by Kai Bird
Philadelphia had two major-league teams, the Phillies and the Athletics. The latter were managed by Cornelius McGillicuddy, known as “Connie Mack,” who in the five-year stretch from 1910 to 1914 led the Athletics to four American League pennants.16 McCloy was thrilled when one day the groundskeeper let him on the field while the “A’s” were practicing. “They were the best, why, I guess they were the best team ever,” recalled McCloy. “I was on speaking terms with ‘Home Run’ Baker, Eddie Collins, and Connie Mack. I used to shag flies for them.” For a while, he became a regular, spending all his after-school hours hanging about the field.17
During the summers, Anna followed her hairdressing clientele to one of the fashionable summer camps in the Adirondack Mountains. One summer, they went to the Ausable Club, a beautiful lakeside resort frequented by Wall Street lawyers and businessmen and their families. Anna would “do heads” and arrange for Jack to work as a chore-boy, delivering wood, milk, and ice to the campsites with a shoulder yoke. When he was a little older, he had jobs maintaining tennis courts or acting as a guide for mountain climbers. On free afternoons, McCloy would go trout-fishing in the Bouquet River or hunt squirrel with a single-shot .22-caliber rifle.
Later, the summer exodus took them to the more exclusive Maine retreats on Mount Desert Island. Roughly fifty miles in circumference and cut halfway through by an arm of the ocean, the island was notched by picture-postcard harbors and crisscrossed by deep freshwater lakes and nine mountain ridges rising to fifteen hundred feet.18 Anna’s best client, Mrs. George Pepper, had gone to Mount Desert every summer since her marriage. Her husband described the island as “an ideal vacation-ground for anybody who loved mountains and sea and enjoyed the companionship of people of culture.” By people of culture, Pepper meant men like Jacob Schiff, founder of the investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University.19
As one of the island’s few hairdressers, Anna made her rounds on foot or bicycle, and when Jack was finished with his chores (often chopping wood for the Peppers), he sometimes accompanied her. He felt at ease around the vacationers. The outdoors was an equalizer, and any condescension was reserved for the island’s taciturn natives, who had to make a year’s living from the visitors during a short summer season. McCloy was part of the summer crowd.
But back at school, Jack did not excel, and soon Anna decided to send him away to a boarding school. “She wanted to get me away from the petticoat government there on 20th Street,” explained McCloy. “[With] all those women in that house, she thought I needed some male influence.” Anna consulted George Pepper, who discouraged her from sending Jack away to school, arguing that she could hardly afford the expense.20 Refusing to be dissuaded, Anna turned for further advice to George Johnson, one of her late husband’s friends from Penn Mutual. Johnson, a Quaker, recommended a Friends school in Concordville, Pennsylvania. The Maplewood Institute, founded in 1862, had a sound reputation as a preparatory school for young men bound for college or careers in business. The headmaster, who had been educated at both Swarthmore and Harvard, taught not only Latin but Greek as well; remembering her husband’s injunction that Jack must learn Greek, Anna made her decision. “She was a very literal-minded person,” explained McCloy. After all, Maplewood didn’t work out.
“I can remember,” said McCloy years later, “my mother sitting me down and telling me, ‘Now, John, this is going to be tough. You will be very homesick and will want to quit. You will just have to be tough and remember your father.’ Well, I knew it was going to be rough, but when I arrived, they stuck me in a bare room all by myself. There was no bed or anything. And then they completely forgot about me. I was supposed to be registered, but they just forgot all about me. It got dark, hours went by, and I ended up spending the whole night alone in that empty room. . . . I remember that night as if it happened yesterday.”21
Perhaps it was this inauspicious arrival or the school’s Quaker austerity but McCloy disliked Maplewood. Despite its idyllic rural location on a lovely tract of wooded land, Maplewood did not emphasize athletics. This was an obvious drawback for a boy who loved the sports field. Nor did he make any progress on the academic front. After a short time, Anna took him out of the school; in 1907, she decided to try another boarding institution, The Peddie Institute.22 Anna’s only reservation about Peddie was that the school was by background Baptist. She told Jack to “be a Presbyterian and don’t let those Baptists convert you.”
