Endicott Peabody was an American educator. He was also an Episcopal priest.
Background
Endicott Peabody was born on Mat 30, 1857 in Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the third of the five children and four sons of Samuel Endicott Peabody and Marianne Cabot (Lee) Peabody. Descended from or related to many of the prominent early families of Massachusetts, he was born and reared a patrician. His great-grandfather was Joseph Peabody, master of a fleet of merchant ships and the wealthiest man in early nineteenth-century Salem. In 1870 the family moved to London, where his father was a partner in Peabody and Morgan, a banking firm established by a distant relative, George Peabody of Baltimore.
Education
Living in Salem until Endicott Peabody was thirteen, Endicott Peabody attended the Hacker School. In England, he attended Cheltenham School for five years and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1878 with a first class in the lower tripos.
Career
On his return to the United States, Endicott Peabody entered Lee, Higginson, and Company, a Boston brokerage firm, but although he gave promise as a businessman, he was not content. His English experiences and friendships had profoundly affected his outlook. Influenced by Phillips Brooks and others, in 1881 he enrolled in the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachussets, despite the family tradition of Unitarianism. While still a divinity student he accepted a call to Arizona's first Episcopal church, in Tombstone, where he served from January to June 1882. Returning to Massachusetts, he was ordained in 1884. For some time he had been interested in starting an Episcopal school for boys. A gift of land by the Lawrence family in Groton, Massachussets, thirty-four miles from Boston, made the dream a fact.
With the backing of an impressive board of trustees, including Phillips Brooks and the elder J. P. Morgan, Peabody opened Groton School on October 18, 1884, with twenty-seven boys and two masters besides himself. From the beginning, Groton School attracted an elite clientele. The boys were mostly drawn from social-register families of Boston and New York City, and many of them went on, by way of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, to distinguished careers. In addition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the alumni roll includes three cabinet members, seventeen ambassadors and ministers, three Senators, five Congressmen, and many prominent figures in education, literature, publishing, the military, and philanthropy. This record is the more noteworthy considering the deliberately small enrollment, which in Peabody's time never exceeded two hundred.
A gifted fund raiser, Peabody used Groton's substantial endowment ($3, 600, 000 by 1939) to give the school a faculty salary scale far in advance of other preparatory schools and many colleges. But Peabody never strove to make Groton a "social" school in the conventional sense; indeed, he was highly skeptical of "society" as exemplified by the ostentation of Fifth Avenue and Newport. Nor was he an educational innovator; mistrusting fads, he made few original contributions to pedagogical practice. Yet by common agreement Groton School under Peabody was a remarkable place, and its distinctiveness lay in the character of its founder and headmaster.
Like Thomas Arnold, Endicott Peabody emphasized hard work and hard play, discipline, and character. Yet he was no uncritical imitator of the English public school system. He was, for example, repelled by the system of "fagging, " whereby older boys tyrannized the younger, and he did what he could to prevent its taking root at Groton. The accommodations at the school were spartan. Athletics, especially football, loomed large. Deeply religious, he always saw himself as a priest first and a schoolmaster second. Though not an outstanding preacher, he was forceful and moving in his short, extemporaneous talks in Groton's compulsory daily chapel services. . Social responsibility was tirelessly stressed. Masters and students were urged to participate in the Groton School Camp operated in the summers at Squam Lake, New Hampshire, for underprivileged boys, and Peabody himself set an example of civic consciousness by maintaining active membership in more than thirty committees and organizations, ranging from the Audubon Society to the Birth Control League of Massachusetts.
As headmaster, Peabody knew every boy in the school intimately, and his efforts to mold character did not end with graduation day. In their college years and beyond, he kept a watchful and dubious eye upon former students, and did not hestitate to write stern letters when word of some misstep reached him. This close supervision extended to the masters and staff of the school as well. By the 1920's such paternalism had come to seem somewhat anachronistic, and during Peabody's final decade as headmaster the turnover of masters was high and student dissatisfaction more vocal. Inevitably a personality as strong and as self-assured as Peabody's aroused strong feelings in others, and he had both his fierce partisans and his bitter detractors. The former praised his emphasis on character formation; the latter charged that his moral rigidity encouraged mindless conformity and choked off individuality.
Nevertheless, Peabody's retirement in 1940, after fifty-six years as active headmaster, produced an outpouring of affectionate tributes from Groton alumni and others. The praise also extended to Mrs. Peabody, who, although sharing her husband's fundamental values, had through her graciousness somewhat tempered his sternness. Peabody continued to live in Groton until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1944, at the age of eighty-seven. He and Mrs. Peabody, who died in 1946, are buried in the cemetery in the town of Groton.
Achievements
Endicott Peabody was distinguished educator and clergyman. He was the co-founder of The Groton School for Boys, and was known for his service as headmaster there. Peabody was the founder of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Ayer, Massachusetts.
Views
Endicott Peabody believed that the decline of virile moral leadership was one of America's gravest problems in the post-Civil War generation, and in founding Groton he deliberately set out to train a patrician class which would reassert that leadership.
Membership
Endicott Peabody was a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Personality
Endicott Peabody was, in some respects, a contradictory person. A strikingly attractive man:very large, blond, outgoing, with a keen sense of humor, "Cotty" loved human companionship and could display great charm in such encounters. Yet, like his friend Theodore Roosevelt, he inhabited a moral universe of absolute right and wrong, adhering to a code of behavior as stern as it was simplistic. When he felt that that code had been broken, he could be blunt and harsh in his judgments. He applied his rigid standards to himself no less than to others, and in letters to intimates often expressed a nagging sense of inadequacy and failure.
Quotes from others about the person
"He made a sacrament of exercise, " a friend once remarked of Endicott Peabody.
Franklin Roosevelt said of Peabody, "As long as I live his influence will mean more to me than that of any other people next to my father and mother. "
Interests
Endicott Peabody early acquired his lifelong devotion to sailing, horseback riding, and physical fitness. The quality of his mind was not remarkable, and his literary tastes were conventional: Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray.
Connections
On June 18, 1885 Endicott Peabody was married to a first cousin, Fannie Peabody of Danvers, Massachussets. This happy union produced six children: Malcolm Endicott, Helen, Rose Saltonstall, Elizabeth Rogers, Margery, and Dorothy.
