Since there is a fairly recognizable prep school look, it is assumed that there is also a prep school personality and a prep school frame of mind. In the outside world of his contemporaries—boys who attend public schools, and girls as well—the “preppie” is not always an object of admiration. He has long been distrusted by all but other preppies. He is brushed off as a “rich kid” going to a rich kids’ school. He is called a snob. His virility is suspect. He is considered undemocratic and possibly even un-American. When he gets to college, he and his prep school friends will tend to form a group of their own. The more select fraternities and clubs will appear to favor the prep school boy. Adult critics of prep schools continue to allege that they are breeding places of the most destructive sort of social snobbery, of prejudice and bigotry, of arrogance and false values. In fact, it is ironic that today, when a prep school education is demanded or dreamed of by more parents for more children than ever before, when competition for entrance has never been stiffer, the New England prep school—as an idea—continues, among a large section of Americans, to be misunderstood if not actually resented.
This didn’t matter so much a generation ago, when the schools were small, isolated, tucked away in the green New England hills, loved and understood by those who knew them and ignored by those who didn’t. But now, with so much emphasis on a boy’s getting into college, particularly a good college and preferably an Ivy League college, the prep schools are very much in the national consciousness. Prep schools often seem uncertain how to cope with their new importance. Prep school administrators have begun to worry about the prep school “image.”
There is worry about the very phrase “prep school.” Because such schools have always been considered college preparatory schools, their officials realize that along with the money spent on a prep school education has gone a kind of unwritten guarantee that the student will get into the college of his choice. A school can do its best, but it cannot offer or fulfill any such promise in the college-hungry world of the 1960’s. It has been pointed out that the prep school education should be valued for itself, not just as a stepping-stone to Yale or Princeton but as a “total experience,” and for a while, prep school headmasters discreetly suggested to parents of less-bright boys that the prep school years be made “an end in themselves,” without the carrot of college held out before the donkey. But, as prep school graduates who were not heading for college began to face the prospect of military service, this argument lost much of its persuasiveness.
New phrases have been offered as substitutes for “prep school,” but none has taken hold. “Private school” has that unfortunate snobbish ring. “Boarding school” is what girls go to. “Independent secondary school” is the term the academicians favor, but it has a pompous sound and is certainly a mouthful.
Meanwhile, as the popularity and importance of the prep school have grown—and as prep schools have come to fill a place in the plans of families from other than the upper class—so have the unpleasant connotations of the phrase. Not long ago, a British schoolmaster, Mr. Timothy Dymond Toswill of England’s Rugby School, was completing a year as a visiting teacher at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire, and with his homeward steamer ticket in his pocket, was in a mood to speak frankly about American prep schools as he saw them. “A bit of an anachronism, wouldn’t you say?” he asked, looking across the cultivated campus of the school. “Still, if you believe in the capitalist system, which I do not, I suppose it’s better for you Americans to spend your money sending a boy to a school like this one rather than on one of your hideous motorcars.” A group of St. Paul’s boys strolled by, wearing blazers of the school’s two boat clubs, Halcyon and Shattuck, and school ties. Nearby, from a flagpole in the center of the school, swung an oar that had been raised shortly before, with full and solemn ceremony, by the captain of the club that won the Championship Meet. With a very British downward curl of the lips, Mr. Toswill said, “You’re awfully keen on traditions here, aren’t you? Traditions which we at Rugby, a somewhat older institution, would regard as—laughable.”
It is easy for an Englishman to tease America—particularly when it comes to a boys’ school and its traditions. Many of the traditions, like a number of the schools themselves, were flung together in the beginning. No prep school would be having image problems today if it were not for this fact and if, in the beginning, such schools as St. Paul’s, Groton, Choate, Hotchkiss—and such non-New England (but still “New England-type”) schools as Lawrenceville in New Jersey, Hill in Pennsylvania, Episcopal High School and Woodbury Forest in Virginia—had not been created to fill quite a different need from the one they are prepared to fill today. The schools are now trying to live down the specific things they started out to be.
