FDR - Jean Edward Smith [21]
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