by FDR
As a child Roosevelt collected stamps and developed a passionate interest in ornithology. At the age of ten he was given his mother’s already formidable postage stamp collection, which she had started when she was five and her father was in China. Over the years FDR would tend it meticulously, eventually amassing a collection of well over a million stamps mounted in 150 matching albums. Admiral Ross McIntire, the White House physician, estimated that Roosevelt spent well over two thousand hours while he was president tending his collection.29 Franklin’s impressive collection of stuffed birds, all of which he shot himself, is still displayed in glass cases in the entrance hall at Hyde Park. His grandfather Delano rewarded his attainments as an ornithologist with a life membership in the Natural History Museum of New York. FDR often referred to the occasion on which the certificate was presented to him as the greatest thrill of his early life.30
The Roosevelts were serious about religion but took the Episcopal faith for granted. Young Franklin was expected to attend Sunday service at St. James’, and he did so without objection. In that sense his belief was instinctive. Nevertheless, he remained committed to his boyhood church until his death, serving first as junior vestryman, then as vestryman, and finally as senior warden. After he became president, vestry meetings were usually held at Springwood and would often extend into the early morning hours.31
Religious faith provided one of the sources of FDR’s unflagging optimism. Deep down he possessed serene confidence in the divine purpose of the universe. He was convinced that however bad things might be at the moment, they were bound to come out all right if he remained patient and put his faith in God. Once asked by Eleanor whether he believed everything he had learned in church, Roosevelt replied that he had never really thought about it. “I think it is just as well not to think about things like that too much.”32
On November 1, 1890, James suffered a mild heart attack. He lived ten more years but became increasingly frail. The impact on Franklin was severe. James had always been his active companion, but less and less would that be the case. Instead, he was someone to care for and look after. That brought Franklin and Sara even closer together. Before 1890, European travel had been a pleasant diversion for the Roosevelts. After James’s heart attack they considered it a necessity. The warm mineral baths at Bad Nauheim were thought to be particularly beneficial for heart patients. James and Sara first went there in 1891; they returned five times in the next seven years. James believed intently in the healing powers of the baths, and Sara and Franklin came to share his enthusiasm—which may help explain FDR’s subsequent attachment to the mineral waters at Warm Springs.
It was in Bad Nauheim that FDR attended school for the first time. Remembering her own experience in Dresden and Celle, Sara insisted that nine-year-old Franklin be enrolled in the local Volksschule to improve his German. Proud of his ability to cope in a foreign setting, Roosevelt enjoyed it immensely. “I go to the public school with a lot of little mickies,” he wrote his young cousins in America. “We have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic … and I like it very much.”33 His German schoolmaster, Christian Bommersheim, remembered FDR as a child in a blue sailor suit. “His parents put him in my class [and] he impressed me very quickly as an unusually bright young fellow. He had such an engaging manner, and he was always so polite that he was soon one of the most popular children in the school.”34
In the summer of 1896, in Bad Nauheim with his parents once again, FDR went on a cycling tour of Germany with his tutor. Each of them had an allowance of four marks a day, which meant they lived largely on bread and cheese and slept in small country inns or farmers’ houses. Several times the pair were arrested for minor traffic infractions, and each time Franklin, whose command of German was excellent, talked their way out of a fine. In the autumn FDR would be entering Groton, and as a final treat his parents took him to Bayreuth for Wagner’s Ring Festival. “Franklin really appreciated it far more than I thought he would,” Sara wrote her sister Dora. “He was most attentive and rapt during the long acts and always sorry to leave, never for a moment bored or tired.”35
America’s confidence in FDR depended on Roosevelt’s incredible confidence in himself, and that traced in large measure to the comfort and security of his childhood. As his daughter, Anna, put it, “Granny [Sara] was a martinet, but she gave father the assurance he needed to prevail over adversity. Seldom has a young child been more constantly attended and incessantly approved by his mother.”36
FDR’s mind was developing. He read rapidly and retained facts easily, a trait that would become more pronounced in the years ahead. He was fluent in French and German and already possessed an uncanny ability to assimilate what he observed. But Roosevelt was not a reflective thinker, nor an original thinker. He learned by doing. And the extensive traveling he did with his parents—he went to Europe eight times in his first fourteen years—exposed him to a wider range of experience than most boys his age. He was small for his age—five feet three, 105 pounds—but his physical growth had yet to begin. All in all, he looked forward to entering Groton—two years late, as it were, most boys entering at the age of twelve.
