Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite. Thomas J. Schaeper
of Oxford, and this hampered them when they tried to pick students who would thrive in a foreign country and a different educational system. When the committees conducted their interviews and their deliberations the results sometimes were capricious. The will spoke of “moral force of character” as a criterion. In more than one instance committees who had to choose between two or more candidates used this as a basis for picking whichever young man happened not to smoke or play cards.22 Elmer Davis later regaled people with the story of how he emerged a winner. In the fall of 1909 five Indiana candidates took the qualifying examination. Three passed it, but one of them became ill. Davis and another young man were thereupon invited to meet with the selection committee. Davis summarized his “interview” as follows:
I presumed that they wanted to test our general knowledge, and I fortified myself with all sorts of reading. But when the educators sat down at table they ignored us and began to trade ideas on what a tough job being a college president was. I didn't know anything about that and kept still. But the other fellow was hell-bent and resourceful. He talked. I got the appointment.23
Thanks to this rather quixotic manner of winning his scholarship, Davis entered Oxford in 1910 and went on to become one of the most popular and distinguished American novelists, newspaper journalists, and radio commentators from the 1920s through the 1940s. He headed the Office of War Information during the Second World War and following that gained admiration as one of Joseph McCarthy's earliest and most vehement critics.
On numerous occasions Parkin let it be known that he did not think the United States was sending its best men to Oxford. In later years some of the first Rhodes Scholars themselves admitted that their quality had not been not uniformly high in the first two decades of the program. They have also acknowledged that many of the early committees tended to select “he-men,” thus favoring the captains of the varsity sports teams over the superior students. Not surprisingly, no Rhodes Scholar himself later admitted that he was one of the mediocre ones. It was always some “others” who came from the bottom of the barrel! Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the average Rhodes Scholar from these early years was an above-average student at the university from which he came. Some, indeed, were outstanding intellectuals – as was demonstrated by their academic records in America and Oxford and by their professional careers. Only above-average students would have desired additional schooling in Oxford and would have been able to pass the qualifying examination. But certainly, as a whole, these pioneer Rhodes Scholars were not supermen.24
They were, however, a fairly representative cross section of American society. As far as can be determined, none was the scion of a extremely wealthy family – but such students did not usually apply for scholarships. They came from middle and working-class families. Some had worked their way through college. One member of the 1904 class, Lawrence Henry Gipson of Idaho, had been both a stagecoach driver and a printer's “devil” and typesetter at his father's small-town newspaper.25 The fathers of these early Rhodes Scholars included bankers, physicians, insurance salesmen, teachers, lawyers, businessmen, and farmers. There were Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and representatives of every major Protestant denomination. The class of 1907 included one black, Alain Locke (who will be discussed further in the next chapter). There was even a set of three brothers: Christopher, Felix, and Frank Morley (1910, 1917, 1919).
The scholars represented a wide array of universities and colleges. There were forty-three Americans in the class of 1904 – no candidates passed the qualifying examination in five states. These forty-three men came from forty-three different institutions. This kind of even dispersal no longer occurs. Changes in the selection process plus other factors in later decades have helped Ivy League and a few other elite universities to claim more than half of the scholars in any given year. Early in the century there was a greater tendency for a bright Nebraska or Wyoming boy to attend a university in his home state rather than elsewhere. Moreover, the college presidents in each state generally preferred to give the scholarships to students who had remained in their home state for their education. Thus the 1904 scholar from Kentucky was a student at Kentucky State University, the Kansan came from the University of Kansas, the Georgian from the University of Georgia, and so on. Not that the elite schools were excluded. The Massachusetts representative, for example, came from Harvard, and the New York winner was a Cornell man.
One ominous question loomed ahead for this melting pot of rambunctious Americans: What would happen to Cecil Rhodes' grand scheme for producing the best men for the world's fight once the scholars reached Oxford?
NOTES
1. For example, see NYT, 5 April 1902, 1; 6 April 1902, 5; 7 April 1902, 1; 25 January 1903, 7; 2 February 1903, 1; 19 July 1903, 9; 9 October 1903, 8; 11 October 1903, 4; 24 March 1904, 5.
2. Lord Elton, ed., The First Fifty Years of the Rhodes Trust and the Rhodes Scholarships (Oxford, 1955), 11, 61; TAO, 51 (1964): 74–83.
3. Thomas Case, “The Influence of Mr. Rhodes' Will on Oxford,” National Review, 39 (1902): 424. Also Elton, First Fifty Years, 59–60.
4. NYT, 9 October 1903, 8. Also see TAO, 2 (1915): 34–44, 21 (1934): 123–31.
5. The Times, 9 May 1902, 10C.
6. See TAO, 21 (1934): 127.
7. TAO, 21 (1934), 126–27; Graham Topping, “The Best Men for the World's Fight?” Oxford Today, Trinity Issue, 1993, 6.
8. Louis Dyer, “The Rhodes Scholarships,” The Outlook, 13 December 1902, 885–86.
9. TAO, 42 (1955): 21 and 52 (1965): 87.
10. Elton, First Fifty Years, 4, 10, 59; TAO, 5 (1918): 81–83, 32 (1945): 8–9, 50 (1963): 64–66, 51 (1964): 76–78, 81 (1994): 3.
11. Initially his title was “agent,” but that was soon changed to “secretary.”
12. That is, eight for Canada proper and one for Newfoundland.
13. See Wylie's article in TAO, 31 (1944): 65–69.
14. Elton, First Fifty Years, 8; TAO, 37 (1950): 65; 54 (1967): 103.
15. Elton, First Fifty Years, 9.
16. NYT, 30 January 1909, 2. Also see 28 January 1914, sec. 4, 2.
17. Aydelotte, American Rhodes Scholarships, 26; TAO, 81 (1994): 8.
18. Elton, First Fifty Years, 186; Frances Margaret Blanshard, Frank Aydelotte of Swarthmore (Middletown, CT, 1970), 49.
19. Elton, First Fifty Years, 63–64.
20. Aydelotte, American Rhodes Scholarships, 25; TAO, 1 (1914): 63–83. Of course, through the entire history of the program there have also been instances where persons who received the scholarships ended up not using them. A handful of students have died sometime in the months before arriving in Oxford. Over the past ninety years there have also been several students who accepted the scholarships and then later, for personal or academic reasons, decided not to go. The program has never selected alternates or replacements, and thus these positions have gone unfilled.
21. Blanshard, Aydelotte, 51; Alumni Magazine (by the Alumni Association of American Rhodes Scholars), 3 (January 1910): 2.
22. TAO, 37 (1950): 65–66; 44 (1957): 55.
23. Quoted in Milton Mackaye, “What Happens to Our Rhodes Scholars?” Scribner's Magazine, January 1938, 9.
24. Elton, First Fifty Years, 21, 187; Aydelotte, American Rhodes Scholarships, 25–30; George Parkin, The Rhodes Scholarships (Boston, 1912), 216–17; TAO, 1 (1914): 63; 39 (1952): 114; 40 (1953): 185; 54 (1967): 39.
25. Leslie V. Brock, “Lawrence Henry Gipson: Historian. The Early Idaho Years,” Idaho Yesterdays, 22 (1978): 9; Diane Windham Shaw, comp., Guide to the Papers of Lawrence Henry Gipson (Bethlehem, PA, 1984), 1.