Neither Franklin Roosevelt nor anyone else at the Groton School on that night of the debate could have guessed that within only a few months America’s place in the world would change dramatically, and that the United States would transform itself from a country with no colonies to defend into an imperial power with global holdings reaching halfway around the world, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. As if to confirm America’s radically new status, Congress would annex those same Hawaiian Islands for whose independence young Franklin had so eloquently pleaded.
The new American empire was the result of the brief but significant Spanish–American War, which was triggered by a mysterious explosion on board the American battleship Maine, moored in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898. The rival press lords William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, caught up in a newspaper circulation war, jumped on the story and in banner headlines, each more lurid than the last, accused the Spanish colonial government in Cuba of deliberate sabotage and demanded war. The public ate it up. President McKinley tried his best to calm things down, vainly pointing out that the Spanish authorities denied responsibility and were offering every assistance to determine the cause of the mysterious explosion, but the public outcry, urged on by the yellow press, only grew louder.
Franklin Roosevelt was very much aware that one of the loudest voices calling for war was President McKinley’s assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt. Cousin Ted, champion of the strenuous life, and always eager to promote action, was conspicuous in his demands for a military response, but was frustrated by the fact that he had no authority to order such a response. As the public outrage continued to mount, Cousin Ted bided his time, and one day, when his superior, the secretary of the Navy, left the office to have a painful corn treated by a podiatrist, Theodore sprang into action, and under his temporary authority as Acting secretary of the Navy, sent a secret cable to Admiral George Dewey, commanding the American Asiatic Fleet:
ORDER THE SQUADRON … TO HONG KONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OF DECLARATION OF WAR YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, AND THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.
In the days that followed, the White House made no immediate call for further action, and Theodore complained that “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” But Admiral Dewey had deployed his ships as directed, and four weeks later, when war did indeed break out, he was in a position to steam into Manila Bay, wipe out the Spanish Navy, and win an almost bloodless victory. Overnight, Admiral Dewey became a national hero, and Theodore Roosevelt decided he wanted to be one too. He forthwith resigned from the Navy Department, attached himself to Army General Leonard Wood, and within weeks raised a regiment of dismounted cavalry made up for the most part of adventure-seeking cowboys. He dubbed his regiment the Rough Riders and embarked for Cuba, where he led a spectacular assault on San Juan Hill that made headlines around the country and earned him a recommendation for a Congressional Medal of Honor. With the war easily won, Colonel Roosevelt returned in triumph to America and, riding on a wave of public adulation, was swept into office as Governor of New York. The total elapsed time from the sinking of the Maine to his election as Governor of New York was just ten months. The startling speed of Theodore Roosevelt’s rise to prominence was not lost on his young cousin in Hyde Park.
From his office in Albany, Cousin Ted continued to impose himself on the national scene. After little more than a year as governor, he had excited so much attention throughout the country that the leaders of the Republican Party, who mistrusted and detested him with a passion but grudgingly appreciated his vote-getting ability, felt compelled to put him on the national ticket as Republican candidate for vice president in McKinley’s bid for reelection.
This dramatic turn of events created great excitement in Hyde Park, where Franklin was preparing to go off to Harvard for the first time. He had already made sure that university life was going to be a very different experience from Groton. No more cold showers and Spartan living. Franklin and his Groton classmate Lathrop Brown had arranged to room together at Harvard, and made a visit to Cambridge the spring before graduation and took a lease on a luxury apartment— two bedrooms, sitting room and bath—in the recently constructed Westmorly Court on Mount Auburn Street, just off campus, one of the private residences on the “Gold Coast” that catered to the upper-crust students. There they would live in comfort and style throughout their years at Harvard, protected from the noise and crowding of the university’s dormitories in Harvard Yard.
One of Franklin’s first moves after arriving at Harvard was to join the Harvard Republican Club, despite the fact that he was eighteen and still far too young to vote. In an excited letter to his parents he described his participation in “a grand torch-light Republican parade of Harvard & Mass. Instit. of Technology. We wore red caps & gowns and marched by classes into Boston and thro’ all the principal streets, about 8 miles in all. The crowds to see it were huge all along the route & we were dead tired at the end.” He was thrilled a week later when the McKinley & Roosevelt ticket handily trounced William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats, 292 electoral votes to 155.
Franklin’s entry into Harvard was shadowed by the passing of his father, still another of the events that would help define his future. The death of James Roosevelt was not an entirely unexpected event. He was seventy-two years old at the time and had been in ill health. Much of his last few years had been spent in a largely fruitless search for cures for his failing health, involving travels to various European spas and other medical treatment. But in spite of his increasing frailty, he had remained as attentive to his young son as Franklin’s much younger and more robust mother, the 46-year-old Sara.
James left Franklin a bequest of $120,000, which if handled prudently was enough to allow him to live a life of frugal independence, but he left the bulk of his estate to Sara, which combined with her Delano inheritance made her a millionaire and gave her the means to become an even more formidable factor in Franklin’s world than previously.
