Word: roosevelts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bush's cross-country odyssey-- from Texas to the Ivy League and back--bears a certain resemblance to the migration of Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, the first Harvard man to win the presidency in this century...
...Harvard students today may not spend as much time debating the relative social merits of the A.D. and the Fly as they did in 1903. But if you substitute student groups--which to a large extent have replaced final clubs as the cornerstone of students' identity--for the clubs, Roosevelt would feel at home. Harvard students still love a good hierarchy. And, sadly, the institutionalized pecking order of many Harvard student groups is oftentimes just as silly as the turn-of-the-century final club scene seems...
...difference is ostensibly that the hierarchies in today's student groups, publications, government simulations, and such, unlike the elitist final club scene of Roosevelt's time, are based on merit. But anyone who has ever applied for a position and seen it go to a friend or roommate of the student making the decision knows this isn't true...
...that sense, things have gotten worse. Roosevelt didn't know who rejected him from the Porcellian, but he and everyone else knew why: that person, whoever he was, just didn't like Roosevelt. No one would have pretended there was any other reason...
...Franklin Roosevelt would know better...