The Right People Page 7

  For a long time, New York parents regarded Avon as a school that was “amusing” and “different” and even “exciting.” Meanwhile, excitement at the school was provided by a series of headmasters who fell into, and then quickly fell out of, Mrs. Riddle’s favor. She was as arbitrary and whimsical in her choice of students, and occasionally offered a boy free tuition if she considered his parents “interesting.” The school failed to prosper academically, however. Mrs. Riddle finally rejoined her admiring Maker in 1946, but even before that the school, fallen upon sorry days, had closed. During World War II it was used as a veterans’ rehabilitation center, but afterward it reopened along more traditional prep school lines—for one thing, no more dressing for dinner. Recently it has been enjoying a slow renascence to academic soundness.

  In 1935, another strong-minded woman, Mrs. Carmelita Hinton, founded the Putney School in Putney, Vermont Though she, too, showed herself to be a woman of certain personal crotchets (she was opposed to tea, coffee, pepper, mustard, catsup, and several other condiments), she wisely left the administration of her school in the hands of experts and now spends most of her time in Europe where, a lady well into her seventies, she only recently gave up skiing. At Putney, an attempt was made to “break through” the traditional ideas and methods of education, and the school was established as a coeducational (boys slightly outnumbering girls) boarding school where students would call their teachers by their first names, individual talents would be encouraged, and no grades would be given. To balance the “technical and intellectual” side of education, the “emotional and sensuous” aspects would also be stressed in a program including singing, dancing, painting, carpentry, drama, and handicrafts. The school farm was also made important, and Putney students, in their afternoon work jobs, help produce a large share of the school’s vegetables, including most of its potatoes, and manage the sizable herd of Holstein dairy cattle that provides all the school’s milk. The youngster driving a tractor is a Putney symbol, but then so is the girl in the black leotard, moving through the slow figures of an expressive dance on the lawn. One Putney student describes the school as “an attempt to put the individual back into the community.”

  That may be. But Putney has been able to attract only the most intellectually enlightened of the Social Establishment to its community and has, in fact, became an anti-Society school. Putney boys, barefoot, in long hair and jeans, sneer at proper, preppie boys from nearby St. Paul’s. “I hear they even take baths there,” one boy says. A Putney girl says airily, “Of course most of us are Marxists here.” These attitudes, plus the common assumption that coeducational boarding and freedom lead to coeducational bedding, make Society parents leary of schools like Putney and, at Putney, the students themselves do their best to shock conventional morality. “Oh, we have rules here,” one boy said to a visiting parent. “No sleeping with the girls—after lights out.” Another Putney joke is, “She’s a terrible snob. She doesn’t like her roommate because he’s a Negro.” (“Actually,” one Putney boy said, “you get to know what girls are like here without sleeping with them.” Putney encourages sexual candor, if not license.)

  The school’s anti-Establishment approach has had some ironic results. Lacking the support of Society, Putney has been unable to build an imposing physical plant. Nor, without generous benefactions from the titans of American finance, has Putney been able to amass an endowment the size of other schools’. It is, therefore, one of the most expensive schools around. Putney’s tuition is nearly twice that of the more “fashionable” St. Paul’s, whose endowment is in the tens of millions and where over $2,000,000 stands in the Scholarship Endowment Fund alone yielding income enough to send, if the school wished, seventy boys a year to school on full scholarships. At Putney, there are few scholarships available. It has become, in other words, truly a “rich kids’ school,” and its students in large part come from the homes of the highly paid in television, films, the theatre, and art. “Shall we name-drop some of our celebrity parents?” asks a Putney girl with a little smile

  For years, in England, schools like Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Cheltenham, Wellington, and Epsom served a sociological as well as a social function. They managed, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to bring together the sons of the old landed gentry and the sons of the new-rich manufacturers, and to produce from this fusion an aristocracy of a special sort. It was an aristocracy which felt that, in return for the privilege of having received an expensive education, it owed a debt to the British public. Its members left school feeling that they were not only destined but obligated to lead the Empire, and lead they proceeded to do. Furthermore, the Empire not only accepted but came to rely on their leadership. Eton and Harrow became the traditional forcing-beds of Britain’s military, religious, and government leaders, both Socialist and Tory. These two schools alone have turned out roughly two dozen prime ministers, plus countless cabinet ministers, members of parliament, ambassadors, Archbishops of Canterbury, marshals and generals and rulers of the Queen’s Navy.