After the boy’s traumatic registration experience at the Maplewood Institute, Anna made sure Jack was properly settled into The Peddie Institute. One morning in mid-September 1907, she and Jack took the train to Hightstown, New Jersey, a ride of an hour and a half from Broad Street Station. Hightstown was a village of some two thousand inhabitants, located about halfway between Philadelphia and New York. They walked to Wilson Hall, a four-story brick Victorian structure, the largest of the half-dozen buildings on the tree-lined campus. There they met Roger W. Swetland, Peddie’s principal since 1898. A tall, balding man, Swetland consciously imitated the dean of New England headmasters, Dr. Endicott Peabody of Groton School. A Peddie education, Swetland advertised, would cultivate “those habits of self-reliance and self-control which are essential to a well-rounded manhood.” Behind his back, Peddie boys irreverently called him “Old Baldy,” or, more fearfully, “The Eagle.”23
Swetland had large ambitions for what he called his “Greater Peddie.” He hoped the school could “fill the gap between the modern high-priced boarding school for boys and the old-time cheap academy.”24 By shunning either extreme of “extravagance” or “impecuniosity,” Swetland had created in Peddie an educational “middle ground” for the sons of “those who occupy the middle ground financially in the industrial and economic world.”25 Swetland’s approach must have appealed to Anna McCloy’s middle-class sensibilities. Here was a man who aspired to give her boy an education equal to that at Exeter or Andover, but at middle-class rates.
After Anna paid the school bursar $200, half the yearly rate for tuition, room, and board, Jack was escorted upstairs and unpacked his trunk. He shared a sparsely furnished room with one other boy. This was to be his home, with the exception of summers in Philadelphia and Bar Harbor, for the next five years. In 1907, there were fewer than eighty other boys at Peddie. Attendance at Bible study and the church of your choice in Hightstown every Sunday was mandatory. But religion was only a backdrop to the boys’ regular curriculum. There was a science laboratory, which boasted a domed observatory with a four-inch telescope, and a library with ten thousand books.
Swetland emphasized a vigorous athletic program, and in 1904 had spent the phenomenal sum of $25,000 to build a modern gymnasium, complete with an indoor running track, a swimming pool, an exercise room, showers, and needle baths. There was a large athletics field with space for football and baseball, a pond for boating and skating, gun traps, and seven tennis courts.
Behind Wilson Hall, near the lake, was the dreaded “guard path,” where any infraction of Peddie rules was paid for by walking fifty, seventy-five, or even a hundred rounds of the worn circular dirt path. A physical chore, certainly, but its real purpose was to make a public spectacle of the offender’s humiliation. Those who walked the guard path were satirized as “pilgrims” of “extreme devotion.”26 It was punishment by ridicule, and Swetland found it highly effective. McCloy later remembered Swetland as a “wise, vigorous, deeply religious man.” But he also feared him: “. . . I have a hard time thinking of him as ever having feared anybody, human or divine. The muses sing of the terrible wrath of the godlike Achilles, but to me Achilles’ wrath was mere petulance compared to the really noble outbursts of which The Eagle’ was sometimes capable.”27
The most frequent cause of “guard” duty was infraction of Swetland’s regulation forbidding the boys to leave their rooms after certain hours. Inevitably, many boys considered it a contest to see how often they could sneak out of the Wilson Hall dormito
ry by sliding down a rain pipe. Many “walked guard” for smoking cigarettes. Young Jack McCloy was, from all accounts, a frequent traveler on the guard path, at least in the first few years of his Peddie tenure.
