FDR Headed Crimson During College Years; Work on Paper Was Most Important Activity

This article is mainly based on material found in the Harvard archives, in the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, and in letters from the surviving editors who served with FDR on the CRIMSON. Very little has previously been written on this part of Roosevelt's early life.

Fifty years ago this fall Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 entered Harvard College. While an undergraduate, FDR spent more time on the CRIMSON than in any other activity. Few persons would think of Roosevelt as a journalist; yet he worked on the CRIME for three and one-half years, becoming its managing editor and president. After he had become President of the United States he said, "It was on the CRIMSON that I received my first and last newspaper training. And I must say frankly that I remember my own adventures as an editor rather more clearly than I do my routine work as a student."

Colored by years and events, the editors who worked with him today remember FDR variously as "a cocky, conceited chap with a great name but nothing much else," the best "mixer of claret punch for the semi-annual initiations of new editors," an "energetic, resourceful, and independent" person, and a man with "remarkable capacity for dealing genially with people."

Certainly none of his fellow editors ever imagined that Roosevelt would come close to the Presidency of the United States, but his record on the paper was a good one, and his associates did name him head of the CRIMSON, the first position of authority FDR ever held. While merely a CRIME candidate, Roosevelt dared to ask President Eliot how he would vote in the 1900 election. Later as president, FDR wrote the CRIMSON editorials, including one blasting the spiritless football team, another describing the Yard dorms as firetraps, and a third suggesting that the new Stadium be turned into a toboggan slide.

Roosevelt's CRIMSON career began on October 15, 1900, when he and about 45 of his classmates answered a call for candidates. FDR's first important story--eight lines long--came a few days later from Eliot. A Democratic magazine at the University had reprinted sections of an article by Eliot in which the president criticized both parties but did not say whom he supported. The Democratic publication made much of the criticism of the G.O.P. and omitted the unfavorable remarks about its own party.

Roosevelt approached Eliot to ask him how he expected to vote, not knowing the rule against candidates talking to the president. Nevertheless, FDR was able to get the story and the CRIMSON of October 29 reported that Eliot would vote for McKinley and the rest of the Republican ticket.

In February, 1901, the first group of freshmen was elected to the paper's staff, but FDR was not among them. He continued as a candidate since year candidacies were not unusual in those days. At the end of April he got the story which insured his election.

He saw in the Boston papers that his cousin, Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt '80, was in town and called to ask him when he could see him. TR said right after the guest lecture he was going to give in Government 1 the next morning in Sanders. FDR got an announcement of the lecture into the CRIMSON, and the hall was so crowded that Professor Lowell, the head of the course and the future president of the University, called the CRIMSON to ask how the paper got its unauthorized information.

In June, Roosevelt was elected to the paper along with two classmates. He made the first step up the paper's hierarchy the next winter, when he was elected secretary--a traditional sophomore post.

It was then that Nazi propaganda lies about Roosevelt's racial background could have begun. For each time a new set of officers was elected in those days a comic poster was printed playing on the names of the new men. In FDR's case it read: "For Secretary, Rosy Rosenfelt, The Lillie of the Valley."

In FDR's sophomore year there was some controversy over the moving of the CRIMSON offices from rooms on Massachusetts Avenue to the basement of the Union. As Roosevelt wrote later, "There was much fear expressed that the new quarters would take away the esprit de corps which had grown up in the old Sanctum and also that no punch-nights could be held in the Union. Both fears have proved more than groundless!"

Supervised Two Papers a Week

At the start of his junior year, FDR was elected one of the two assistant managing editors and given charge of the paper two nights a week. The papers of that period were dull and routine by the standards of today, and the papers which Roosevelt supervised appeared no different from the rest.

But, in spite of this and his late election to the paper, Roosevelt beat out all his classmates for the managing editorship in January of 1903. After a term as m.e., FDR's promotion to the presidency was virtually automatic.

Roosevelt completed the requirements for his College degree in three years, but took graduate courses at Harvard in the fall of 1903, so that he could stay in Cambridge and head the paper for a semester.

According to Roosevelt's successor as managing editor, FDR had a special talent for persuading the printers to open their forms at the last minute when some late news came in. In his term as managing editor, the biggest news stories that he had to dummy, were the plan to build the Stadium on soldiers Field, the selection of Dean Briggs as president of Radcliffe, and the establishment of the Godkin lectures. Not much can be said about his writing of news for the paper; articles were not signed.

