Roosevelt’s Upbringing, Character and Background.

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Roosevelt's Upbringing, Character and Background.

For this question I will split it up into 3 main areas and analyze each separately. Roosevelt's upbringing, his background and his character. After analyzing each section of his life I will decide if he would have found it easy to understand ordinary Americans.

I will start with Roosevelt's upbringing and in what ways it may have hindered his understanding of ordinary Americans. A main factor in his upbringing was that he was from an upper-class family and so would have lived in luxury. This would have made him believe that most people lived like him and had all the advantages he had. This belief caused him to lose elections early in his political career. As the Roosevelt family was very rich they had many trips to Europe and stayed in expensive resorts. A lot of time in Roosevelt's early years were spent in Europe and this meant that he was a long way form ordinary Americans and so making it harder for him to understand them.

Roosevelt had a private tutor until he was 14, this meant that it was very unlikely that he left his house much and defiantly would not have socialized with people of other classes. His private tutoring made him very bright and he assumed that everyone was as bright as he was. This caused problems in his early political career. Once Roosevelt was 14 he went to Groton school in Massachusetts. This school was modeled on the great public schools in England where wealthy young men were educated. Roosevelt now socialized with others of his own class but not with those of lower classes, as Groton was a fee-paying school for only the very rich. This would have made it very difficult for him to associate with those of lower classes. An example would be he would not understand a working class mans constant need for money as he and all of his friends had more than they needed. In 1900 Roosevelt entered Harvard. Harvard was a University for the elite and even though Roosevelt's record was undistinguished there he would have been spending all of his time with the cleverest and richest young men in the country. Again in his education he was not associated with the lower classes.
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I will now look at how Roosevelt's upbringing helped him. Roosevelt's family had a tradition of helping the less fortunate. This would have introduced Roosevelt to the realities of what life was like for ordinary Americans, even if this were only for short periods of time or from a distance. Roosevelt lived in the country when he was very young and so he knew some of the problems faced by people in the country. Later on he moved into the city and so would have known the problems faced by city-dwellers. The combination of the knowledge of both ...

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