This week, History, Rinse, & Repeat takes a further break from its usual servings of political history to focus, as we occasionally do, on something cultural. However, today’s cultural take differs from what we usually offer, as it involves not a writer, composer, or artist from the past, but a contemporary work that purports to offer a glimpse into a historical period.
While recently hospitalized, too enervated to read or write (or to research), I spent my time watching sports and an occasional movie. Among the latter was a film, set at Christmas break of 1970, about a teacher and student at an all-male, New England boarding school – The Holdovers.
The all-male boarding school, the subject of our article, School Wars -- What Preppies Can Tell Us, is a topic that is of particular, and of personal, interest to me. This is partly because it was only in retrospect that I realized that many of the seemingly arbitrary and capricious experiences of my boarding school days were, in fact, carefully choreographed to shape the character with which I would leave the school. It is also partly because, having celebrated my 50th reunion two years ago, I have been in frequent email contact with numerous classmates who have brought to the fore many forgotten memories of that time. Needless to say, The Holdovers was a topic of extensive discussion among my class members not just because the period of the movie coincided precisely with our time at school (we were Fifth Formers at Christmas of 1970), but because several classmates had undergone the “holdover” experience themselves. To top it off, many of the scenes were filmed at the school I attended, St. Mark’s School.
I apologize in advance if this article is more personal than our usual fare. However, it is a painful consequence of growing old(er) that what seems to my generation as only yesterday is considered by most to fall into the category of “history.” Nevertheless, whether I admit it or not, the all-male prep school has become an historical curiosity. It disappeared almost overnight in the early seventies with the admission of girls by all the major prep schools. It is a world unimaginable to anyone who never experienced it. As noted in School Wars, the prep school environment was one of isolation and ritual purposefully designed to establish its own set of rules and values. As one educator, quoted in the article, wrote:
The key to the [prep] school ethos is that its ends and means are one. Its values are embodied in a total social system; divesting its pupils of many of the roles and attributes they possess in the larger society, the school provides them with its own structure, role patterns, relationships, style and norms. It is in living out its subtle, complete and all-inclusive way of life that the values are so effectively and permanently imbibed.
To be sure, the cocooned environment of the boarding school was not immune to larger outside cultural influences, but these influences affected day-to-day day life within the cocoon far less than one can envisage from the outside.
Accordingly, it was with substantial curiosity that I approached The Holdovers. Could an author, who graduated from high school ten years after the events portrayed in the film, and who apparently graduated from a day school rather than a boarding school, capture even partly what the experience was like? Could he isolate and remove from his story the cultural influences of today that were non-existent fifty years ago?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. The filmmaker, while constructing a story that is, at a minimum, entertaining and funny, misses the boat almost entirely in his effort to reconstruct an environment that reflects not the sensibilities of today, but of a nearly forgotten past. While my own personal prep school experience might not be universal (St. Mark’s was toward the disciplined and tightly harnessed end of the prep school spectrum), the film portrays the school administration, its teachers, its students, its staff, and, ultimately the teacher who is the central character in a manner that would not be recognizable to most of my contemporaries. While a pleasant dramatic diversion, it is not even remotely historical.
The Plot (Spoiler Alert)
The plot of The Holdovers is relatively straightforward. After setting the scene at a fictional school, Barton Academy, and establishing the characters, the plot commences when a tyrannical classics teacher, Paul Hunham, is informed that, as punishment for flunking the son of a wealthy donor, he will be required to supervise five students staying at the school over Christmas break. The five students are reduced to one when another wealthy parent helicopters into school mid-vacation, and agrees to take four of the boys with him, leaving behind one student, Angus Tully, who was unable to contact his parents. Tully and Hunham are joined over Christmas by the chief cook of the school.
From there, the movie takes a predictable, albeit enjoyable path. Tully and Hunham go through adventures and mishaps together. Tully grows up; Hunham becomes more human. Ultimately, Hunham takes Tully to visit his father in a mental institution, for which he is fired.
