America's Secret Aristocracy (38 page)

At the same time, he believed in common sense. “In fact,” he would say with a little sniff, “I've never understood why it's called
common
sense, because to find anyone using it is quite uncommon.” If a distinction can be made between commoner and aristocrat, then Van Santvoord believed in aristocratic sense. When one of his students came to him with a problem, his usual response was, “Well, what do
you
think?” Or, “How do
you
think this problem should be handled?” On the subject of morality, he often said, “One way to decide whether an act is moral or immoral is to ask yourself what the world would be like if everybody did it.”

The Hotchkiss School first opened its doors in 1892, the gift of Mrs. Maria Bissell Hotchkiss, a former schoolteacher whose late husband, Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss, had made a fortune as a munitions manufacturer. Among Mr. Hotchkiss's inventions had been one that perfected the machine gun, and Mrs. Hotchkiss may have wanted to donate a school for boys to atone for the many young male lives her husband's device had dispatched in wars. Before George Van Santvoord's arrival, Hotchkiss had been a school much like other prep schools in New England of the era: a school for the pampered sons of the rich.

But Van Santvoord decided to change all that, and he was immediately branded—by trustees, alumni, faculty, and students alike—as an iconoclast, a radical, a shatterer of sacred traditions, even a bolshevist. One of the first things he did was to abolish the practice of hazing new boys. Up to then, the lowerclassmen had been ruled despotically—often savagely—by members of the senior class. When speaking to seniors, new boys were required to call them Sir, and then were only to speak when spoken to. Among the rules set down by seniors for new boys were:

No whistling

No loud ties

When walking down corridors new boys are always to keep elbow or finger touching wall furtherest from windows

Keep out of corridors except on business

As much as possible keep out of sight of Seniors

Violations of these rules could lead to brutal corporal punishment
. All this was outlawed by Van Santvoord. Also outlawed were the fraternities and secret societies that, in such schools as Groton and St. Paul's, had taken such a firm grip on student life that they were completely beyond administrative control. Prior to Van Santvoord, the school had placed much emphasis on athletics. Students had been selected for brawn as much as brain, and alumni were horrified at George Van Santvoord's announcement that sports were to be downplayed in favor of more intellectual activities. Saturday nights at the school had been traditionally given over to movies. Van Santvoord decided to vary this fare with periodic piano or violin concerts and readings from visiting novelists and poets, including the “controversial” Vachel Lindsay. He discovered that the school had a cache of reasonably good paintings, and art and sculpture exhibitions were displayed in the corridors. Boys were encouraged to decorate their rooms with paintings rather than the customary pennants and pinups.

Under the Van Santvoord regime, the school added its own infirmary and its own full-time physician. The school library more than doubled its number of volumes and included the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, writers whose thoughts had been considered “dangerous” to well-born American youths. When asked by a worried alumnus whether some of his students might be being exposed to “improper books,” Mr. Van Santvoord replied that he was more interested in dealing with improper fractions. His own personal store of knowledge was formidable. He was scholastically equipped to teach—and often did—courses in Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, English, and history, as well as comparative religions. Though he had never formally studied it, in his spare time he taught himself Russian. He could converse knowledgeably about Confucius and Mencius and Lao-tse, as well as on the great violin makers Guarnieri, Amati, and Stradivarius. Once, when asked by a student if there was an encyclopedia handy to look something up, Van Santvoord replied coolly, “What is it you want to know?”

Though the Sunday services in the school's chapel were basically Church of England, Mr. Van Santvoord had a broader, more ecumenical outlook. He frequently invited rabbis, priests, and clerics from other Protestant denominations, as well as lay speakers, to visit the school and deliver the Sunday homilies. He occasionally took the pulpit himself to talk
about whatever was on his mind and encouraged members of his teaching staff to do the same.

