America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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.

  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 s
et 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.”