Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands Read Free Book Online

between visits to his doctors. On December 8, 1900, Franklin’s father died.
    Franklin remained with his mother throughout the holidays. And during the following year he observed a sort of mourning by using stationery bordered in black. But otherwise his father’s passing appeared to affect him fairly little. He had never known his father except as an old man, and one who was often sick. In many respects James was more a grandfather than a father to his younger son. An eagerly athletic boy like Franklin had difficulty seeing himself in James.
    The chief emotional effect of James’s death was to reinforce the bond between Franklin and Sara. Always her only son, Franklin now became the only man in her life. She doted on him as never before; without James to care for at Hyde Park, she rented a house in Boston during winters to be closer to him. James left Franklin a modest inheritance, but the bulk of the estate went to Sara. Sara supported Franklin and did so in what she judged his best interests. But it was her judgment, not his, that counted. And she no longer had to heed James’s opinion in the matter.
    Even as his father’s death made Franklin more dependent on Sara financially, it also made him feel more responsible for Sara emotionally. Until now James had provided an outlet for Sara’s emotions; with James gone that function fell entirely to Franklin. He grew solicitous of her in ways he hadn’t been before; when she became upset he was the one who soothed her. The bond between mother and son, already strong, grew stronger.

 
    2.
     
    F RANKLIN GRADUATED FROM G ROTON IN THE SPRING OF 1900 AND enrolled that fall at Harvard, down the road in Cambridge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Harvard aspired to intellectual eminence, but social standing still counted for more among the undergraduates than academic achievement. Boys from wealthy families inhabited the “Gold Coast” along Mt. Auburn Street, living in large apartments, dining in expensive eating houses, and gathering in exclusive clubs. Boys from poorer families lived across Massachusetts Avenue in the drab, crowded dormitories of the Yard. The two castes mingled in the lecture halls, but outside the classrooms they rarely encountered each other.
    Roosevelt, naturally, was a Gold Coaster. He lived at Westmorly Court, a prime property, in a four-room apartment he shared with Lathrop Brown, another Grotonian. “The sitting room is large enough for two desks, and the bedrooms and bath light and airy,” he wrote home. “The ceilings are very high.” The suite was bare when Roosevelt arrived. “The rooms look as if struck by sheet lightning, the sitting room having the chairs and tables but no curtains or carpets…. The bed is in place in my room, and it looks inhabitable, but one trunk is the sole piece of furniture of Lathrop’s room.” The apartment perked up when Sara sent carpet and curtains, and Roosevelt and Brown put pictures on the walls. A rented piano completed the décor and provided a focus for entertaining.
    Roosevelt’s circle widened at Harvard. “On Monday I went to a ‘Beer Night’ in a Senior’s room,” he noted. “It is a regular institution by which a senior has a few of his classmen and about 20 Freshmen in to his room in order to get them acquainted with each other.” Sports played a socializing role at Harvard as they had at Groton, and Roosevelt threw himself into the games. He was realistic about his prospects for football. “There are still over 100 candidates”—or about a quarter of the freshman class—“for the ’04 team, and I shan’t make it, but possibly a scrub team.” The scrubs were where he wound up, yet he enjoyed the distinction of being elected captain of one of the eight scrub squads. “It is the only one composed wholly of Freshmen, and I am the only Freshman captain.”
    He joined the school newspaper. Like the football team, the Crimson required tryouts; cub reporters who made the