Franklin Delano Roosevelt III is a retired American economist and academic. Through his father, he is a grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and through his mother he is related to the prominent du Pont family.
Family
Roosevelt was the first child born to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. and his first wife, Ethel du Pont. He was born during his paternal grandfather Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term as president and was his eighth grandchild to be born. After his birth, his father said, "'Battling' Frank III is a beautiful baby." He has a younger brother, Christopher du Pont Roosevelt, born 1941, also from his parents' marriage. From his father's later marriages, he has two younger half-sisters, Nancy Suzanne Roosevelt and Laura Delano Roosevelt, and a younger half-brother, John Alexander Roosevelt. He also had a younger half-brother, Benjamin S. Warren III, from his mother's later marriage to attorney Benjamin S. Warren, Jr.
Education and career
After graduating from St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, Frank Roosevelt received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Yale University in 1961, his master's degree from Columbia University in 1968, and his Ph.D. from The New School. His dissertation was entitled Towards a Marxist Critique of the Cambridge School. His work primarily focused on combining Marxism and capitalism in an attempt to make modern economic systems more "fair" and less prone to the "winner takes all" scenario. In 1977, he became a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where he was chair of the social sciences faculty from 1988 to 1990 and from 1991 to 1993. In retirement, he continued to speak about his grandparents' legacies. He refers to himself as a "radical" or "alternative" economist. Rhona Free, one of his former students who is a professor of economics at Eastern Connecticut State University, was named in 2004 one of four U.S. Professors of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. In her acceptance speech, she cited Roosevelt as a significant influence, saying, "The most important teacher I ever had was Frank Roosevelt, an economics professor at Sarah Lawrence. He's much more interested in teaching than in testing and in encouraging than in evaluating. In his classes even an average student, as I was, can learn to think critically, express thoughts carefully, and view the world with an open mind." In 2004, the university awarded him the Lipkin Family Prize for Inspirational Teaching. Roosevelt was active in the Civil Rights movement. During the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Freedom Summer program in Mississippi in 1964, he was arbitrarily arrested by the Mississippi Highway Patrol while driving the civil rights lobbyist Allard K. Lowenstein across the state, but was immediately released when the police realized his identity.
