Tucked into a corner of B-entryway in Adams House’s Westmorly Court is the ornately decorated former room of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Class of 1904. Stepping into the Victorian architecture of Adams House in and of itself evokes a bygone era, but the FDR suite, replete with reconstructions of each room, is a genuine blast from the past. In 1900, Roosevelt and his Groton classmate Lathrop Brown visited Cambridge and chose to rent rooms in the newly constructed Westmorly Court, part of the so-called Gold Coast dorms along Mt. Auburn Street. The pair chose a two bedroom suite which cost the modern equivalent of about $13,000 annually.
At the time, this prodigious sum would have bought a laundry list of amenities including daily maid service, doormen, breakfast in bed, and access to the school’s largest private swimming pool complete with palm trees and a river god installation sprouting hot water. Roosevelt and Brown lived in the room for four years and decorated it extensively with stolen signs, Groton memorabilia, and personal effects. In 2008 the room underwent an extensive reconstruction process based on significant archival research, ceasing all undergraduate ability to reside there. Many of the objects in the room are recreations or sourced from Roosevelt’s time period.
As a first-year, Roosevelt joined the Republican Club to support his cousin and Harvard Class of 1800 graduate Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt’s vice-presidential campaign, inspiring comparisons from his classmates when sporting Theodore’s classic pince-nez and shouting ‘Bully!’, a common exclamation by Theodore meaning ‘wonderful’. A few months into his first year on campus, a scandal arose involving another of FDR’s cousins at Harvard, James Roosevelt “Tadd” Roosevelt Jr. Descended from the Astors on his mother’s side, Tadd decamped from Harvard after his freshman year, married an alleged prostitute Sadie Messinger, and settled in an Upper West Side apartment in New York. The shock of the scandal allegedly led to the heart attack and death of FDR’s father and Tadd’s grandfather, James Roosevelt, after he disowned his grandson.
Roosevelt’s time at Harvard following his first-year was spent engaging in numerous extracurriculars and social activities that will seem familiar even today. He rowed intramural crew and served as president of the Crimson. He also served as a cheerleader and usher at football games. From this suite in Westmorly Court, he was even plagued by a regular modern complaint: the Lowell Bells. After a 1933 hoax in which undergraduates attempted to congratulate Roosevelt on the dedication of the bells in his name, “Strictly between ourselves, I should much prefer to have a puppy-dog or a baby named after me than one of those carillon effects that is never quite in tune and which goes off at all hours of the day and night! At least one can give paregoric to a puppy or a baby.”
One room that still possesses its original furnishings is the bathroom. Pictured here is the original tub, fixtures, floor, and woodwork. Out of frame is the original toilet and sink.
This Ivers and Pond upright piano dates back to 1898, bought by Roosevelt and Brown to help them practice for the freshman Glee Club. Atop the piano is an original portrait of a Gibson Girl and Johnny the Bobcat pinning down Eli the Quail. On the right is the room’s entrance and on the left is Brown’s room.
FDR’s bedroom is complete with an Eastlake bed, which was a popular choice for the time. Most of the wall decoration revolves around traveling and ornithology, passions which were developed by Roosevelt in his childhood years spent across both Europe and the United States.
The period football on top of the leftmost cabinet is smaller and shaped differently than the modern football. In 1906 when the forward pass was added to the game the football was made larger and thus easier to throw. Proposals under consideration to increase the safety of the game included widening fields or increasing the forward pass, and the recently constructed Harvard Stadium could not be widened. Thus Harvard lobbied strongly for the addition of the forward pass.
The wall displays the Harvard 1904 flag, a Class of 1904 picture (right), a view of Harvard Yard in 1896 (center), and poster from the Hasty Pudding Show in 1904 (left).
Even at Harvard, Roosevelt’s post-graduate career breathes rarified air, being one of the five presidents who attended Harvard College. Despite this impressive professional path, Roosevelt received primarily ‘gentleman’s C’s’, averaging a C- on his study card. While Roosevelt returned regularly for reunions following his graduation and spoke at both Commencement and Tercentenary exercises, in the years following his death Harvard kept him at arm’s-length. Until the establishment of the FDR Foundation and Suite, there existed no lasting memorial to Roosevelt at the school.
In contrast to this, President John F. Kennedy ‘1940 maintained a close relationship with the school while he was president. While visiting Harvard to campaign for his economic reform bill which aimed to revitalize so-called ‘distressed areas’, Kennedy was greeted in the yard by students in Weld Hall holding signs which read “Mr. President, Weld is a distressed area!” Following Kennedy’s assassination, Harvard honored him by renaming its school of public administration.
The FDR suite thus provides an important opportunity to engage with the legacy of Roosevelt and his time at Harvard. In implementing his New Deal economic policy in the wake of the Great Depression, Roosevelt hired extensively from Harvard faculty. Roosevelt always returned requests from the class office for alumni information, and in 1939 answered the questionnaire as follows:
Your business or professional associations: Same.
What traveling have you done? About 1,000,000 miles.
What classmates do you frequently hear from or see? Flocks.
What have you written, edited, compiled, translated, or composed? Altogether too much.
What public service have you performed? President, U.S.
Tours of the FDR suite are available for Harvard affiliates upon request. For more information, please contact michael.weishan@fdrfoundation.org.
Matthew Shum ’24 (mshum@college.harvard.edu) has used FDR’s toilet and ranks it in the top 5.
Images sourced from the FDR Foundation website.