The American Boy

Of course, what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be really proud. . .

Nowadays, whatever other faults the son of rich parents may tend to develop, he is at least forced by the opinion of all his associates of his own age to bear himself well in manly exercises and to develop his body—and therefore, to a certain extent, his character—in the rough sports which call for pluck, endurance, and physical address.

Theodore Roosevelt - The American Boy

Teddy Roosevelt came to St. Paul’s School in June of 1906 to dedicate the Spanish American War Memorial. (Teddy had also visited SPS back in 1875, when he had retrieved his younger brother Elliot who couldn’t complete his first term due to nervous “hysteria”.) The war memorial, a bronze statue by Bela Pratt (a student of Saint Gaudens) shows a young soldier “at ease but tense, committed but with an air of youthful insouciance,” gazing off past the black waters sluicing off of Library Pond. The boys and masters and alumni of the school assembled on the terrace before the Sheldon Library that day and remembered “the noble and unselfish ardor aroused by our nation’s interference in the cause of Cuba.”

A large posse of Eastern blue bloods had enlisted in T.R.’s Rough Rider regiment, at a time when “the white man’s burden” was every young gentleman’s social obligation. Dudley Dean “perhaps the best quarterback who ever played on a Harvard 11,” Bob Wrenn “the champion tennis player of America,” Waller “the high jumper,” Craig Wadsworth “the steeplechase rider,” and Joe Stephens, “the crack polo player,” formed the core of the regimental leadership as it started the campaign towards Santiago.

Hamilton Fish (SPS 1890), the ex-captain of the Columbia crew, was in the thick of it along with five other “Paulies”. His Grandfather and namesake, the Secretary of State, (he preceded Wm. M. Evarts) had worked diligently to preserve peaceful relations with Spain, but young Ham found his destiny on the Caribbean island. Colonel Roosevelt was Ham’s close friend, and gave him a dog, “Don” which quickly became the regiment mascot. The evening before the Battle of Las Guasimas, Ham and Teddy sat together in their campground and, facing combat for the first time, talked heart to heart.

“I said, ‘Well, Fish, we have all got to die sometime, and after all, we cannot die in a better way,’ and he nodded and said, ‘That is just how I feel, Colonel, and it is one of the reasons that made me come.’”

Sergeant Hamilton Fish took a bullet to his heart the next morning; he was the first American soldier to die in the Spanish American War. (Don, his dog, went on to rush San Juan Hill, and after the war quietly retired to the Quaker town of Whittier, California, until a big touring car containing four persons rounded a corner at a high speed and the old dog, walking quietly along, could not get out of its way.)

When Teddy came to commemorate the war dead and personally express his admiration for the men who served with him in Cuba, my grandfather Edward Perkins was completing his first year as a master at Saint Paul’s School. Like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had cast about for a vocation after leaving college, and like them he took up teaching school in New England.

He had been a boy at the school in the final years of the second Rector, Joseph Howland Coit. In 1905, the year Edward returned to teach, Dr. Henry Ferguson took over as interim Rector. St Paul’s was “a picked and purple school”; fashionable magazines of the day noted the “physical beauty, general alertness, and winsome charm of these finished little gentlemen.” Henry Vaughan had filled the pastoral landscape with the high gothic Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, the heavy Georgian Lower School, and the massive “Tudorbethan” Upper School. The school was morphing from its early incarnation as an extension of the Coit family to a much larger and more complex educational institution. It was a time when students showed “a mixture of conformity and rebellion, conventionality with strong individualism.” Boys wore stiff collars and were expected to tip their hats to each master he passed, but beards and sideburns were grown and drinking and smoking were common throughout the school. Relations between boys and masters were often strained; boys were known to torment new masters, and prided themselves on being able to reduce the term of several new recruits to a single year.

When Edward returned to St. Paul’s in 1905 he became an instructor in Latin and Greek. For four years it was a pleasurable enough life, insulated from the many vagaries of young bachelorhood. Young masters lived on a meager salary, thread-bare aristocrats moving in upper class society without any real wherewithal to support such a lifestyle, bonding with each other and their young charges and their students’ affluent parents.

