-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Right People - A Portrait of the American Social Establishment
Stephen Birmingham©1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1968
Little, Brown and Company
BostonoToronto
LCCN 68-11525
360pps. out-of-print
--[4]--
The New "'St. Grottlesex Set"
YOU can usually tell a Hotchkiss, Choate, Deerfield, Groton or St. Mark's man
about a mile away because, for the past few years, he has been wearing a
Madras plaid jacket and unpressed chino pants that ride high around his
ankles. He may be sockless, but if be wears socks they will be of the white
athletic variety. The shoes are loafers. The top button of his button-down
shirt is usually unbuttoned (not always a sign of sloppiness so much as a
sign of an outgrown shirt). His necktie may be slung over one shoulder and
hanging down his back, as though a high wind blew it there or he himself put
it there. Within the framework of this uniform, variations are possible, and
they exist from school to school. At Hotchkiss, for example, the preference
is for battered loafers, often pieced together with adhesive tape. St. Paul's
shows a fondness for loafers with a hard, jewel-like polish. A curious rule
operates. One concentrates either on the bottom part of one's appearance or
on the top. As there are about loafers, there are two schools of thought
about haircuts; they are either long and uncombed or short and slicked.
Shoulder-length locks, however, hiphugging bell-bottoms and flowered Tom
Jones shirts are seldom if ever seen. Carnaby Street, which has made its
presence felt in public high schools across the country, has yet to have much
impact on the great private boarding schools of New England where, in ways
both subtle and direct, young men are reminded that they are the future
leaders of America.
Since there is a fairly recognizable prep school look, it is assumed that
there is also a prep school personality and a prep school frame of mind. In
the outside world of his contemporaries -boys who attend public schools, and
girls as well the "preppie" is not always an object of admiration. He has
long been distrusted by all but other preppies. He is brushed off as a "rich
kid" going to a rich kids' school. He is called a snob. His virility is
suspect. He is considered undemocratic and possibly even un-American. When he
gets to college, he and his prep school friends will tend to form a group of
their own. The more select fraternities and clubs will appear to favor the
prep school boy. Adult critics of prep schools continue to allege that they
are breeding places of the most destructive sort of social snobbery, of
prejudice and bigotry, of arrogance and false values. In fact, it is ironic
that today, when a prep school education is demanded or dreamed of by more
parents for more children than ever before, when competition for entrance has
never been stiffer, the New England prep school as an idea continues,
among a large section of Americans, to be misunderstood if not actually
resented.
This didn't matter so much a generation ago, when the schools were small,
isolated, tucked away in the green New England hills, loved and understood by
those who knew them and ignored by those who didn't. But now, with so much
emphasis on a boy's getting into college, particularly a good college and
preferably an Ivy League college, the prep schools are very much in the
national consciousness. Prep schools often seem uncertain how to cope with
their new importance. Prep school administrators have begun to worry about
the prep school "image.
There is worry about the very phrase "prep school." Because such schools have
always been considered college preparatory schools, their officials realize
that along with the money spent on a prep school education has gone a kind of
unwritten guarantee that the student will get into the college of his choice.
A school can do its best, but it cannot offer or fulfill any such promise in
the college-hungry world of the 1960's. It has been pointed out that the prep
school education should be valued for itself, not just as a stepping-stone to
Yale or Princeton but as a "total experience," and for a while, prep school
headmasters discreetly suggested to parents of less-bright boys that the prep
school years be made "an end in themselves," without the carrot of college
held out before the donkey. But, as prep school graduates who were not
heading for college began to face the prospect of military service, this
argument lost much of its persuasiveness.
New phrases have been offered as substitutes for "prep school," but none has
taken hold. "Private school" has that unfortunate snobbish ring. "Boarding
school" is what girls go to. "Independent secondary school" is the term the
academicians favor, but it has a pompous sound and is certainly a mouthful.
Meanwhile, as the popularity and importance of the prep school have grown
and as prep schools have come to fill a place in the plans of families from
other than the upper class so have the unpleasant connotations of the
phrase. Not long ago, a British schoolmaster, Mr. Timothy Dymond Toswill of
England's Rugby School, was completing a year as a visiting teacher at ' St.
