In September 1901, William McKinley was assassinated and as a result, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president in U.S. history. Meanwhile in Cambridge, Massachusetts a reporter for The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s prestigious campus newspaper, broke the story that President Roosevelt was coming to campus. That reporter was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president’s fifth cousin. The Crimson would prove to be one of the earliest training grounds for FDR to hone his potent political skill. 
           
Controversial author and media baron Conrad Black describes TR’s visit to Harvard’s campus in his book Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. “The President, who was always kind to Franklin, greeted him warmly in front of hundreds of other students.” FDR later wrote a story about one of his two meetings that he had with the president during this time and that story would be just enough leverage to get Roosevelt elected as one of the editors of the Crimson.
           
Black reveals that the story of the president’s arrival was actually revealed by someone else and Roosevelt claimed that he was not aware of how or where the version of the story featuring him had come from. This form of sly political power play was Roosevelt at his best.

the Institute of 1770. None other was more prestigious at this time than The Porcellian Club.  Both his father and cousin Teddy had been members of this organization and it would be here that FDR would lose his first battle after being black balled by his peers and left out in the cold.

The future president would try vigorously to make up for the defeat by running for class marshal. He ran on a platform of reform and clearing the debris of corruption within the campus political atmosphere.  This would be a clear foreshadowing of his days as a state senator and governor of New York when he successfully attempted to destroy the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. 

With the influence he had accumulated as editor of the Crimson, Roosevelttried to bypass those that turned him down from The Porcellian Club.  Although he would lose the election for marshal in December 1903, he would go on to win victory for another office.  “A few days later, he won his first ever electoral victory by a comfortable margin, as chairman for the 1904 class committee,” according to Black

In true FDR fashion, he felt the need to carry on longer than some may have felt necessary. Armed with a Harvard degree, Roosevelt decided to stay on the scene at Harvard yard for another year, this time as a graduate student living off of the fame and adulation awarded to him as the editor of the Crimson. Known as a great manager, Black describes Roosevelt’s lasting mark on the paper. “The Harvard Alumni Bulletin considered his time as editor ‘at least mildly distinguished for the animation of his many editorials and for certain college reforms that he engineered.’”

Black essentially traces Roosevelt’s cunning political prowess from its roots. “His informal and largely intuitive understanding of the nature of political power in America, which began at Springwood, and developed at Groton, reached a much higher level of sophistication at Harvard.”

-Club Relaford Staff