Frank Roosevelt at Harvard, November-December 1996

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FDR and classmates held their fifteenth reunion at Harvard's rowing camp on Cennecticut's Thames River. He was then assistant secretary of the navy. Photograph courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, tinted by Jim Gipe

Frank Roosevelt and Jake Brown were probably there when President Charles William Eliot spoke at a Sanders Theatre reception for incoming students in October 1900. "It is a common error," Eliot told the newcomers, "to suppose that the men of this University live in rooms the walls of which are covered with embossed leather; that they have at hand every luxury of modern life. As a matter of fact, there are but few such. The great majority are of moderate means; and it is this diversity of condition that makes the experience of meeting men here so valuable."

Frank Roosevelt had already declared his intention of acquiring "a large acquaintance," but it would not be as diverse as President Eliot might have wished. His freshman social life revolved around luncheons, teas, dinners, and dances in Boston and Cambridge. In College affairs he was resolved to be "always active." He competed (at first unsuccessfully) for the Crimson news board. He sang with the Freshman Glee Club and became its secretary. Though the Hyde Park side of the Roosevelt family normally voted Democratic, he joined the Republican Club to support his Oyster Bay cousin Theodore, President William McKinley's running mate in the election of 1900. In red caps and gowns, Frank and most of the freshman class joined a torchlight parade into Boston to celebrate the Republican victory in November. Sporting his pince-nez and spouting "Bully!", Frank seemed to some of his classmates to be trading too much on familial ties. A few started calling him "Kermit," after one of the Rough Rider's preadolescent sons.(see footnote 2)

Frank had been at Harvard for less than a month when his 72-year-old father had a heart attack. James Roosevelt had been ill with heart trouble for 10 years. His attack came two days after news of a scandal involving the erratic "Taddy" Roosevelt, James's grandson by his first marriage. Taddy had been a year ahead of Frank at Groton. He had great expectations: his mother had come from the wealthiest family in America, the Astors. After a troubled

Twenty years later, FDR sent in this information for the thirty-fifth reunion book. Photograph courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

freshman year at Harvard, Taddy married a New York prostitute and rented a West Side apartment, replete with servants. His father found out and broke up the household. Perhaps hoping to embarrass TR, someone tipped off reporters. The headlines didn't hurt TR's candidacy, but they were too much for James Roosevelt. In late November he had another attack. A few days later Frank got a telegram from his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, summoning him to New York. He went immediately and was there when his father died on December 8.

"I regret to tell you of the death of my Father, Mr. James Roosevelt," Frank wrote to Le Baron Russell Briggs, dean of the College:

As my Mother is all alone and as the end of the term is so near, I feel sure that you will not mind my staying at home with her. Also I should have to be here on Dec. 20th for some legal matter and I think I can make up during the holidays the work I am losing now. I shall be in Cambridge however on Wednesday next and if you desire to see me that day I can go to see you. I know you will understand that I am staying away merely for my Mother's sake and hope to have the work made up when we return early in January.
Believe me
Sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Frank was the only child of the marriage and was close to both parents. He and his mother spent a bleak Christmas holiday at Springwood, the family estate in Hyde Park, and Frank returned to Harvard on January 3. The conventional six-month interval of deep mourning curtailed his social activities. He did not make the Crimson when freshman candidates were elected in February, but he entered the spring competition and was one of five who survived it.

His big break came in April, when his cousin, now vice president, visited Boston. Frank reached TR at Professor Lowell's house and learned that he was speaking at Lowell's constitutional government class the next day. To avoid attracting a crowd, Lowell had kept it quiet. Frank, who was taking the course, wrote a news item for the Crimson. To Lowell's displeasure, a crowd of 2,000 was outside the lecture hall the next morning.

Frank and another Oyster Bay cousin, Theodore Robinson '04, went out for freshman crew that spring. More than 200 students rowed as aliates of the Newell and Weld boat clubs, which competed for seats in the freshman and varsity boats. Frank hadn't rowed before, but was good enough to stroke Newell's third boat. In the final club race of the year his crew came from behind to nip Weld's by three feet. This was Frank's last hurrah in intramural sports. As an upperclassman he would put most of his energy into the Crimson. What extracurricular time he had left went into club life and social-service activities.

His father's death had tightened the already close bonds between Frank and his mother. The family usually summered on Campobello Island, east of the Maine-New Brunswick border, but in the summer of 1901, after Frank's freshman year, neither he nor his mother wanted to be there without James. Instead they took ship for Europe, accompanied by cousin Teddy Robinson. On the return voyage, as their liner passed the Nantucket lightship, they learned that President McKinley had died of an assassin's gunshot. At 43, TR was now in the White House.

The new president was interested in his cousin Franklin. He had encouraged him during his years at Groton and Harvard; in 1905 he would give the bride away at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. "I'm so fond of that boy, I'd be shot for him," he once told Sara Delano Roosevelt. The admiration was mutual. In letters to her son, Sara referred to TR as "your noble kinsman." Exposure to his ebullient relative always quickened Frank's political hopes. But as a second-year student at Harvard, he hoped most of all to follow TR as a member of the Porcellian Club.