The Players
The characters portrayed in The Holdovers can be divided into five groups: (1) the faculty; (2) the staff; (3) the parents; (4) the students; and, (5) Paul Hunham.
The Faculty
The primary villain of the film is the faculty and, more importantly, the headmaster of the fictional Barton Academy. The faculty members are portrayed as petty and competitive, and the headmaster is portrayed as one intent primarily upon survival, placating the wealthy parents and donors to whom he must answer. While I have no doubt that modern heads of school are inherently political, the old-time headmaster of a boys’ prep school was an entirely different kettle of fish.
As set forth in Preparing For Power, America’s Elite Boarding Schools, by authors Peter W. Cookson, Jr. and Caroline Hodges Persell, the headmaster of a boy’s prep school was an almost mythical figure. As Cookson and Persell note, the model for the American headmaster was his English predecessor. “To be a headmaster at one of the great public schools was “a position of great power,” and of “great importance.” They further wrote that a quick review of official and semi-official biographies of great American heads . . . leaves the reader with a firm impression that the sagacity, wit, and patience of these headmasters has no known parallel.”
A head of school needed to be a leader, and his leadership was based upon “tradition,” “bureaucracy,” but above all “charisma.” A successful headmaster was necessarily charismatic. Moreover, “as the high priest of the status seminary,” he “was committed to the goal of producing an elite cadre of patricians and parvenues.” As noted in our prior article, what stands out about the old prep school is the “institutional self-confidence in the beliefs and values that the school imparted to its students. This self-confidence was based upon a track record of producing generations of capable students.” The headmaster of Barton may have existed, but he was the exception rather than the rule, a reflection of the moral relativism of today rather than the moral certainty of fifty years ago.
The second misstep of The Holdovers was its portrayal of the Barton faculty. Venal, petty, and contemptuous of its students, the faculty are offered as a stark contrast to the apparently idealistic Hunham. This one-dimensional approach is, at best, simplistic. As Cookson and Persell observed, the shape of boarding school faculties resembled an hourglass. At the bottom were young “short-timers” who came to work right out of college before moving on, and at the top were the lifers, who spent decades at the school. These long-time teachers were committed to the institution. “Pride in service is an old-fashioned quality that captures more than a few boarding school teachers. There may not be many Mr. Chipses left in prep schools, but there are a good number of men and women who have devoted their lives to the young with a level of dedication that elevates their calling.” To be sure, the cattiness and pettiness on display in The Holdovers likely existed at some institutions, but one cannot spend one’s entire life at a school without some buy-in.
The Staff
One of the wrinkles of The Holdovers was its inclusion of a member of the kitchen staff among its cast of characters. Integral to the plot is the head cook, Mary, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
The staff at a boarding school was a central, yet largely “invisible” component of a boarding school according to Preparing For Power:
The presence of a large, almost invisible, staff is also a useful vestige from a different era. The physical operation of a prep school is a complex process involving all the problems of maintaining a small town and feeding a small army. Building maintenance alone requires carpenters, plumbers, painters, and electricians. The extensive grounds of the schools need care-taking, and the miles of private roadways need plowing in the winter.
It is to The Holdovers’s credit that its author recognized the unique window into prep school life provided by a member of the staff – an essential component of prep school life but not necessarily entirely part of it. Despite this separation, many of the staff felt invested in the institution where they worked. One of the more interesting conversations I had as an alumnus was with the equipment manager in the St. Mark’s gymnasium, who lamented what he perceived to be the deleterious effect that resulted from the school’s dropping its jacket and tie requirement for boys.
However, The Holdovers does not really take advantage of this opportunity to say anything meaningful about the boarding school existence, other than that it was unreal. The role of Mary is offered more for dramatic purposes than to capture the tenor of the era.
