Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite. Thomas J. Schaeper
new sources of raw materials. The rapid economic growth of the major European powers and the United States likewise seemed to be a sign from God that Western civilization and Christianity were superior to all other cultures and religions. Added to this was Social Darwinism. Charles Darwin himself rejected the extension of his theories from biology to human history, but Herbert Spencer and many other philosophers and social scientists had no such misgivings. Social Darwinism permitted them to believe that the West not only had “might” but that this was “right.” Europeans and Americans had no reason to apologize for their “superiority.” The survival of the fittest was in the laws of nature instituted by God. Africans, Asians, and islanders in the Caribbean and Pacific would benefit from exposure to Western ideas and customs.
There were a few vehement critics of New Imperialism. Mark Twain bitterly attacked the American acquisition of the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. He pilloried the high-sounding motives of the United States government as mere camouflage hiding naked conquest. In his book Imperialism, published in 1902, British author J.A. Hobson argued that the only people to benefit from empire were big businessmen in the mother countries. Quite prophetically he said that competition for empire would also lead to war between the major powers.12
The overwhelming majority of Europeans and Americans were staunch imperialists at least until the First World War. In 1899 Rudyard Kipling penned his poem “White Man's Burden,” written to urge the United States to acquire the Philippines. Young white men sent out to the colonies, said Kipling, were going into exile, where they served their “captives' need” rather than gaining wealth or fame for themselves. Native peoples, according to the poem, were wild, sullen, half-devil, half-child. As late as 1910, in its classic eleventh edition, the Encyclopedia Britannica claimed that the Vietnamese were “the worst-built and ugliest of all the Indo-Chinese who belong to the Mongolian race”; that Negroes were “easy going” and had no real hair, only wool; that “the Chinese character is inferior to the European”; that Haitians were “ignorant and lazy”; that Filipinos were “physical weaklings…with large clumsy feet”; and that Afghans were cruel and crafty.13
The First World War punctured inflated Western notions of self-importance and supremacy. The so-called rational West, with its elevated sense of fair play, its Christianity, and its economic progress, very nearly blew itself to smithereens. France, Britain, Germany, and several other countries were devastated economically, socially, and psychologically by the war. As a result of the carnage, the “roaring” Twenties was more a decade of disillusionment and anxiety than of prosperity or joy. These doubts about Western supremacy lay in the future, however, well beyond the life span of Cecil Rhodes.
In 1881 young Rhodes achieved two important goals: he won election to a seat in the all-white Cape Colony parliament and obtained his Oxford degree. Over the next fourteen years his exploits brought him not only enviable wealth and political power but also international notoriety. He would retain his parliamentary seat until his death. His business affairs included the manufacture and sale of ice, ice cream, and water pumps (necessities in mining). Through the early and mid-1880s, working with two partners, he ruthlessly bought out all of his rivals in the Kimberley mines. By the end of the decade his company, De Beers Consolidated Mining, controlled more than 90 percent of the world's diamond production. (Today the company still supplies over 80 percent.) In 1889 Rhodes obtained a royal charter for his British South Africa Company, which gave him almost unlimited authority to explore and settle the vast territories that he named Rhodesia. (In 1964 Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, and in 1980 Southern Rhodesia achieved independence as Zimbabwe.) He was also instrumental in Britain's acquisition of Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Nyasaland (Malawi). He nearly succeeded in wresting Mozambique from the Portuguese and the Congo (Zaire) from King Leopold of the Belgians. Once he bragged that he would annex the planets if he could. Altogether his acquisitions for the British Empire were equal in size to Western Europe (including Britain and Ireland). He almost achieved his goal of extending British control from the Cape to Cairo.
Meanwhile Rhodes expanded both his business and his political activities. After gold was discovered in the Transvaal's Witwatersrand in 1886, Rhodes formed the Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa Company and won a large percentage of that industry. In 1890 he was appointed prime minister of the Cape of Good Hope Colony. Over the next five years he worked further to subdue the native tribes and to develop a modus vivendi with the Dutch.14
Until 1895 his career trajectory pointed ever upward. But then the infamous Jameson Raid brought a disgrace that would hound him until his premature death. Dr. Leander Starr Jameson was one of Rhodes' closest and most reliable associates. Rhodes entrusted him with engineering a secret raid into the Transvaal. The goal was to spark an uprising in Johannesburg that would topple the independent Dutch government of Paul Kruger. The result would be the elimination of any obstacles to Rhodes' control of the gold mines, plus the expansion of British control. The raid was a fiasco, with Jameson and many of his men being captured. Both at that time and today scholars debate the question of how much Rhodes and the British government in London knew about the raid in advance. Undoubtedly they knew its general outline, but whether they had tried to cancel or delay it remains shrouded in conflicting and vanished evidence.
At any rate, as prime minister in the Cape Rhodes was blamed for the debacle. He was forced to resign from office and to quit the board of the British South Africa Company. He retained his seat in the colonial parliament as well as his diamond and gold interests, but a cloud hung over his name thereafter.
There are deep ironies about the ignominy in which Rhodes spent his final years. He might have emerged a hero after the raid if the enterprise had succeeded. After all, successful revolutionaries usually become heroes; the unsuccessful ones are branded as rebels and traitors. Britain did want to expand its control over all of South Africa, either peacefully or by force. The Anglo-Boer War that eventually erupted in 1899 ended with British conquest of the independent Dutch states of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The 1895 raid thus was in harmony with general British aims. Nevertheless, the fact that it was premature and a disaster contributed to unfavorable press commentary around the world. The government in London thus repudiated both Jameson and Rhodes.
By the late 1890s Rhodes was a bloated, pasty mess. Years of smoking, drinking, and eating to excess, plus several falls from horses and a series of heart attacks dramatically altered his appearance. The news of his death, at the age of forty-eight, came as no surprise to anyone who knew him. His body was buried in the Rhodesian mountains, in a favorite spot of his called “The World's View.”
Historian David Cannadine has aptly concluded that “in an age of imperial titans, Rhodes was the most titanic imperialist of all.”15 Few of Rhodes' contemporaries or later writers would disagree about the magnitude of his accomplishments. Where they do differ markedly is in their evaluations of the man and his deeds. The passages quoted at the beginning of this chapter give some indication of the extremes of opinion. Rhodes generated love or hate, never ambivalence. To his friend Jameson and his architect Herbert Baker, he was the greatest man they had ever known. In their later writings they rhapsodized over his charisma, his charm, his vision, and his generosity. Upon the death of his friend and business associate, Lord Rothschild asserted that Rhodes:
…was a very great man, he saw things as no one else saw them and he foresaw things which no one else dreamt of…his great generosity bewitched those who came in contact with him…his loss would be irreparable, were it not for the fact that he put in motion ideas which have taken root, ideas firmly established…which will continue to grow and flourish.16
To others he was the devil incarnate. The great South African novelist and feminist Olive Schreiner went from liking and admiring Rhodes to despising him. She concluded that “the man's heart…is corrupt.”17 Novelist and essayist G. K. Chesterton believed that:
…Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world…. What he called his ideals were the dregs of Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous…. it was exactly because he had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and ruined republics to spread them.”18
Sometimes contemporaries could not even agree on