Sarge Shriver was sixteen years old when FDR took office in March 1932. And with his strong bias for the prerogatives of local government, he was initially skeptical of the president’s ambitious plans for the federal government. But the strain the Depression put on his parents became forever linked in Shriver’s mind with the helpless, do-nothing approach of Herbert Hoover. And though he didn’t recognize it at the time, his own politics were subtly changing. The influence of Governors Albert Ritchie and Al Smith remained evident (even as Sarge watched, chagrined, as Smith in his later years became a cranky, demagogic critic of the New Deal policies of his former protégé FDR); Shriver, to be sure, retained a healthy respect for states’ rights. But as a witness to the 1930s and ’40s, he gained a deep appreciation for the power of the government to help its citizens, particularly the least fortunate.
On September 24, 1930, Hilda and Robert dropped their younger son off at the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, where he was to begin the ninth grade. Canterbury was like many prep schools throughout western Massachusetts and Connecticut: an all-boys boarding school based on the English model (schools like Eton and Harrow) that aspired to provide a college preparatory curriculum for students who would soon be matriculating at primarily Ivy League schools. Canterbury was also—like nearby Westminster, Kent, South Kent, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and St. George’s, among others—religiously oriented: Although basically secular in its main course of instruction, it also strove to ground students in the moral tenets of a religious faith. But Canterbury was almost unique among these schools in that it was Catholic; all other prep schools in the country at that time, save Portsmouth Priory, in Rhode Island, were strictly Protestant. Indeed in 1915, when Canterbury was founded, “the domain of American—and this meant particularly New England—classical education was a citadel of reserved culture, the breaching of which by any intimation of ‘Popery’ was unthinkable.”
There were, of course, Catholic schools before 1915. But these institutions were run by religious orders, like the Jesuits or the Dominicans, who would not—as a matter of principle—prepare students to enter non-Catholic colleges such as those in the Ivy League; therefore the priests at these schools would not teach their students the knowledge required to pass the College Entrance Examination. The Ivy League colleges, for their part, refused to waive the requirement that students pass this examination, even for graduates of Catholic schools. “This was a stalemate from which neither side would move” until 1914, when a group of affluent Catholic immigrant families from New York and New England banded together to start what theretofore would have been an oxymoron: a Catholic college-preparatory school.
With money and advice from prominent Catholics across the country, the school was officially established on the grounds of a former girls school in the rolling hills of southwestern Connecticut, overlooking the Housatonic River. Named after England’s famous Canterbury Cathedral, where the Catholic martyr and saint Thomas More had been archbishop, the school appointed as its first headmaster Dr. Nelson Hume, a man of stern moral bearing and diverse background. Hume had trained briefly to be a priest, then done stints in business and the theater, before finally settling on teaching as his metier.
On full scholarship, Robert and Hilda’s sons (Herbert was also at Canterbury) did not cost them anything in tuition or room and board. For spending money, Sarge relied on a summer job at the B. F. Shriver cannery and on the occasional small allowance from his parents. His letters home during prep school and college reveal a constant need for money that he strives to balance with his acute awareness of his parents’ own financial straits. “When I wrote my last letter,” Sarge wrote to his parents in the spring of 1934, “I hated to [ask for money]. I did not know where the money was coming from, but I hoped, and as usual you came through.… If we were worth millions, nothing you would have done would have been more appreciated.… Promise that if it will mean a hard struggle through all the summer, you will not send the money. If I thought that it was meaning a long summer for you, I know that I should not get much pleasure out of [my summer vacation].”
For the most part, Canterbury insulated Sarge from the tribulations of the Depression. As the 1930s progressed, Sarge could tell on his visits home that all was not well with his father—as his economic state continued to erode so did his emotional well-being. But at Canterbury itself, life was not much changed from the more halcyon, pre-crash days. The sons of Catholic affluence went to Mass, attended classes, played sports, and socialized under strictly circumscribed—almost Victorian—behavioral standards.
