FDR - Jean Edward Smith [20]
But Peabody’s overriding desire was to create a church-affiliated boarding school for the sons of America’s establishment. In 1883, with the financial assistance of family friends, including J. P. Morgan, Peabody realized his dream and founded Groton on ninety acres of donated farmland thirty-five miles north of Boston. The school was small: six classes of not more than twenty boys each. Tuition was $500 a year. That was about twice what the average American family had to live on.39 And there were no scholarships. Morgan served on the board of trustees, as did Phillips Brooks, the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, and William Lawrence, dean of the Episcopal Theological Seminary. The contrast between the rawness of Tombstone and the refinement of Groton seems extreme, yet there is no better measure of the breadth of Peabody’s character.
Groton’s purpose, as the rector saw it, was to cultivate “manly Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development.” He believed in religion, character, athletics, and scholarship—roughly in that order. And character was formed by discipline and obedience. Especially obedience. “You know,” Averell Harriman (Groton ’09) once said to his father, the rector “would be an awful bully if he weren’t such a terrible Christian.”40
Groton was an immediate success and within ten years had become the most exclusive school in America. Wealthy fathers, disgusted with the soft living their offspring enjoyed, flocked to send their sons to a school where boys would be trained not only intellectually but morally and physically as well. Some of the most successful men in the country had never been to college, but they were good judges of character, and they recognized that Peabody was their type of man. They welcomed the opportunity to place their sons under his care.
Life at Groton was Spartan. Each boy lived in a six-by-ten-foot cubicle with a bed, bureau, rug, and chair. All were standard issue. There was no closet, wall hangings were prohibited, and there was a curtain instead of a door because Peabody frowned upon too much privacy. Mornings began at 6:45 with an icy shower in a communal washroom. Breakfast, chapel, and three morning classes followed with clockwork precision. Dinner, the main meal, was served at noon, followed by two afternoon classes and athletics. Another frigid shower, the evening meal (for which official school dress was required), chapel, and study hall, following which the Rector and Mrs. Peabody shook the hand of each boy and wished him good night.
Despite his pampered upbringing, FDR adjusted handily to the rigor of Groton. Twice a week for the next four years he wrote to his parents, and never once did he complain about his experience. In a sense, except for the cold showers, he was substituting one disciplined regime for another. Autumns were filled with football excitement, edging on to the Christmas season, culminating in the unforgettable reading of Dickens’s Christmas Carol by the rector’s father.41 In winter, skating and sledding substituted for team sports; with spring came baseball, tennis, swimming, and golf. At vacation time most boys reacted like sailors on shore leave. Franklin was an exception. If he got into mischief, there is no record of it. School vacations were invariably spent at Hyde Park. Summers he usually went to Campobello, where he enjoyed nothing so much as sailing his twenty-one-foot knockabout, New Moon, which his father had given him.
Groton’s curriculum was classical, taught with great attention to detail. Peabody himself taught sacred studies and set the tone of the school. He saw Groton as a large family with the rector as paterfamilias. Leading the school athletic teams, Peabody personified the muscular Christianity in which he believed. Football was his favorite. To Yale coach Walter Camp he wrote, “I am