  But in the days when New England’s prep schools were being founded, there were no Peers of the Realm in America, and landed gentry were in short supply. As a result, the sons of the new-rich manufacturers mingled mostly with one another. Theirs was an aristocracy based on mills, mines, machines and machine guns—a Society based on the same social and economic forces that gave us the national corporation, national advertising, the brand name, and more recently, the trading stamp and the credit card. New England prep schools have been criticized for their apparent inability to match the records of Eton and Harrow in turning out national leaders and statesmen. But this has not been so much the fault of the schools as the fault of American Society people who, for so long, dominated the schools. American Society has never been much concerned with government leadership, or service.

  American prep schools have, therefore, graduated many successful corporation lawyers, few Supreme Court justices; many Wall Street investment bankers, few Secretaries of the Treasury; many minstrels of Madison Avenue, but only a handful of bishops; many executives of General Foods, General Mills, and General Motors, but no Generals of the Army. The British public schools have become, so to speak, the property of the British public, through alumni who have given themselves to England. But American private schools have remained for the most part “private.” And, in the tradition of American private enterprise, which believes that a share of the profits should be plowed back into the corporation, American prep school alumni have given largely to the treasuries of their alma maters.

  It has been argued of course, that large numbers of Americans do not want their leaders to have fancy diplomas—that the log cabin and the school of hard knocks are more appealing than the town house and Groton. It seems to be more a case of Americans not knowing which they prefer. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Groton alumnus, was the first American President to have graduated from a prep school. John F. Kennedy, who went to Choate, was the second. (Though the prep school influence has always been significantly Republican, our few American prep-school-educated statesmen have been Democrats. Adlai Stevenson was a Choate man, too. Perhaps these men were rebelling from the prep school influence. Political careers have always been for the rebels in American Society.)

  Though Roosevelt was one of our more popular Presidents, his Groton background did little to enhance his popularity. It certainly did not with his Groton classmates, many of whom refused to attend a school reunion because F.D.R. was to be there. In fact, Roosevelt’s Groton-Harvard background and accent were the object of fun-poking from both sides of the political divide.

  When Mrs. Robert A. Taft made her famous speech to a gathering of Ohio mine workers in 1938—“My husband did not start from humble beginnings … he had a fine education at Yale”—it was widely assumed that she had dealt him a political death blow. But he went on to win the Senatorial election. During Adlai Stevenson’s two Presidential campaigns, it was decided to play down his Choate-Pr
inceton schooling. He lost both times, regardless. During William W. Scranton’s gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania, it was deemed wise to play down Hotchkiss and Yale. He won. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island decided to play down neither his prep school (St. George’s) and college (Princeton) nor his Old Family background, and won. Also in Rhode Island, William H. Vanderbilt—on the theory, that, being a Vanderbilt, he would have had to have gone to some prep school—similarly decided neither to disown nor flaunt St. George’s. He ran for a term as Governor, then lost the reelection. Most recently, New York City’s Mayor, John V. Lindsay, chose the artful (and, to those who knew his school, hilarious) tactic of referring to St. Paul’s as his “high school” during his campaign. (Few boys’ prep schools are as unlike high school as is St. Paul’s where even the match-books in the public rooms and the guest towels in the washrooms are embossed with the school’s monogram, “S.P.S.,” where the chapel is furnished with a vaulting, hand-carved reredos donated by a Vanderbilt, and where the school gymnasium is entered through a reception room filled with English antiques.) This Gosh-I’m-No-Better-Than-You approach may have helped Lindsay win. In short, a New England prep school education won’t kill a politician’s chances, but it won’t do much to help them, either.