It was natural, in the years following the Civil War, when America’s great fortunes were being made, that the fortune makers and their wives should begin looking anxiously to England for cues as to what to do next. England, after all, had launched its industrial revolution more than a hundred years earlier. The results of this look across the Atlantic became quickly apparent on our shores: pompous manor houses in the English style sprawled across sooty hillsides outside Pittsburgh; rooms shipped to Tarrytown from Northumbrian castles; acres of heavy English furniture; English butlers and, for the children, English nannies. The American upper class announced itself born—in the newly acquired “social voice,” a blend of the Southern accent and the Yankee but heavily powdered with inflections copied (but with an American’s somewhat tin ear) from the British aristocracy. It was the period when the Anglican Episcopal faith became established as America’s “fashionable” religion, and when the first loud voices of anti-Semitism were heard throughout the land.
A logical question, in the minds of the new American industrialist millionaires, was how to educate their sons. And the logical system to try to copy was that of the English “public” school. Two schools in the vicinity of Boston led the way in attempting to create the American counterparts of such ancient and aristocratic English institutions as Eton, Harrow, and Winchester. They were St. Mark’s (founded in 1865) and Groton (1884). (Despite its perennial air of venerability, Groton is not the oldest but a relative latecomer among the great New England boys’ schools.) St. Paul’s was founded even earlier, in 1856, but it was not until the post-Civil War decades that it began to have a significant enrollment. It is not a paradox, then, but quite logical that two of the oldest and richest and largest boys’ schools in New England—Andover (1778) and Exeter (1781)—are among the least fashionable and “social” today; they were successful academies long before dollars became the chief yardstick of social standing.
The great era of the birth of the New England prep school was also and by no coincidence the era of J. Pierpont Morgan who, in his day, appeared to have invented the dollar. Within ten years, either way, of Morgan’s greatest triumph, the formation of the United States Steel Company, as many as seven English-inspired private boys’ schools were founded in the United States. Morgan himself (who, needless to say, had been educated in England) helped finance the Groton School. The founders of other schools represented fortunes made throughout the East—notably in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Pittsburgh,—and felt, as Morgan did, that the logical place to put their schools was in New England. The Taft School, in Watertown, Connecticut, was founded in 1890 by Horace D. Taft, a brother of President Taft. The Hotchkiss School, in Lakeville, Connecticut, was opened in 1892 by Maria Hotchkiss, the widow of the man who perfected the machine gun. St. George’s School, in Newport, was built in 1896, and owes no small debt (including a million-dollar Gothic chapel) to the Providence industrialist John Nicholas Brown, of the same family that established Brown University in that city. In the same year the Choate School was established in Wallingford, Connecticut, with Andrew Mellon and Owen D. Young among its best friends (their heirs remain the school’s best friends today). In 1901 a group of wealthy Bostonians, including a Lowell and a Forbes, founded
the Middlesex School near Concord (and inadvertently helped give rise to the term “St. Grottlesex,” the catchall used to describe all boys from Groton, Middlesex, and the “Saint” schools—Paul’s, Mark’s, and George’s). Deerfield, which had been a local Massachusetts academy since 1797, was reorganized in 1902 as a boys’ boarding school by the man who is still its headmaster, Frank L. Boyden. And, in 1906, the Kent School was founded in Kent, Connecticut by Episcopal Father Frederick H. Sill, and has been befriended by, among others, several du Ponts.
Like Groton, which was established to educate “Christian gentlemen,” and to develop “manly Christian character,” St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, St. George’s and Kent entered the world under the firm influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Taft, Hotchkiss, Middlesex, and Deerfield were established as nondenominational schools, but they are hardly secular. Divine worship is part of the daily life at all of them, and as one Hotchkiss student puts it, “They call it a nondenominational service but it comes right out of the Episcopal prayer book.” Andover and Exeter, though they have certain ancient Unitarian and Calvinist traditions, place the least emphasis on the religious aspect of school life. At Exeter, for example, “morning chapel” consists of reading school announcements and, according to one Exeter boy, “to call it chapel is a gas.” For many years, wealthy Catholic families sent their sons to Protestant schools. Then, in 1915, an important Roman Catholic boys’ school, Canterbury, was established in New Milford, Connecticut. Shortly after, the Episcopal founder of St. George’s had a change of heart and became a Roman Catholic convert and, next, a priest. In 1926 he founded the Catholic Portsmouth Priory School, six miles north of St. George’s but, according to old Newport residents, six miles farther away from God.
