FDR - Jean Edward Smith [24]
Socially, FDR’s dance card at Harvard was fuller than most. He kept a horse and a runabout, and there was scarcely a weekend when he was not attending a dinner or a party somewhere in the Boston area.62 He was not admitted to Porcellian, the most prestigious of the final clubs, but he did make Fly (Alpha Delta Phi) and Hasty Pudding, served as librarian of each, and began his lifelong habit of collecting naval Americana. Years later, with typical hyperbole, he told a distant relative that his failure to make Porcellian was “the greatest disappointment he ever had.”63 Yet, as his roommate, Lathrop Brown, noted, “Franklin was not a typical club man of his generation. He had more on his mind than sitting in the Club’s front window, doing nothing but criticizing the passers-by. His not ‘making’ the Porcellian meant only that he was free of any possible 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.”64
Roosevelt received his degree from Harvard in 1903. But in the tradition of the Ivy League he was always a member of the Class of ’04. At graduation he was elected permanent chairman of the class committee, the linchpin of alumni affairs. Roosevelt won no prizes and did not make Phi Beta Kappa, yet he had prospered intellectually. His university experience imparted renewed confidence and enhanced the innate optimism that James and Sara had so carefully nourished. As one biographer has written, “At Groton, Roosevelt learned to get along with his contemporaries; at Harvard he learned to lead them.”65
THREE
KEEPING THE NAME IN THE FAMILY
Nothing is more pleasing to the eye than a good-looking lady, nothing more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
LESS THAN A YEAR after graduating from Harvard, FDR married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin once removed, the orphaned daughter of his godfather, Elliott—a tall, striking young woman variously described by an adoring New York press as “beautiful,” “regal,” and “magnificent,” with “greater claim to good looks than any of the Roosevelts.”1 Franklin was an impressionable twenty-three. Eleanor was twenty: the same age her mother had been, yet still innocent of the birds and the bees. As she later informed her son James, the kiss she and Franklin exchanged at the close of the wedding ceremony was their first in more than two years of courtship.2*
Throughout his adult life FDR relished female companionship. Yet he was late discovering it. At Springwood for fourteen years his contact with the opposite sex was limited. At Groton he relied on his mother to organize his social life: “I wish you would think up some decent partner for me for the N.Y. dance, so that I can get someone early, and not get palmed off on some ice-cart.”3 At Harvard he was on his own but hesitated to take an unguided step. “What do you think of my taking M.D.R. [Muriel Delano Robbins], Helen [Roosevelt], and Mary Newbold to see the Harvard–West Point game Saturday afternoon?” he asked Sara. “If you approve make arrangements as to trains.”4
Gradually, his diffidence faded. By the end of sophomore year FDR was charming and relaxed, eager to ingratiate himself with the eligible young women of upper class Boston and their families. This was 1902—the apogee of Victorian restraint. Unlike John F. Kennedy and his classmates in the 1930s, who took a direct approach, the men of FDR’s generation were oblique. In refined circles contact with the opposite sex was strictly chaperoned. Touching was risqué, kissing stretched the limit, and premarital sex was absolutely prohibited. There were two outlets: the company of loose women who traded in sex, or marriage. For someone of FDR’s straitlaced upbringing, the former was unthinkable.*