Shriver’s parents visited him nearly every weekend during his first semester of boarding school. Noted alongside “Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Shriver, of New York City” in the log of visitors to the school those first few weekends at Canterbury is another couple: “Mr. and Mrs. Joe P. Kennedy, of Bronxville, New York.” Joe and Rose Kennedy were—like the Shrivers—the parents of a new Canterbury student that autumn, dropping off a second former (or eighth grader), John F. Kennedy, their second-eldest son. The crash had bankrupted Robert Shriver, but it had catapulted Joe Kennedy—who had taken short positions in the market—to vast wealth.
If a visitor to Canterbury in 1930–1931 had been asked to guess which boy, of Sarge Shriver and Jack Kennedy, would one day be president of the United States, he would surely have named the former. Although both Shriver and Kennedy appeared on the honor roll when first-term marks were posted that November 11, it would be just the first of many such appearances for Shriver, the sole one for Kennedy.
Academics aside, Shriver quickly established himself as a boy to watch, making the junior football squad as an end in the fall season and earning the starting catcher’s position on the varsity baseball team during the spring season. Sarge was growing tall and fit, his physical stature catching up with his already charismatic presence. His classmates seemed naturally to gravitate to him. He was becoming a leader.
Jack Kennedy, in contrast, a year younger than Shriver, was small and wan and apparently unhappy. In his history of the school, Edward Mack, who taught history to both Shriver and Kennedy, recalled “little Jack Kennedy … a shock of auburn hair, a Boston accent, highly reserved and somewhat on the defensive, not quite certain of himself.” Shriver watched Kennedy trying to play football without much strength or skillfulness.
Shriver knew Kennedy only slightly at Canterbury, but he could tell that his future brother-in-law did not like it there. Jack found the school too strict, too regimented—it didn’t provide a ready outlet for the mischief that would later make him legendary at the Choate School. (School Life at Canterbury, a promotional catalog from the 1930s, says that “the kind of boys that attend Canterbury is another outstanding feature of the school. Boys that do not appreciate or respond to the idea of self-discipline are not kept in the school.”) Although Kennedy came from an important family, he was neither athletically strong nor an academic standout, and he was not a boy of much status. He left after one year.
Unlike Jack, Sarge thrived in the regimented environment. He had attended Mass every day almost since birth, so the daily religious rituals were a comfort, not a burden, and the strictness of the faculty was nothing new to a boy who had previously been educated by the no-nonsense nuns at St. John’s and the Cathedral School. He loved the camaraderie and the discipline, and he excelled academically, athletically, and socially.
The strict school discipline reflected the character of its headmaster. Hume believed in a correlation “between manners and virtues, between cleanliness and Godliness,” and therefore demanded civilized comportment at all times from his students. A single instance of being late or untidily dressed—clothes (white shirt, dark suit, black shoes) clean and pressed, shoes shined, four-in-hand neatly tied—would result in the dreaded “days on bounds”: A boy “on bounds” could not leave campus to go downtown.
Although there was no priestly religious instruction, and in fact no full-time chaplain on campus during S
hriver’s four years at Canterbury, Headmaster Hume ensured that the lay teaching of religion was woven into the curriculum. He personally taught the sixth formers a religion class, in which he tried to impress on the graduating seniors “the atmosphere of secularism, of agnostic indifference, of sectarian hostility which he knew they would encounter in non-Catholic colleges and universities.”
In the 1930s, Canterbury advertised that students would acquire both “a reasonable knowledge of the doctrines of the faith” and a “love” of the “actual practice of the Christian faith.” The boys would receive lessons “in doctrine, in morals, in ethics, in liturgy, in history, and in apologetics.” Religion would become, Canterbury promised, an integral part of its boys’ natures, “a mould of their characters, a firm foundation of their lives.” An item in the February 17, 1931, school newspaper gives the flavor of how Canterbury may have been somewhat different from other prep schools:
School Hears Pope Speak—Time Taken from Classes to Hear
Radio Address of His Holiness
Pope Pius XI was heard in a radio broadcast from Vatican City. The program was heard on the radio in the common room of Middle House.… Although the boys could not understand the Latin tongue as spoken by the Pope, few of them could help being moved by the gravity and impressiveness of the occasion.
