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

Times reporter wrote, “and they enjoyed themselves after the manner of young people. The state apartments had been turned over to them, with no other injunction put upon them than that they would incur the great displeasure of the President if they did not make a jolly night of it. They appeared to heed this injunction.”
    The guests included several Roosevelts. Franklin rode the train down from Boston on the Friday morning of the ball, took tea with one set of family friends and dinner with another. “Then to the dance, which was most glorious fun,” he told his mother. “From start to finish it was glorious…. We left at 2 a.m. and I slept till 12 on Saturday.” That afternoon he visited the new—as of 1897—home of the Library of Congress. A White House tea followed, again hosted by Edith, with Alice once more the center of attention and her father still absent. “All most interesting,” Franklin recorded. On Saturday night he attended a reception given by the Austrian ambassador, and he mingled with numerous members of the diplomatic corps. Sunday brought more of the same. “On the whole it was one of the most interesting and enjoyable three days I have ever had,” Franklin wrote Sara.
     

     
    T HIS WAS SAYING a lot, for Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed nearly all his college days. “On Saturday I went to Beverly to the Beals, played golf that day, and on Sunday went to the Sohier’s camp on a neighboring lake for the day, returning here Monday a.m.,” he wrote from Cambridge on a Wednesday in October of his junior year. “Now (11 p.m.) I am just back from a dinner of the Massachusetts Republican Club, of 1,000 people, at which Secretary Shaw of the Treasury and Senator Lodge made most interesting addresses. Mr. Beal gave me the ticket, and it was the chance of a lifetime.” Perhaps Mr. Beal, the father of one of Roosevelt’s Harvard classmates, wished to make a Republican out of his son’s friend; perhaps he simply wanted to do a favor for the budding journalist.
    Roosevelt joined several of the clubs that ruled Harvard’s extracurricular universe. The Porcellian Club, the most exclusive, snubbed him, for reasons he never learned. A black ball—literally—from any of the sixteen members sufficed to bar a prospective new member; Roosevelt received at least one in the critical vote. The rejection stung, the more so since Cousin Ted had been a Porcellian member. Later—during the First World War—Franklin remarked that his rejection was the “greatest disappointment of my life.” This may have revealed a lingering hurt; it also reflected the minor character of his failures till then. While he was at Harvard he certainly didn’t appear to dwell on his exclusion from the single stuffiest of the clubs but rather made do quite well with others. He was chosen for Alpha Delta Phi, known as the “Fly Club,” of which he became librarian; the Institute of 1770; the Signet Literary Society; the Memorial Society, which served as keeper of Harvard history and traditions; and Hasty Pudding, the student theatrical group.
    He didn’t exactly ignore his studies. His courses included a full round of English, history, and government, as well as the odd philosophy and fine arts class. He passed them all, without distinction. And because he had taken several college-level courses at Groton, he completed the requirements for his bachelor’s degree by the end of his third year.
    But he didn’t dream for a minute of skipping his fourth year, which he expected to be his time of social glory. In the autumn of his third year he was elected assistant managing editor of the Crimson, and in the spring managing editor. He could reasonably anticipate, given the paper’s traditions, making president, or editor in chief, in his fourth year, if he stayed in school. When he took his summer vacation in 1903 in Europe, on a tour of the Swiss Alps, he carried along the previous year’s editorials and read them with an eye to