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Young Roosevelt, bound for Harvard, in the spring of his senior year at Groton, "a fellow of exceptional ability and high character." Photograph courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, tinted by Jim Gipe

Even adversaries admired his way with words, and the "wise sauciness"-in Felix Frankfurter's phrase-with which he disarmed his critics. His speech at the 1936 Harvard Tercentenary was a famous example. "This meeting is being held," he began,
In pursuance of an adjournment expressly taken one hundred years ago on the motion of Josiah Quincy. At that time many of the alumni of Harvard were sorely troubled concerning the state of the nation. Andrew Jackson was President. On the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, many alumni again were sorely troubled. Grover Cleveland was President. Now, on the three hundredth anniversary, I am President.

He cherished his Harvard connections. In the spring of 1934, when pending legislation seemed likely to keep him from attending his thirtieth reunion, he put on a White House reception for most of the class of 1904. Before attending the Fly Club's annual dinner the following winter, he wrote Jimmy O'Brien, still the janitor of the residence hall where he'd lived as an undergraduate, inviting him to stop by the clubhouse and say hello. In the presidential yacht, Sequoia, he visited Harvard's rowing camp at Ledyard, Connecticut, where his freshman son, Franklin Jr., was in training. The next spring he entertained two dozen Harvard oarsmen at a White House dinner.

His enthusiasm was infectious. As a senior at Groton, his son James wanted to go his own way and attend some other college. His father provisionally agreed, James later recalled, but then began talking "hypnotically" about the Crimson, the Fly Club, the Pudding, and his Harvard friendships. James became the fifteenth Roosevelt to enroll at Harvard; many more were to come.

Love it he might, but Harvard did not always love him back. President emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell was rude to him when the Tercentenary exercises were being planned. When he first ran for president, a straw vote held by the Harvard Crimson showed a three-to-one preference for Herbert Hoover. Four years later a Crimson editorial called the president-a former Crimed himself-"a traitor to his fine education." In irate letters to newspapers and the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, many older Harvard men took the same line.

Yet he was not without honor at Harvard. At the age of 35 he was elected to the Board of Overseers. In 1929, when he was governor of New York, he was elected chief marshal at Commencement. He gave the Phi Beta Kappa Oration, received an honorary degree, and spoke at the afternoon meeting of the alumni. And in 1936, as the nation's chief executive, he spoke at the Tercentenary exercises.

Two days after his death in oce on April 12, 1945, mourners jammed the Memorial Church for a service led by Willard Sperry, dean of the Divinity School. "We have lost one of our own members," said Sperry. "It would be presumptuous to say that elsewhere there is no sorrow like our sorrow. But our sorrow is touched with a humble and proper pride that this society was one of the shaping forces which fitted him for his duty and his destiny.

"He will live in the memory of generations to come," said the dean, "as one with whom his own time had dealt, if not unfairly, at least austerely. He is a casualty of these costly years of war."

A fortnight later the Alumni Bulletin published tributes from five distinguished alumni. Older readers contributed reminiscences of his undergraduate days. But the surprising fact is that no lasting memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt was ever established at Harvard.

The institution dealt less austerely with the Harvard-educated presidents who preceded and followed him. The name of Theodore Roosevelt, class of 1880, LL.D. '02, is cut in stone on the 1880 Gate, outside Lamont Library, and carried on by the library's Theodore Roosevelt Collection. When John F. Kennedy '40 was assassinated, Harvard's school of public administration was renamed in his honor. But no Franklin D. Roosevelt Center, no Roosevelt chair of political science, no Roosevelt lectureships, scholarships, or fellowships memorialize the most famous American of his time, a man who overcame severe physical disability and led his nation and its allies through the most desperate days of the twentieth century. Only a modest plaque marks his old rooms in Westmorly Court.


With its manorial façade, diamond-leaded windows, and oak wainscoting, Westmorly was the most ornate of the privately owned residence halls that lined Harvard's "Gold Coast." On Bow Street, opposite Saint Paul's Church, the building was new in the fall of 1900, when Franklin Roosevelt and Lathrop Brown moved in as freshmen. In the fashion of the day, they decorated the walls of their first-floor suite--now Adams House B-17, a faculty office--with school pennants and banners, team pictures, beer steins, and social invitations. The roommates would stay there four years.

Frank Roosevelt and "Jake" Brown, both New Yorkers, had become close friends as students at Groton School. Frank's Groton career had been unexceptional, but his teachers liked him. He loved to sail and had thought of going to the Naval Academy, but he applied to Harvard at the behest of his father, who had studied law there. Frank's best college recommendation came from the Reverend Sherrard Billings, who taught Latin, led the choir, coached football, and shepherded the Groton Missionary Society. Billings had been a Harvard classmate of Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880, governor of New York, Spanish War hero, and Frank Roosevelt's fifth cousin. Writing in May 1900, he advised College officials that

F.D. Roosevelt is a fellow of exceptional ability and high character. He is mature in his aims and will get a great deal from his courses. He hopes to go into public life, and will shape his work at Cambridge with that end in view. I expect him to be a very useful member of society at Harvard.

The senior board of the Harvard Crimson in 1904, FDR presiding. Photograph courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, tinted by Jim Gipe

Roosevelt and Brown were among 18 Grotonians in the entering class of 1904, which initially had 537 members. A slender six-footer with patrician features and an engaging smile, Frank Roosevelt had begun wearing pince-nez glasses like his famous cousin TR's. He was good at golf, so-so at tennis, and too light for football, TR's favorite contact sport and the one that mattered most in the turn-of-the-century culture of masculinity. With 150 others Frank tried out for freshman football, but was cut and assigned to the Missing Links, lightest of eight intramural "scrub" teams. His teammates elected him captain. "It is the only [team] composed wholly of Freshmen," he wrote to his parents, "and I am the only Freshman Captain."

Having done well enough on his entrance exams to earn sophomore standing, Frank took six courses per term, the maximum number permitted, in order to meet the requirements for the A.B. in three years (a practice followed by more than a third of the undergraduates of the time). He majored in history and got "gentleman's C's"-worth high B's by today's standards-in almost all his courses.

His teachers in history and government classes included Edward Channing, Archibald Cary Coolidge, Silas Macvane, Hiram Bingham (then a doctoral student, later the discoverer of Machu Picchu), and Abbott Lawrence Lowell. His instructors in public-speaking courses were Irvah Winter and assistant professor George Pierce Baker. Le Baron Russell Briggs, George Lyman Kittredge, Pierre la Rose, and Barrett Wendell were among his English teachers. Twice he took undemanding geology courses given by the colorful Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School. In his third year he took Fine Arts 4 (medieval and Renaissance art) and enrolled in Josiah Royce's Philosophy 1a. He soon dropped it. "The appeal of systematic or abstract thought," one biographer has observed, "remained a mystery to Franklin Roosevelt all his life."(see footnote 1)

Frank Roosevelt at Harvard, continued. Also see Roosevelts at Harvard, and "Roosevelt History Month"

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