Before the Trumpet by Geoffrey C. Ward

Author:Geoffrey C. Ward [Ward, Geoffrey C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7334-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

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1. Another wealthy Hyde Park boy who attended Groton some years after FDR had moved on recalled how hard it had it been for him to adjust to the school. “Life on an estate,” he told me, “was the most abnormal way in the world to grow up. Imagine it for yourself: always having maids and governesses, never seeing the inside of a public school, knowing no one else in town, unable to cope with the tough, real world outside. It’s a wonder how any of us grew up half sane.”

Confidential source.

2. His later personal letters—thousands of them written over forty-five years—are almost equally bland, revealing as little as possible of the emotional life of the man who moved the pen. Even most of those intended for his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt once admitted, were just “letters to be letters.”

3. The rector was nothing if not impartial about pumping. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was pumped twice with Peabody’s approval, just three weeks before his father was sworn in as Vice President of the United States; and his own son, Malcolm Peabody, also once underwent the ordeal because of his allegedly poor “tone.”

4. Francis Biddle reacted much the same way. Pumping’s special savagery was entirely lost on him while at school; he was just grateful it was never done to him, and glad to be among the punishers instead of the punished. “I was not shocked by it, only frightened.… I had no sense of shame or regret, but on the contrary knew the thrill of exercising mob justice and the excitement which communicated itself to me as I struggled to be in the center of the crowd that was handling its victim.”

Source: Francis Biddle, A Casual Past, page 172.

5. His admiration for Groton athletes was wistfully adolescent. On the backs of group photographs of the football teams he carefully noted the name and weight of every player.

6. “Many-sided men,” FDR told an interviewer in 1932, “have always attracted me. I have always had the keenest interest in five men … of comparatively modern times.” They were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Theodore Roosevelt, and Count Rumford. (The last of these is little remembered today; he was Benjamin Thompson [1753–1814], an American-born genius who combined careers as soldier, statesman, essayist, scientist, and inventor and became a count of the Holy Roman Empire. The drip coffeepot is said to be one of his inventions.) All five pursued political careers while maintaining the broadest possible variety of other interests—precisely as Roosevelt himself sought to do.

Source: Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy, pages 336–337.

7. On the general topic of racial equality, turn-of-the-century Groton reflected all the contradictions of its time. The word “nigger”—to denote those who did life’s dirty work—was used without a thought. There were also “chapel niggers” who readied the chapel for daily services, and “express niggers” who wrestled trunks and delivered packages. Peabody himself, who believed “that the Anglo-Saxon race should be the predominant one for the good of the world,” invited black spokesmen such as Booker T.

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