  New England boys’ schools themselves have, in recent years, tried to rid themselves of the St. Grottlesex tag, and to shake off the position they occupied in the public’s mind fifty or sixty years ago. There has been talk of a “new look” in prep schools, and educators like to say that the schools have “changed drastically” in the years since the end of the Second World War. But they may not have changed as much as some would like to think. They have tried to lure boys from a broader geographic spectrum, and most schools today can boast enrollments from the majority of the fifty states and from a number of foreign countries. With their multi-million-dollar endowments—some of which are larger than those of many large universities—the schools have also tried to tempt boys from the other end of the economic scale with scholarships. Though it would have been something of a surprise to see a Negro boy at a prep school in the 1940’s, it is now a surprise to find a school that does not have at least three or four. No prep school would dream of discriminating against Jews nowadays, though anti-Semitism among prep school students is a recurrent unpleasant theme. (When the young son of the photographer Richard Avedon, who is Jewish, was looking over prep schools in New England recently, he told his father, with a certain accuracy, “I’d probably stand a better chance of getting in if I was a Negro.”) But the fact remains that prep school applications—including applications for scholarships—continue to come from the best addresses in the larger cities and the better suburbs, from families who want their sons to go to schools where they will meet “nice people”—which causes school administrators to grumble about parents who are giving their sons “the right education for the wrong reasons.”

  “A school,” so runs a familiar prep school maxim, “is only as good as its current headmaster,” and there is certainly a new look and a new wave of young and vigorous headmasters who have almost completely replaced the old, paternalistic, lovable “heads” and “Rectors” of a generation ago. These men include Mssrs. A. William Olsen of Hotchkiss, John Kemper of Andover, Seymour St. John of Choate, and Sidney Towle of Kent (where, to the astonishment of old Kent graduates, a co-ordinated school for girls was opened in 1960). The latest Old Guard headmaster to resign in favor of a younger man has been Exeter’s beloved William G. Saltonstall (“Bill Salty”), who is now director of the Peace Corps mission in Nigeria, and who was replaced at the school by a forty-seven-year-old ex-paratrooper, Richard Ward Day.

  Practically the last member of the Old Guard still in his post is Deerfield’s Frank Boyden, who, well in his eighties, seems indestructible. It is becoming harder and harder for friends of the school to think of Deerfield without him. Still, Mr. Boyden is not at all to be regarded as behind the times. “It’s that old son-of-a-gun Boyden who forced us into the public relations business,” says one of the younger headmasters. “Bruce Barton got hold of his ear, and Madison Avenue came to the prep school. He made us competitive with one another. Now a headmaster has to sell his school the way an automobile dealer sells cars.” Mr. Boyden is credited with having used “promotional gimmicks” to raise money for, and attract students to, Deerfield, and the success of his methods has been both admired and envied. For some of his gimmickery, however, he may owe no small debt to such “Old Dear” headmasters as Endicott Peabody; one of Mr. Boyden’s devices is riding around the Deerfield campus in a horse-drawn buggy. There have been dark hints that other headmasters, to compete, have had to dream up devices or eccentricities or “trademarks” of their own. Seymour St. John at Choate, for instance, has been seen with a pet otter flopping at his heels, and the Reverend Matthew Warren, headmaster of St. Paul’s, was given a red-and-white golf cart by an appreciative alumnus in which to tool around the campus.

  The St. Grottlesex boy, according to prep school administrators, is no longer the snobbish, pampered Society heir or rich man’s son. He is now simply “the most qualified boy.” In prep school circles, he is referred to as the “M.Q.B.” Prep school educators today are apt to refer to their schools as, “America in microcosm,” or, as William Saltonstall once said he hoped Exeter would one day be, “a great national high school”—which is perhaps also the way Mayor Lindsay has begun to think of St. Paul’s. But most prep school boys would disagree with these notions. The reason, they say, is simple. “Most of us didn’t really want to go away to school,” one boy said. “We were told we were going, and our parents pretty much told us which school we were going to. They wanted us to go to prep school for one of two basic reasons—because they figured it would put us in a position of superiority in later life, or because they just wanted us the heck out of the house.”

