Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, his friends discussed plans to establish the Roosevelt Scholarships, an American counterpart to the Rhodes Scholarships. Students from all over the world would be brought to the United States for graduate study, just as the Rhodes awards annually bring men to Oxford in England. Nothing has ever come of this living memorial to FDR.
But it is an idea that deserves consideration around Harvard, for Roosevelt is the University's most prominent graduate of the 20th century. Today there is no recognition of the fact that FDR ever went to Harvard College.
To establish Roosevelt Scholarships to Harvard would serve a double purpose. Not only would this plan honor FDR, but it also means that more foreign students would come to the University, which has previously had fewer foreigners per capita than the University of Chicago and Yale.
Harvard would seem the logical place to establish Roosevelt Scholarships; it is the university with which FDR had the closest ties, and it has a strong Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Harvard alumni and non-Harvard men who revere FDR could help to build international understanding by giving the money necessary to start these scholarships.
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