The continuing belief that prep schools are snobbish has not been helped by the fact that, in the early days, many schools maintained subtle, unwritten quota systems by which Jews were kept in the minority. “No more than ten per cent,” one headmaster used to say discreetly to parents who questioned the presence of a certain name in the school’s enrollment. When Jacob Schiff, who was J. P. Morgan’s peer and, at times, his better on Wall Street, wished to send his son Morti to Groton, he asked that Morti, “as a conscious Jew,” be excused from the school’s religious exercises. After an “amiable exchange of letters” between Mr. Schiff and Groton’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, it was decided that Groton was not the proper school for Morti. One father of a former prep school boy recalls, some twenty years ago, tearing up a school application that wanted to know, “Is the boy in any part Hebraic?” “It was not only the idea of the question that infuriated me,” this man says. “It was the abominable semantics of the sentence. How could I answer it? Which part of him was Hebraic? His left foot? His right ear?”
As the idea of the American prep school was born, with it came the prototype American prep school headmaster. He was supposed to be tweedy, pipe-smoking, cuddlesome, full of homilies and wisdom, with a strong hand but, from within, exuding warmth as mellow as his tobacco; under a tough exterior, he was supposed to possess a heart as soft as tapioca. He was, in other words, Mr. Chips rolled into one, and, at various schools, he was known variously as “The Head,” “The Duke,” “The King,” and “The Old Man.” He was a kind of universal Grand Dad. In real life his name was Endicott Peabody of Groton and, for many years, all New England prep school headmasters were merely pallid imitations of “The Rector,” as the Reverend Mr. Peabody was called by all who knew him. (He was the model for the hero of Louis Auchincloss’s novel, The Rector of Justin.) Peabody and J. P. Morgan had much in common in addition to being good friends. Peabody’s father was a Morgan partner in London, and the younger Peabody, after being educated at a select public school in England—Cheltenham—returned to America to work in Wall Street. His social credentials were impeccable, and he made a socially correct marriage. When, after joining the clergy, he first dreamed of Groton and—with Morgan’s help—proceeded to found it, his dream was of a school that would, quite literally, be a spiritual extension of a wellbred boy’s own family. A Groton boy was to feel as loved and as needed at Groton as he had been on Fifth Avenue or Beacon Hill. Endicott Peabody’s biographer says, “It was the most natural thing in the world for him to think of his school as being simply a large family.… At the center of the big school family his own family grew and the beautiful home and family life was presided over by Mrs. Peabody, the most gracious and beautiful of wives and mothers.” Like Mr. Chips, the Rector considered all Grotonians “my boys.” Every night, he and Mrs. Peabody said good night to each and every lad before he went to bed, and, on the foreheads of the younger ones, Mrs. Peabody often bestowed a motherly good-night kiss.
Peabody’s counterpart at St. Paul’s, “The Rector” Samuel S. Drury, was almost equally lovable. His wife, it was often pointed out, was “a Wolcott,” and his mother was “a Wheeler,” and for twenty-seven years he guided St. Paul’s boys in loco parentis. To make the transition from home-family to school-family seem less abrupt, uniformed waitresses waited on the boys in the school dining room, serving from the left and removing from the right, just as the family servants would have done at home. Faculty wives joined their husbands at the tables for meals, to simulate a family atmosphere. In true headmasterly tradition, Drury was stern but forgiving—the perfect parent. Once, when a group of boys was taking an illegal swim in the nude in a pond near the campus, they heard a familiar voice bellowing through the trees: “Boys, this is your rector speaking. I am taking a walk with Mrs. J. Lewis Bremer of Boston. You will stay in the water until we have passed. You will then resume your clothes and go back to the School. I have recognized none of you.” A St. Paul’s tradition is the annual new-boy picnic, called “Cricket Day,” and, for each picnic, Drury and his wife appeared to scramble eggs and butter toast for the boys. The date of Cricket Day is always a surprise and, to announce that the jolly day had arrived, Drury’s innovation was to open morning chapel with a special prayer which began, “O Lord, who hast promised Thy holy city Jerusalem shall be full of children playing in the streets thereof—” That gave it away. The chapel filled with happy shouts. What boy could help but love and respect a man like that? This at least was the theory.
