Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T13:59:11.806Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Education of an Elite

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Edward N. Saveth*
Affiliation:
State University of New York

Extract

About a century ago, the private boarding school movement began in earnest in the United States. What are today considered among the best, if not the best, boarding schools were founded between 1883 and 1906: Lawrenceville (1883); Groton (1884); Woodbury Forest (1889); Taft (1890); Hotchkiss (1892); Choate (1896); St. George's (1896); Middlesex (1901); Deerfield (1903); and Kent (1906). Other schools launched earlier, were enlarged or their character altered during this quarter century: Phillips Andover (1778); Phillips Exeter (1783); Episcopal (1839); Hill (1851); St. Paul's (1856); and St. Mark's (1865). This is the “select sixteen” identified by E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment. Baltzell should know—being a Philadelphia mainliner, a graduate of St. Paul's, and for years professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the History of Education Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Digby Baltzell, E., The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Class in America (New York, 1964), 128.Google Scholar

2 Useem, Michael, “The Social Organization of the American Business Elite and Participation of Corporation Directors in the Governance of American Institutions,American Sociological Review 44 (Aug. 1979): 553–72.Google Scholar

3 Packard, Vance, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, Your Future (New York, 1959), 253–56.Google Scholar

4 Cookson, Peter W. Jr., and Hodges Persell, Caroline, Preparing for Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

5 Profile of Private Secondary Boarding Schools,” in Sargent, Porter, The Handbook of Private Schools: An Annual Descriptive Survey of Independent Education (Boston, 1981).Google Scholar

6 Keller, Morton, ed., Problems of Modern Democracy: Problems and Economic Essays (Cambridge, 1966), 280; Armstrong, William M., ed., The Gilded Age: Letters of E. L. Godkin (Albany, N.Y., 1974), 101.Google Scholar

7 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams Sentry ed. (New York, 1961), 285.Google Scholar

8 Kirkland, Edward C., Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835–1915: The Patrician at Bay (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 159–60.Google Scholar

9 Godkin, E. L. to Frederick Law Olmsted, quoted in Geoffrey Blodgett, “Reform Thought and the Genteel Tradition,” in The Gilded Age, ed. H. Wayne Morgan (Syracuse, N.Y., 1970), 71; Godkin, E. L., “Role of the Universities in Politics,” in Reflections and Comments, 1865–1985 (New York, 1895), 157–60.Google Scholar

10 William Curtis, George, The Public Duty of Educated Men (Albany, N.Y., 1897).Google Scholar

11 Haraszti, Zoltan, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 74.Google Scholar

12 Schwartz, Barry, “The Character of Washington: A Study in Republican Culture,American Quarterly 38 (Summer 1986): 202–22; Cappon, Lester J., ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 2: 402; McFarland, Gerald W., ed., The Mugwumps, 1884–1900: Moralists or Pragmatists? (New York, 1975), 1.Google Scholar

13 Shils, Edward, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), 278.Google Scholar

14 Kirkland, , Adams 180, 189.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 54, 296.Google Scholar

16 Hughes, Thomas, “The Public Schools of England: Part II,North American Review 128 (1879): 352, 369, and “Part III,” 129 (1879): 52.Google Scholar

17 Sargent, , Handbook (1915), xxi, 78.Google Scholar

18 Kirkland, , Adams 148.Google Scholar

19 McLachlan, James, America's Boarding Schools: A Historical Study (New York, 1970), 84.Google Scholar

20 Kit, and Konolige, Frederica, The Power of Their Glory: America's Ruling Class, the Episcopalians (New York, 1978), 8194, 140–71.Google Scholar

21 Pier, Arthur S., St. Paul's School, 1855–1934 (New York, 1934), 223.Google Scholar

22 Heckscher, August, St. Paul's: The Life of a New England School (New York, 1980), 93.Google Scholar

23 Morison, Elting E., ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, 1951), 3: 107–8.Google Scholar

24 Link, Arthur S., ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1966), 19: 226ff. One wonders why the reputedly strong fathers of the Victorian era surrendered their sons to headmasters serving in loco parentis. Why were both J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt impressed by the strong moral force that drove Henry Augustus Coit, headmaster of St. Paul's before Drury? Is this another episode in the decline of the father's role, which, according to psychohistorians, began with the rebellion of Americans against the father king? George B. Forgie traces paternal weakening throughout the nineteenth century, and Joe J. Dubbert interprets Victorian fathers as voting in large numbers for Theodore Roosevelt because they saw in him a father image stronger than they. No wonder the boys idealized and idolized their headmasters as fathers larger than life. Joe J. Dubbert, A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1979); Forgie, George B., Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

