Frank Roosevelt at Harvard, November-December 1996

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FDR on Vireo with sons James and Elliott at Campobello Island in August 1920. He had just been nominated for the vice presidency. Photograph courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, tinted by Jim Gipe

In the years ahead he would prove a remarkably loyal alumnus. He regularly attended Harvard Club dinners in New York, Boston, and Washington. Until he was stricken with polio he rarely missed a Harvard-Yale football game. He returned for reunions, and for Fly Club and Crimson dinners. In 1917 he was elected to the Board of Overseers.

At that point his political star was rising. The similarity of its course to TR's had been noticed. Like TR, Franklin had gone from Harvard to Columbia Law School. (see footnote 3) At the age of 28, after a desultory four years of private practice, he ran on the Democratic slate for the New York senate. Making four to six speeches a day, he won a seat that had been Republican property for almost three decades. While still in his twenties TR had served three terms in the New York state assembly. FDR won reelection in 1912, and was named assistant secretary of the navy the next year. TR had held that post and gone on to become the governor of New York. Democratic strategists were now talking about running FDR for the governorship.

In his run for Overseer he made a strong showing. Under the system used at the time, Harvard degree-holders initially chose from a field of 20 candidates. In 1917 they included the governor of New Hampshire, the police commissioner of New York City, a justice of the New Jersey supreme court, the Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania, and a former army chief of staff. Alumni attending Commencement then elected five Overseers from a slate made up of the 10 leading vote-getters. At 35, FDR was the youngest candidate in the field. He placed third in both rounds of balloting (behind Major General Leonard Wood, M.D. 1884, an ex-Rough Rider who would contend for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, and New York police commissioner Arthur Woods, A.B. 1892). He attended that year's Commencement exercises and was fêted by classmates at a reception at the Harvard Club of Boston.

But he would have limited time for Harvard affairs. The nation was now at war. After the armistice FDR would be drawn into the inner game of New York politics. In 1920 he spoke at the Democratic nominating convention, making a seconding speech for New York governor Al Smith. When Smith stepped aside to break an extended deadlock, convention-floor horse-trading left FDR as the running mate of Ohio governor James Cox. "His is a name to be conjured with in American politics," proclaimed an Ohio delegate: "Franklin D. Roosevelt!"

FDR chatting with Grenville Clark '03, LL.B. '06, New York lawyer and member of the Harvard Corporation, at the Harvard Tercentenary in 1936. Photograph courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, tinted by Jim Gipe

In the spirit of TR-who had died suddenly, at 60, the previous year-Cox and Roosevelt campaigned strenuously. So did TR's eldest son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. '09. He had supported General Leonard Wood at the Republican convention. Now he stalked FDR on the campaign trail. "He is a maverick, [who] does not have the brand of our family," Ted Jr. told a troop of Rough Riders in Wyoming. In November American voters cast a massive vote of no confidence in the idealistic internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and his would-be successors. The Republican ticket of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge got more than 16 million votes; Cox and FDR got just 9 million.

The following August, while vacationing at Campobello, FDR was stricken with polio. His paralysis was severe and agonizingly painful. The remoteness of "Campo" made matters worse. A local doctor from Lubec, Maine, was brought over by motorboat the next day. He diagnosed FDR's ailment as a bad cold. Dr. W. W. Keen, a venerable Philadelphia physician, was persuaded to motor up from Bar Harbor. He arrived two days later and concluded that the paralysis had been caused by a blood clot or spinal lesion. (see footnote 4) FDR's uncle Frederic Delano located a specialist: Dr. Robert Lovett, A.B. 1881, professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission. Two weeks after the onset of FDR's illness, Lovett arrived at Campobello for a consultation. He quickly diagnosed the disease as poliomyelitis.

Three more weeks passed before FDR could be taken to New York via small boat and private railroad car. For six weeks he was hospitalized. Another six months would pass before he could leave his bed and try to hold himself up with crutches. But his ordeal as a recovering polio patient would be unending.

His calamitous illness was the defining event in FDR's life. Before his affliction with polio he was viewed by many who knew him as cocky, self-absorbed, superficial, a bit of a playboy, a political lightweight cashing in on his family name. His infirmity and his arduous rehabilitation changed him physically and mentally. He gained a new empathy with those whose lives had been ill-favored. Suffering toughened his character and stiffened his political will. His unquenchable optimism, his refusal to regard himself as an invalid, and his determination to walk again became legendary.

His emotional recovery was magnificent; his physical recovery was largely a myth. From the outset, FDR's family and advisers downplayed the seriousness of his illness and overstated the progress he made during his lengthy period of recuperation. His political life was at stake. He did regain the full use of his hands and his upper body. Beyond that he became adept at impersonating a man with lame legs who was reasonably mobile. The complicity of the press helped FDR hide the fact that he was a paraplegic, dependent on others to move him and help meet his quotidian needs.

