Freidel Sketches Roosevelt's Debt To College Life

Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04 was, like most of his Groton classmates, a rather lukewarm scholar in college, but what he derived from Harvard was of perhaps greater significance in shaping his future career than what he might have gleaned from the lectures of Santayana and James.

How to get along with other people, the pragmatism of Dale Carnegie rather than that of James and Dewey--such was the lesson of Harvard the young F.D.R. learned, Frank B. Freidel, professor of History and a Roosevelt biographer, commented in a talk last night before a capacity audience in Harvard Hall.

While gentleman's C's, the prerogative of the Social Register set in the bygone era of the Gold Coast, satisfied the youthful squire of Hyde Park, he devoted himself with "incredible energy and perseverance" to extracurricular activities, Freidel emphasized.

The teachings of Groton Headmaster Endicott Peabody and the example of his distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, according to Freidel, combined to produce in the adolescent F.D.R. a strong sense of social responsibility and a taste for the virile life. Freidel also noted Roosevelt's early concern with being well-liked and his adolescent willingness to accommodate himself to the ways of his prep school classmates in order to gain popularity.

Though stressing Roosevelt's success in manipulating his fellow students at Harvard, Freidel urged that F.D.R. was nevertheless activated by a genuine concern for people, thinking in terms of personalities rather than collective statistics.