousin Theodore Roosevelt in Boston to ask to see him, Franklin discovered that the vice-president was to lecture in a Harvard course and thereby he won a scoop for his paper. But his success was due mainly to doggedness.

  Obviously Roosevelt wanted to make good at Harvard. What was the source of this ambition? Doubtless it lay largely in his anxiety to gain the respect of his classmates in general, and of the social elite in particular. Throughout his college career Roosevelt was a joiner. But some organizations one did not join—one was asked.

  The club system that Roosevelt encountered at Harvard was one of the most harshly exclusive in the country. Sophomores were first sifted out by the “Hasty Pudding,” which gave special social prominence to the first group chosen. Then came the real test—election to one of the “final” clubs. At one time affiliated with national fraternities, the chapters at Harvard had not enjoyed brotherhood with provincials in Ohio and points west and had gladly given up their charters. They had become a direct link between Harvard and Boston society. Behind their elegantly dowdy exteriors few activities of any importance went on; the important thing was to belong to them, not to be active in them.

  Delightedly Franklin entered the social lists. “I am about to be slaughtered, but quite happy, nevertheless,” he wrote home after hearing that he had been picked for a sophomore club. As a Roosevelt and as a Grotonian, he was almost sure of membership in a final club. But which one? At the top of the hierarchy stood Porcellian, which years before had tapped Cousin Theodore. Franklin made a high-ranking club, the Fly, but was passed over by Porcellian. This blow gave him something of an inferiority complex, according to Eleanor Roosevelt; it was the bitterest moment of his life, according to another relative. Evidence is conflicting on this point, but one thing is certain: social acceptance was of crucial importance to the young Roosevelt.

  There was time for classes too. Roosevelt took the liberal arts course; his program included English and French literature, Latin, geology, paleontology, fine arts, and public speaking; but he concentrated on the social sciences, enrolling in a dozen history courses and in several courses each in government and economics. These were European history, English history, American history, American government, constitutional government, tendencies of American legislation, international law, currency legislation, economics of transportation, of banking, and of corporations. As at Groton he was only a fair student, attaining a “gentleman C” average. He had anticipated several courses at Groton, however, and hence was able to meet his requirements for a bachelor’s degree in three years. He stayed a fourth year at Harvard in order to edit the Crimson, registering in the graduate school, but he did not take his courses too seriously and was not granted a master of arts degree.

  During much of the college year he saw his mother frequently. James Roosevelt died at the age of seventy-two, during his son’s freshman year, after a long struggle with heart disease. “I wonder how I lived when he left me,” Sara said afterward. She managed to endure one lonely winter at Hyde Park; after that she took an apartment in Boston only a few miles from her son. Franklin’s relation with her was close but relaxed. He dealt with her tactfully and a
ffectionately and made a brave effort to shoulder some of the responsibilities of Hyde Park and Campobello. He saw a good deal of his mother during the summers, which took the old easy pattern. Following his freshman and junior years he made trips to Europe, touring the Norwegian coast, Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. But these trips left time for golf, tennis, and sailing at Campobello.

  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.

  TWO

  Albany: The Young Lion

  IT 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 busine
ss 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.