Paul's School, in New Hampshire, and with his homeward steamer ticket in his
pocket, was in a mood to speak frankly about American prep schools as he saw
them. "A bit of an anachronism, wouldn't you say?" he asked, looking across
the cultivated campus of the school. "Still, if you believe in the capitalist
system, which I do not, I suppose it's better for you Americans to spend your
money sending a boy to a school like this one rather than on one of your
hideous motorcars." A group of St. Paul's boys strolled by, wearing blazers
of the school's two boat clubs, Halcyon and Shattuck, and school ties.
Nearby, from a flagpole in the center of the school, swung an oar that had
been raised shortly before, with full and solemn ceremony, by the captain of
the club that won the Championship Meet. With a very British downward curl of
the lips, Mr. Tosswill said, "You're awfully keen on traditions here, aren't
you? Traditions which we at Rugby, a somewhat older institution, would regard
as laughable."
It is easy for an Englishman to tease America particularly when it comes to
a boys' school and its traditions. Many of the traditions, like a number of
the schools themselves, were flung together in the beginning. No prep school
would be having image problems today if it were not for this fact and if, in
the beginning, such schools as St. Paul's, Groton, Choate, Hotchkiss and
such non-New England (but still "New England-type") schools as Lawrenceville
in New Jersey, Hill in Pennsylvania, Episcopal High School and Woodbury
Forest in Virginia had not been created to fill quite a different need from
the one they are prepared to fill today. The schools are now trying to live
down the specific things they started out to be.
It was natural, in the years following the Civil War, when America's great
fortunes were being made, that the fortune makers and their wives should
begin looking anxiously to England for cues as to what to do next. England,
after all, bad launched its industrial revolution more than a hundred years
earlier. The results of this look across the Atlantic became quickly apparent
on our shores: pompous manor houses in the English style sprawled across
sooty hillsides outside Pittsburgh; rooms shipped to Tarrytown from
Northumbrian castles; acres of heavy English furniture; English butlers and,
for the children, English nannies. The American upper class announced itself
born in the newly acquired "social voice," a blend of the Southern accent
and the Yankee but heavily powdered with inflections copied (but with an
American's somewhat tin ear) from the British aristocracy. It was the period
when the Anglican Episcopal faith became established as America's
"fashionable" religion, and when the first loud voices of anti-Semitism were
heard throughout the land;
A logical question, in the minds of the new American industrialist
millionaires, was how to educate their sons. And the logical system to try to
copy was that of the English "public" school. Two schools in the vicinity of
Boston led the way in attempting to create the American counterparts of such
ancient and aristocratic English institutions as Eton, Harrow, and
Winchester. They were St. Mark's (founded in 1865) and Groton (1884).
(Despite its perennial air of venerability, Groton is not the oldest but a
relative latecomer among the great New England boys' schools.) St. Paul's was
founded even earlier, in 1856, but it was not until the post-Civil War
decades that it began to have a significant enrollment. It is not a paradox,
then, but quite logical that two of the oldest and richest and largest boys'
schools in New England-Andover (1778) and Exeter (1781)are among the least
fashionable and "social" today; they were successful academies long before
dollars became the chief yardstick of social standing.
The great era of the birth of the New England prep school was also and by no
coincidence the era of J. Pierpont Morgan who, in his day, appeared to have
invented the dollar. Within ten years, either way, of Morgan's greatest
triumph, the formation of the United States Steel Company, as many as seven
English-inspired private boys' schools were founded in the United States.
Morgan himself (who, needless to say, had been educated in England) helped
finance the Groton School. The founders of other schools represented fortunes
made throughout the East notably in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and
Pittsburgh, and felt, as Morgan did, that the logical place to put their
schools was in New England. The Taft School, in Watertown, Connecticut, was
founded in 1890 by Horace D. Taft, a brother of President Taft. The Hotchkiss
School, in Lakeville, Connecticut, was opened in 1892 by Maria Hotchkiss, the
widow of the man who perfected the machine gun. St. George's School, in
Newport, was built in 1896, and owes no small debt (including a
million-dollar Gothic chapel) to the Providence industrialist John Nicholas
Brown, of the same family that established Brown University in that city. In
the same year the Choate School was established in Wallingford, Connecticut,
with Andrew Mellon and Owen D. Young among its best friends (their heirs
remain the school's best friends today). In 1901 a group of wealthy
Bostonians, including a Lowell and a Forbes, founded the Middlesex School
near Concord (and inadvertently helped give rise to the term "St.
