JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II ---- Episode 19

        GROTON TURNED OUT "MANLY CHRISTIANS " 

    The idea of "manly Christian character" was a British import that may be traced back to the writings of Charles Kingsley [1819--1875] , an Anglican clergyman, novelist, and Cambridge professor who exerted a profound influence on the young Endicott Peabody.  A passionate advocate of what came to be known as "muscular Christianity," Kingsley was a devoted English patriot and a stout defender of British imperialism.  A proponent of a reformist strand of "Christian socialism," he believed that committed Christians were warriors on behalf of goodness whose responsibilities both at home and abroad could not be met without great "strength and hardihood." Kingsley was a firm champion of vigorous athletics, for sports would instill the sturdy character and shape the strong body that permitted Christians to do God's work. Athletics, he believed, would offer England's privileged classes "that experience of pain and endurance necessary to bring out the masculine qualities." 
   Kingsley was near the height of his influence when Peabody was a student at Chetenham and Cambridge. Early in his college career, the young American read the Life of Charles Kingsley, which first gave him the idea of becoming a minister.  Kingsley's biographer, Peabody later recalled, "set forth his subject's enthusiasm in connection with social problems" and "introduced me to a man of vigorous, virile, enthusiastic character ; a gentle, sympathetic, and unafraid example of muscular Christianity, a 'very' gentil Knight." Kingsley's distinctive version of muscular Christianity exerted an enduring impact on Peabody as well as on the headmasters of many other boarding schools. 
    As at the British public schools, Groton's vehicle for the development of manly Christian character was athletics. Competing in sports, Peabody believed, helped develop in students a multiplicity of virtues : loyalty, courage, cooperation, and masculine strength. Bt teaching young men to exert themselves to the fullest while playing within the rules, athletics would teach self-control and a sense of decency and fair play. 
   Though quite attached to crew and "fives" [a kind of squash imported from Eton] , Peabody reserved his greatest enthusiasm for football. All boys, however physically slight or personally uninterested, had to play. Football was, in Peabody's view, a deeply moral enterprise. Writing to a friend in 1909, he articulated his views : "In my works at Groton I am convinced that football is of profound importance for the moral even more than the physical development of the boys. In these days of exceeding comfort, the boys need an opportunity to endure hardness and, it may be, suffering. Football has in it the element which goes to make a soldier." For Peabody, as for many of his contemporaries in the British and American upper classes, life was a ruthless Darwinian struggle between good and evil in which the morally superior ---those who represented "civilization" against "barbarism" --- would sometimes need physical force to impose moral order. 
   With athletes occupying the apex of the student pecking order, both Christianity and character tended to be overshadowed by "manliness." Ranking lower still was intellect --- a quality that was viewed with suspicion as oriented to the self rather than the community. "I'm not sure I like boys who think too much," Peabody once said. "A lot of people think of things we could do without."
   In such an atmosphere, the boy of bookish or artistic inclination who lacked interest in ---or talent for --- manly sports was relegated to the lower ranks and sometimes despised. Remembering his years at Groton, Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of Atlantic Monthly who later became a trustee, recalled "but a single instance of a boy who became the acknowledged head of the school wholly innocent of athletic supremacy and merely gifted with character and superlative intelligence." In a school in which "organized sport is the personification of manliness" and the belief widespread that "moral courage is a by-product of the physical struggle," Sedgwick observed, "the boy who seeks another path to his development presents to the master a picture of a shirker and not infrequently a poltroon as well." 
   There was little room at Groton for the boy of artistic or intellectual inclination. As his biographer admits, Peabody "distrusted artists as a genus," believing them to be "a folk who have unreliable relationships with the world, the flesh, and the devil, with a consequent weakening of moral fiber." Nor was there much room for the independent spirit. In a letter to the parents of boy whom Peabody suggested "would get more from a different school," the young man, whose offenses were admittedly "very slight," seems to have been guilty of the crime of being "an individualist who has little in common with his surroundings." 
   Peabody was fond of saying that a headmaster has "to be a bit of a bully" and needs to have the capacity to inflict pain. But in Groton's system of authority and social control, it was often the students who used the harshest means to enforce conformity and to punish classmates judged deviant. For students deemed to be in violation of the school's rigid and sometimes mysterious code of etiquette or who were felt to be lacking the right "tone"[often by showing insufficient deference to upperclassmen], the punishment could be brutal. 
   The harsh atmosphere was part of a larger system of socialization that imposed on the children of the privileged a willful regime of austerity and deprivation. These schools were hardening the sons of the elite for a life of command in which subordinates --- whether inferior classes, ethnic or racial groups, or colonial "natives" ---would often be disinclined to obey and would sometimes mount resistance. The system of power and control at the elite boarding schools was devised to expose the young men who went through them to the experience of both obedience and command, often under trying conditions. Having survived institutionalized bullying, the graduates would have the necessary toughness to succeed in their future leadership positions. 
   The Groton ethos, like that of the leading British public schools, was an admixture of two seemingly contradictory systems of belief : gentility and social Darwinism. On the one side, men such as Peabody were deeply committed to the nurturance of Christian gentlemen : men whose devotion to such virtues as honesty, integrity, loyalty, modesty, decency, courtesy, and compassion would constitute a living embodiment of Protestant ideals. But on the other side, life was viewed as a struggle in which the battle went to the strong, and those individuals and nations not manly enough to participate would be left remorselessly behind in a world in which only the fittest survived. The Christian gentleman thus had no choice but to be aggressive and even ruthless in order to win.