Washington, D.C. 90210
Are the public and private high schools of Los Angeles's Westside the new St. Grottlesex?
Every high school has its Stephen Miller. Ours was a guy I’ll call Tom Smith. Smith ran for student body president on some sort of fascist program—I can’t recall the particulars, but he strutted around in military fatigues and a green Army helmet and said the sort of things that today would prompt school administrators to suspend him, or subject him to weeks of sensitivity training, or both. Since this was the 1970s, they just ignored him. He lost, and I assume outgrew his compulsion to offend. He did not, in any case, become a policymaker in the Trump administration, or acquire a talk-radio show, or get appointed to the Supreme Court, which is a great blessing to the rest of us.
My high school was Beverly Hills High School, which, along with various other public and private high schools on L.A.’s Westside, has evolved into something like what used to be called St. Grottlesex—the assortment of elite New England prep schools that incubated the American Episcopacy that guided American foreign policy through World War II and then blundered badly in Vietnam. It’s a weird phenomenon that diverges from the 20th century model because it’s a much more polarized cohort, consisting of people who either embraced the affluent liberalism of the place (the kind that embraces environmentalism and sexual freedom and treads lightly on questions of economic justice) or rebelled against it. I write about the new Westside hegemony this week in the New Republic.
(The headline on this entry is swiped from my witty friend Michael McGough, who used it on Twitter.)
Update: My friend Steve Weisman, who was White House correspondent for the New York Times during the Reagan administration, is a fellow Beverly High graduate, or “Norman.” Steve informs me that Alejandro Mayorkas (Beverly High ‘77), Joe Biden’s nominee to be Homeland Security secretary, will not, if confirmed, be the first Norman to serve in a presidential Cabinet. That distinction belongs to John W. Gardner, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from 1965 to 1968. Gardner was more in the old-style Episcopacy mold, serving as president, director, or trustee of assorted prominent philanthropies, including Common Cause, which he founded, and also the Carnegie Corporation; the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; the Educational Testing Service; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which he also founded.
It was news to me that Gardner, who died 19 years ago but is still remembered as a pillar of the Establishment, attended Beverly. If Gardner did go there, it wouldn’t have been for more than one or two years, because the school didn’t open its doors until 1927, two years before Gardner entered Stanford. The city didn’t even exist when Gardner was born in 1912; he lived there because his parents sold houses to the movie people and others who, after the Beverly Hills Hotel opened that same year, quickly turned the surrounding lima beanfield into a wealthy suburb.
(Turning the beanfields into a residential area was Plan B for the speculators who’d purchased them; Plan A had been to cover them with oil derricks, but there wasn’t enough oil. The timing for Plan B worked nicely because the fledgling motion picture industry was just then relocating en masse from New York to Southern California to escape Thomas Edison’s broad patent claims on whatever could be created with his movie camera. Los Angeles was attractive in part because it was close to the Mexican border. The movie people weren’t welcome in L.A.’s more established neighborhoods, such as they were—Los Angeles was barely more than a village itself—because those neighborhoods were populated with wealthy retirees seeking a healthful climate and lots of quiet.)
Gardner is not in Beverly High’s Hall of Fame, which may indicate he didn’t go there but just as easily could mean he’s been overlooked.