Grottlesex," the catchall used to describe all boys from Groton, Middlesex,
and the "Saint" schools Paul's, Mark's, and George's). Deerfield, which had
been a local Massachusetts academy since 1797, was reorganized in 1902 as a
boys' boarding school by the man who is still its headmaster, Frank L.
Boyden. And, in 1906, the Kent School was founded in Kent, Connecticut, by
Episcopal Father Frederick H. Sill, and has been befriended by, among others,
several du Ponts.
Like Groton, which was established to educate "Christian gentlemen," and to
develop "manly Christian character," St. Paul's, St. Mark's, St. George's and
Kent entered the world under the firm influence of the Protestant Episcopal
Church. Taft, Hotchkiss, Middlesex, and Deerfield were established as
nondenominational schools, but they are hardly secular. Divine worship is
part of the daily life at all of them, and as one Hotchkiss student puts it,
"They call it a nondenominational service but it comes right out of the
Episcopal prayer book." Andover and Exeter, though they have certain ancient
Unitarian and Calvinist traditions, place the least emphasis on the religious
aspect of school life. At Exeter, for example, "morning chapel" consists of
reading school announcements and, according to one Exeter boy, "to call it
chapel is a gas." For many years, wealthy Catholic families sent their sons
to Protestant schools. Then, in 19 15, an important Roman Catholic boys'
school, Canterbury, was established in New Milford, Connecticut. Shortly
after, the Episcopal founder of St. George's had a change of heart and became
a Roman Catholic convert and, next, a priest. In 1926 he founded the Catholic
Portsmouth Priory School, six miles north of St. George's but, according to
old Newport residents, six miles farther away from God.
The continuing belief that prep schools are snobbish has not been helped by
the fact that, in the early days, many schools maintained subtle, unwritten
quota systems by which Jews were kept in the minority. "No more than ten per
cent," one headmaster used to say discreetly to parents who questioned the
presence of a certain name in the school's enrollment. When Jacob Schiff, who
was J. P. Morgan's peer and, at times, his better on Wall Street, wished to
send his son Morti to Groton, he asked that Morti, "as a conscious Jew," be
excused from the school's religious exercises. After an "amiable exchange of
letters" between Mr. Schiff and Groton's headmaster, Endicott Peabody, it was
decided that Groton was not the proper school for Morti. One father of a
former prep school boy recalls, some twenty years ago, tearing up a school
application that wanted to know' "Is the boy in any part Hebraic?" "It was
not only the idea of the question that infuriated me," this man says. "It was
the abominable semantics of the sentence. How could I answer it? Which part
of him was Hebraic? His left foot? His right ear?"
As the idea of the American prep school was born, with it came the prototype
American prep school headmaster. He was supposed to be tweedy, pipe-smoking,
cuddlesome, full of homilies and wisdom, with a strong hand but, from within,
exuding warmth as mellow as his tobacco; under a tough exterior, be was
supposed to possess a heart as soft as tapioca. He was, in other words, Mr.
Chips rolled into one, and, at various schools, he was known variously as
"The Head," "The Duke," "The King," and "The Old Man." He was a kind of
universal Grand Dad. In real life his name was Endicott Peabody of Groton
and, for many years, all New England prep school headmasters were merely
pallid imitations of "The Rector," as the Reverend Mr. Peabody was called by
all who knew him. (He was the model for the hero of Louis Auchincloss's
novel, The Rector of Justin.) Peabody and J. P. Morgan had much in common in
addition to being good friends. Peabody's father was a Morgan partner in
London, and the younger Peabody, after being educated at a select public
school in England Cheltenham returned to America to work in Wall Street.
