Early Life
John Aspinwall Roosevelt was the youngest child of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. His siblings were Anna E. Roosevelt, James Roosevelt, Elliott Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.. Roosevelt grew up on the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York and attended preparatory school at Groton School.
John and his next oldest sibling, Franklin Jr., were much closer to their mother than the three older Roosevelt children had been. This was in part because by the time they were born, she was more comfortable in her role as a parent. However, others contend that as a result of his father's disability, "John had grown up with less emotional connection with his parents than any of the others."
By family consensus, John was the son least like his father, which reflected itself politically as well as in many other aspects. James Roosevelt wrote that he "had the smoothest, least exciting life of all of us." "The youngest, he was also the least close to father." And, he was "the most thoughful and businesslike of us."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio, which confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, when John was five years old. Conscious of her husband's disability and determined that the younger children should not miss out on the sports and physical activities that their older siblings had enjoyed, Eleanor Roosevelt learned to swim and skate. She also took John and Franklin Jr. camping and to Europe. In 1937, John was involved in a drunken brawl and an attack on the mayor in Cannes that made headlines across the world.
Of John's pre-war activities, a Roosevelt biographer noted: "When he was a junior at Harvard, FDR got him a summer job working in the forests of Tennessee for the Tennessee Valley Authority. At the end of the experience, his supervisor felt compelled to write Eleanor to say that her youngest son seemed to believe in 'the psychology of making one's way by influence and association rather than by hard work and personal achievement.'" However, most biographers agree that this judgment was actually far more appropriate for the other sons.
On the eve of World War II, alone among the sons John announced that he would seek conscientious objector status. Family persuasion ultimately changed his mind, and he served in the Navy.
Read more about this topic: John Aspinwall Roosevelt
Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)