In 1924 he reentered politics, nominating Al Smith--"the 'Happy Warrior' of the political battlefield"--at the Democratic convention. Supported by crutches and assisted by his oldest son, James, then 16, he made his way to the podium with painful slowness. The crowd of delegates responded with a rousing ovation that went on for three minutes. At the 1928 convention he made a stirring speech to renominate Smith-this time using a cane and the arm of his son Elliott for support. That fall he reluctantly ran for governor of New York. He had meant to continue the immersion treatments he had been taking at Warm Springs, Georgia. But Al Smith, facing an uphill fight as the Democratic nominee, wanted FDR on the ballot to help carry New York. FDR won the two-year term by a narrow margin, but Smith lost in his own state and was soundly defeated by Herbert Hoover.

Three months later a letter from President Abbott Lawrence Lowell informed Governor Roosevelt that his alma mater wanted to give him an honorary degree. "I have been, and still am, quite overcome by your news," FDR replied, "and it has taken me 'all of a heap.' If I ever had thought of the possibility of a Harvard honorary degree, it would have been with the feeling that perhaps I might deserve it at the age of 70-certainly not at this time." Lowell was now implementing his long-incubated plan for a residential House system, prompting FDR to add, "As you know, I have always strongly favored something along this line, and I congratulate you on what I think will be the most important step taken in American education during this generation."

He returned for his twenty-fifth reunion in June 1929. His classmates had elected him chief marshal of Commencement. Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, to which TR had belonged, chose him as orator at the annual Literary Exercises, and made him an honorary member (along with his uncle Frederick Delano, A.B. 1885, twice an Overseer and later president of the Harvard Alumni Association). Helped to his seat on the Sanders Theatre stage by his son James, then a rising senior, FDR was given a lengthy standing ovation when he stood up to speak. His address was titled "The Age of Social Consciousness." It blended a hopeful meliorism with the complacencies of a generation that would soon be wondering how things got so bad so fast:

Fifty years ago we humans were still divided by an undoubtedly existent class consciousness.It is not so long ago that our own Harvard catalogues listed the young gentlemenas those with "Esquire" after their names, and those with the mere prefix "Mister." I incline to the phrase "the age of social consciousness" as most fitting the trend of our own day. It best describes the change in the social relationships.

The Kansas farmer and the New York mechanic send their sons and daughters to college; there is a motorcar for one out of every four of the inhabitants of the United States; proper sanitation, excellent transportation, electric light, music, arts, books by the million, the news of the day, good clothing, ready-made food-all these are literally at the command of the majority of our citizens. The luxuries of the past generation have become the necessities of the present; in creature comforts, the making easy of daily household tasks, we have gained more in 50 years than in the previous five centuries.

At Commencement President Lowell awarded 1,957 degrees in course-a record number-and 12 degrees honoris causa. The citation accompanying FDR's LL.D. degree read, "Governor of New York; a statesman in whom is no guile." It was a curious way to describe a man later known for his genial deviousness, love of subterfuge, and administrative legerdemain. (see footnote 5) At the afternoon exercises of the Alumni Association, FDR presented the class gift of $150,000 and was one of five speakers. His theme was the need to shift the focus of higher education from "teachingdirected to cooperative and mass effort" to "the stimulation and strengthening of the will and the power of the individual to act as an individual." To many of his hearers, that must have sounded oddly like Republican ideology.

The stock market crashed in October 1929, wiping out $40 billion in stock prices, ending the Harding-Coolidge era of "normalcy," and dooming the presidency of Herbert Hoover. In 1930 FDR was reelected governor by a record plurality. His victory made him the most logical Democratic nominee in 1932.

His adversaries at that year's convention included Al Smith, who had come to resent his past ally, and pundit Walter Lippmann '10, who tried to derail FDR's nomination in his syndicated column. Though he had urged FDR to run for governor in 1928, Lippmann now called him "an amiable boy scout," "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications, would very much like to be President." Among FDR's backers was Joseph P. Kennedy '12, a millionaire real-estate speculator whose large family included a 15-year-old son, John Fitzgerald, who would follow his father to Harvard and later become the nation's thirty-fifth president. Joe Kennedy's machinations got the California delegation into the Ro0sevelt camp. Other states fell in line, and FDR was nominated on the fourth ballot. Breaking with tradition, he flew to Chicago to accept the nomination, promising "a new deal for the American people."

FDR's energetic campaigning and vibrant optimism raised the nation's morale even as the depression worsened. In October Lippmann did a volte-face, advising his readers that he would "vote cheerfully for Governor Roosevelt." Ted Roosevelt Jr., who had come of age in the White House and yearned to reclaim it, stuck to his Republican guns. He endorsed the reelection of Hoover and told his mother that he was "distinctly hopeful about November. Franklin is such poor stuff it seems improbable that he should be elected President." In November Ted's distant cousin carried all but six states and his alma mater. The electorate gave FDR 23 million votes to Hoover's 16 million. Harvard students went strongly for Hoover, a Stanford grad, in the Crimson's straw vote. Even Norman Thomas, making the second of six presidential bids as the candidate of the Socialist Party, outran FDR in five of the seven undergraduate Houses.

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

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