“Oh, was he mischievous,” recalled a classmate, Amzi Hoffman. “He was capable of all kinds of tricks . . . being out after hours, getting caught going up the rain pipe . . . or [he] might have gotten a guard penalty for not having good marks.”28
McCloy was still not the best of students. His friend Amzi, who had started school late, was five years older. McCloy nicknamed him “Amazia.” Amzi took a fair amount of ribbing for being an exemplary student, but McCloy nevertheless began to take his cues from the older boy. Hoffman recalls McCloy as someone who knew how to “take advantage of the opportunities. Lots of times I would know the answer to a question in class and sort of half give the answer under my breath, only half-audible, and he’d stick his hand up and give the same answer and get credit for it.”29
It took McCloy more than a year to realize “what I could achieve.”30 Even after that, his grades were usually only a bit above average. The turning point was a Greek-language class, which he began to take in his second year, fifty minutes a session, five days a week. For some reason, perhaps because his mother had drummed into him his father’s injunction that “John must learn Greek,” he excelled. The Greek instructor, Herbert Winters, whom the boys nicknamed “Wintees,” made him memorize hundreds of lines from Homer’s Illiad, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia; for the rest of his life, he could and often did recite these lines. In his eighties, he recalled fondly how “Wintees” had made him pound out the rhythm of the Greek verse with his feet, until he could “smell the dust, sweat and blood of the Scamander Plain.”31
McCloy was one of the youngest members of his class. Shorter than most of his classmates, he had grown into a handsome, baby-faced young teenager with a shock of neatly parted brown hair. He had a well-scrubbed, all-American look about him; only his eyes betrayed a certain playful intelligence. His friends would always remember the roguish gleam in his eyes. He would never lose that brazen, mischievous expression. Even when he was a grown man, an old friend, an army general, would write him, “You always were impish with Generals. Like a girl, you do it with your eyes.”32
He still loved sports, but his light, short frame made it difficult for him to get on any of the varsity teams in baseball or football. John D. Plant was the school’s “physical director,” and without question the most popular member of the faculty. “The ‘Old Roman,’ as we called him,” remembered McCloy. “Tireless, cheerful, patient . . . he inspired us to play, or play at, all sports.”33 He was a strong, short, barrel-chested man with a mane of blondish hair swept straight back over his forehead. His round, flushed red face always had a friendly smile for his boys.34 He was the only man on campus in whom every boy could confide his problems. For McCloy, the coach quickly became somewhat of a father figure. Plant exhorted his boys to play hard; those who hesitated received a kick in the rear. McCloy remembered, “If you flinched a tackle in football, the next day you were apt to find a jersey in your locker with a yellow streak down its back. It was pretty brutal.”
Plant told McCloy, “John, always run with the swift. You might someday come in second.” “It was good advice,” he later recalled. “I took it to heart in all things. I always tried to play tennis with superior players. It’s axiomatic. If you are always challenged by a superior player, sooner or later, if you are sound in body, you must someday beat the other fellow.”35
With Plant’s coaching, McCloy soon learned to play an aggressive game of tennis, a skill that served him well the rest of his life, opening doors that might otherwise have remained closed to someone of his social background. In 1911, when a tennis team was formed for the first time since 1907, eighteen boys tried out. Only five were chosen, and McCloy was ranked second. They had matches with teams from Princeton Preparatory School, ten miles down the road, the Drexel Institute, and Law-renceville Prep, a preparatory school that catered to boys of wealth.
During his junior year, McCloy began to shine. That year he won the Hiram E. Deats, ’91, Greek Prize, given to those who show the best scholarship in Greek during their junior and senior years. The prize brought an award of $10.36 He was becoming more confident of himself and socially more gregarious: “I found you could raise your voice and talk out loud in the world.”37 Invited to join practically every one of the fraternities on campus, McCloy chose the oldest and most prestigious club, Alpha Phi. Founded in 1872, it had chapters at twelve other preparatory schools on the East Coast. Members got together for elaborate meals paid for by dues McCloy had to ask his mother to forward. Peddie had become a surrogate family. As with boys from similar elite prep schools, the camaraderie he enjoyed from his fraternity also served to inculcate in him a self-conscious sense of exclusivity. His Peddie class yearbook pictured a dapper McCloy, hair neatly slicked down, wearing a tweed vest and jacket, with a tie and large shiny pearl tie-pin. The photo was captioned, “So young but oh so wise.” He had become a proper young gentleman, acculturated to the upper-class values common to a private-boarding-school life style.
