Thomas’s parents were risking their son’s education, and by extension the social standing and future of the family, on a new pedagogical idea. A young minister, the son of a family friend, had decided to establish an intentionally remote, enclosed educational haven in the old-growth forest. At the time, the academies—Andover, Exeter, Milton—weren’t boarding schools at all. Their buildings lined each town’s main street and students lived with local families or in independent rooming houses. But every family knew a few boys who had come back from the academies with drinking and gambling problems, and this was an error in the system. The point had always been to have a son escape the distractions and temptations of the city in order to become prepared.

So to announce its contrast, St. James chose as its school symbol not an eagle or lion or dragon, but an ant. The school crest was a black worker ant below an open Bible over the motto Vade ad Formicam. That impressed the Weekses. All students would live together on campus under the direct supervision of teachers, and together they would undergo the same curriculum of Latin, rhetoric, mathematics, and theology. Students would work on the buildings and grounds. After four years, the risk paid off several times over.

Thomas went on to Princeton and was an early investor in the rubber industry. The Weeks family had contributed to the rubber tire, the sealing gasket, the windshield wiper, the shoe sole, the conveyor belt, the latex glove: modernity itself. Money was not a possession but rather a trust, and the owner simply a trustee, a steward.

Ben had been told this story many times. He had been reminded of the particular worthiness of this origin, but most of the time it was too familiar to be distinct to him. The photo of Thomas Weeks with the six other graduates of the first St. James class hung inconspicuously along the back hallway of Ben’s house, and Ben would sometimes look at all of them leaning on the split-rail fence and wonder when it had become the rule to smile in pictures. Almost right away, St. James had been accepted as one of the very few training grounds for America’s nervous and changeable aristocracy, and soon several other schools imitated the idea.