F D R 's Early Career
N, William L.
FDR. s Early Career Franklin D. Roosevelt: the apprenticeship, by Frank Freidel. Little, Brown. 456 pp. $6. Champion Campaigner: franklin d. roosevelt, by Harold F. Gos-nell. Macmillan. ...
...From private tutor to Groton and from Groton to Harvard, Roosevelt's life was lived within a narrow circle of family and friends, all well-bred and well-financed...
...No one studying Roosevelt's career in this first decade of his public life could find much ground for predicting that he would later be known as the defender of the forgotten man and the foe of economic privilege...
...235 pp...
...He assumes that F.D.R...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann ARICH mythology surrounds the early career of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...almost invariably did the right thing and that few Americans had reason not to vote for him...
...For its creation F.D.R...
...BOYD C SHAFER is a professor of 'Jstory at the University of Arkansas...
...Fortunately for the historian, Roosevelt and his mother were historical string-savers and carefully treasured almost every documentary bit of his life from birth onwards...
...It is the story of the education and early manhood of a Hudson Valley aristocrat...
...But at Groton he was deeply impressed with the code of the wealthy Christian gentleman...
...WILLIAM L. NEUMANN teaches history at the University of Maryland...
...was busy with THE REVIEWERS A. J. MUSTE is executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...Frank Freidel is the first historian to dig deeply into this rich collection for the first volume of a projected six volume biography...
...But he also devoted at least part of one summer to settlement work among the poor in Boston...
...3.50...
...DAVID S. BURGESS, a former minister, heads the Georgia State Industrial Union Council...
...the socially-approved activities of his circle, seemingly escaping intellectual stimulation from his professors or any sustained contact with the outer world of students who came from high schools and who worked their way through college...
...Once Roosevelt entered politics in 1910, the similarity between his outlook and that of his wife's uncle, Theodore, increased...
...One key to this change is Louis Howe, the newspaperman who guided F.D.R.'s career from 1912 untiLhe achieved the Presidency...
...What sets out to be a critical analysis becomes little more than a panegyric, chiefly of value for its capsule summaries of ten Roosevelt campaigns...
...wrote, with his wife, "India Afire...
...JOHN A. BAKER, on the Washington staff of the Farmers Union, recently returned from Korea...
...Whatever the extent to which Roosevelt escaped the confines of his class background, Freidel shows that Howe must be given major credit for creating a public figure whose vote-getting abilities were to exceed even those of his famous namesake...
...MORTON A. KAPLAN is a political scientist now engaged in research at Princeton's Center of International Studies...
...Harold Gosnell, in Champion Campaigner, attempts the interesting task of studying the techniques by which F.D.R...
...won over the voters from 1910 onwards...
...HARRIS WOFFORD, JR...
...As Teddy worked for war with Spain in 1897-98, so Franklin as Assistant Secretary of the Navy wished for his country's entry into World War I by the fall of 1916...
...as early as 1915 became a willing accomplice of the big-navy advocates in their drive for all-out preparedness...
...could not equal the animal vigor of Teddy and lacked his genuine intellectual drive, there was a close parallel between their attitudes towards reform and their belligerent nationalism...
...At Harvard F.D.R...
...While the picture of Roosevelt's Presidential years will continue to shift with the tides of history, little will ever be added to the story which Freidel presents of Roosevelt's career down to 1919...
...himself was in part responsible, since he enjoyed the anecdotal reconstruction of his past into one more befitting his later political role...
...Impatient with his boss, Josephus Daniels, F.D.R...
...While F.D.R...
...Today these materials are enshrined in the Hyde Park Library for posterity...
Vol. 17 • April 1953 • No. 4