Beginning in 1932, during his junior year at Canterbury, weekends would often find Shriver and his friends at the Noroton School of the Sacred Heart, a convent school in Connecticut where Shriver’s first love, Eleanor Hoguet, was enrolled.
In the 1930s, Eleanor’s parents, Robert Louis Hoguet and his wife, Louise, stood atop New York Catholic society. Robert was descended from an old French Catholic family; his grandfather had made millions of dollars investing in real estate in Manhattan. Robert’s father, in turn, had frittered many of those millions away on bad investments and a spendthrift lifestyle. But Robert Hoguet was cut from his grandfather’s cloth. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he diligently ascended through the ranks of New York law and banking. He met Louise Lynch at a debutante party in 1902 and married her in a Catholic ceremony in Paris in 1907. In 1927 the Hoguets took up residence in grand style in an enormous brownstone at 45 East Ninety-second Street, just around the corner from where the Shrivers would soon move.
By the 1930s Robert Hoguet had reached the empyrean of the New York banking establishment. As president of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank and as a board member of other important institutions, he commanded respect within both the banking profession and Catholic social circles. When Hilda and Robert Shriver moved to New York in 1929, they were quickly assimilated into New York’s Catholic society, much of which was centered on the Shrivers’ local church, St. Ignatius Loyola, at 980 Park Avenue. The Hoguets and Shrivers were introduced to each other by one of the grandes dames of New York society, Effie Wyatt (her extravagant full name was Euphemia Van Wenschler Wyatt), who in addition to running a fancy rooming house for single Catholic girls from the Midwest was a prominent drama critic. Before long, the Hoguets and the Shrivers were sitting on many of the same Catholic boards, working together to support Commonweal magazine, and working for the same charities and relief organizations. The two families soon became close.
The Hoguets had eight children, the seventh of whom, Eleanor, was born in 1918. Off at their respective boarding schools, Sarge and Eleanor did not meet until 1932, at a small dinner party at the Shrivers’ apartment. Eleanor was initially intimidated by Sarge. She was only thirteen, somewhat timid and shy. Sarge was three years older, and tall and handsome. He talked with the adults as confidently as if they were his peers. Eleanor was struck on this first visit to the Shriver apartment by how big the furniture was relative to the size of the apartment. The Shrivers had brought with them all their furniture from their house in Baltimore, and as each successive apartment got smaller, the furniture seemed disproportionately bigger, more packed in. Sarge seemed that way, too—his presence was so large the apartment could hardly contain him. Before long, however, Sarge and Eleanor had become smitten with one another. They would remain romantically involved on and off for the next seven years.
As they became upperclassmen, Sarge and his friends from Canterbury would sometimes drive over to Noroton to surprise Eleanor and her schoolmates. Eleanor’s best friend at Noroton was Kathleen Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s younger sister. Thus in visiting Eleanor at Noroton, Shriver continued a pattern established when he and Jack Kennedy had enrolled at Canterbury at the same time: orbiting in and out of the Kennedy family galaxy into which he was ultimately to fix his star.
Marriage, for the moment, was out of the question. Shriver had to finish his education, and Eleanor wanted to finish hers—and besides, there was the problem of money. Sarge didn’t have any, and he was not inclined to propose as a pauper.
In the evenings, after a date, Sarge would walk Eleanor back to her family’s brownstone on Ninety-second Street. The most distinctive feature of the home was a semicircular driveway running around the house to a garage in the back, which accommodated the Hoguet family Packard. Standing in the shadows on the long brick semicircular driveway that ran around the great house, Sarge and Eleanor would say good night, talking softly and kissing. If the kissing went on too long, Eleanor’s mother would begin banging on the window, ringing a bell, and yelling, “That’s enough, Ellie! Good night, Sarge. Good night, Sarge!”
