America's Secret Aristocracy (37 page)

But what the system did create was sixty-seven thousand individuals who, though intensely proud of their upper-class education, have been a little shy when it comes to talking about it—except, of course, among themselves.

Meanwhile, it would seem to be a fact that, out of even the most pampered and protected of environments, certain notions of behavior—of propriety, or duty, whether spoken or unspoken—become instinctual, almost automatic responses. This is not to say that a genteel upbringing and schooling will guarantee worthwhile citizens, or even ladies and gentlemen, as an inevitable result. The American upper-class educational system has produced its share of cads and bounders, and one of the most notorious of these was perhaps Richard Whitney, who “betrayed his class” in the 1930s. After being splendidly educated at Groton and Harvard, he went on to become president of the New York Stock Exchange and, in 1938, was sentenced to Sing Sing for defrauding not only the American public and the state of New York but also his business partners and the treasury of his own New York Yacht Club. And yet even the Whitney case offered an example of upper-class values at work. While Whitney served his prison sentence, he received regular visits from the Reverend Endicott Peabody of Groton, his old school headmaster. It simply seemed to the Reverend Peabody the gentlemanly and proper thing to do for a Groton boy who had, alas, become a felon.

Groton is often cited as the most aristocratic of New England's private schools, and though it is by no means the oldest (both Exeter and Andover were founded more than a hundred years earlier), it came into existence in 1884 with excellent credentials, both social and financial. Its founder, the Reverend Peabody, was connected with a variety of old New England families, including the Lawrences and the Parkmans, as well as the Endicotts—an ancestor was Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Endicott—and Peabodys of Salem, where, it was said, even the peeping frogs in ponds on summer nights sang a chorus of “Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” The school's chief financial backer was J. Pierpont Morgan, who at the time ran what amounted to his own federal reserve system before there was such an institution. Both Peabody and Morgan had been educated at select “public
” schools in England, where Peabody's father had been a Morgan partner in London, and their intent with Groton was to create a school in America that would follow the English upper-class mode as closely as possible. Their models were such schools as Eton, Harrow, and Cheltenham, and since Peabody was an Episcopal clergyman, their goal was to educate “Christian gentlemen” and to develop “manly Christian character.” Religious services were an important part of the school's curriculum. In addition to church on Sunday, compulsory chapel services were held twice daily, in early morning and at vespers. The school's motto, created by the rector, was
Cui servire est regnare
—“To serve Him is to rule.”

The Rector, as the Reverend Peabody was always called, was a strapping, handsome six-footer with piercing eyes and a long, thin, aristocratic nose. Standing behind his pulpit in his flowing white robes, he was a commanding figure as he delivered one of his impassioned sermons on the subtleties of a Satan who could tempt a boy into the paths of unrighteousness through such a simple technique as permitting him to mouth the prayers and liturgical responses with his lips, rather than in full, strong, manly voice. But there was more to the Rector's emotional appeal than that. His goal was to make his school quite literally a spiritual extension of a well-born boy's own family. A Groton boy was intended to feel as loved and needed while away at boarding school as he would feel at home, and like the fictional Mr. Chips, the Rector referred to all Grotonians as “my boys.”

As an affectionate biographer of the Rector wrote, “It was the most natural thing in the world for him to think of his school as being simply a large family.… At the center of the big school family his own family grew and the beautiful home and family life was presided over by Mrs. Peabody, the most gracious and beautiful of wives and mothers.” Every night, the Rector and Mrs. Peabody would say individual good nights to each and every boy as he trooped off to bed, and on the foreheads of the younger lads Mrs. Peabody would bestow a kiss, along with a sweet-dreams wish.

From the outset, the Rector adopted the habit of following his boys throughout their careers and lives. He was frequently called upon to marry them (he officiated at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt) and, toward the end of his long tenure at Groton, occasionally to bury them. For fifty-six years, until his retirement in 1940 at the age of eighty-four,
and continuing until his death four years later, every Groton graduate received a handwritten letter on his birthday from file Rector—even when the list of the school's alumni had swollen to include thousands of names. Writing from the White House in 1936 to thank the Rector for his annual message, Franklin D. Roosevelt told him that he had saved every one of the birthday letters since his graduation.

