I Left My Homework in the Hamptons by Blythe Grossberg

Author:Blythe Grossberg [Grossberg, Blythe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-20T20:12:00+00:00

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As Freud, who understood neuroses so well, might have predicted, the fear exhibited by Maria runs rampant among the New York elite, in spite of their increasing opulence. The reality of the neo-gilded age in which we live is that the top 1 percent, and especially the top .01 percent, own more than ever before. They have a near stranglehold on the nation’s goods and wealth, and their share of the wealth is only increasing, while the rest of us watch our wealth fall or stagnate. But their perception of their place in the world is very different, and they believe that if they don’t exercise constant frenetic competitiveness, they will fall. Their wealth has the ironic effect of not calming them down but making them evermore restless.

The old gilded age was filled with men and women who spent the summers eating boned fowl and turbot in lobster sauce and yachting in Newport, but the neo-gilded age is filled with men and women who don’t stop working and fretting. They bring their cell phones and iPads on their sailboats. This isn’t rare, even among the middle class, but the elite supercharge their work with a kind of hyperactivity that extends to every aspect of their lives.

The elite in the gilded age weren’t afraid of outside threats because there didn’t seem to be any. They were instead afraid of a kind of weakness from within, a corruptive, corrosive softness that they thought would cause their class to putrefy. As a result, their children’s schools were marked by austere conditions and tough headmasters. Perhaps the most notorious at that time was Groton School (which now bears no resemblance to its earlier, Spartan self) under its founding headmaster, Reverend Endicott Peabody. He was himself an embodiment of the “muscular Christianity” he advocated and was not afraid of going door-to-door in Tombstone, Arizona, to raise funds for a new Episcopal church only shortly after the notorious gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In the early days of Groton, the students, all boys, were permitted to take only cold showers, and they were not allowed to receive more than twenty-five cents a week in allowance, even though they were from some of the richest families in the country.

Clinton Trowbridge, who attended Groton in the early 1940s, writes about receiving disciplinary “blackmarks” that meant he had to run around the track surrounding the Circle, the grounds at the center of the school, for six hours—six hours! For worse infractions, students were sentenced to “black death,” a punishment in which they were locked in a room for three days with bread, water, and a Bible for sustenance.

It’s impossible to imagine parents—not to mention state authorities—countenancing this type of punishment now. Today’s private schools do not follow the Spartan mantra. They are appointed with rugs, chandeliers, and comfy libraries in which kids can sleep in leather chairs. The dining services in many schools serve gourmet food, and there are festive holiday meals with artisanal hot chocolate. While

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