JEWS IN THE UNITED STATES FROM1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 20

    EMPHASIZING THE STRENUOUS LIFE AT GROTON 
  [ continuing with the saga of Endicott Peabody, headmaster]

   
   Peabody's most important ally in promulgating the "strenuous life" ideology at Groton was Theodore Roosevelt, who had been preaching the virtues of "the strenuous life" since the 1890s. A close friend of Peabody's and the father of a student, TR was a frequent visitor at Groton, where he unfailingly preached the virtues of a life of gentlemanly service to the public. In a speech on Groton's twentieth anniversary, in 1904, President Roosevelt told the students : "You are not entitled, either in college or life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been to Groton---not an ounce, but we are entitled to hold you to exceptional accountability because you have been to Groton. Much has been given you, therefore, we have a right to expect much of you." 
   Adherence to the philosophy of "the strenuous life," Roosevelt believed, implied a duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself." The Christian gentleman, then, was impelled on both moral [ ? ] and practical grounds[Reckon these are economic grounds?] to take up what some have called the "gentlemen's burden" : the responsibility, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, to "fulfill duties to the nation and . . . to the race" and to "do our share of the world's work by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers has driven the Spanish flag." 
   Peabody, whose beloved Cheltenham had sent many of its graduates into the imperial civil service in India, shared Roosevelt's enthusiasm for America's fledgling empire. Indeed, even before the Spanish-AmericanWar ended, he wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, offering Groton as a source of the officials who would be needed to administer the empire. Yet Peabody was not, as the historian James McLachlan has rightly noted, "a howling imperialist ; he simply believed that if America was to have an empire, it should be a Progressive empire --- honestly administered by well-educated gentlemen, pure, clean, and Christian."