America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Of course some of the Old Guard would argue that they made it too amusing and too chic, and that the Misses Henderson and Harriman would be appalled at the huge, catchall organization the Junior Leagues of America have become today. Their intention had been to demonstrate that debutantes were not empty-headed social butterflies but had social consciences as well, and originally the league’s membership was restricted to debutantes and debutantes only. Jewish girls were not invited to join the league, and certainly no blacks were. Today, all those barriers have fallen. In many cities, including New York, the Junior League holds a fund-raising ball where debutantes are presented. Any set of parents willing to contribute sufficiently to a league-approved charity can make their daughter a tax-deductible debutante. Similarly, any young woman (debutante or not) who is willing to undergo the league’s rigorous training program and who agrees to devote the prescribed number of hours a week as a league volunteer can join. Some would say that in the process of democratization, the whole point of joining the league and the whole point of being a debutante—even the whole point of charitable work and giving—have been lost.

  But the idea of a huge, high-ticket, commercially underwritten function for charity was born with the Junior League. In a sense, though it was clearly not Miss Harriman’s or Miss Henderson’s intention, what they were doing was opening up the private world of metropolitan high society to the entire outside world. Today, anyone with the price of a ticket can go to a charity ball.

  22

  “To Serve …”

  In January 1936 (which, we need hardly be reminded, was the height of the Great Depression) Fortune, by then the self-appointed mouthpiece of the American moneyed, if not necessarily the upper, class, was casting about for social institutions that might be blamed for the country’s economic woes. The magazine hit upon the nation’s dozen most prestigious college preparatory schools and chose to attack them in two major articles. “They have produced,” the series led off, “from among the privileged youth of the country 67,000 Old Boys—but in all their history only twenty-seven U.S. Senators, one member of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one President of the U.S.”

  This harsh judgment was based almost entirely on what the magazine saw as the failure of the elite schools to produce graduates who would enter public service, as their equivalent schools had traditionally done in England. American private schools, the articles claimed, had failed to train their students for leadership in a democratic country. Thus the Depression was probably their fault. Fortune’s anonymous writer concluded: “The American ruling class may quite possibly be taxed out of existence in the next few decades because the American ruling-class schools have not educated rich men’s sons to political superiority—have not presented the country with any logical reasons why the class should not be taxed out of existence.”

  Fortune’s argument, however, was more emotional than logical. Nor was its crystal ball unclouded. In the decades to come, it would be the British ruling class that would be threatened with extinction by taxation, and it would be the British public schools that would be brutally forced to relax their elitist admissions standards during the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Furthermore, the magazine overlooked the fact that American prep schools were designed only to prepare young people for college and, though they offered courses in government, history, and political science, had provided no guarantee of entrée into a ruling class, the way Britain’s public schools had virtually done for years.

  Finally, the magazine’s arithmetic was off. The “one President of the U.S.” referred to was probably intended to be Franklin D. Roosevelt, a graduate of Groton, but Fortune had forgotten FDR’s relative President Theodore Roosevelt, who was also Groton-educated, as well as the similarly private-school-educated William Howard Taft. Also, though prep schools as such didn’t exist at the time, presidents Washington, Jefferson, and both Adamses were all the products of decidedly upperclass private educations. In the years since the Fortune articles appeared, a number of other political leaders have emerged from a prep-school milieu, including John F. Kennedy, a graduate of Choate.

  Part of the trouble has been that, in terms of American politics, no one has been quite able to decide whether an upperclass education is an asset or a liability, and so campaign managers have tended to shy away from the whole issue. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, whose popularity was said to be based on his appeal to the common man, was advised to play down his privileged schooling at Groton and Harvard. Indeed, his Groton classmates were grateful that he did, since they considered FDR and his New Deal a blot on the school’s escutcheon and threatened to boycott a school reunion if the president were also planning to attend. Adlai E. Stevenson’s Choate and Princeton background did not seem to be held against him when he campaigned successfully for the governorship of Illinois. But, in his two campaigns for the U.S. presidency, his advisors recommended soft-pedaling his boarding-school credits, and he lost both times. On the other hand, during William W. Scranton’s gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania, it was also deemed wisest not to mention Scranton’s fine record at Hotchkiss and Yale, and Scranton won.

