JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --Episode 18

      BY THE LATE 1800s, THE PROTESTANT ARISTOCRATS
      SAW THE "NECESSITY" OF PREP SCHOOLS FOR THEIR
      KIDS 


The tiny Groton School was an almost immediate success. Within five years of its founding, Theodore Roosevelt,  who had declined Peabody's invitation to to become one of the school's first teachers, wrote to the headmaster, telling him that he was "doing a most genuine service to America" and that "it has been a great comfort to me to think of small Ted [then ten years old] at your school." In 1889, Peabody was asked to apply for the presidency of Columbia University [he declined] , and in 1890, the prominent diplomat and future secretary of state John Hay asked Peabody to place Hay's two sons on the list of students wishing to attend Groton. To support his request, he offered a list of references that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Adams, and Phillips Brooks. [In the end, Peabody placed the boys on the wrong waiting list, and they were forced to attend other schools.] Even Emily Post entered one son's name at birth for admission to Groton and the other's at age two. By 1900, a veritable Who's Who of the American ruling class---Whitneys, Biddles, Adams, Saltonstalls, du Ponts, and Roosevelts ---had entrusted their sons to Endicott Peabody and Groton. 
   Social distinction was at the very center of Groton's magnetic appeal to the Protestant ruling class. Peabody himself---with his patrician appearance, his gentlemanly demeanor, and his ardent commitment to the boys' cultivation of impeccable manners ---attracted the scions of leading families. The men of wealth and power who entrusted their sons to him were well aware of his unique social position. To be sure, many other boarding school headmasters shared his background [if not his British education] . But none of them could match his personal location at the crossroads of America's two most important investment banking firms of the era --- the House of Morgan and Lee, Higginson and Company ----in New York and Boston, the nation's two greatest financial centers. To the Protestant elite, a Groton education meant, not only the inculcation of the right values, but also the fostering of intimate ties to "THE RIGHT PEOPLE." One of the principal motivations to send boys to Groton and like institutions seems to have been their parents' desire to rescue them from the life of luxury and self-indulgence that they feared the children were destined to lead unless vigorous countermeasures were taken. "Early Groton parents," wrote Peabody's biographer, were privately disgusted with the bringing up of well-to-do American boys of the period, "whom they considered 'spoiled ladies' men tied to women's apron strings." Affluence, they believed, was rendering their sons soft and effeminate." 
   In response to these concerns, the "St. Grottlesex"schools imposed a regime of Spartan deprivation on their charges. At Groton, the students lived in small, barren cubicles almost totally lacking in privacy. Showers were cold, and weekly allowances were limited to a quarter, a nickel of which was to be donated at Sunday church services. Deprivation, Peabody firmly believed, was salutary. Otherwise, the parental "tendency to overindulge their children" would lead to a "lack of intellectual and moral fibre." 
   What did not loom large among these parents was a commitment to intellect. Scholarship as such was not something most of these parents gave a shit about. Mathe WASP ny of these eminent parents had never attended college themselves.  What they correctly saw in Peabody was a man who considered character [ethical conduct among peers] far more important than intellect. In hiring teachers, Peabody valued intelligence, but he believed that "there were things distinctly more important" such as "fine character," a "lively manner," and a love of boys. 
   At the core of Peabody's vision of Groton was the ideal of "manly Christian character." Generally speaking,  the WASP elite was not really and truly religious : Some of the early fathers did not care a tuppence for religion, except as a thing to be generally encouraged and strengthened.  What the fathers of the ruling class were really concerned about was emphasis on "MANLY CHARACTER." What Peabody promised the ruling class was that Groton would turn their fragile and overindulged sons into the kind of "manly" men fit to run the affairs of the nation.