25 Sargent, , Handbook (1915), xxi.Google Scholar

26 Szasz, F. M., “The Stress on ‘Character and Service’ in Progressive America,Mid-America 63 (Oct. 1981): 145–56.Google Scholar

27 Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985); idem, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1974); Wood, Gordon S., “The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,New York Review of Books, 18 Feb. 1988, 33–40.Google Scholar

28 Appleby, Joyce, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790's (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

29 Hall, Peter D., The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York, 1982), 90; Diggins, John P. and Kann, Mark E., eds., The Problem of Authority in America (Philadelphia, 1981).Google Scholar

30 Dutton Taft, Horace, Memories and Opinions (New York, 1942), 197–99, 222–23, 227, 245, 257, 260.Google Scholar

31 Howard Taft, William, “The College Slouch,Ladies Home Journal, 31 (May 1914).Google Scholar

32 Ward, Geoffrey C., Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 (New York, 1985), 179.Google Scholar

33 Schwartz, , “The Character of Washington,205.Google Scholar

34 Szasz, , “Stress on ‘Character and Service.'Google Scholar

35 McLachlan, , America's Boarding Schools 285.Google Scholar

36 Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York, 1986), 40.Google Scholar

37 Davies, John, The Legend of Hobey Baker (Boston, 1966), x.Google Scholar

38 Crosbie, L. M., The Phillips Exeter Academy (Norwood, Mass., 1924), 218.Google Scholar

39 Ashburn, Frank D., Peabody of Groton: A Portrait (New York, 1944), 100101.Google Scholar

40 Memorials of St. Paul's School (New York, 1891), 137.Google Scholar

41 Cabot, R. C., Prescriptions … (Boston, 1915), 26.Google Scholar

42 Santayana, George, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (New York, 1936), 380, 382, 387, 395, 397, 541.Google Scholar

43 Thimmesch, Nick and Johnson, William O., Robert Kennedy at 40 (New York, 1965), 28.Google Scholar

44 Davies, , The Legend of Hobey Baker xi.Google Scholar

45 Quoted in Stimson Bullitt, To Be a Politician (New York, 1959), xix.Google Scholar

46 Morison, , Roosevelt 8: 1434–35.Google Scholar

47 Quoted in Dubbert, A Man's Place, 181.Google Scholar

48 Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men 55.Google Scholar

49 The Grotonian (June 1907), 154.Google Scholar

50 Adams, , Education 420. Professor Samuel P. Huntington and the late Professor Warren Susman have indicated the importance of research into American aristocratic traditions. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watameki, eds., The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York, 1975), 89; Susman, Walter, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984), 95.Google Scholar

51 Godkin, E. L., Introduction to Orations and Essays by Edmund Burke (New York, 1900), xiii.Google Scholar

52 Keller, , Problems of Modern Democracy 2728, 44; “What Is the Use of Going to College?” The Nation, 4 Apr. 1867, 276; Godkin, E. L., Henry G. Pearson: A Memorial Address Delivered June 21, 1894 (New York, [1894]), 5.Google Scholar

53 Quoted in McLachlan, America's Boarding Schools, 136; Levine, Steven B., “The Rise of American Boarding Schools and the Development of a National Upper-Class,Social Problems 28 (Oct. 1980).Google Scholar

54 Wilkinson, Rupert, Gentlemanly Power: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition: A Comparative Study in the Making of Rulers (New York, 1964), vii, 37.Google Scholar

55 It has been said of the English public schools that, in view of the backgrounds of students, the goal of training for leadership may be superfluous. “The future leaders just happened to be lodged there to spend their youth.” Brian Simon and Jan Bradley, eds. The Victorian Public School: Studies in the Development of an Educational Institution: A Symposium (Dublin, 1975), 61.Google Scholar

56 Ashburn, , Peabody 176–77; The Grotonian (June 1897).Google Scholar

57 Bundy, McGeorge and Stimson, Henry L., On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1948), xvii; Morison, E. E., Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston, 1960), 17, 27, 38, 40. Adlai Stevenson, of Choate and Princeton, and John V. Lindsay, of St. Paul's and Yale, stress the role of their preparatory schools and colleges in shaping their decisions for public service. Kenneth S. Davis, A Prophet in His Own Country: The Triumphs and Defeats of Adlai E. Stevenson (New York, 1957), 20, 36–37, 52; Davis, Kenneth S., The Politics of Honor: A Biography of Adlai E. Stevenson (New York, 1967); Miller, H. J., Adlai Stevenson: A Study in Values (New York, 1967); Brown, Stuart G., Conscience in Politics: Adlai E. Stevenson in the 1950's (Syracuse, N.Y. 1961), 251–52; Ives, E. S. and Dolson, H., My Brother Adlai (New York, 1956), 152–55; Lindsay, John V., Journey into Politics: Some Informal Observations (New York, 1967), 4.Google Scholar