In terms of teaching, Van Santvoord once remarked that he cared less about whether a student knew the dates and generals of the War of 1812 than whether the student knew why that war was fought. In teaching English, he felt that it was less important for a boy to know how to parse a sentence than to be able to speak and write the language gracefully and correctly. In other words, he had the revolutionary notion in private-school education that a young man should be taught to
think
.

In manner and bearing, Van Santvoord was aloof and somewhat distant, though the faint traces of a smile usually hovered tentatively about the corners of his mouth, and when truly pleased, he fairly beamed. Still, he frightened many boys and often offended parents—doting mothers in particular. When they came to him with trivial questions about their sons' progress in school, he gave them short shrift. Their progress in school, he implied, was his business, not theirs. He particularly disliked parents who were divorced or separated, feeling that these couples had abandoned
their
job—raising a son—before they had finished it. Once, after expelling a boy and learning that neither parent was available to collect their son (a chauffeured car was being sent instead), he announced that such parents didn't deserve to have their son back, and the boy was reinstated in the school. Outspoken, a touch autocratic, regal but usually fair, he quickly earned the nickname that would stick to him throughout his thirty-year Hotchkiss career: the Duke.

His school, the Duke used to say, had only one rule, and that was “Be a gentleman.” How he defined what a gentleman was he did not say, but what a gentleman was usually became clear when you discovered what a gentleman wasn't. A gentleman didn't cheat. He didn't lie. A gentleman wasn't petty. A gentleman wasn't intolerant of others' shortcomings. A gentleman wasn't a whiner, wasn't a gossip, wasn't a boor, wasn't inconsiderate of others' feelings. Once, in a discussion of what the most serious of human crimes might be, he said that he felt the worst was deliberate cruelty. But a close second, he added, was boredom.

The Hotchkiss curriculum was both loosened and expanded under the Duke. If, for example, a boy could pass the examination for French I, he was not required to take that course
and could move directly on to French II. A teacher was hired to teach art and art history, another to teach music and music appreciation, and still another to teach drama. Though alumni moaned that the school was teaching “sissy courses,” the Duke remained unfazed. It was clear that, in his opinion, a gentleman was a man of taste and culture. He offered prizes for the most tastefully decorated dormitory rooms, which, he made clear, did not mean the most expensively decorated.

In the winter of 1945 a young teacher, recently hired by the school, chose to commit suicide in his campus apartment by hanging himself with his bathrobe cord. When his body was discovered long after lights out, the entire school was awakened by the sounds of ambulance and police sirens and the lurid flashing of red and blue bubble lights. The next morning, since the school was agog with what had happened, the Duke felt it necessary to address the situation at the students' daily assembly in the chapel. The expression on his face was one of extreme distaste, and his remarks were very brief. Obviously, some sort of standard had been betrayed. It was clear from his icy look that he disapproved of suicides in general, and also that he found the young teacher's choice of venue unpardonable. That was the worst sin—to commit such an act within the confines of a school for boys whom he had been employed to teach and guide. The Duke, however, said none of this, while conveying it all in his eyes and in his voice: overwhelming disappointment that a man he had counted upon to be a gentleman had turned out not to be one after all. What he said, after making a few routine announcements, was this: “I am sure you have all heard by now that Mr. __________ chose to take his own life last night. I do not know why. He came to me yesterday afternoon with some problems that didn't seem to me terribly important. I suppose one way to think of this is that there are interesting novels, and interesting short stories. Mr. __________ chose to make a short story of his life.”

Be a gentleman! Oh, there were other rules, most of them sensible. Drinking and smoking on the campus were grounds for expulsion. So were swimming in the lake at night and accepting rides in automobiles from anyone who was not a faculty or family member. Jackets and ties were required in classrooms and in the dining room, and there were some quaint exceptions to this dress code. On hot days, for example, boys would be permitted to remove their jackets in the
classrooms but only provided that they were not wearing suspenders, which the Duke called galluses. But otherwise the only duty was to that unwritten code.