“At St. Paul’s, we believe that Latin provides a medium, unsurpassed by any other subject, for developing those qualities so necessary for scholastic success in school and college. From the first the student may be taught the importance of care and accuracy, of facing and analyzing a problem, of memorizing and learning the essential facts. A boy may learn how disastrous it is to put things off. On the other hand, he will find how inevitably and surely a well-prepared lesson brings its satisfaction. For the first time he faces a problem that taxes all his mind.”

Hobey Baker, John “Gil” Winant, and Charlie Scribner were all third formers that year at SPS, and Edward did his best to share his enthusiasm and affection for the classics with them. Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Iliad and the Odyssey presented the young master and his charges with intellectual challenges, aesthetic enjoyment, and moral instruction.

Hobey Baker, particularly handsome, “slim and defiant”, with a blond shock of hair, was making his mark in the classroom as an industrious, though not brilliant student. He was absolutely dazzling, however, on the gridiron and on the “black ice” of the Lower School Pond. Hockey was taking hold in Millville; the ice froze quickly on the shallow ponds and the thermometer sank below zero early in the winter in the Merrimack Valley. Hobey viscerally loved sport for sport’s sake; no-one could play with or against Hobey without being influenced by his contagious charisma and spirit of fair play. In his sixth form year, the St. Paul's team defeated Princeton, the Tigers' only loss that year. He was never penalized for foul play, and he went out of his way to congratulate his opponents at the close of every contest. He would become to Scott Fitzgerald “an ideal worthy of everything in my enthusiastic admiration, yet consummated and expressed in a human being who stood within ten feet of me.”

Gil Winant was a poor student at St. Paul's, but he discovered his gift as a natural leader who could inspire and persuade others with the force of his personality. Gilt was sober, serious, quiet, unassuming, idealistic and passionate about the causes of social justice. He cared little for the practicalities of money; he was indifferent to food, often forgetting to eat. He loved St. Paul's because it was a thoroughly impractical school, whose only function was to prepare students to enter Princeton or Harvard or Yale. It concentrated on learning in an ideal way, without any concerns for training its young charges for a career. This suited Winant fine. He was, above all, an impractical idealist. And St. Paul's was the only place and time in his life in which Winant was ever fully happy.

Charlie Scribner was gentle and reserved, with a bit of an Edwardian stammer; he was quite artistic, like his Flagg uncles, and had a good sense of humor. He loved horses, and with his neatly parted flaxen hair, cut a dashing figure riding the hunts of New Jersey. He did not personally have a great literary bent, but his family’s publishing house in New York had just published The Golden Bowl by Henry James, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the first twenty-three volumes of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, and it was obvious he would someday go on to join the family firm.

At Anniversary, 1909, Woodrow Wilson, President of Princeton University was the principal speaker. “The tall, ascetic figure, the deeply chiselled and beautifully modeled features, the brow of the scholar, the eyes that flashed as he drove home his points” held his audience in thrall. “I am sorry for the lad who is going to inherit money; the object of college is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Wilson warned that both St. Paul’s and Princeton were doomed to disappear unless they reformed and adapted themselves to the needs of modern life. By promoting social exclusivity, they were failing to train leaders, and today’s college men would find themselves capable of playing little useful role on graduation.

Gil Winant, Hobey Baker, and Charlie Scribner all went on to Princeton.

After four years at the school, Edward decided to move on as well. “The life and work there I enjoyed and it was with a great deal of regret that I finally made up my mind that if I remained in it permanently I would certainly find myself in middle life dissatisfied in having irretrievably renounced the interests and rewards of an active career in more expansive surroundings. But recognizing that such was the fact I entered the law school of Columbia University in the autumn of 1909.”

His younger brother Max was a cub reporter at the New York Times, Learned Hand had just been appointed Federal Judge, Harlan Fiske Stone was the new Dean of the Law School, the Columbia Law Review was nearing its second decade; New York would become his home.