The Students
The second anachronism of The Holdovers is its treatment of the students. The film breaks the students into easily identifiable, and predictable stereotypes – the entitled rich kid, the bully, the scared bed-wetter, and the bullied freshman. While the use of distinct stereotypes is not unique to The Holdovers, such use ignores the core mission of the old-time prep school -- the stripping away of the individual to reshape a member of the collective. To ignore the pervasive resocialization of the student body is to ignore the very essence of the all-boys prep school:
The bond between parent and child is probably weakened when children are sent away to school. From the child’s point of view, he or she has little choice but to forge new loyalties to survive. The vulnerability caused by detachment is magnified by the assault on privacy in the total institution; the compulsory social intimacy that prep schools require of their students is, from an outsider’s point of view, extraordinary. Like privates in army boot camp, prep school students must grow accustomed to eating, sleeping, studying, and playing together. As one student wrote, “The art of living close to other people is part of the education. You learn not only to face ten people in the shower in the morning, but you get a full picture of a friend’s character.”
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But this pervading sense of uniformity is essential if students are to form a collective whole. If individuals were allowed to live in small private buildings and decorate their living quarters totally to their own taste, there would be little pressure to join the group. Indeed, most younger boys at Groton [and at St. Mark’s] live in cubicles, which are nothing more than wood-paneled stalls where personal possessions and furniture are kept to the bare necessities. Privacy in the everyday sense of the word is virtually nonexistent.
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[T]he loss of individuality is thought of as part of the price students must pay if they are to be prepared for the exercise of power. The socialization processes that go on in boarding schools include both the visible curricula, as we have just discussed, and an invisible curricula that is designed to mold students into certain kinds of people.
The failure of The Holdovers to understand this dynamic mars fundamentally its portrayal of students’ interactions with each other. There were bullies and cliques, to be sure, but these were tempered by the collective identity that each student shared with another. Universal misery is often a powerful bond among young people.
Even falser is the portrayal of students’ interactions with teachers in the film. Simply put, no student of my day would have spoken to a teacher in the manner that those in The Holdovers did. This is not to say that students were not rebellious or even disrespectful. But that disrespect was, at worst, expressed in an indirect or (so we thought) subtle way. Students may have tried to edge to the line, but they never crossed it.
The Parents
The third anachronism of The Holdovers is its treatment of parents. Much of the plot is driven by the interference of parents in the operations of the school. This interference may be quite prevalent in elite private schools of today (at my daughter’s former school in New York City, the advanced math class became bloated for a period because so many wealthy parents demanded that their own daughters be placed in it), it was virtually non-existent at the all-male prep school. As noted in School Wars, separation from parents was the essential ingredient in the prep school experience. “Our parents dropped us off at school in the ninth grade and returned at graduation to pick us up and drive us to college.” According to Cookson and Persell, more than half of prep school students had a close relative who attended a prep school. Such schools had often educated their parents, their parents’ parents, and would educate their children. The parents were as invested in the school as the faculty, and were purposefully entrusting their children not just to be educated, but to be infused with the qualities that would make them leaders in the future. A parent did not send his child to prep school to get into an Ivy League school -- that was a given (25% of my class at St. Mark’s was accepted to Harvard). Instead, the school was expected to prepare the student to succeed at the Ivy League school and later in life. Parents who sent their children away expressly to absorb the values and ethos of a school usually did not question those standards or complain when their son failed to live up to them. Anecdotally, I do not know of a single peer from that era who committed a transgression and whose parents blamed the school rather than the student when he got in trouble.
Further, on a more peripheral note, the scene of a father landing a helicopter on the school’s football field rang particularly false. Thorstein Veblen and the concept of conspicuous consumption were still prevalent in the late sixties and early seventies. Parents in that era did not flaunt their wealth. The car of choice was the Ford Country Squire, not the Range Rover or Porsche Cayenne. If one owned a foreign car, it was a sign of eccentricity or sophistication, not of wealth. Such a conspicuous display of wealth would have revealed the parent to be a parvenu, a label which most newly minted elites sent their children to the school precisely to shed.
