170 ChaPter^4
job was to rescue it without resorting to an alternative economic or political
system, and also make it stronger and less likely to crash again. Though he
did not use the phrase, he surely would have agreed with Hoover about the
problem of “damn greedy” Capitalists, and so he set about to fix, reform, and
regulate the system more than any government ever had before—in order to
save it.
FDR was born into wealth. In the 1830s, a man named Warren Delano
became rich as a narcotics trader in China during the so-called Opium Wars.
Delano’s daughter, Sara, later married a wealthy neighbor, James Roosevelt,
who had made money in railroads and coal and had invested profitably. In
1882, while living on the family’s luxurious estate in Hyde Park, New York,
they had a son and named him Franklin Delano, after his grandfather.
Roosevelt’s family hired tutors to home school him, and then sent him to
Groton, perhaps the most elite preparatory school in America, between 1896-- At Groton, FDR attended a talk given by Vice-President Theodore
Roosevelt, a 5th cousin, and this motivated him to want to become a public
figure, a politician. After prep school, FDR went to Harvard and graduated
FIGuRE 4-1 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inauguration at the u.S. Capitol