His social credentials were impeccable, and he made a socially correct
marriage. When, after joining the clergy, he first dreamed of Groton and
with Morgan's help proceeded to found it, his dream was of a school that
would, quite literally, be a spiritual extension of a well-bred boy's own
family. A Groton boy was to feel as loved and as needed at Groton as he had
been on Fifth Avenue or Beacon Hill. Endicott Peabody's biographer says, "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." Like Mr.
Chips, the Rector considered all Grotonians "my boys." Every night, he and
Mrs. Peabody said good night to each and every lad before be went to bed,
and, on the foreheads of the younger ones, Mrs. Peabody often bestowed a
motherly good-night kiss.
Peabody's counterpart at St. Paul's, "The Rector" Samuel S. Drury, was almost
equally lovable. His wife, it was often pointed out, was "a Wolcott," and his
mother was "a Wheeler," and for twenty-seven years he guided St. Paul's boys
in loco parentis. To make the transition from home-family to school-family
seem less abrupt, uniformed waitresses waited on the boys in the school
dining room, serving from the left and removing from the right, just as the
family servants would have done at home. Faculty wives joined their husbands
at the tables for meals, to simulate a family atmosphere. In true
headmasterly tradition, Drury was stern but forgiving the perfect parent.
Once, when a group of boys was taking an illegal swim in the nude in a pond
near the campus, they heard a familiar voice bellowing through the trees:
"Boys, this is your rector speaking. I am taking a walk with Mrs. J. Lewis
Bremer of Boston. You will stay in the water until we have passed. You will
then resume your clothes and go back to the School. I have recognized none of
you." A St. Paul's tradition is the annual new-boy picnic, called "Cricket
Day," and, for each picnic, Drury and his wife appeared to scramble eggs and
butter toast for the boys. The date of Cricket Day is always a surprise and,
to announce that the jolly day had arrived, Drury's innovation was to open
morning chapel with a special prayer which began, "0 Lord, who hast promised
Thy holy city Jerusalem shall be full of children playing in the streets
thereof " That gave it away. The chapel filled with happy shouts. What boy
could help but love and respect a man like that? This at least was the theory.
With such heavy injections of intimacy and family feeling it was natural that
certain schools were adopted by certain families as their very own. Sons of
Groton graduates entered Groton as soon as they were able. "It won't be like
going away from home," one Groton father told his uncertain youngster.
"Groton is a part of home." St. Mark's became the favorite school of Cabots,
Hotchkiss of Fords, Choate of Mellons, Taft of Tafts. Vanderbilts favored St.
Paul's but, according to a Philadelphia lady, "Those Vanderbilts were always
climbers. The main reason they sent their children to St. Paul's was to meet
Philadelphia people." (This lady echoes a persistent, if totally baseless,
rumor in the highest circles of Society that the Vanderbilts and, no less,
the Astors are actually Jewish.)
Just as the silver cords of Groton and St. Mark's stretch toward Beacon Hill,
St. Paul's for a long time was the educational outpost of Philadelphia. It
has graduated numerous Ingersolls and Biddles, but it is Philadelphia's
august Wheeler family that can say, with the greatest degree of accuracy,
"There has always been a Wheeler at St. Paul's." Hotchkiss for years was
largely a New York Society school, though it was also popular with Middle
Western families from Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Polarized around
certain families and certain cities, schools became oriented toward certain
colleges whether they wished to be or not though St. Paul's did wish it.
For years, St. Paul's sent boys to Yale, Princeton, or Pennsylvania, and
spurned Harvard. This was because Henry Augustus Coit, another longtime
headmaster, considered Harvard "Godless." The school still sends the largest
number of its graduates to Yale and Princeton. (Princeton is still
Philadelphia's favorite college, and there is still a "Hotchkiss set" at
Yale.) Today it may even be that certain prep schools have become suppliers
of personnel to certain corporations. Time, Inc., which has had a gaggle of
Hotchkiss alumni at its helm (including the late Henry R. Luce '16 and James
A. Linen '30) has a reputation for being more than a little interested in
Hotchkiss graduates.
