It Wasn't So Easy for Roosevelt, Either

On a clear morning in late September 1900, a lanky young man with patrician features and pince-nez stood among the more than 500 freshmen gathered to register at Harvard. Though neither a brilliant scholar nor a talented athlete, the young man had a certain charisma about him—a classmate later described him as "gray-eyed, cool, self-possessed, intelligent [with] the warmest, most friendly, and understanding smile." The freshman had been given a strong recommendation from his Latin teacher, who described him as "a fellow of exceptional ability and high character" who "hopes to go into public life." His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and in 1933 he became the fourth graduate of Harvard College to serve as president of the United States.

Franklin's acceptance at Harvard had been taken for granted. Having attended Groton, the most socially elite of America's boarding schools, he was sure to be admitted to Harvard; in 1900, 18 of his Groton classmates (out of a class of just 23) joined him in Cambridge. There the Groton boys—with their peers from St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Milton and other leading private schools—dominated the upper reaches of campus life.

Even then, however, the children of the elite did not make up the entire freshman class. Harvard, far more than Yale and especially Princeton, took pride in the diversity of its student body. In his address to new students, President Charles W. Eliot denounced as a "common error" the supposition that "the men of the University live in rooms the walls of which are covered with embossed leather." The truth, Eliot insisted, was quite the contrary: The "majority are of moderate means; and it is this diversity of condition that makes the experience of meeting men here so valuable."

Though Eliot was downplaying the heavy representation of children of privilege at Harvard, there was a surprising degree of heterogeneity among the students. More than 40 percent of Roosevelt's freshman class came from public schools, many the children of immigrants. And of Harvard's leading feeder schools, the top position in 1900 was occupied not by Groton or St. Paul's (18 students) but by Boston Latin (38 students), a public institution that had long since lost its cachet as a school for the sons of Boston Brahmins.

Yet the Harvard that was attended by public school boys was separated from the Harvard of Roosevelt and his friends by a vast social chasm. Its physical symbol was the divide between Mount Auburn Street's luxurious "Gold Coast, where the patrician students lived," and the shabby dormitories of Harvard Yard, some of which lacked central heating and plumbing above the basement, where the more plebeian students stayed.

As the scion of a prominent family with long Harvard ties—his father, James, had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1851, and his distant cousin Theodore, then running for vice president of the United States, graduated from the college in 1880—Roosevelt fit smoothly into the Gold Coast atmosphere.

Though Roosevelt's distinguished lineage guaranteed him a certain social success, it did not free him from the need to compete for a place in Harvard's rich and highly stratified extracurricular system—a realm of energetic activity that occupied a far more central place in the lives of most students than their studies. Occupying the apex of the extracurricular life at turn-of-the-century Harvard was football, and Roosevelt dutifully went out for the team. He was joined by 142 other students—well over a quarter of the entering class. Trying out for the position of end, he stood 6-foot-1 but weighed just 146 pounds. On Oct. 13, 1900, Roosevelt—who had been a mediocre, if eager, football player at Groton—was notified that he had failed to make the team.

Within days of being cut, Roosevelt decided to try his hand at another prestigious activity—The Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper. But at The Crimson, as in football, he did not survive the fierce competition; vying for a slot among 86 candidates, he was passed over when the first crop of freshmen was selected in February.

Yet Roosevelt persisted in his efforts to make the paper, scoring a coup in April when his cousin Theodore, by then the vice president, visited Cambridge and told him that he would be lecturing the following morning in Prof. Abbott Lawrence Lowell's class in constitutional government. Franklin broke the story in The Crimson, and the following morning a crowd of 2,000 was milling about in front of Sanders Theater, trying to attend the lecture. From this point on, Roosevelt's star began to rise. He ultimately served as president of The Crimson from June to December 1903.

The Crimson valued hard work and talent, yet some of the same social cleavages that divided the campus were nevertheless visible. Remembering his days on the newspaper, Roosevelt's classmate Walter E. Sachs, later of the Goldman Sachs investment firm, recalled that he lived in a very different world from Roosevelt's. Whereas F.D.R. ate at the Groton table on the Gold Coast and went to fashionable parties in Boston, Sachs and his friends lived in the Yard and ate cheap and disagreeable food at Table 30 in Memorial Hall, which served 21 meals a week for only $4.25.

Yet Roosevelt got along with his peers on The Crimson. Though hardly a crusading president (he devoted his editorial energies to such issues as the deficiencies of the football team and the need for wider walkways in the Yard), he revealed a talent as a leader. Recalling that Roosevelt "liked people and made them instinctively like him," his classmate and successor as Crimson president, Walter Russell Bowie, observed that "in his geniality was a kind of frictionless command."