Harvard—and Boston—offered plenty of opportunities for an active social life, and Franklin, after the close monitoring and strict regimentation of Groton, was eager to participate, although he was not always successful. According to the journalist John Gunther, who many years later interviewed a number of Roosevelt’s college classmates, he was never particularly popular and was remembered as “a mixture of affability, marked sensitiveness, and superiority. His desire to be universally liked repelled some of his fellows, who called him ‘two-faced.’” Apparently some of the awkwardness and seeming insincerity of the Groton years still clung to him.
Another biographer, Kenneth S. Davis, suggests that Roosevelt’s off-campus reputation was equally equivocal: “In his own social circles there were a few who thought him immature for his age and circumstances and that his enjoyment of high society, his excessive enjoyment in their view, manifested this. There were girls, attracted by his lithe handsomeness and social prestige, who were put off by what they deemed an all-too-smug awareness of these on his part and by a personality that seemed to them shallow, trivial, timidly conventional beneath a superficial self-assurance. They told one another that he was a lightweight with many of the attributes of a prig.”
Such reflections would indicate that young Roosevelt still had a considerable amount of growing up to do. But then, the same could undoubtedly be said for many of his peers as well.
Following his freshman year at Harvard, Franklin and his mother, still in mourning, spent the summer in Europe along with some family friends, where they chartered a yacht to explore the Norwegian coast. During the cruise, when they steamed into the little harbor at Molde, they found Kaiser Wilhelm’s yacht Hohenzollern at anchor, surrounded by various German naval vessels. The Kaiser accepted their invitation and came aboard their yacht for tea, and later invited the Americans aboard the Hohenzollern. That European royalty would deign to mix with American tourists gives us a measure of the Roosevelts’ elevated social status.
They were still on the other side of the Atlantic when they heard the shocking news that President McKinley had been shot by an assassin but was expected to recover. Days later, as they were returning home on a liner, they learned from the pilot boat that McKinley had died, and that Cousin Ted was now President of the United States. Theodore’s sudden elevation to the White House would in time prove to be one of the most important turning points in Franklin Roosevelt’s life, and would influence his personal philosophy, his life goals, and even his choice of a wife.
At least one more event during his Harvard years would impact significantly on Franklin’s future. Harvard, at the turn of the twentieth century, had a student body of around five hundred undergraduates. The great majority—around eighty percent—lived either in the dormitories on campus or commuted from home. The remainder, including Franklin, made up the club set, the well-to-do dandies who were socially active and lived in the apartments on Mount Auburn Street or in similar digs, and who participated in the complex rituals governing the social pecking order of their peers.
The complicated process by which members were selected for the various clubs at Harvard began in the autumn of their second year, when the new sophomores first competed to be selected by the oldest and largest of the clubs, the Institute of 100. Over a period of months, the Institute offered membership to a hundred candidates who would be nominated in groups of ten, with the most desirable sophomores in the first groups, and later groups being made up of those perceived to be of lesser worth. By the time of the Christmas break, the first fifty sophomores had been selected. These included Lathrop Brown, Franklin’s roommate, but not Franklin, who was forced to go home for the holidays in an agony of suspense. He was undoubtedly greatly cheered at New Year’s to be invited to Washington to attend the most glamorous social event in the nation, the debut of his Cousin Alice, Theodore’s eldest daughter, at the White House.
When at last he returned to Harvard he learned that he had indeed been selected by the Institute of 100, “the 1st man in the 6th ten,” as he reported proudly to his mother. The immediate next step was “running for the Dickey,” a club that was a shadowy remainder of what had been Delta Kappa Epsilon, the national fraternity once prominent at Harvard, but which now served as what was known as a “waiting club.” After acceptance and a week of initiation rites, Franklin was duly elected to the Dickey, and was now ready for the final test, when candidates hoped to be selected to the most prestigious “final clubs.”
Of these, the most socially prominent was the Porcellian, and Franklin was confident that he belonged there. He had good reason to be hopeful of selection. He was a “legacy,” a candidate who deserved special consideration, because his father had been a member, as had Cousin Ted, who took great pride in the fact.
The selection process for Porcellian was secret and final. The sixteen juniors and seniors who made up the membership sat in conference, discussed each prospect in turn, and then voted for or against inviting him to join. Each member registered his choice by dropping either a white ball into the voting box, signifying a positive vote, or a black ball, signifying a negative vote. When the box was opened, a single black ball was sufficient to condemn a candidate.
No one today knows whether the vote for Franklin Roosevelt included a single black ball or more than one, and who it might have been who cast those votes. No one knows the reasons for his rejection. All that is known is that Franklin did not make it into Porcellian. Once again, he was not “one of the boys.”
It was a crushing blow to him, a disproportionately devastating disappointment that is difficult for a modern observer to appreciate. And the pain continued to hurt for years. Almost twenty years later, in 1919, he admitted his rejection by Porcellian had been “the greatest disappointment of my life.”