Midway through his third year at Columbia, Franklin took the grueling eight-hour New York bar examination and passed handily. He was immediately admitted to practice and at that point dropped his courses at Columbia and never took a degree. Twenty-two years later, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was invited to address the Columbia Law School Alumni Dinner. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, sat next to him, chatting affably. At some point Butler was overheard joking with FDR on his failure to obtain an LL.B. “You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual until you
...more
