Modeling Spiritual Parenthood
A Reflection on Endicott Peabody and Franklin Roosevelt
By The Rev. Charles Hoffacker, ’82
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lifelong Episcopalian, came to recognize as the most influential people in his upbringing his parents and Endicott Peabody, rector of his school, who remained a factor in his life throughout his adult years. To appreciate Franklin Roosevelt’s faith, it is necessary to understand something of Peabody, rector of Groton School and FDR’s spiritual father.
The term “spiritual father” may summon a picture of someone with a long grey beard who appears only slightly rooted in this world. Peabody did not match this stereotype, but a spiritual father he certainly was, starting from an early age.
The Rev. Endicott Peabody, circa 1882. Peabody’s outgoing personality helped him make many friends, including Wyatt Earp, whose family donated the altar rail for Peabody’s first church in Tombstone, Arizona. Image courtesy Groton School, Massachusetts.
Episcopal priest and founding rector of Groton School, Endicott Peabody (1857-1944) deserves attention for reasons beyond his influence on America’s longest serving president. Generations of Groton alumni, many of them serving in prominent places in American society, remembered him as an awe-inspiring figure, both demanding of them and deeply engaged in their lives. Occupying an important place in the history of Episcopal schools and of boarding schools in general, Peabody embodied two major movements in American religion popular during his time: what is historically termed muscular Christianity and the Social Gospel.
Peabody’s family roots extended back to prominent New England Puritans, but in more recent generations the family were Unitarians, a popular spiritual commitment for people of their time, place, and class. In 1870, when Endicott was thirteen, his father Samuel was invited by Junius S. Morgan (father of J. P. Morgan) to become his business partner and represent the firm in London. The next year Endicott began his five-year career at Cheltenham, an English public school or what is known in America as a private boarding school.
Franklin Roosevelt’s class at Groton, 1896. Roosevelt, age 14, located top row, far right.
Cheltenham, established in the nineteenth century, was one of the newer public schools. It aimed to produce future officers and administrators for the British Empire’s foreign service, thus appealing to a prosperous middle class who wanted their sons to become “gentlemen.” Cheltenham maintained the evangelical Anglican practices and prohibitions of the time and honored the Anglican heritage of social reform represented by William Wilberforce’s parliamentary crusade against slavery.
Peabody went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read law, rowed, and played cricket. He continued to absorb the Anglican tradition. A major influence on him was the recently deceased Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), a leader in the Christian Socialist Movement and a prominent exponent of muscular Christianity, which linked physical fitness with Christian character.
Upon returning to the United States, Peabody worked briefly for the family firm in Boston, but found it not to his liking. After consultation with Phillips Brooks, rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Peabody enrolled at the Episcopal Theological School (later the Episcopal Divinity School, ordained 1884) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, part of the emerging Broad Church movement.
Episcopal priest and educator, Endicott Peabody, founder of Groton School.
He interrupted his studies for six months to minister in what was known popularly at the time as the Wild West. In Tombstone, Arizona, he established the first Episcopal church in the Arizona Territory.
Peabody’s connections with other Boston brahmins led to an invitation to found a school in rural Groton, Massachusetts. The ninety-acre farm proposed for the campus was deemed worthy for this purpose by Frederick Law Olmsted, the leading landscape architect of the time. In 1884 a board of distinguished persons was assembled, with Phillips Brooks as president. During Groton’s early years, Peabody was quite successful in raising money and expanding the campus. For the 56 years he served as rector, Endicott Peabody was Groton.
The Rector, as he was known, understood his task as a ministry of the Episcopal Church. He was to help shape the rising American elite of the Industrial Age into responsible public servants, strong in character and committed to Christian ideals in religion and ordered liberty in politics.
Phillips Brooks was a larger-than-life hero who actively supported Groton and consistently inspired its rector. Brooks helped introduce to a wide American audience the liberal theology that accompanied the Social Gospel. He became the only person to have a building named after him on the grounds of Groton. Peabody passed on to Roosevelt the optimism, broad churchmanship, and image of America as “a great household land” characteristic of Phillips Brooks, and Roosevelt expressed these characteristics through his manifold political achievements.
The Social Gospel to which Brooks, Peabody, and Roosevelt contributed in their different ways translated Christ’s commandment of neighbor love into terms appropriate to the new world shaped by an industrial economy. This meant socializing sacrifice, moving from economic competition to economic cooperation, replacing self-interest with service, and acknowledging all people as God’s children. The result was to be a new form of gospel gladness as a materially ample life became available to all.
Peabody believed in a reliable God who remained always present and always loved his children. In obedience to this divine example, he did his best to serve as a strong pillar for others—and he succeeded. He became a second father for Franklin, whose first father James Roosevelt was fifty-three years old when his son was born. When Franklin left home for Groton, Peabody was thirty-nine and very vigorous, while James Roosevelt was sixty-eight, nearing the end of a long decline in health. James died during Franklin’s first semester at Harvard.
Peabody admitted to his boys that duty could become tiresome, but asserted that religion was different. Echoing Phillips Brooks, he declared, “Religion is all alive with personality. It is God’s will for you. He wants you to do this. He does not compel it. You can refuse it if you like, but He desires it in his great love for you.” Not surprisingly, one of his favorite sermon texts was Isaiah 6:8: “Then said I: Here am I. Send me.”
This calling also had a civil aspect. Christianity included “the purifying & uplifting of public life so that government shall be carried on by men who are honest in private & in public . . . who are working for the interest of their city & state or nation & not for their own mean profit.”