In his last year at Peddie, McCloy, who had registered four years earlier as John Snader McCloy and had always signed his name “John S. McCloy,” began to call himself John Jay McCloy. He told his friends that he had decided to name himself after John Jay, the nation’s first Supreme Court chief justice. “That just tickled him,” recalled Amzi Hoffman. It made a good story, and he told it with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, as if to say that he knew it for the joke that it was. He really did aspire to be a lawyer, because that was what his father had wanted. But it was his mother’s wish as well. Widowed now for eleven years, Anna Snader McCloy had refused to remarry, and now that her only son was about to go off to college, she was determined that he use his late father’s middle name.38
His grades had improved enough by his senior year so that he could begin to think about going to a good university. To pass a subject at Peddie, one had to score at least 75 percent. But Swetland refused to “certify” any student in a subject for university unless he had a score of 85 percent. In his last year, McCloy mustered this grade in most of his subjects, and higher in Greek. (He was also captain of the tennis team.) He assumed that he would enter the University of Pennsylvania, which would mean he could live at home.
Swetland had other ideas. He thought the boy, once so nonchalantly oblivious to discipline, had developed some of what he liked to call “Peddie character.” He wanted such students to aspire to something better than even the University of Pennsylvania. It was part of Swetland’s “Greater Peddie” strategy to have as many of his students as possible break into one of the elite Ivy League universities. Some of his “boys” were now in Princeton, Yale, Brown, and Amherst.39 At the last, Swetland had placed two Peddie boys from the class of 1907.40 Now Amzi Hoffman, the school’s valedictorian in 1912, had been accepted at Amherst, as well as another McCloy classmate, Theodore “Gus” Edwards.
When the possibility of Amherst was broached with Anna McCloy, she resisted the idea; she had always thought the University of Pennsylvania was the best place for her son. Many “Proper Philadelphians,” such as George Wharton Pepper, were alumni of Penn. And, of course, Jack could live at home. But at Swetland’s urging, she began to reconsider. “I told her,” Swetland wrote to Hoffman on July 19, 1912, “that if we could arrange for Jack to room with you, I thought it would be a splendid arrangement for the boy. You know Jack needs someone to act as ballast for him in order to get the best results out of his work. That I should expect you to do. Jack has the making of a splendid man in him, but he needs some one to steady him and hold him down to serious work during his college life.” Swetland set the plot further in motion by closing his letter with the firm instruction that Amzi immediately write McCloy, “telling him of your own plans, and urging him to go with you.”41 In short order, McCloy consented.
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sp; He left Peddie a self-assured young man. He now had the simplicity of manners and easy dignity that mark many adolescents groomed in a prep-school cocoon. The private-boarding-school experience had taught him, in the words of his coach, to “run with the swift.” He had learned that a little perseverance would allow him to compete with the best. The Spartan quarters and close comradeship of boarding school had also taught him to get along with his peers. As he later described the life of a boarding-school student: “He lives, eats, plays and studies with his fellow students and, of necessity, adjusts himself to their characteristics and attitudes.” He even thought the experience was more democratic than a public-school education: “. . . true democratic forces can operate more effectively in the private school. . . . The student becomes freed from the local family and community prejudices and attitudes to a much greater degree than is the case of the public school student. . . . The outward symbols of class or other distinctions are lost more rapidly and more completely in the whole-absorbing community of the school than they are apt to be in the public school.”42 He had experienced a kind of class acculturation. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote, America’s elite private prep schools “perform the task of selecting and training newer members of a national upper stratum. . . .” Like Groton, Andover, or Saint Mark’s, Peddie served to transmit upper-class values, and as such it was a “force for the nationalization of the upper classes.”43
