Roosevelt Read Online Free Page B

that he would not pass examinations. He submitted a story to the school magazine; “there is precious little chance of its being accepted,” he wrote home.
    Actually, Franklin’s occasional feelings of inadequacy were not without cause: he had much to feel inadequate about. Despite his excellent tutoring at home as a child and his oral facility, his grades in his first years at Groton averaged about C (D was failing), and in the later years he brought them up barely to the B level. Despite his enthusiastic participation in football, baseball, hockey, golf, tennis—Peabody required group sports for all boys and merely tolerated individual sports—he was distinguished in nothing but the “high kick.” In this he set a school record—significant only because his successful kicks of over seven feet meant landing painfully on his left side and arm, and suggested an intense drive on Franklin’s part to excel in some arena.
    Franklin’s life at Groton followed an inexorable routine: chapel and classes took up the morning, sports the afternoon, and chapel and study hall the evening, until the boys, all in Eton collars, blue suits, and pumps, filed past the Peabodys, shook hands, and said good night. Autumns were filled with football excitement; then came the Christmas season, with the unforgettable reading of Dickens’s Christmas Carol by the Rector’s father. In winter the short afternoons were taken up with coasting, tobogganing, and skiing. With spring came boating, swimming, golf, and drilling for the Memorial Day parade. Absorbed in this routine, Groton had little interest in the outside world. The dramatic events of 1898, however, broke through with a thunderous roar. Franklin was immensely excited by the war with Spain. Indeed, he and two boys planned to decamp from Groton in a pieman’s cart and enlist, but at the crucial moment he came down ingloriously with scarlet fever.
    At vacation time, a Grotonian later recalled, the boys reacted to the close, monastic life of the school like sailors taking shore leave. But not Franklin. If he got into escapades, or even mischief, there is no hint of it. During short vacations he joyously threw himself back into the life of Hyde Park. Summers he spent usually at Campobello, where his greatest pleasure was in sailing his twenty-one-foot sailboat, New Moon, which his father had given him. He still showed little interest in girls. While he duly observed the social amenities, he spent a good deal of time evading certain girls whom he called “pills” or “elephantine.”
    As the four years at Groton came to an end, Roosevelt was showing more maturity and assurance. He had gained more independence from his mother, who had frequently visited him at school. His schoolwork improved, he became a dormitory prefect and manager of the baseball nine. Some of his schoolmates considered himself-assertive and quarrelsome. Others liked him strongly; one remembered him as “gray-eyed, cool, self-possessed, intelligent,” with the “warmest, most friendly and understanding smile.” But there is evidence that Roosevelt did not consider himself a success at Groton. He did not win the prized position of senior prefect, and he felt bitter toward the Rector for his “favoritism” in choosing others. In his senior year he still patronized the “new kids,” but he himself was a tall, gangling youth with pince-nez and with braces on his teeth.
    “He was a quiet, satisfactory boy,” the Rector summed him up many years later, “of more than ordinary intelligence, taking a good position in his Form but not brilliant. Athletically he was rather too slight for success. We all liked him.”
    What influence did Groton have on Roosevelt as a future politician? The question takes on special interest because Peabody made much of his eagerness to educate his boys for political leadership. Himself a graduate of Cheltenham and Cambridge, he was impressed by the fact that the English public ( i.e.,