More is known about FDR's term as president of the CRIMSON, as it was then the president's job to write all the editorials. In this period, before the editorial board was founded, the president still could not have found the job too difficult; most editorials were just a few sentences long. The managing editor may have written a few editorials, but other than that, they were all Roosevelt's. There is no question about the authorship of the best of the pieces, since they were identified as FDR's in outside newspaper stories at the time or later.

Criticized Listless Athletes

After the football team had only narrowly defeated the Carlisle Indians, FDR wrote, "They (the undergraduates) have grown somewhat weary of the slow, listless play of certain men in the line, who seem to think that their weight is a sufficient certificate of admission to membership on a University team."

FDR described the paths in the Yard, on which the University had failed to place board walks in snowy weather, as "licensed highways to the Stillman Infirmary." Another one of his editorials had a prophetic ending: "There must be many among us who, whether or not of voting age, would be more than glad to gain knowledge by actual experience of the intricacies of federal, state, and municipal politics."

Roosevelt always had an issue for which to crusade: "It is undoubtedly disagreeable for ladies under the present seating system (at football games) to be surrounded with smoke and flying ashes from tobacco which is not always of the best quality . . . it is not unreasonable to ask that a separate section be provided which ladies may enter without fear of being asphyxiated."

Yard Dormitories Not Fire-proof

FDR's most famous editorial campaign was directed at the condition of the Yard dormitories, not one of which "can make the least pretense of being fire-proof . . . What then are the facilities offered for escape? . . . The flimsy wooden staircases can certainly not be relied on for egress, and the single rope in each suite of rooms is of such character that more than one person would find great difficulty in reaching the ground without a broken neck."

The University did make some improvements in the fire-fighting equipment in the Yard dormitories and did try to decrease the danger of inadequate exits; this was one of the first campaigns that FDR won. The reforms came near the end of FDR's time as CRIMSON president, and were a climax to his career on the paper.

In later years Roosevelt always used to tell the White House correspondents that he felt on a par with them because of his CRIMSON days. Jonathan Daniels, who was his press secretary for a year, said, "Franklin Roosevelt never quite got over having been an editor of the Harvard CRIMSON." On cruises, when newspaper men got sick, he frequently offered to write their dispatches for them.

Remained Interested in Later Years

Through the years FDR kept his interest in the paper. Gardner Cowles '25, head of Look Magazine and another former president of the CRIMSON, was summoned once from Des Moines to the White House when Roosevelt wanted to size him up. With FDR leading the conversation, they spent three hours discussing only the CRIMSON.

Roosevelt's fellow editor's opinion of him is mixed; except for a die-hard or two, most of them agree that he was a "very good companion . . . with a ready laugh and a keen sense of humor." A number feel that "other men on the board at the time showed greater promise."

A final verdict of his fellow editors is that Roosevelt was no democrat during the time he was on the paper; for example, he refused to stop running the list of men who made the various clubs. The next year other editors stopped "that concession to snobbery."

Comments on FDR from his contemporaries on the paper are quite informative. Robert W. Ruhl '03, now a country editor in Oregon, reports, "I saw little of him and that little I did not like much. Before I graduated, I talked with the other editors who had executive positions and they said Franklin had a lot on the ball and the nerve of a brass baboon. And I must admit, although I never lost my original skepticism entirely, I was pleased (on a meeting later in life) by the President's cordiality and informality. The man could, if he wished, charm the birdies right out of the trees."

Arthur A. Ballantine '04, Under Secretary of the Treasury under Hoover, recalls, "there was never any doubt of Franklin Roosevelt's ability to write. When as a holdover Under Secretary of the Treasury, I came to the White House almost every day in the early days of his administration as President, I found that same skill, further developed.

More Class Instruction?

"As I watched his extraordinary career I could always see that a most useful factor in it was his CRIMSON training. There were times when I wished that Franklin Roosevelt had managed to spend more time in college on some of our excellent instruction in economics and in government."

The Rev. W. Russell Bowie '04, now a dean at the Union Theological Seminary, remarked, "He was handsome and light-hearted and apparently easy-going, not of particularly high rank in college class, quick witted and capable as a CRIMSON editor, but not extraordinary.

"Yet there were traits of his which, as one looks back on them, become significant. He had a force of personality which was latent and which subsequent occasions would call out. He liked people, and he made them instictively like him. Moreover, in his geniality there was a kind of frictionless command."

Other editors agree the CRIMSON could be called the start of Roosevelt's rise in success.

Lauds CRIMSON Training

Roosevelt's own views on the CRIMSON are probably best summed up in the last message he sent the board on the occasion of the paper's 70th anniversary in 1943: "I am sure that I voice the sentiment of all that company of happy men when I say that none of them would exchange his CRIMSON training for any other experience or association in college days.