FDR - Jean Edward Smith [22]
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 diary. “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