On the other hand, some of the Reverend Peabody's Brahmin borrowings for Groton from the British public-school system seemed so abject as to be anachronistic. He always used British spellings, for example, of such words as
colour, honour, favour, centre
, and
realise
. Bruised knees of Grotties were treated with sticky plasters, not Band-Aids. Cheers for the school's athletic teams were not of the one-two-three-four-siss-boom-bah variety, but were hip-hip-hurrah. Some of the Rector's Briticisms drew snickers from the boys. Criticizing a messily erased theme paper, for instance, the Rector might say, “You need to get yourself a good rubber.”

At Cheltenham and Cambridge, where he himself had been educated, the Spartanness of damp and drafty eleventh-century corridors and chambers had been touted as character building, and a certain amount of physical discomfort was considered good for spiritual and moral growth. Thus, at Groton, undergraduates slept in unheated cells without doors, washed up at long communal black sinks with cold water and slabs of yellow kitchen soap, and ate meals that featured such items as cold poached cod and “sure-death hash.” Groton boys wore stiff white collars and black patent-leather pumps to dinner, and there were other rules laid down by the Rector. The purpose of these may have seemed mysterious to many of the boys. It was against the rules to walk or stand with one's hands in one's pockets. Close friendships were discouraged, and it was also against the rules to walk or sit about the school in groups of twos. (Male adolescent crushes, the Rector seemed to feel, which might lead to the vice that dare not speak its name, could this way be discouraged.)

Much emphasis was placed on vigorous outdoor exercise, and Grotonians played fives, an Etonian form of handball. “Leadership” was another of the Rector's favorite nouns, and boys were taught that to become a sixth-form prefect was perhaps the most splendid achievement a young man could hope for in his scholastic life. The British custom of “fagging,” in which upperclassmen used lowerclassmen as their
personal servants, was not allowed, but the Rector did believe that senior boys should be allowed to discipline their juniors when they misbehaved or failed to achieve that ineffable quality known as the Groton “tone.” (That tone might be defined as an air of perpetual self-assurance, combined with an attitude of distrust toward anyone who was not a fellow Grotonian.) A favorite form of punishment was known as pumping, where an errant youth was taken into the lavatory and literally pumped full of water. Over the years, there were several near-drowning episodes, where artificial respiration had to be applied, from pumpings.

All of this made the Groton School seem, to outsiders, a very peculiar place as the school moved into the twentieth century. But that was perfectly all right with the Rector. “Groton School,” wrote William Amory Gardner, one of the School's early trustees, “is perfectly incomprehensible to those who have not belonged to it,” and the Rector kept it that way through the force of his personality.

Meanwhile, in such matters as imparting actual knowledge, much less scholarship, the Rector had less interest. More emphasis was placed on godliness and cleanliness (of mind and body) and good sportsmanship. Peabody's biographer summed it up politely, saying, “He never seemed to enter wholeheartedly into the field of theory, as he always fought the idea that teaching can or should be limited to the mind alone. He was primarily a personality, interested in persons, each of whom he saw most importantly as a child of God.” Despite such pieties, the Rector turned Groton into the most openly snobbish school in America.

And yet Groton is the only private boarding school in America to have turned out two U.S. presidents, both of them named Roosevelt. This was Endicott Peabody's greatest source of pride. Again and again in his sermons the Rector stressed his belief that Groton's students composed the future leadership of the country. Public service was held up as a noble goal. His boys represented the cream of America's youth, and after Groton—and Harvard—his boys were to go forth and serve their nation with the same dedication and devotion as they gave to their daily prayers. With such dedication and devotion to God and country, Grotonians could only be expected to rise naturally into the highest ranks of government. Hadn't they harkened to the school's proud motto that to serve God was to rule?