After the safe harbor of Springwood, Groton was a challenge for Roosevelt. For fourteen years he had been the center of attention of two doting parents. Now he was one of 110 adolescent boys living in an almost monastic setting. Each new boy faced such problems, but for Franklin they were compounded, entering as he was in third year, without any real experience of organized schooling. If he was concerned, he did not show it. “I am getting on finely both mentally and physically,” he reported in his first letter home.37
The founder and headmaster of Groton was the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a man of immense personal magnetism, who had studied for the ministry in England and the Episcopal Theological Seminary at Cambridge, Massachusetts. His first church was at Tombstone in the Arizona Territory at the time of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, just after the shoot-out at the OK Corral. A large, vigorous, uncomplicated man with the build of an athlete, Peabody fit right in on the frontier. “Our parson,” clucked the Tombstone Epitaph, “doesn’t flirt with the girls, doesn’t drink beer behind the door, and when it comes to baseball, he’s a daisy.”38
But Peabody’s overriding desire was to create a church-affiliated boarding school for the sons of America’s establishment. In 1883, with the financial assistance of family friends, including J. P. Morgan, Peabody realized his dream and founded Groton on ninety acres of donated farmland thirty-five miles north of Boston. The school was small: six classes of not more than twenty boys each. Tuition was $500 a year. That was about twice what the average American family had to live on.39 And there were no scholarships. Morgan served on the board of trustees, as did Phillips Brooks, the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, and William Lawrence, dean of the Episcopal Theological Seminary. The contrast between the rawness of Tombstone and the refinement of Groton seems extreme, yet there is no better measure of the breadth of Peabody’s character.
Groton’s purpose, as the rector saw it, was to cultivate “manly Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development.” He believed in religion, character, athletics, and scholarship—roughly in that order. And character was formed by discipline and obedience. Especially obedience. “You know,” Averell Harriman (Groton ’09) once said to his father, the rector “would be an awful bully if he weren’t such a terrible Christian.”40
Groton was an immediate success and within ten years had become the most exclusive school in America. Wealthy fathers, disgusted with the soft living their offspring enjoyed, flocked to send their sons to a school where boys would be trained not only intellectually but morally and physically as well. Some of the most successful men in the country had never been to college, but they were good judges of character, and they recognized that Peabody was their type of man. They welcomed the opportunity to place their sons under his care.
Life at
Groton was Spartan. Each boy lived in a six-by-ten-foot cubicle with a bed, bureau, rug, and chair. All were standard issue. There was no closet, wall hangings were prohibited, and there was a curtain instead of a door because Peabody frowned upon too much privacy. Mornings began at 6:45 with an icy shower in a communal washroom. Breakfast, chapel, and three morning classes followed with clockwork precision. Dinner, the main meal, was served at noon, followed by two afternoon classes and athletics. Another frigid shower, the evening meal (for which official school dress was required), chapel, and study hall, following which the Rector and Mrs. Peabody shook the hand of each boy and wished him good night.
Despite his pampered upbringing, FDR adjusted handily to the rigor of Groton. Twice a week for the next four years he wrote to his parents, and never once did he complain about his experience. In a sense, except for the cold showers, he was substituting one disciplined regime for another. Autumns were filled with football excitement, edging on to the Christmas season, culminating in the unforgettable reading of Dickens’s Christmas Carol by the rector’s father.41 In winter, skating and sledding substituted for team sports; with spring came baseball, tennis, swimming, and golf. At vacation time most boys reacted like sailors on shore leave. Franklin was an exception. If he got into mischief, there is no record of it. School vacations were invariably spent at Hyde Park. Summers he usually went to Campobello, where he enjoyed nothing so much as sailing his twenty-one-foot knockabout, New Moon, which his father had given him.
Groton’s curriculum was classical, taught with great attention to detail. Peabody himself taught sacred studies and set the tone of the school. He saw Groton as a large family with the rector as paterfamilias. Leading the school athletic teams, Peabody personified the muscular Christianity in which he believed. Football was his favorite. To Yale coach Walter Camp he wrote, “I am convinced that football is of profound importance for the moral even more than for the physical development of the boys.”42 As one graduate put it, the boys loved him and feared him, and from him they learned determination and to be unafraid. Roosevelt said the influence of Peabody and his wife meant more to him than that of any other people, “next to my father and mother.”43
FDR had little difficulty academically. He had been well prepared and within a month of his arrival stood fourth in a class of nineteen, a position he more or less maintained. As Peabody recalled, Roosevelt “was a quiet, satisfactory boy of more than ordinary intelligence, taking a good position in his form but not brilliant. Athletically he was too slight for success. We all liked him.”44 Athletic success was central to real distinction at Groton, and, as Peabody noted, FDR was too small. He was also inexperienced, never having played a team sport before. He was assigned to the second worst of eight football teams and the worst baseball squad, but his enthusiasm never wilted. When hit in the stomach by a line drive, he wrote his parents that it was “to the great annoyance of that intricate organ, and to the great delight of all present.”45 In his final year Roosevelt won a school letter as equipment manager of the baseball team. He also won the Latin and Punctuality Prizes and was a dormitory prefect and a member of the school choir and the debating society.