  He went on to say that many boys, however well-qualified, simply have no desire to go to prep school. “It just isn’t an accepted American idea,” he said. “It’s popular only with a small minority. You take a boy who’s going to a public high school in Nebraska. He’s president of his class, a great athlete, and a straight-A student. He’s prep school qualified, all right, and he’d be a great addition to any school. But you could offer him Choate or Deerfield or Exeter on a platter, free, and he’d turn it down. Why should he leave his home and family and friends, and all his success there, to come to some place in the East he’s heard is a snob school? Why should he want—or even need—a prep school? That kind of guy can get into any college in the country, anyway. That’s the great fallacy of the M.Q.B. We want him. But he just doesn’t think we’re all that great.” This boy feels that the American people do not wholeheartedly support the idea of private secondary school education; that the schools cannot be called strongholds, or even mirrors, of democracy. Instead, he says, “Most of us are upper or upper-middle class, country-club-coming-out-party, stockbroker-Tudor-French-Provincial-suburban.”

  Prep school boys themselves do not believe that they are America’s M.Q.B.’s. They feel they are something a little different, a little special—not just a little better than other boys. At prep school, many boys begin to feel hints of the heavy weight that will one day fall on them as members of an American Establishment. A St. Mark’s boy says, soberly, “For me and others it’s a real problem to justify the fact that we’re being given a top-grade education without deserving it more than the next fellow—except by an accident of birth. It’s a heavy responsibility we’re given, and often we don’t feel qualified to handle it.”

  And prep school administrators themselves admit that, M.Q.B. or no M.Q.B., the sons of alumni are given special consideration. “It is a matter of economic necessity,” says one headmaster—since alumni gifts are so important to a school’s maintenance and expansion. A teenage Ford would have to be most unqualified indeed to be turned away from Hotchkiss, now that the splendid Ford Library reposes there. Problems like these may n
ot keep prep school headmasters awake nights, but they are matters of continuing concern. Sons of alumni and benefactors must be served—and usually served first. When the mother of a prep school student, who had been warned that his spelling was so poor as to be far below the school’s standard, confronted the headmaster, she asked, “What difference does it make whether he can spell or not? He’ll always have a secretary.” The headmaster admitted he had no answer to this.

  And so a money and family elite are perpetuated through the medium of the prep school. As a St. Paul’s sixth-former put it dryly not long ago—when a young Pillsbury from Minneapolis was applying to St. Paul’s where many other Pillsburys have studied—“I kinda think he’ll get in, don’t you?”

  5

  “We’re Coming Out Tonight”

  History’s first debutantes were, presumably, young women of marriageable age who were presented at European Courts during the seventeenth century for the approval of Court ladies, Court gentlemen, and, sometimes, the Monarch. But there is strong evidence that the practice of introducing eligible virgins to members of the tribe began considerably before that, and that the debutante ritual dates from the Old Stone Age, if not before. The ritual has always carried strong sexual overtones—a rite of passage between the ages of puberty and of marriage—and, even in primitive cultures, has been carried out with trappings intended to demonstrate the debutante’s social position and wealth. Among certain tribes in New Guinea, fathers announce the marriageability of their daughters by throwing large quantities of coconuts into the sea—the richer the man, the more coconuts he throws. In Africa, there are tribes which ritually prepare their young women for their debuts by placing them in “fattening houses” where, for beauty’s sake, their bodies are anointed with butter for weeks on end while the girls are stuffed with food. Again, it is the richest men who produce the fattest daughters. In most of these primitive ceremonies the girls wear approximations, or adaptations, of the wedding costume, just as American debutantes—anthropologically just a step away from their sisters in the savanna—today appear in their almost identical, though “one-of-a-kind” long white gowns, wearing bits of veiling, carrying bouquets, and stand in receiving lines like make-believe brides. Otherwise, today’s debutantes retain few of the tribal practices of the Stone Age, but they have developed some equally interesting ones of their own. The father of a modern debutante does not toss coconuts into New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay, but he tosses considerable amounts of money in other directions.