In the 1930s, New England prep schools joined together to form an organization called the Secondary School Society of International Cooperation (SSSIC). Each year students from a dozen schools would gather in the spring for a meeting to talk about international relations. Guest speakers would lecture for a few hours, and then all the delegates from the various schools would break into smaller groups to talk about how better cooperation among nations might be achieved.
In the spring of 1934 the SSSIC meeting was to be held at a girls school, Avon-Old-Farms, in Avon, Connecticut. The Canterbury headmaster, Nelson Hume, who knew that Shriver’s charisma would reflect well on the school, asked if he would serve as the school’s senior delegate to the SSSIC and deliver a fifteen-minute speech to the meeting on the League of Nations. The text of the speech Shriver gave that Sunday at Avon-Old-Farms is lost to history, but the response to it is not.
“Dear Mr. Shriver,” Nelson Hume wrote to Sarge’s father,
Sargent did such a good job for us today at the meeting of the S.S.S.I.C. that I think that you and Mrs. Shriver should share the pleasure that I had when I heard a report.… Sargent had written the paper and prepared himself under great difficulties, for he was very busy with his lessons, “The Tabard” [the school newspaper, of which Sarge served as editorial chief], and the captaincy of the baseball team.… Well, apparently he ran away with the meeting.… He was the last speaker called upon … and he was greeted at the end with a real round of sincere applause. Then, according to custom, a discussion of his ideas began from all over the hall.… Sargent didn’t falter a bit, and answered questions from all sides without any hesitation. Later in the afternoon, Mr. Riddle, a former ambassador to Russia, whose money was responsible for the founding of [Avon-Old-Farms], came around … and said that he wanted to meet Sargent and congratulate him on the fine showing he had made in his speech in the morning.… [This] was evidence of a fine impression having been made by the boy on a mature man.
This may be a little incident in the general school life but it is an important indication and shows that Sargent has a good deal of courage and determination, for it took both to go up in front of that meeting and make such a good impression. There was no question that his performance reflected a good deal of credit on his school.
A week or so later, Hume summoned Shriver to his office after dinner. When Shriver got to Hume’s office, the headmaster was waiting for him with a middle-aged woman. After Hume made introductions, during which Sarge learned that the woman came from a foundation in Massachusetts that gave money to international causes, the woma
n turned to Sarge. “Sargent,” she said to him, as he recalled it, “I was at the SSSIC the other week, and I was very impressed with your speech on the League of Nations and the importance of international cooperation.” Shriver beamed. The woman continued, “Have you ever heard of the Experiment in International Living?”
Three years earlier, in 1931, Donald Watt, a thirty-eight-year-old Pennsylvania Dutchman hailing originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had conceived a simple idea that he believed would foster peace among nations: If young people from different countries could be exposed to other cultures, folkways, lifestyles, values, and attitudes, the mutual understanding that would be generated would inhibit war. This was neither an isolated nor an original idea. The air after the Great War was thick with schemes to prevent future such conflicts; many religious groups, in particular, had espoused such ideas for decades, if not centuries. But Watt was convinced that by putting this simple idea—having young people of different national cultures interact deeply with one another—into practice on a small scale and then letting it spread, it would lead ultimately to, as the novelist Pearl Buck, a great supporter of the program, was later to put it, “peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”
Calling his program the Experiment in International Living, Watt brought together a group of German boys and a group of American boys at a camp in the Swiss Alps over the summer of 1932. Although he succeeded in cementing some friendships among the boys, Watt found the camp environment too artificial, too divorced from the real German life that he wanted his American youth to experience. So the following year, he placed participants (now consisting of boys and girls) in the homes of German families, where they could experience life as it was actually lived in a foreign culture. Soon there were groups of Experimenters living with families all over Europe, as well as in South America and India.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 6