The controversy that has always surrounded the "traditional" boys' schools in
New England has prompted various individuals, from time to time, to try to
alter or improve the pattern according to their private visions. Some of
these experiments have been more successful than others. In the 1920's and
1930's, New York Society buzzed with talk of the super-elegant Avon Old Farm
School in Avon, Connecticut, and the school's creator, an altogether curious
woman called Theodate Pope Riddle. Mrs. Riddle, a wealthy bicycle heiress,
was a self-styled missionary to youth, a devotee of Molyneux gowns, and a
dabbler in religious cults. Theodate was not her real name, but a Greco-Roman
hybrid she had manufactured for herself, meaning "gift of God." Frank N. D.
Buchman, father of the Buchmanites, held Moral ReArmament hootenannies on the
lawn of her Avon "cottage." (At one of these, God Himself made one of His
infrequent public utterances and announced, somewhat ambiguously through
Buchman, that He "wanted" Mrs. Riddle which apparently came as no surprise
to her.)
To build her school, Mrs. Riddle spared no expense, putting up sprawling
buildings in the English country style and transplanting fullgrown elms to
the campus so that the school, though new, immediately looked as though it
had been there for centuries past. It was her notion that the blacksmith's
art had been sorely neglected by young gentlemen why she felt this has
never been quite clear and so a fully equipped forge became an integral
part of the school. To tone up the place, she required the boys to dress for
dinner in black tie. (Some say she would have preferred white tie and tails,
but bad to compromise somewhere.)
For a long time, New York parents regarded Avon as a school that was
"amusing" and "different" and even "exciting." Meanwhile, excitement at the
school was provided by a series of headmasters who fell into, and then
quickly fell out of, Mrs. Riddle's favor. She was as arbitrary and whimsical
in her choice of students, and occasionally offered a boy free tuition if she
considered his parents "interesting." The school failed to prosper
academically, however. Mrs. Riddle finally rejoined her admiring Maker in
1946, but even before that the school, fallen upon sorry days, had closed.
During World War II it was used as a veterans' rehabilitation center, but
afterward it reopened along more traditional prep school lines for one
thing, no more dressing for dinner. Recently it has been enjoying a slow
renascence to academic soundness.
In 1935, another strong-minded woman, Mrs. Carmelita Hinton, founded the
Putney School in Putney, Vermont. Though she, too, showed herself to be a
woman of certain personal crotchets (she was opposed to tea, coffee, pepper,
mustard, catsup, and several other condiments), she wisely left the
administration of her school in the hands of experts and now spends most of
her time in Europe where, a lady well into her seventies, she only recently
gave up skiing. At Putney, an attempt was made to "break through" the
traditional ideas and methods of education, and the school was established as
a coeducational (boys slightly outnumbering girls) boarding school where
students would call their teachers by their first names, individual talents
would he encouraged, and no grades would be given. To balance the "technical
and intellectual" side of education, the "emotional and sensuous" aspects
would also be stressed in a program including singing, dancing, painting,
carpentry, drama, and handicrafts. The school farm was also made important,
and Putney students, in their afternoon work jobs, help produce a large share
of the school's vegetables, including most of its potatoes, and manage the
sizable herd of Holstein dairy cattle that provides all the school's milk.
The youngster driving a tractor is a Putney symbol, but then so is the girl
in the black leotard, moving through the slow figures of an expressive dance
on the lawn. One Putney student describes the school as "an attempt to put
the individual back into the community."
That may be. But Putney has been able to attract only the most intellectually
enlightened of the Social Establishment to its community and has, in fact,
become an anti-Society school. Putney boys, barefoot, in long hair and leans,
sneer at proper, preppie boys from nearby St. Paul's. "I hear they even take
baths there," one boy says. A Putney girl says airily, "Of course most of us
are Marxists here." These attitudes, plus the common assumption that
coeducational boarding and freedom lead to coeducational bedding, make
Society parents leary of schools like Putney and, at Putney, the students
themselves do their best to shock conventional morality. "Oh, we have rules
here," one boy said to a visiting parent. "No sleeping with the girls after
lights out." Another Putney joke is, "She's a terrible snob. She doesn't like
her roommate because he's a Negro." ("Actually," one Putney boy said, "you
get to know what girls are like here without sleeping with them." Putney
encourages sexual candor, if not license.)