His shining example was Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was his flagship Groton student: a man of fine family and distinguished ancestry, an American aristocrat, a bold war hero who had gone on to seek and obtain the highest office in the land and become a fine and upright and beloved president. Over and over, Teddy Roosevelt was offered up to Groton boys as their ultimate ideal. Roosevelt, in turn, had sent his two sons to Groton and made frequent trips to the school to address the students, to regale them with stories of his adventures in the worlds of the military, big-game hunting, and politics, and to provide them with solid, in-the-flesh inspiration.

The Rector once said, “If some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land it won't be because they have not been urged.” One person who obviously listened to these exhortations very closely was the young Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's distant cousin. For despite the egalitarian thrust of the New Deal, his apparent deep concern and sympathy for the poor, the blacks, the laborers, and the unemployed, and what seemed to be his determination to tax the rich out of existence, FDR was an aristocrat to the core. He had merely adopted the tactic of some of his peers by making a secret of it. He had been raised in a world that had been neatly divided between servants and masters, and it was a world he was used to and comfortable within. Writing home to his mother from Groton, and commiserating with her on the loss of a butler (Sara Delano Roosevelt perennially had difficulties keeping servants), he said, “Don't let Papa worry about it, after all there are plenty of good butlers in the world.” And when it came time for him to marry, he did not choose a woman he had fallen in love with—as his wife would learn, in time, to her sorrow. He married another Roosevelt, his own kind, because it was the familiar, the traditional thing to do. At the same time, with a relative in the White House, FDR had certainly been given a special impetus to enter politics. He was a frequent White House guest, had attended Cousin Alice's coming-out party, and had been given a firsthand taste of the pomp and privilege and perquisites and glamour that went with being president. The excitement … the power.

But, alas, for the great majority of Groton's graduates, the urgings of the Rector and the leaders of the community whom he imported as lecturers fell on deaf ears. Most Groton boys had come from families who had taught them that politics was
dirty and that politicians were not gentlemen. (Franklin Roosevelt's father believed the same thing.) In 1881, Henry Adams had told his Harvard pupil Henry Cabot Lodge, “I have never known a young man to go into politics who was not the worse for it.” Oh, there were a handful—a very small handful—of Groton-educated men who became public figures: Senators Bronson Cutting and Frederick Hale, Congressman Jonathan Bingham, Dean Acheson, Francis Biddle, Averell Harriman, and Sumner Welles, in addition to the two Roosevelts. But that is about the end of the list. Most of the other Grotonians went into family businesses, or became lawyers or bankers, or “went down to Wall Street,” where the benevolent and paternalistic J. P. Morgan—who always had a special fondness for Groton boys—usually could be depended on to find them places at his bank. After all, politics did sound like hard work—all that campaigning. And, unless one went into politics dishonestly, as most Groton boys would be loath to do, there was very little money in it. Going down to Wall Street was easier. Again, it was the traditional, the familiar, the more expected thing to do.

While the Reverend Peabody at Groton longed, perhaps naively, to have his school produce America's leaders—
Christian
leaders, it might be added—the way Eton and Harrow had for centuries turned out England's ruling class, George Van Santvoord at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, had a somewhat different goal for the school that he headed from 1926 to 1955. His concern was the development of
character
, and not so-called Christian character, either. Both the Talmud and the Koran, he often pointed out, as well as Confucius, had something to say about character. If Hotchkiss educated young men who turned out to be leaders, that was fine with him. But, to him, a leader with a flawed character was worse than no leader at all.

At the time of Van Santvoord's appointment by the school's board of trustees, this choice was considered peculiar. For one thing, though the history of the world's religions was a subject that interested him—he even taught a course about it at Hotchkiss—he was not a clergyman. He was, on the other hand, better educated than Peabody, having earned Bachelor's, Master's, and Bachelor of Letters degrees and being a graduate of Yale, a Rhodes scholar, and a winner of the croix de guerre in World War I. Tall, erect, broad-shouldered, and
patricianly handsome, with an Old Knickerbocker, Hudson Valley name, he looked every inch the American aristocrat.