Roosevelt Read Online Free Page A

“I would sooner be Uncle Frank, than Nephew Rosy as they have been calling Taddy!” Franklin quickly sided with the dominant majority, not the rebellious few. He was a bit contemptuous of the “new kids” who arrived at school. “The Biddle [Moncure] boy is quite crazy, fresh and stupid, he has been boot-boxed once and threatened to be pumped several times,” he reported with relish.
    If stresses and strains were concealed behind this easy adaptability, they found no reflection in Franklin’s chatty letters to his parents. “I am getting on finely both mentally and physically,” he wrote in his first letter home. He conformed fully with Groton mores—he played intramural football on a fourth-string eleven, happily endured numerous scrapes, bruises, and lacerations, cheered himself hoarse at varsity football games, sang in the choir, got into little mischief, criticized the food, and begged for goodies from home. “He strikes me as an intelligent & faithful scholar, & a good boy,” Peabody reported to the parents.
    How explain this smooth passage from home to school? Thereason in part was that Franklin found himself among boys of the same social-economic class that he had known in Hyde Park. His shift was geographical, not social. Of the other boys in his form, nine were from New York City, seven from Boston, two from Philadelphia. Blagden, Chadwick, Greenough, Peabody, Ramsford, Thayer—the names in his form, including his own, were those of wealthy, socially established families from a few centers on or near the eastern seaboard. A random sampling of Groton classes during the early years, according to one authority, showed that over 90 per cent of the boys were from families listed in social registers.
    Another reason was the Rector. Doubtless Peabody came to serve as something of a substitute for Franklin’s own father, who was entering his seventies and ailing. This remarkable headmaster seems to have put the stamp of his personality on every Grotonian, and not least on young Roosevelt.
    A large, vigorous, uncomplicated man with blond hair and an athletic frame, Peabody was thirty-nine when Franklin arrived at Groton. He was a dull teacher, a stuffy preacher, and he had little interest in intellectualism, religious or otherwise. An autocrat, he had a withering “look” that could quell the most bumptious boy. “You know,” Averell Harriman once said to his father, “he would be an awful bully if he weren’t such a terrible Christian.” When a defiant boy told the headmaster in front of the school that he had been unfair, Peabody gave him six black marks and told him that “obedience comes before all else.” Peabody believed in religion, character, athletics, and scholarship, seemingly in that order. “Instinctively he trusted a football-player more than a non-football-player, just as the boys did,” according to his biographer. He was as puritanical as his forefathers, forbidding the boys to skate on Sunday, chiding Groton alumni for their moral lapses long after they had left the fold.
    But Peabody had big virtues that dwarfed his failings. His sense of dedication and warmth of personality enveloped the whole school. He knew precisely what he wanted—to cultivate “manly Christian character, having regard to [the] moral and physical as well as intellectual development” of his charges, and he was the living embodiment of these purposes. Striding solidly through classrooms, in his blue suit, starched collar, and white bow tie, or taking part energetically in the boys’ games, he dominated the campus and personified the lusty Christianity in which he believed. The boys loved and feared him; they could not ignore him. One alumnus, otherwise critical of the Rector, said that from Peabody the boys learned determination and to be unafraid.
    Roosevelt needed this kind of example. Despite the easy transition from Hyde Park, at times he felt insecure and uncertain ofhimself at Groton. Often he feared