The acquisition of wealth was not an end in itself. “The finest outcome of a man’s financial success is that it makes it easily possible for his children to give themselves to the service of others or without being hampered by the fear of poverty.”
Peabody brought to Groton prominent reformers including Jacob Riis (1849-1914). A Danish immigrant and newspaperman-photographer, Riis produced How the Other Half Lives, a widely read book about shocking conditions in New York City tenements that continues to remain in print. The two men engaged in familiar correspondence for almost a quarter century, and when Riis died in 1914, Peabody conducted the funeral service for his “cherished friend.”
Frederick B. Allen, founder of the immensely successful Episcopal City Mission in Boston became something of a fixture at the school so that Groton boys were brought into contact with people unlike themselves.
The City Mission reached out through a variety of organizations, providing support and resources to sailors, prisoners, alcoholics, transients, the poor, and many others.
The Rev. Endicott Peabody (left) and FDR, Washington, D.C., 1942.
Another friend and colleague of Peabody was William S. Rainsford, rector of St. George’s - a Christian Socialist and J. P. Morgan’s pastor - in New York City. Rainsford advised Peabody in founding a camp for boys from the slums, first on Squam Lake and then on Newfound Lake, both in New Hampshire. Like other Groton boys then and later, the young Franklin Roosevelt served there as a counselor.
Subtle theological matters were not of interest to Endicott Peabody nor to Franklin Roosevelt. Both were men of simple faith more concerned with right action than deep thought. Moreover, as John F. Woolverton notes in A Christian and a Democrat, Endicott Peabody “did not shiver on the shores of faith; he confidently walked the beach and marked the view. In all this, Franklin Roosevelt was his faithful spiritual son.”
When Franklin graduated from Groton in 1900, there were few signs of his coming greatness. A conformist who stirred up argument as a way to make himself stand out, he showed no great courage or rebellious nature. Peabody saw him as a good enough student, well liked, but nothing special, a view he maintained for years. Still he continued to show Roosevelt a father’s care, and Roosevelt continued to reciprocate until they died only a few months apart.
Endicott Peabody presided at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905. He quickly reached out to the couple when Franklin contracted polio in 1921. Over the years he wrote numerous letters to Franklin filled with words of encouragement along with spiritual and moral advice. Throughout FDR’s presidency, the two kept in touch by mail and occasional visits.
Thousands of people in the upper strata of American society nurtured a fanatical hatred for President Franklin Roosevelt, viewing him as “a traitor to his class.” This group included many of the Groton School community. In the midst of this intense animosity, Peabody stood up repeatedly for Roosevelt. On one occasion he was met with complete silence when he told a Groton group, “I believe Franklin Roosevelt to be a gallant and courageous gentleman. I am happy to count him as a friend.” On the fiftieth anniversary of the school’s founding, he told graduates who could not give proper respect to the president that they should not attend.
A letter from President Roosevelt to The Rev. Endicott Peabody regarding wartime manufacture of devotional medals. Image courtesy Peabody Estate, Saratoga Springs, New York.
In 1944, FDR’s cousin Daisy Suckley wrote in her diary about Peabody’s influence on Roosevelt. With surprise and delight she noted that the rector called the president “my boy.” She noted a look of “real and deep happiness” in Roosevelt’s face in talking with Peabody, “a look which he rarely has.” She continued: “It is a look which shows a state of mind completely devoid of anything but affection & trust & respect & mutual understanding.”
For his first inauguration day in 1933, FDR arranged an unprecedented service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square. Located near the White House, this parish is known as the Church of the Presidents. Those invited included the new president’s family and close friends and the members of his cabinet. The service was conducted by Endicott Peabody.
The 1944 commemoration of this first inauguration featured a service in the East Room of the White House. Those assembled included senior Army and Navy officers, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and many others from official Washington. Endicott Peabody took part in the service, his voice described as “full and vibrant.” This was the last time he and his most famous student met.
Peabody’s interest in Roosevelt extended practically to his last breath. On November 17, 1944, the old headmaster, now 87, set out to drive Mary Louise Ackland, a family friend, to the train station in Ayer, Massachusetts. At a slight bend in the road, the car slowly swerved off the track. Ackland warned Peabody, but received no answer. Noticing a strange expression on his face, she took the wheel, steered the car to the side of the road, and turned off the key. Peabody was breathing very heavily, his head fell back, and his whole body slumped. Just before this stroke, he had said, “You know there’s no doubt that Roosevelt is a very religious man.” These turned out to be his dying words.
The next day the president wired Mrs. Peabody. His message of condolence included this sentence: “The whole tone is things are going to be a bit different from now on, for I have leaned on the Rector in all these years far more than most people know.”
For Further Reading
Ashburn, Frank Davis. Peabody of Groton: A Portrait. First edition Coward McCann, 1944. Second edition Riverside Press, 1967.
Wicker, Christine. The Simple Faith of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Religion’s Role in the FDR Presidency. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2017.
Williams, Peter W. Religion, Art, and Money: Episcopalians and American Culture from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Woolverton, John with James D. Bratt. A Christian and a Democrat: A Religious Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Foreword by James Comey. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019.
The Rev. Charles Hoffacker, ’82, is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington who lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. He served as a campus minister, rector of three parishes, and interim in five congregations, as well as a convocation dean, General Convention deputy, and reader of the General Ordination Examinations. Now enjoying an active retirement, he ministers in various ways, including as a writer, independent scholar, activist, and board member of the Frances Perkins Center.
Images courtesy Groton School, Massachusetts.