The Porcellian was the loftiest of Harvard's "final" clubs. The selection process was rigidly hierarchical. First you had to get into the Institute of 1770, the oldest and largest club. If you were among the first 70 or 80 of the 100 sophomores accepted, you were taken into Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity ("the Dickey"). Then you might join a "waiting" club, and at last a final club like Porcellian or A.D. Your chances improved if you were a "legacy," i.e., related to a member.

By Christmas of 1901 the Institute of 1770 had elected 50 men. Frank Roosevelt wasn't one of them. His anxious thoughts were diverted by an invitation to the social event of the season-17-year-old Alice Roosevelt's coming-out party at the White House. Two days after Christmas, Frank wrote Dean Briggs,

I have been asked to a dance at the White House in Washington on Friday January 3rd. As I have only three recitations on Friday, and none on Saturday, do you think I might go to it? It would be very kind of you to let me know about it.

Frank spent three days in Washington. He had tea at the White House and returned for a private talk with TR. He enjoyed the dance, reporting to his mother that "The Washington people weren't in it with the New Yorkers & from start to finish it was glorious." Returning to Cambridge, he found he had made the Institute and the Dickey. Then came the blow. Despite his ties to TR, despite the fact that James Roosevelt had been an honorary member, and even though five of the 16 undergraduate members were Grotonians, Frank was not among the eight sophomores elected to the Porcellian.

Lathrop Brown, Frank's roommate, would later write that "his not 'making' the Porcellian meant only that he was free of any restraining influences of a lot of delightful people who thought that the world belonged to them and who did not want to change anything in it." Frank settled for membership in the Fly Club. He joined the Signet Society, then and now a haven for students interested in the arts, and the Memorial Society, dedicated to the preservation of Harvard history. He served as librarian of the Fly, the Hasty Pudding Club, and the newly opened Harvard Union, and began buying new and rare books for their shelves and his own.

His resolve to be "always active" was reflected by memberships in the Social Service Society, the St. Paul's Society, the Political Club, the Yacht Club. He was even an usher and cheerleader at football games. But his core activity was the Crimson. He became an assistant managing editor in the fall of 1902, and managing editor in January 1903. He would complete his degree requirements in another four months, but the presidency was his if he wished to stay on. In order to do so he decided to take more economics and history courses as a graduate student.

Some of his Crimson staffers would recall his leadership as no better than competent. Managing editor Walter Russell Bowie '04, who later became dean of Union Theological Seminary, was more positive. "He had a force of personality which was latent," said Bowie, "and which subsequent occasions would call out. He liked people, and he made them instinctively like him. Moreover, in his geniality there was a kind of frictionless command."

That fall's top stories included the opening of the Germanic Museum, the bequest of millions to Harvard from the estate of Gordon McKay, the completion of Harvard Stadium, and the shortcomings of the football team. An industrious editorial writer, Frank tried to spur on the team (its manager was his roommate). Certain linemen, he declared in one of his editorials, were "of a spirit that will not awake till the team is in a desperate crisis, and goes to sleep again when the crisis is fancied to be past." He campaigned for wider boardwalks in the muddy Yard, and (successfully) for better fire apparatus and the installation of fire escapes in Yard dormitories. He stepped down as Crimson president in February, and Russell Bowie succeeded him.

By then Frank was thinking about life after Harvard. He had run unsuccessfully for class marshal, finishing fourth in a field of six. (The clubs, he thought, had conspired to elect their own three-man slate.) He then ran for class committee chairman and chalked up an electoral victory. Now he had to choose a law school. He had meant to attend Harvard Law, but his mother wanted him closer to home and was urging him to enroll at Columbia.

To his mother's dismay, he intended to marry. He and Eleanor Roosevelt, TR's "favorite niece," had been distantly acquainted since childhood. They had been seeing each other regularly since November 1902, when they met at the New York Horse Show. Eleanor visited Frank and his mother at Campobello the following fall. In November she was his guest at the Harvard-Yale football game. The next day they went walking in Groton and Frank proposed. He was then 21; Eleanor was 18.

He broke the news to his mother at Thanksgiving. She first asked that the engagement be kept secret for a year. Later she told Frank that she would be renting a Boston apartment that winter, as she had for the past two years. Frank opposed this extension of motherly oversight. As an alternative he suggested they take a five-week winter cruise to the West Indies, with Lathrop Brown as their guest. Sara acquiesced. The separation from Eleanor did not cool Frank's ardor. Sara tried vainly to get him a post as ambassadorial secretary at the Court of St. James's, where both his father and half-brother had served. In time she became reconciled to the marriage, but she also contrived to retain a controlling interest in her son's personal life.

Frank was graduated from Harvard on June 29. As class committee chairman he got to sit on the Sanders Theatre stage. Sara and Eleanor were in the audience. The class orator was Arthur Ballantine, a man Frank had beaten out for the presidency of the Crimson. "Our freedom must be made a means of service," declared Ballantine. "Some, catching a bit of the spirit of our brothers Phillips, Sumner, and Roosevelt, will find their chance in the field of politics and social reform. Others, perhaps, may help to lift American literature back to that high plane to which it was once led by a Cambridge group. Wherever we serve, the message of this ancient University is clear: we are to stand for absolute freedom of thought." The Roosevelt he had in mind was, of course, TR. But FDR would find his chance when it came.

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

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