JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800s UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode16

        EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS PLAYED A ROLE IN 
        PROMOTING PREJUDICE IN AMERICA 

   Educational institutions ----notably, boarding schools and the elite private colleges ---- played a critical role in socializing and unifying the national upper class. Indeed, it was only during this period that entry into the right clubs at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale --- few of which predated the Civil War --- became a student obsession. Meanwhile, the upper classes of the  great eastern cities increasingly sent their children to the Big Three. By the 1890s, 74 percent of Boston's upper class and 65 percent of New York's sent their sons to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. 

   Perhaps even more than the Big Three, the emblematic institution of the Protestant upper class was the private boarding school. Bringing together children as young as eleven from the upper classes of the major eastern metropolitan areas, the boarding school was the ideal instrument to shape the personal qualities and instill the values most esteemed by the Protestant elite. Educational and cultural ideals, Max Weber once observed, are always "stamped by the decisive stratum's . . . ideal of cultivation." In the United States in the late nineteenth century, the "decisive stratum" was the WASP upper class and its ideal, that of the cultivated "gentleman" along British lines. 
   
   As early as 1879, the North American Review, a venerable magazine founded in Boston in 1815 that was one of the few American periodicals to compete with the great British quarterlies, published a two-part series, " The Public Schools of England." It was written by Thomas Hughes, the author of the popular Tom Brown's School Days, and it was intended to introduce an American audience to the peculiar British institution that had proved so successful in welding the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie into a cohesive ruling class. Hughes proposed that private boarding schools on the British model be built in the United States to serve as a "stepping-stone . . . between the home of the American gentry and the universities."

   "It is not easy," he wrote, "to estimate the degree to which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most --- for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their public spirit, their vigor and manliness of character, their strong but not slavish respect for public opinion , their love of healthy sport and exercise." However discriminating a nation may be in spirit and character," he argued, "the time must come when it will breed a gentry, leisure class, aristocracy, call it by what name you will." The public schools had "perhaps the largest share in molding the character of the English gentleman." Two "nations of the same race, and so nearly identical in character and habits as the people of the United States and the English," Hughes concluded, would benefit from employing the same type of educational institutions to shape their leadership class. 

   Less than four years later, a young Massachusetts patrician named Endicott Peabody proposed the establishment of a boarding school in New England almost exactly on the model described by Hughes. A member of a distinguished family whose roots went back to the Puritans, at the age of thirteen Peabody had moved to England, where his father joined Junius Morgan [the father of J.P. Morgan] as a partner in a banking firm. "Cotty," as the young man was called by friends, immediately entered Cheltenham, an English public school, and soon became a devoted Anglophile. The sturdy Peabody flourished at Cheltenham, joining enthusiastically in the athletic life of the school and becoming skilled in cricket, tennis, and rowing. After five years at Cheltenham, he went on to Trinity College at Cambridge, where he studied law and once again was a star athlete. Though born a Unitarian, Cotty developed a deep attachment to the Church of England during his time at Cambridge. 
   PEABODY RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES IN 1880. TO BE CONTINUED.