The school's anti-Establishment approach has had some ironic results. Lacking
the support of Society, Putney has been unable to build an imposing physical
plant. Nor, without generous benefactions from the titans of American
finance, has Putney been able to amass an endowment the size of other
schools'. It is, therefore, one of the most expensive schools around.
Putney's tuition is nearly twice that of the more "fashionable" St. Paul's,
whose endowment is in the tens of millions and where over $2,000,000 stands
in the Scholarship Endowment Fund alone yielding income enough to send, if
the school wished, seventy boys a year to school on full scholarships. At
Putney, there are few scholarships available. It has become, in other words,
truly a "rich kids' school," and its students in large part come from the
homes of the highly paid in television, films, the theatre, and art. "Shall
we name-drop some of our celebrity parents?" asks a Putney girl with a little
smile.
For years, in England, schools like Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester,
Cheltenham, Wellington, and Epsom served a sociological as well as a social
function. They managed, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to
bring together the sons of the old landed gentry and the sons of the new-rich
manufacturers, and to produce from this fusion an aristocracy of a special
sort. It was an aristocracy which felt that, in return for the privilege of
having received an expensive education, it owed a debt to the British public.
Its members left school feeling that they were not only destined but
obligated to lead the Empire, and lead they proceeded to do. Furthermore, the
Empire not only accepted but came to rely on their leadership. Eton and
Harrow became the traditional forcing-beds of Britain's military, religious,
and government leaders, both Socialist and Tory. These two schools alone have
turned out roughly two dozen prime ministers, plus countless cabinet
ministers, members of parliament, ambassadors, Archbishops of Canterbury,
marshals and generals and rulers of the Queen's Navy.
But in the days when New England's prep schools were being founded, there
were no Peers of the Realm in America, and landed gentry were in short
supply. As a result, the sons of the new-rich manufacturers mingled mostly
with one another. Theirs was an aristocracy based on mills, mines, machines
and machine guns a Society based on the same social and economic forces
that gave us the national corporation, national advertising, the brand name,
and more recently, the trading stamp and the credit card. New England prep
schools have been criticized for their apparent inability to match the
records of Eton and Harrow in turning out national leaders and statesmen. But
this has not been so much the fault of the schools as the fault of American
Society people who, for so long, dominated the schools. American Society has
never been much concerned with government leadership, or service.
American prep schools have, therefore, graduated many successful corporation
lawyers, few Supreme Court justices; many Wall Street investment bankers, few
Secretaries of the Treasury; many minstrels of Madison Avenue, but only a
handful of bishops; many executives of General Foods, General Mills, and
General Motors, but no Generals of the Army. The British public schools have
become, so to speak, the property of the British public, through alumni who
have given themselves to England. But American private schools have remained
for the most part "private." And, in the tradition of American private
enterprise, which believes that a share of the profits should be plowed back
into the corporation, American prep school alumni have given largely to the
treasuries of their alma maters.
It has been argued of course, that large numbers of Americans do not want
their leaders to have fancy diplomas that the log cabin and the school of
hard knocks are more appealing than the town house and Groton. It seems to be
more a case of Americans not knowing which
they prefer. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Groton alumnus, was the first American
President to have graduated from a prep school. John F. Kennedy, who went to
Choate, was the second. (Though the prep school influence has always been
significantly Republican, our few American prep-school-educated statesmen
have been Democrats. Adlai Stevenson was a Choate man, too. Perhaps these men
were rebelling from the prep school influence. Political careers have always
been for the rebels in American Society.)
Though Roosevelt was one of our more popular Presidents, his Groton
background did little to enhance his popularity. It certainly did not with
his Groton classmates, many of whom refused to attend a school reunion
because F.D.R. was to be there. In fact, Roosevelt's GrotonHarvard background
and accent were the object of fun-poking from both sides of the political
divide.
