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By Root 1768 0

John’s senior year at Harvard—lasted twenty-seven years, a record for the Roosevelt siblings, and he married only twice, another record. After finishing Harvard in 1938 he went to work as a clerk at Filene’s department store in Boston, earning $18 a week. John flourished in the retail trade and later owned and operated his own department store in Los Angeles. In 1953 he entered the investment banking business, where he prospered as well. Because FDR came down with polio when John was a toddler and was absent from the family much of the time, John had less emotional attachment to his parents and their political views than the other children. A closet Republican, he waited until after FDR’s death to announce his affiliation. He contributed generously to GOP candidates, publicly endorsed both Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and when his brother FDR, Jr., ran for New York attorney general in 1954, John backed his Republican opponent, Jacob Javits.

In college during the 1930s, John attracted his share of attention. Visiting Cannes with classmates in the summer after his junior year, he and his friends joined the annual “Battle of Flowers,” when decorated floats competed for prizes. By the time their flower-bedecked carriage reached the reviewing stand in front of the Hotel Carlton, they had been drinking vintage Moët & Chandon for three hours and were snockered. When the mayor of Cannes, Pierre Nouveau, advanced to present the coach with a bouquet of flowers, John took a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket on the carriage floor and squirted him in the face with the contents. The incident generated wide press coverage, riled Franco-American relations, and required high-level diplomatic intervention to repair the damage.73 John provided a ritual denial, and Ambassador William C. Bullitt offered what support he could. Franklin and Eleanor accepted John’s version, and ER met him at the dock in New York when he returned. As she put it:

If it had been one of my other boys I would have felt the incident was more than probable, for they have great exuberance of spirit. It just happens that John is extremely quiet, and, even if he had been under the influence of champagne, I doubt if he would have reacted in this manner.74

The Roosevelt sons sought no special favors in World War II. James fought with Carlson’s Raiders (the Marines’ famous 2nd Raider Battalion) at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and the Solomon Islands, later commanded the Fourth Raiders, and earned the Navy Cross and a Silver Star. Elliott enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1940, flew three hundred photoreconnaissance missions, was wounded twice, and rose to command the 325th Photographic Reconnaissance Wing during the D-Day invasion. FDR, Jr., after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, served in the Navy, commanded the destroyer Ulvert M. Moore, and won the Navy Cross, the Legion of Merit, and a Purple Heart. John, who was the last to enlist, saw combat as a lieutenant (later lieutenant commander) on the aircraft carrier USS Wasp in the Pacific, and earned a Bronze Star.

THE SECOND SESSION of the Seventy-fifth Congress was little more productive than the first. When members departed Washington sine die on June 16, 1938, only one significant piece of legislation had been enacted: the Fair Labor Standards Act, better known as the wages and hours bill. And it had been an uphill struggle. Introduced by liberal Alabama senator Hugo Black, the bill passed the Senate in July 1937. But a combination of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats (who feared the racial equality implications) kept the measure bottled up in the House Rules Committee until a discharge petition brought it to the floor in May 1938. After twelve hours of stormy debate and numerous amendments the bill passed with a lopsided majority of 314–7, only to run into the obstacle course of a House-Senate conference committee that sought to reconcile the newer House version with the bill the Senate had passed the year before. The final bill, reflecting the Hughes Court’s latitudinarian interpretation