FDR’s four years at Groton provided a transition from the snuggery of familial warmth at Hyde Park. He accepted Peabody’s premises and made them his own: competition is healthy, success comes from effort, reward is based on performance, religious observance and moral probity are indispensable to a productive life. “Playing the game” came naturally to FDR. When graduation came, he was sorry to leave. “What a joyful yet sad day this has been,” Franklin wrote his parents. “Scarce a boy but wishes he were a 1st former again.”46
In one sense, Roosevelt never left Groton. The experience was indelible. “More than forty years ago,” he wrote to the old rector in 1940, “you said, in a sermon in the Old Chapel, something about not losing boyhood ideals in later life. Those were Groton ideals—taught by you—I try not to forget—and your words are still with me and with hundreds of others of ‘us boys.’ ”47
FDR entered Harvard in the autumn of 1900, along with sixteen of his eighteen Groton classmates. The university was rigidly stratified in those years. Students from socially prestigious families, most of whom had attended East Coast private schools, lived off campus in sumptuous residence halls on Mt. Auburn Street known as the Gold Coast. Young men who were less well-off, usually high school graduates from middle- and working-class backgrounds, made do with considerably more modest accommodations in university housing within the Yard. Roosevelt, together with his Groton classmate Lathrop Brown, took a three-room corner suite in Westmorly Court, the newest of the Gold Coast edifices, and with Sara’s help furnished it in an opulent style so firmly prohibited by Rector Peabody. By Harvard standards, FDR’s $400-a-year suite was luxurious. He and Brown lived there for the next four years, surrounded by fellow Grotonians and other preppies.
Only rarely did men from the Gold Coast and the Yard interact. Except for friendships that grew out of common interests in the classroom or on the athletic field, there were few opportunities for students of different backgrounds to come into social contact. Professors decried the division of the campus, and Endicott Peabody railed against “the gap between Mt. Auburn Street and the Yard,” yet not until the development of the house system in the mid-1920s did Harvard achieve anything approaching social integration of the student body.48
Under President Charles W. Eliot, appointed in 1869 and still in firm control when Roosevelt entered, Harvard stood in the vanguard of university reform. Scholarship, not “teaching,” became the order of the day. Education was defined exclusively in intellectual terms and had little concern for character development or the protection of private morality. Faculty were appointed on the basis of their research, and students, after a few required courses in the first year, were free to enroll in whatever they wished. Eliot believed a student could choose his courses better than anyone else and that all nonvocational subjects had equal value. He also believed students should make their choice based on the professor teaching the course, not the course description.49
Harvard’s emphasis on intellectual advancement attracted brilliant scholars. William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Josiah Royce held chairs in philosophy; the great Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge adorned the English Department along with George Pierce Baker, founder of the “47 Workshop” for playwrights, and Charles Townsend Copeland, the matchless “Copey” for generations of Harvardians. In the newly established Government Department, A. Lawrence Lowell held forth; Frank W. Taussig lectured in economics; Nathaniel Shaler, the nation’s preeminent geologist, headed the Lawrence Scientific School; and Christopher Columbus Langdell was dean of law.
For students, the elective system and its corollary, voluntary attendance at classes, were enormously liberating. FDR and his Groton classmates had taken the equivalent of the required freshman courses during their sixth-form year and therefore were allowed to skip the mandatory curriculum entirely. Not only did that mean they could graduate in three years instead of four, but they could choose whatever courses they wished. Roosevelt hewed closely to fact-heavy courses in economics, government, and history. “I took economics courses in college for four years and everything I was taught was wrong,” the president quipped in 1941.50 FDR took his studies seriously—unlike many Gold Coast habitués he took no “football courses”—and though he won no honors, he was never in academic difficulty. Thanks to the elective system, he avoided courses in philosophy and theory, which might have meant trouble. Throughout his life Roosevelt remained mystified by abstract thought, and Harvard did nothing to lessen that.
In late autumn of his first year, FDR received disturbing news from Hyde Park. His father had suffered a severe heart attack. Then a second one. Sara took James to their New York apartment so he might be nearer his doctors, but his health continued to deteriorate. On December 8, with his family at his bedside, James died. “All is over,” Sara wrote in her dia
ry. “At 2:20 he merely slept away. Dr. Ely was in the apartment and called, but it was too late. As I write these words I wonder how I lived when he left me.”51 James left an estate of roughly $600,000, or slightly less than $14 million in today’s currency. Franklin and Rosy were each provided a trust fund, with Springwood passing to Sara. Two years before, on the death of her own father, Sara and her siblings had each inherited $1.3 million from the Delano fortune. That would amount to more than $28 million now, and it became the primary source of FDR’s family wealth.
Roosevelt spent the spring of 1901 in close touch with Sara. That summer, with the memory of James hanging heavily, they chose not to return to Campobello but to travel to Europe. The Roosevelts spent ten weeks abroad, returning in late September just in time for FDR to return to college. First, it was off to the fjords of Norway on the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s elegant cruise ship Princessin Victoria Luise—and a chance encounter near the Arctic Circle with the kaiser, William II, who invited them aboard his yacht. Sara found the emperor impressive and energetic but not so kind as she remembered his grandfather, William I, whom she had once seen in Paris. Later they visited Dresden so Sara might show Franklin where she had lived and gone to school as a child. They spent a week with Aunt Laura Astor Delano, Uncle Frank’s widow, at the Beau Rivage on the shore of Lake Geneva. In Zurich they stayed at the same hotel in which Sara had stayed on her honeymoon. In Paris, their last stop, they learned that President William McKinley had been shot while visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Twelve days later, as they passed the Nantucket lightship on their way home, they received the news by megaphone: “President McKinley died last Saturday.” Cousin Theodore was president of the United States.52