When Mrs. Robert A. Taft made her famous speech to a gathering of Ohio mine
workers in 1938 -"My husband did not start from humble beginnings . . . he
had a fine education at Yale" -it was widely assumed that she had dealt him a
political death blow. But be went on to win the Senatorial election. During
Adlai Stevenson's two Presidential campaigns, it was decided to play down his
ChoatePrinceton schooling. He lost both times, regardless. During William W.
Scranton's gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania, it was deemed wise to play
down Hotchkiss and Yale. He won. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island
decided to play down neither his prep school (St. George's) and college
(Princeton) nor his Old Family background, and won. Also in Rhode Island,
William H. Vanderbilt on the theory that, being a Vanderbilt, he would have
had to have gone to some prep school similarly decided neither to disown
nor flaunt St. George's. He ran for a term as Governor, then lost the
reelection. Most recently, New York City's Mayor, John V. Lindsay, chose the
artful (and, to those who knew his school, hilarious) tactic of referring to
St. Paul's as his "high school" during his campaign. (Few boys' prep schools
are as unlike high school as is St. Paul's where even the matchbooks in the
public rooms and the guest towels in the washrooms are embossed with the
school's monogram, "S.P.S.," where the chapel is furnished with a vaulting,
hand-carved reredos donated by a Vanderbilt, and where the school gymnasium
is entered through a reception room filled with English antiques.) This
Gosh-I'm-No-Better-Than-You approach may have helped Lindsay win. In short, a
New England prep school education won't kill a politician's chances, but it
won't do much to help them, either.
New England boys' schools themselves have, in recent years, tried to rid
themselves of the St. Grottlesex tag, and to shake off the position they
occupied in the public's mind fifty or sixty years ago. There has been talk
of a "new look" in prep schools, and educators like to say that the schools
have "changed drastically" in the years since the end of the Second World
War. But they may not have changed as much as some would like to think. They
have tried to lure boys from a broader geographic spectrum, and most schools
today can boast enrollments from the majority of the fifty states and from a
number of foreign countries. With their multi-million-dollar endowments
some of which are larger than those of many large universities the schools
have also tried to tempt boys from the other end of the economic scale with
scholarships. Though it would have, been something of a surprise to see a
Negro boy at a prep school in the 1940's, it is now a surprise to find a
school that does not have at least three or four. No prep school would dream
of discriminating against Jews nowadays, though anti-Semitism among prep
school students is a recurrent unpleasant theme. (When the young son of the
photographer Richard Avedon, who is Jewish, was looking over prep schools in
New England recently, he told his father, with a certain accuracy, "I'd
probably stand a better chance of getting in if I was a Negro.") But the fact
remains that prep school applications including applications for
scholarships continue to come from the best addresses in the larger cities
and the better suburbs, from families who want their sons to go to schools
where they will meet "nice people" which causes school administrators to
grumble about parents who are giving their sons "the right education for the
wrong reasons."
"A school," so runs a familiar prep school maxim, "is only as good as its
current headmaster," and there is certainly a new look and a new wave of
young and vigorous headmasters who have almost completely replaced the old,
paternalistic, lovable "heads" and "Rectors" of a generation ago. These men
include Mssrs. A. William Olsen of Hotchkiss, John Kemper of Andover, Seymour
St. John of Choate, and Sidney Towle of Kent (where, to the astonishment of
old Kent graduates, a co-ordinated school for girls was opened in 1960). The
latest Old Guard headmaster to resign in favor of a younger man has been
Exeter's beloved William G. Saltonstall ("Bill Salty"), who is now director
of the Peace Corps mission in Nigeria, and who was replaced at the school by
a forty-seven-year-old ex-paratrooper, Richard Ward Day.
Practically the last member of the Old Guard still in his post is Deerfield's
Frank Boyden, who, well in his eighties, seems indestructible. It is becoming
harder and harder for friends of the school to think of Deerfield without
him. Still, Mr. Boyden is not at all to be regarded as behind the times.