“To be a gentleman, to be a person of character—that is the most important thing we can teach you here,” Van Santvoord often told his boys. In his notes and in his office sessions, the Duke kept stressing character; how we must always be on guard that we do and say only those things that are truly worthy of a gentleman—regardless of whether anyone finds out or we get caught. We owe it to others, the Duke wrote, to do what is truly right. And, above all, we owe it to ourselves. For only that way can we truly live with ourselves in peace. A gentleman was defined by his strength of character.

Though he never came right out and said so, George Van Santvoord was emphasizing the true standards of a true aristocracy—standards of cultivation, of intellect, of duty, of generosity of spirit, standards of doing one's best. The fact is that out of schools like Groton and Hotchkiss, out of even the most hothouse-seeming notions of how the children of the American rich should be educated, would emerge people who, when the chips were down, would manage to rise to occasions and do the things that were expected of them. It is as though this instinct had been somehow absorbed by osmosis from the attitudes of parents, or grandparents, or teachers, or a combination of all these influences. It is as though service in a time of need were an almost atavistic response, the way an English gentleman will sit for hours waist-deep in the icy waters of a duck blind on the chance of bringing down a single bird, not because he enjoys it so much but because his family and friends all do it, have always done it, and it is the thing that, if one is an English gentleman,
one does
.

“Where did it come from, I often wonder?” mused the late Mr. Wilmarth S. Lewis, Yale alumnus ('18), Horace Walpole scholar, and gentleman farmer of Connecticut. The subject of Mr. Lewis's musings was his adored wife, the former Annie Burr Auchincloss, one of the most gently bred, gently spoken, and gently featured of women, whose chief preoccupation and talent had always appeared to be tending her extensive flower gardens, taking cuttings, and creating hybrid roses. And yet, for all her apparent delicacy, she had emerged during World War II as something of a heroine. Mrs. Lewis had had, as her wondering husband explained it, “the most
restrictive, blindered sort of childhood,” raised in New York by nurses and governesses, privately tutored and schooled, shielded from such realities as poverty and crime and mortality, never permitted to forget that she was a Burr. Her education had ended, in the manner of young women of her day and social class, at a finishing school—in her case, Miss Porter's, at Farmington, Connecticut, a school many girls attended accompanied by private detectives serving as bodyguards, and a school so discreet that the young Gloria Vanderbilt was asked not to return because it was felt that her presence generated “too much publicity.”

At Farmington, young ladies were expected, if they did not know how to do so already, to learn to play tennis, to curtsy, to pour tea, to remove the finger bowl
with
the doily and place these at eleven o'clock before separating the dessert spoon and fork. Girls were not permitted to wear high heels because of Miss Porter's arcane belief that high heels damaged a woman's child-bearing ability. A bit of art, a bit of music, a bit of American history, and a bit of French were taught for good measure. The school also employed a riding mistress and arranged for stables for the saddle horses that some girls might wish to bring along with them. The school's greatest honor was for a girl to be asked to help carry the daisy chain.

And yet, despite this swaddled upbringing and an education that was insular to say the least, no sooner had the first Japanese bombs fallen on Pearl Harbor than Annie Burr Lewis was galvanized into action—volunteering for Red Cross work, driving an ambulance in France, changing tires and spark plugs, caring for the sick and wounded, and winding bandages, much of this activity behind enemy lines.

Where had this extraordinary ability come from, her husband wondered? Surely not from Miss Porter's School. Might he be suggesting, Mr. Lewis was asked, that there were such things as “American aristocratic values” that sprang to the fore in times of crisis—an intuitive, inherited knowledge that when service is needed from one, one must serve, and that when duty and country call, the dutiful and patriotic must respond? Would this account for his wife's volunteer service in the war?

Mr. Lewis looked briefly alarmed at this suggestion. Then,
lowering his voice, he murmured, “Oh, yes, of course—of course there are. But one isn't supposed to talk about such things. Once you mention them, then the hackles begin to rise.…”