58 Choate Alumni Bulletin 8 (Nov. 1946): 74–75.Google Scholar

59 Drury, Stephen S., Drury and St. Paul's 86, 108.Google Scholar

60 Seidel Canby, Henry, Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York, 1936), 126, 135–36.Google Scholar

61 Byrnes, Robert F., Awakening American Education to the World: The Role of Archibald Cary Coolidge, 1866–1928 (Notre Dame, Ind., 1982), 153. A similar role was played by William and Robert Morse Lovett. Ernest R. May, American Imperialism (New York, 1968), 44–48.Google Scholar

62 Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men 142–54, 157–58; Destler, I. M., Gelb, Leslie H., and Lake, Anthony, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1984), 103, 124–25, 189; Weil, Martin, A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

63 Wyman, David S., The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

64 Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Bias of European History (New York, 1921); Stoddard, T. L., The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York, 1920).Google Scholar

65 Alsop, Joseph, FDR: 1882–1945: A Centenary Remembrance (New York, 1982), 12.Google Scholar

66 Eliot, Charles W., “The Function of Education in Democratic Society,” in Charles W. Eliot: The Man and His Beliefs, ed. Neilson, W. A. (New York, 1926); Hawkins, Hugh, Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (New York, 1972), 182, 224–62.Google Scholar

67 James, William, “The Social Value of the College Bred,McClure's Magazine 30 (Feb. 1908): 419–22.Google Scholar

68 Canby, , Alma Mater 225, 240.Google Scholar

69 Oren, David, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 8586.Google Scholar

70 Sam Anson, Robert, Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry (New York, 1987). The subject of Jews and blacks in preparatory schools is treated tangentially in Frederick S. Allis, Jr., Youth from Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy (Hanover, 1979), 344–45, 616; Saltonstall, William G., Lewis Perry of Exeter (New York, 1980), 77–78; Levine, , “Rise of American Boarding Schools.”Google Scholar

71 Heckscher, , St. Paul's 361–63.Google Scholar

72 Allis, , Youth from Every Quarter.Google Scholar

73 Preppies: The Last Upper-Class,” Atlantic 243 (Jan. 1979): 5566.Google Scholar

74 Heckscher, , St. Paul's 363.Google Scholar

75 Anson, , Best Intentions 108.Google Scholar

76 Cookson and Persell, Preparing for Power.Google Scholar

77 Smigel, Erwin O., The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (New York, 1964), 7273.Google Scholar

78 Bell, Daniel, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1976), 83.Google Scholar

79 Cookson and Persell, Preparing for Power 168, 188, 196, 260, 265, 288, 316. Diverse views concerning the value to society and, to some extent the individual, of education in elite private schools are advanced by J. P. Marquand in Millicent Bell, Marquand: An American Life (Boston, 1979), 65; “Twelve of the Best American Schools,” Fortune 13 (June 1936); Curwen, Henry D., ed., Exeter Remembered (Exeter, N.H., 1965). Criticism is centered mainly in the failure of graduates to contribute to public life. John F. Kennedy took this position in 1946. Shortly before his assassination, Kennedy acknowledged the values of elite education in training public servants. He also said: “These schools will not survive if they become the exclusive possession of a single class or creed or color.” Curwen, Exeter Remembered, 109.Google Scholar

80 Johnson, Owen M., Stover at Yale (New York, 1912), 88, 188, 260, 265, 288, 316.Google Scholar

81 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987), 8990.Google Scholar

82 Bundy, McGeorge, The Strength of Government (Cambridge, 1968), 90.Google Scholar

83 Marty, Martin E., “Pluralists Take It on the Chin—Deservedly,New York Times, 2 Apr. 1988, 23.Google Scholar

84 Quoted in Sandra Frances Van Burkleo, “Honour, Justice, and Interest': John Jay's Republican Politics and Statesmanship on the Federal Bench,” Journal of the Early Republic 4 (Fall 1984): 239–74.Google Scholar