"It's that old son-of-a-gun Boyden who forced us into the public relations
business," says one of the younger headmasters. "Bruce Barton got hold of his
ear, and Madison Avenue came to the prep school. He made us competitive with
one another. Now a headmaster has to sell his school the way an automobile
dealer sells cars." Mr. Boyden is credited with having used "promotional
gimmicks" to raise money for, and attract students to, Deerfield, and the
success of his methods has been both admired and envied. For some of his
gimmickery, however, he may owe no small debt to such "Old Dear" headmasters
as Endicott Peabody; one of Mr. Boyden's devices is riding around the
Deerfield campus in a horse-drawn buggy. There have been dark hints that
other headmasters, to compete, have had to dream up devices or eccentricities
or "trademarks" of their own. Seymour St. John at Choate, for instance, has
been seen with a pet otter flopping at his heels, and the Reverend Matthew
Warren, headmaster of St. Paul's, was given a red-and-white golf cart by an
appreciative alumnus in which to tool around the campus.
The St. Grottlesex boy, according to prep school administrators, is no longer
the snobbish, pampered Society heir or rich man's son. He is now simply "the
most qualified boy." In prep school circles, he is referred to as the
"M.Q.B." Prep school educators today are apt to refer to their schools as,
"America in microcosm," or, as William Saltonstall once said he hoped Exeter
would one day be, "a great national high school" which is perhaps also the
way Mayor Lindsay has begun to think of St. Paul's. But most prep school boys
would disagree with these notions. The reason, they say, is simple. "Most of
us didn't really want to go away to school," one boy said. "We were told we
were going, and our parents pretty much told us which school we were going
to. They wanted us to go to prep school for one of two basic reasons
because they figured it would put us in a position of superiority in later
life, or because they just wanted us the heck out of the house."
He went on to say that many boys, however well-qualified, simply have no
desire to go to prep school. "It just isn't an accepted American idea," he
said. "It's popular only with a small minority. You take a boy who's going to
a public high school in Nebraska. He's president of his class, a great
athlete, and a straight-A student. He's prep school qualified, all right, and
he'd be a great addition to any school. But you could offer him Choate or
Deerfield or Exeter on a platter, free, and he'd turn it down. Why should he
leave his home and family and friends, and all his success there, to come to
some place in the East he's heard is a snob school? Why should he want or
even need a prep school? That kind of guy can get into any college in the
country, anyway. That's the great fallacy of the M.Q.B. We want him. But he
Just doesn't think we're all that great." This boy feels that the American
people do not wholeheartedly support the idea of private secondary school
education; that the schools cannot be called strongholds, or even mirrors, of
democracy. Instead, he says, "Most of us are upper or uppermiddle class,
country-club-coming-out-party, stockbroker-Tudor-French-Provincial-suburban."
Prep school boys themselves do not believe that they are America's M.Q.B.'s.
They feel they are something a little different, a little special not just
a little better than other boys. At prep school, many boys begin to feel
hints of the heavy weight that will one day fall on them as members of an
American Establishment. A St. Mark's boy says, soberly, "For me and others
it's a real problem to justify the fact that we're being given a top-grade
education without deserving it more than the next fellow -except by an
accident of birth. It's a heavy responsibility we're given, and often we
don't feel qualified to handle it."
And prep school administrators themselves admit that, M.Q.B. or no M.Q.B.,
the sons of alumni are given special consideration. "It is a matter of
economic necessity," says one headmaster since alumni gifts are so
important to a school's maintenance and expansion. A teenage Ford would have
to be most unqualified indeed to be turned awayfrom Hotchkiss, now that the
splendid Ford Library reposes there. Problems like these may not keep prep
school headmasters awake nights, but they are matters of continuing concern.
Sons of alumni and benefactors must be served and usually served first.
When the mother of a prep school student, who had been warned that his
spelling was so poor as to be far below the school's standard, confronted the
headmaster, she asked, "What difference does it make whether he can spell or
not? He'll always have a secretary." The headmaster admitted he had no answer
to this.
And so a money and family elite are perpetuated through the medium of the
prep school. As a St. Paul's sixth-former put it dryly not long ago when a
young Pillsbury from Minneapolis was applying to St. Paul's where many other
Pillsburys have studied "I kinda think he'll get in, don't you?"
pps. 56-73
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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