Paul Hunham
All of these flaws might be forgivable but for the movie’s treatment of the principal protagonist, Paul Hunham. The Hunham we meet is initially a recognizable figure to students of that era, albeit a caricature – extremely intelligent, demanding, principled, feared and hated by most of the students. As the movie progresses, Hunham becomes more human, questioning many of the assumptions that have governed his life. A movie about a prep school lifer, looking back on his life and questioning his existence, might have proven a worthy subject for a movie. But that movie is not The Holdovers. Instead, we learn that Hunham was falsely accused of cheating at Harvard, that a teaching job at Barton is the only employment he could get, and that he remains embarrassed about his life’s work, lying about it when he meets a former Harvard classmate. This plot twist, apart from being less satisfying as a matter of drama, represents a facile denigration of the entire prep school experience – that one would dedicate one’s life to the service of an ideal only if one were forced to do it.
Like many students of that era, I knew a Mr. Hunham. He was my advisor after, in a rare moment of self-awareness, I recognized I needed an unforgiving mentor to help me through school rather than a forgiving one (I said this was personal).
Raised in working class New Bedford, Massachusetts, this Hunham hitchhiked every day to attend Brown University. He was accepted at Harvard Law School, but chose to teach a year at St. Mark’s to help pay for his law school tuition. He never left.
The real-life Mr. Hunham, like the fictional one, was a classicist, teaching Latin and Greek. He was brilliant, obtaining a Doctorate in Classics from the University of Chicago while teaching at St. Mark’s. Given the nickname “Cage,” he was demanding, caustic, and the strictest enforcer of discipline. He was hated by many students who, even at their fiftieth reunion, had nothing but bitter memories about him. However, when he retired after more than forty years of teaching, hundreds of other former students came to his retirement dinner to honor the man who had been such a strong and positive influence on their lives. Like the fictional Hunham, our teacher underwent a personal evolution, not as the result of manufactured crises, but through the natural changing of the times, including the introduction of girls. At his retirement dinner, we discovered that the fearsome “Cage” had metamorphosized later in his career into “Uncle Bill,” always an available “shoulder to cry on.”
Unlike the fictional Hunham, I doubt that this teacher had any regrets about the life he chose. When he wasn’t molding young men, he travelled and read and wrote with the utmost freedom. He took pleasure not only in his own achievements, but those of the students whom he trained.
A Missed Opportunity
It is the flaw of The Holdovers that the film cannot comprehend a man devoting his life to something greater than himself. As Cookson and Persell explain, “[a]lmost everyone who teaches in prep schools could be doing something else.”
Understanding [prep school] culture is not easy for an outsider because it is a highly codified world where the keys to perception are kept carefully locked away from strangers. Teaching at a boarding school is, according to the teachers, “a way of life,” much like a religious vocation where service gives life meaning.
The Holdovers could have been an interesting twist on the hagiographic Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a modern analysis of what makes a talented and accomplished man devote his life to building the sons of wealthy families. While some can denigrate such men, history has demonstrated that in many ways, they were remarkably successful. A recent book about Groton, Divine Fire: Groton School and the American Century, details the influence our arch-rival had on the shaping of America, producing, in a short period, such alumni as Franklin Roosevelt, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Sumner Welles, C. Douglas Dillon, William and McGeorge Bundy, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, and Joseph Grew. That so many leaders emerged from one small school was no accident.
Instead, The Holdovers opts for easy melodrama. It may be entertaining, but it is not history.
I also saw The Holdovers and thought it was harmless enough, and agree with HRR that it got a lot wrong. For one, the movies opens with a bully who tosses a kid's gloves in the water. Yes, there were bullies in those days at those schools (I suppose for veneer of inclusion at today's private schools, there still are bullies.) But I never saw this sort of thing.