In William’s junior year he reached his final hatred of Franklin Roosevelt when Roosevelt was chosen president of the Crimson. William had supposed himself secure for the place and he did not know why he had failed. He was not able to bide his disappointment from Jeremy, always quick to feel suffering in anyone else.
“Sorry, William,” Jeremy said. “You would have done a magnificent job.”
“It doesn’t matter,” William said with a grimace.
“Don’t be ashamed of feeling,” Jeremy said gently.
William allowed a few words to escape from his vast inner misery. “It seems unjust that I shouldn’t get it, and that fellow got it so easily.”
He saw Jeremy looking at him with a peculiar and pitying gaze and he averted his eyes.
“I’d like to say something to you, William, if you’ll let me,” Jeremy said after a moment.
“Well?” William heard his own voice harsh.
“Perhaps we can’t say such things to each other. We never have, somehow. Perhaps if we could we would both feel better.”
“Say what you like,” William said. He sat down abruptly at the desk and pretended to fill his fountain pen with ink.
“Roosevelt has got everything he wanted because he is warm toward everybody. He is full of a sort of — of — love, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” William said. “He is full of loose ideas, so far as I am concerned.”
“I know some of his ideas are crazy,” Jeremy admitted. “But everything else about him is so right that he can just about think as he likes.”
William dropped the pen and it fell on the floor. His gray eyes were furious under his black brows and his lips tightened. “I suppose you mean his father is rich, his mother is socially correct, they live on the right street, all the sort of things that I haven’t!”
“You know I don’t mean that,” Jeremy said. “We’d better drop it.”
They had dropped it and he was too proud to tell Jeremy that he did know what he meant. For William was beginning to know that he lacked one grace among his gifts. He could not win love from ordinary people. He excused himself by saying that it was because they felt his superiorities, his obvious mental power, his ability to do easily what others did only by effort. The superior man, he told himself, turning the pages of his Nietzsche, must always be hated by his inferiors, but even this hatred could be turned to advantage and used as a tool for further power for good.
“I must expect hatred,” William thought. “I must accept it as my due because I am not understood. What the common man cannot understand he hates.”
Sometimes he thought even Jeremy hated him. But such moments passed and he was careful to seem kinder to his friend, more quick to help him, more patient with his frailties, his headaches, his manners.
William, relentlessly remembering his defeat, was further disturbed by an editorial in the Crimson before the class elections. Roosevelt wrote:
“There is a higher duty than to vote for one’s personal friends, and that is to secure for the whole class leaders who really deserve the positions.”
These were the words of a man determined to be a liberal in spite of class and property. While the Gold Coast repudiated them, votes belonged to the many.
William never forgave Franklin Roosevelt. He had already begun to believe that the people anywhere in the world were clods and fools and now he was convinced of their folly. The Boers who fought England were clods and fools. The Chinese he remembered upon the streets of Peking were clods and fools. From now on he spoke to no one at Harvard except those who lived on the Gold Coast.
Yet he heard one day a remark that horrified him again. A pallid professor with long mustaches said these words with an emphasis too fervent for William’s taste: “The American people control their own destiny.”
William began then in earnest the study of the history and government of his own country. He perceived to his dismay that the professor’s remark was a true one. Clods and fools though they might be, the American people elected their rulers, laughed at them, despised or admired them, obeyed or disobeyed them, clung to them or rejected them. He began after that to look at the people he passed on the street with consternation and even fear. Out of ignorance apparent upon their faces, obvious in their crude speech, these men chose from among themselves certain ones upon whom they bestowed the powers of state. It was monstrous. For months William felt himself in a den of lions. He tried to talk to Jeremy, who first laughed at him and then tried to explain:
“Americans aren’t just people — they are Americans.”
William had no such reverence. What he saw beyond the Gold Coast reminded him ominously of the streets and roads of China. He had feared the common people there. Had they not risen up in all their folly against men like his father? Von Ketteler had been murdered by an ignorant clod. He remembered that dignified German, who at the Fourth of July celebrations at the American Embassy had more than once spoken to him with courtesy. The common people could rise against their betters anywhere and kill them, unless they were taught and controlled.
Yet, how to control these boisterous, independent, noisy jokesters who were the common folk of his own country? They would not tolerate a real ruler. They had no respect for those above them. They delighted to pull down the great and destroy them. Look at Admiral Dewey, a hero for an hour, whose plaster triumphal arch, designed for marble, fell to dust and was carted away by the garbage collectors! The whim of the people was the most frightening force in the world.
Upon this William pondered, knowing now his own lack of charm, that strange senseless power to attract his fellows, the charm which young Franklin Roosevelt possessed as easily as he possessed height, fearlessness, and ready laughter. Without this frail gift, William told himself proudly, he must rely upon his brains and devise a means of teaching and controlling the wild beast of the multitudes. He would lead them wisely, insidiously, charming them through words, himself never seen.
In that third year in college he wrote to his father to say that he would not come back to China. “I feel I am needed more here than there. The truth is, I am not impressed by American civilization. I intend to start some sort of newspaper, something ordinary people will read, or at least look at, and so do what I can to enlighten my fellow countrymen.”
Some day, William vowed to his own heart, he would be the editor and owner of a newspaper, perhaps even a chain of newspapers, by which he could defeat any man he disliked or disapproved. To dislike was to disapprove. Money, of course, he must have but he would get it somehow. Quite stupid men were able to get rich.
Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt did not win the Phi Beta Kappa key, and William felt assuaged when he himself was among the chosen.
Yet the college years, as they passed, were good ones. He became a member of the Cameron family and spent his vacations with them, after brief duty visits to his grandparents and his sisters. It was accepted now that William was independent and different. Henrietta was proudly silent with him, Ruth worshiped him timidly, and his grandparents tried, somewhat in vain, to treat him as an ordinary young man. They knew he was extraordinary. Even Mrs. Cameron saw that now. It was pleasant to have about her a handsome young man who knew how to dress and was always ready to do what she needed done. He paid little attention to Candace, she reflected after each vacation, and he behaved like a strong elder brother to her poor son. She introduced William to the ladies at her Christmas At Home and forgot to mention that his father was a missionary, leaving the impression that he was connected with the diplomatic corps in Peking. William did not correct her.