Roosevelt Read Online Free

interest in the Hyde Park public school, but it probably never occurred to Sara to send Franklin there. The boy’s only taste of public school came one summer in a German Volksschule. His mother thought this “very amusing,” but doubted that he learned much. Franklin seemed to enjoy going to school with “a lot of little mickies,” as he called them.
    Sara herself gave the boy his first schooling. At six he went to a kind of kindergarten under a German governess at the house of some family friends nearby. Then began a succession of governesses and tutors at home. One of these, Mlle. Jeanne Sandoz, had a sense of social justice that probably influenced the boy to an extent. But her main job was to drill Franklin in Latin, French, German, penmanship, and arithmetic; a little European history was thrown in. Sara remained in active charge of her son’s education, and a governess either deferred to her wishes or left.
    But Franklin could not be schooled at home forever, and Sara had long before laid plans against the time when he would leave. The year after their son’s birth she and James had visited friends in Groton, Massachusetts, a small town forty miles northwest of Boston. These friends had given land nearby to a young clergyman, Endicott Peabody, to found a school for boys. Peabody’s idea attracted Sara. Resolving to keep his school small, he saw it as simply a large family, with himself as paterfamilias. The headmaster and the trustees—including Phillips Brooks, William Lawrence, and J. Pierpont Morgan—came from eminently respectable families.
    Sara clung to her son until he was fourteen. Although Peabody was reluctant to admit boys except for the whole six-year period, Franklin began school as a third former. His Hyde Park neighbor Edmund Rogers entered with him, and his nephew Taddy Roosevelt—grandson of James and his first wife—was a class ahead. When in September 1896 the Roosevelts deposited their son at Groton, Sara wrote plaintively in her diary: “It is hard to leave our darling boy. James and I feel this parting very much.”
    Here were the makings of a real trial—if not a crisis—for the fourteen-year-old boy. He was out, very late, from under his mother’s sheltering wing. He had been the center of attention, evenadoration, at Hyde Park; now he was but one of 110 boys. He had had many comforts; now he lived in a cubicle, almost monastic, with a cloth curtain across the doorway, and he washed with a tin basin in soapstone sinks. At home his tempo had been his own; now he had to conform to a rigidly laid out day, from chapel in the morning to study period in the evening, and punctuality was enforced.
    Every new boy at Groton faced such problems, but Franklin had others. Joining his form in the third year, he had to break through the icy crust that his classmates put up against “new boys.” He spoke with the trace of an English accent. Having a nephew older than he was a source of embarrassment; soon he was dubbed “Uncle Frank.” Moreover, Taddy was a “queer sort of boy”—a reputation that could easily spread to a relative. Franklin, in short, was a trifle unorthodox, and unorthodoxy at Groton could encounter harsh penalties at the hands of the older boys. One of these penalties was the “bootbox”—being shoved forcibly, doubled up, into a small locker, and being left there. Another, also permitted by the faculty, was “pumping”—sixth formers would call out the name of an offender in study period, drag him quailing and shaking to a nearby lavatory, bend him face upward over a trough, and pour basins of water over his face and down his throat until he went through the sensations of drowning.
    But Franklin Roosevelt was never bootboxed, never pumped—and he won the Punctuality Prize his second year. He got few black marks from his masters; indeed, he was almost relieved when he did, “as I was thought to have no school-spirit before.” If the boys called him Uncle Frank,