OLD MONEY, NEW MONEY, AND NO MONEY
The history of boarding schools also embodies another American theme, one that has been constant through time - the establishment of elites, the rise of social mobility, and the quest for acceptance by excluded groups. The relationship between three aspects of American society – Old Money, New Money and for want of a better term, No Money, continues to play out on boarding school campuses.
Old Money derives from the earliest American elites, wealthy colonial families who devised behaviors and legal structures to ensure the preservation of capital and the means to pass it on within families from generation to generation. These families provided the wherewithal to found cultural and educational institutions, including the academies, as well as political leadership. Old Money families inherit and manage their wealth; work is not a means to acquire more money, it is an opportunity for service or personal enrichment. Since the earliest wealth in the United States derived from the British colonies and then the states created from them, the original Old Money people were and continue to be primarily WASPs.
WASP, an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” was first coined by the influential sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (1915-1996), himself a WASP with an elite education (St. Paul’s, Penn and Columbia). Baltzell’s contention that an ongoing American aristocracy was necessary to provide national leadership was tempered by his view that rising individuals from other backgrounds should join the elite based on their merits. Baltzell, who wrote from the 1950s to the 1990s, maintains influence today.
The earliest Old Money included the “Mayflower families” – the colonial New England merchants and the Dutch families who controlled New York back when it was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Recently wealthy businessmen with no social background, such as John Jacob Astor, were never fully accepted, shunned as “New Money” arrivistes; in time their descendents became Old Money as well.
The rush of wealth created after the Civil War brought an entirely new wave of successful New Money families, flush with cash but lacking social credentials. These newcomers, were despised as crass, status obsessed materialists by the Old Money crowd (some of whom, of course, were rather recently considered New Money). Newly prosperous New Money families, intent on social success, were largely responsible for the sudden explosion of prep school foundings in the 1880s and 90s, the Gilded Age. These Gilded Age New Money families wanted their children to mingle with and marry into Old Money, and much of the social anxieties of the era have to do with these tensions; the novels of Henry James and Edna Ferber all do. These tensions exist in the modern era; Nelson Aldrich, Jr.’s Old Money (1988) limns this world in elegant detail.
According to Baltzell and Aldrich, New Money people are economically ascendant, focused on success, power, prestige, and status possessions. Trophy marriages are New Money habits. New Money relies less on extended families and more on nuclear families, yet with a focus on acquisitiveness and febrile upward striving – more money, more power, more fame, and more social acceptance. Old Money people live quietly. New Money people live large, with lavish lifestyles, leveraged assets, and public personalities. While Old Money remains mostly WASPs, New Money now includes families from every background in the world. The 20th century story of the Kennedy family and the current ones of the Trumps and the Clintons are New Money sagas of financial and political success followed by quests for social acceptance, with mixed results. New Money families seek status and prestige. Old Money families, such as the Bushes and the Roosevelts, seek to maintain relevance in a changing world.
Families without capital or social influence (let’s call them No Money) didn’t figure into this mix. With the exception of some scholarship students at the old academies, No Money students were not admitted to the boarding schools, nor had the means to pay the tuition even if they were accepted. This changed in the modern era with the advent of diversity and inclusion on boarding campuses. Schools which had built large endowments earmarked funds for grants for students needing tuition support. As a result, present day boarding schools include student populations from Old Money, New Money, and No Money backgrounds.
This history has significance in several ways. First, boarding school is a rare circumstance in modern society where young people of radically different backgrounds mingle, work, eat, study, and socialize together on a day to day basis. One result of this is a tendency for boarding school graduates to have more understanding of “other people” than peers from their own social background may do. Another is a certain ease of communication with all sorts of people, as a consequence of this mingling.
Boarding school populations now are economically, racially, and ethnically diverse, but staffing remains remarkably traditional, with most administrators coming from the same cohort that used to populate the traditional student enrollment. Old Prep values which derived from the original Old Money values continue on: valuing service and sacrifice over individuality, and caution and comportment over free expression and exuberance. A good portion of this preference may stem from common sense – keeping a lid on a campus full of teenagers is no small task – but the underlying assumptions of restraint, service to the group, an appreciation of conformity and a suspicion of individuality appear to be due more to cultural assumptions than to pure necessity.
A FAMILY TRADITION
Some boarding schools were founded by members of the same family. The Phillips family of Massachusetts established the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA; a few years later, Phillips Exeter Academy was founded in New Hampshire. The Webb family founded not one but two Webb Schools in Tennessee, and also the Webb Schools of California. St. George’s an Episcopal School, and Portsmouth Abbey, a Catholic school, were both founded by the same person, the Rev. John B. Diman.
SO WHAT IS A “PREPPY” ANYWAY?
Just as the definition of “prep school” is imprecise, so the term “preppy” (or “preppie”) means different things to different people. This has some relevance to the purpose of this book.
In the beginning, a preppy was simply a young lad from an Old Money background who attended the family’s boarding school as a matter of course before going on to the family’s college. The post-WWII era brought the rarified and secluded world of WASP privilege to more general attention. The “Ivy League”, a termed dating from the 1930s, became firmly entrenched in American parlance when the Ivy League athletic conference was founded in 1954. Ivy League men’s clothing became fashionable. Tracking this development, prep schools gained wider attention and interest. Some point to the film Love Story as the first wide spread use of the term “preppy” , used in a somewhat mocking and negative tone, indicating a person from an upper class WASP background and their manner of dress and behavior.
In 1980, a book was published that changed that definition – probably by accident. The Official Preppy Handbook, a witty insouciant satire on prep culture, became an instant best seller and a “how-to” handbook for determined status seekers. The result was a shift in the meaning of “preppy” from an underlying WASP lifestyle (and its fundamental values) to a fashion trend: “preppy style”. This expanded into a lifestyle choice one could acquire. A prep school education became a status symbol to collect, along with other preppy accoutrements – Volvo station wagons, pure bred dogs, and summer vacations in certain acceptable zip codes.
The prep craze was magnified by intense marketing. Ralph Lauren, who began his career with Ivy/prep mainstay Brooks Brothers, recognized this marketing opportunity and has exploited it ever since. Popular Merchandise, Inc, aiming for a Ralph Lauren look at a much lower price point, rebranded itself as J. Crew, a fabricated name referencing the ultimate Ivy clothier J. Press and the uber-prep sport, crew.
The prep style continues as it always has, waxing and waning in popularity. The damage, however, has been done. The whimsical sprezzatura of the earlier Old Money era carries on, but it has been nearly overwhelmed by a relentless, rather desperate New Money search for status. With the latter comes a grim focus on all prep schools, boarding and day, as commodities, status markers, and stepping