  In American politics, as well as in business life, the feeling seems to have developed that while it is acceptable to have gone to college, to have attained a prep-school diploma in addition is somehow unacceptable, an unnecessary gilding of the lily. Men in particular seem embarrassed by their prep schools, as though there were almost something sissified about the whole thing, something dandified and effeminate. The term “preppie” is used derisively, and the question “Where did you prep?” when asked in a drawing room comedy will inevitably get a laugh from the audience, for the fop who would ask such a question doubtless also has the sexual proclivities of an Oscar Wilde. The good manners and speech and poise that boarding schools tend to instill are something like upperclass values—one has them but doesn’t talk about them. One has them, but one doesn’t let them show too much. They are private secrets, shared with a private world of one’s private-school social peers. Adlai Stevenson’s private-school training was visible in his upper-crust manners and audible in his upper-crust speech, and in an interesting lapse of manners, John F. Kennedy once referred to his fellow Democrat and fellow boarding-school alumnus as “that faggot.”

  Still, in Rhode Island, Senator Claiborne Pell decided to make no bones of the fact that he had been privately educated at St. George’s School and Princeton, nor of the fact that he was descended from one of America’s oldest and most aristocratic English manorial families, the Pells of Pelham. Yet Pell remains one of the state’s most popular figures in Democratic politics. Also in Rhode Island, William H. Vanderbilt—perhaps acting on the theory that, being a Vanderbilt, he would have had to have had a fancy education—decided to neither disown nor flaunt the fact that he had attended the same schools as Claiborne Pell. He won one term as Republican governor of the state in 1939 but lost his bid for a second term. Bitter in his defeat, he pulled up stakes and moved to Massachusetts, where he went into real estate. John D. Rockefeller IV, campaigning for the governorship of West Virginia, affected scuffed sneakers, faded blue jeans, and a down-home Appalachian manner, and apparently got voters to forget that he was a Rockefeller and had any sort of education whatsoever. Others have buried the shameful secret of their prep-school pasts even more cleverly. Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City chose the tactic of referring to his boarding school as “my high school”—a ploy that amused those who knew the high school was snobbish St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. And, meanwhile, who ever suspected that Lindsay’s tough-talking predecessor, Robert Wagner, Jr., was a graduate of the Taft School? That Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was an alumnus of Hotchkiss was never advertised until it appeared in his obituary.

  But the results of confessing to an upperclass upbringing remain unpredictable. In 1938—Depression days again—Mrs. Robert A. Taft made a startling speech to a gathering of Ohio mine workers in which she said, “My husband did no
t start from humble beginnings … he had a fine education at Yale.” Her husband’s Republican backers wrung their hands, and it was widely assumed that she had dealt him a political death blow in his senatorial campaign. But she hadn’t, and Taft went on to win his Senate seat handily.

  Another thing that Fortune’s writer seemed to have overlooked is that there are other forms of public service, outside the realms of government and politics, where citizens can prove themselves useful. And at a number of these endeavors the alumni of America’s private schools seem to have acquitted themselves rather well. Philanthropy and patronage of the arts come first to mind. New England boarding schools have turned out such art patrons as Seymour H. Knox, whose benefactions to the city of Buffalo have included its Fine Arts Academy, and the late Robert Lehman. When Mr. Lehman’s princely collection was turned over to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the public to enjoy, a whole new wing for the museum was required to house it—a wing donated by Mr. Lehman, of course.

  Walter Chrysler’s art collection has similarly benefited the city of Detroit, and in the meantime, many prep-school graduates have gone on to careers in the arts. These, in a very random sampling, would include Craig Smith, head of the Department of Fine Arts at New York University; Henry Gardiner, designer of exhibits at New York’s Museum of Natural History; Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford; Gray Williams, a curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; William Hutton, curator of the Toledo Museum of Art; artists Tony Vevers, Jerry Pfohl, Denver Lindley, and the New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno; director John Frankenheimer; composer Stephen Sondheim; and novelist Louis Auchincloss.

  The list could go on and on, including newspaper editors, scientists, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and educators. Surely Fortune sadly underrated the contributions of America’s upperclass schools when it accused them of creating nothing more than a network of sixty-seven thousand “Old Boys.”

  But what the system did create was sixty-seven thousand individuals who, though intensely proud of their upperclass 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 upperclass 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 upperclass 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 upperclass 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 my
sterious 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.