With such heavy injections of intimacy and family feeling it was natural that certain schools were adopted by certain families as their very own. Sons of Groton graduates entered Groton as soon as they were able. “It won’t be like going away from home,” one Groton father told his uncertain youngster. “Groton is a part of home.” St. Mark’s became the favorite school of Cabots, Hotchkiss of Fords, Choate of Mellons, Taft of Tafts. Vanderbilts favored St. Paul’s but, according to a Philadelphia lady, “Those Vanderbilts were always climbers. The main reason they sent their children to St. Paul’s was to meet Philadelphia people.” (This lady echoes a persistent, if totally baseless, rumor in the highest circles of Society that the Vanderbilts—and, no less, the Astors—are actually Jewish.)
Just as the silver cords of Groton and St. Mark’s stretch toward Beacon Hill, St. Paul’s for a long time was the educational outpost of Philadelphia. It has graduated numerous Ingersolls and Biddies, but it is Philadelphia’s august Wheeler family that can say, with the greatest degree of accuracy, “There has always been a Wheeler at St. Paul’s.” Hotchkiss for years was largely a New York Society school, though it was also popular with Middle Western families from Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Polarized around certain families and certain cities, schools became oriented toward certain colleges whether they wished to be or not—though St. Paul’s did wish it. For years, St. Paul’s sent boys to Yale, Princeton, or Pennsylvania, and spurned Harvard. This was because Henry Augustus Coit, another longtime headmaster, considered Harvard “Godless.” The school still sends the largest number of its graduates to Yale and Princeton. (Princeton is still Philadelphia’s favorite college, and there is still a “Hotchkiss set” at Yale.) Today it may even be that certain prep schools have be
come suppliers of personnel to certain corporations. Time, Inc., which has had a gaggle of Hotchkiss alumni at its helm (including the late Henry R. Luce ’16 and James A. Linen ’30) has a reputation for being more than a little interested in Hotchkiss graduates.
The controversy that has always surrounded the “traditional” boys’ schools in New England has prompted various individuals, from time to time, to try to alter or improve the pattern according to their private visions. Some of these experiments have been more successful than others. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, New York Society buzzed with talk of the super-elegant Avon Old Farm School in Avon, Connecticut, and the school’s creator, an altogether curious woman called Theodate Pope Riddle. Mrs. Riddle, a wealthy bicycle heiress, was a self-styled missionary to youth, a devotee of Molyneux gowns, and a dabbler in religious cults. Theodate was not her real name, but a Greco-Roman hybrid she had manufactured for herself, meaning “gift of God.” Frank N. D. Buchman, father of the Buchmanites, held Moral Re-Armament hootenannies on the lawn of her Avon “cottage.” (At one of these, God Himself made one of His infrequent public utterances and announced, somewhat ambiguously through Buchman, that He “wanted” Mrs. Riddle—which apparently came as no surprise to her.)
To build her school, Mrs. Riddle spared no expense, putting up sprawling buildings in the English country style and transplanting full-gown elms to the campus so that the school, though new, immediately looked as though it had been there for centuries past. It was her notion that the blacksmith’s art had been sorely neglected by young gentlemen—why she felt this has never been quite clear—and so a fully equipped forge became an integral part of the school. To tone up the place, she required the boys to dress for dinner in black tie. (Some say she would have preferred white tie and tails, but had to compromise somewhere.)
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