Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite

Thomas J. Schaeper, Kathleen Schaeper

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857453693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Each year thirty-two seniors at American universities are awarded Rhodes Scholarships, which entitle them to spend two or three years studying at the University of Oxford. The program, founded by the British colonialist and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes and established in 1903, has become the world's most famous academic scholarship and has brought thousands of young Americans to study in England. Many of these later became national leaders in government, law, education, literature, and other fields. Among them were the politicians J. William Fulbright, Bill Bradley, and Bill Clinton; the public policy analysts Robert Reich and George Stephanopoulos; the writer Robert Penn Warren; the entertainer Kris Kristofferson; and the Supreme Court Justices Byron White and David Souter.

Based on extensive research in published and unpublished documents and on hundreds of interviews, this book traces the history of the program and the stories of many individuals. In addition it addresses a host of questions such as: how important was the Oxford experience for the individual scholars? To what extent has the program created an old-boy (-girl since 1976) network that propels its members to success? How many Rhodes Scholars have cracked under the strain and failed to live up to expectations? How have the Americans coped with life in Oxford and what have they thought of Britain in general? Beyond the history of the program and the individuals involved, this book also offers a valuable examination of the American-British cultural encounter.

Chapter 1

RHODES, SOUTH AFRICA, AND OXFORD

What an amazingly clever fellow Rhodes is. The only person I ever knew who combined patriotism & plunder.

John Xavier Merriman, South African politician, 1895

The man who amalgamated the diamond industry, who created the Chartered Company and dreamed of extending British influence from the Cape to Cairo…was also the man whose guiding star was Aristotle's definition of happiness as activity in excellence, whose pocket was never without his well-thumbed Marcus Aurelius, who had the whole of the classics specially translated for himself, and whose lasting memorials are the name of a great country and an educational endowment.

L.S. Amery, Senior Rhodes Trustee, 1953

The Man

When Cecil John Rhodes died on 26 March 1902 he left one final surprise for the world. In his checkered, spectacular career he had won international fame as an empire builder, colonial governor, financier, and diamond baron. Few would have guessed that he could be a philanthropist too. Yet when his will was published about two weeks after his funeral the world learned of the bequest establishing the scholarships that bear his name. The Rhodes Scholarships quickly became the most famous educational awards in the English-speaking world.

Rhodes was born in 1853 in the Hertfordshire town of Bishop's Stortford. His father was the parish vicar. The family had eleven children, nine of whom reached adulthood. Cecil was the fifth son. The family had been able to afford to send his older brothers to public school (that is, private boarding schools), but Cecil himself went to a local grammar school.

When Cecil was seventeen his family dispatched him to South Africa. Most authorities who have written about him have stated that the reason for this move was the youth's fragile health. He was thought to have been tubercular and to have a “dickey” heart. His most recent and authoritative biographer, Robert I. Rotberg, however, sharply revises this view. Rhodes was not consumptive. Although the young man's health was often described as delicate and he occasionally suffered from what probably was arteriosclerosis, he often displayed impressive vigor and stamina. Rhodes did not suffer from constant ill health until his final years.¹

The primary reason for sending him to Africa was economic. The family hoped that Cecil would find a career and establish himself financially. Two of his older brothers were already in South Africa. Frank was a soldier, and Herbert a cotton farmer.

The territory that today makes up the Republic of South Africa was at that time a patchwork of different lands. The British Empire controlled the colonies the Cape of Good Hope and Natal. The social and political elites there were English-speaking settlers and Afrikaners of Dutch descent. These two groups coexisted in an uneasy alliance and dominated the vast majority of blacks, coloreds (people of mixed race), and Asian immigrants. Further to the north were the Dutch republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, dominated by Boers (Dutch for “farmer”). There were also vast stretches of territory where native tribes such as the Bantu still dominated.

After only a year at farming, Rhodes followed his restless brother Herbert to the rough frontier town of Kimberley, where the discovery of diamonds in 1867 had created a hectic and brutal scramble similar to the 1849 gold rush in California. The young man who until that time had displayed no special talents or interests quickly found his métier. Over the next two years his hard work and clever, perhaps unscrupulous, dealings with competitors made him a fortune that would have lasted a lifetime for a person of lesser ambitions.

In 1873 Rhodes returned to England, primarily to see his ailing mother. While there he decided to seek admittance to the University of Oxford. As a budding entrepreneur who perhaps already aspired to political office, he appears to have felt the need for the polish that an Oxford education could give him. He wanted to be accepted as a gentleman and have social connections with the right sort of people. He also thought an academic degree could guarantee him a job in law or government, in the event that his business ventures failed to satisfy him economically or intellectually.

From 1873 to 1881 Rhodes alternated between terms in Oxford and trips to Kimberley, where he supervised his mining operations. The result was that he needed eight years to obtain a degree that normally would have taken three.

The story of Rhodes in Oxford is bathed in legends and anecdotes, many of these embellished to extravagant degrees by his earliest biographers. What impact did he have on Oxford? What impact did Oxford have on him? The answer to the first is close to none. The answer to the second is some, but not nearly as much as was formerly thought.

Then and now, a student seeking admission to Oxford must apply to one of the colleges that make up the University. Rhodes' first choice was University College, which turned him down. Depending on which version of the story one believes, he was rejected because he failed an entrance exam in Latin, because he had attended a local grammar school rather than a school like Eton or Harrow, or because he hoped to pursue only a pass degree. At Oxford at that time one could obtain either an honors degree or a less demanding “pass.” Many sons of aristocrats and gentry who were not gifted academically or who did not have lofty career goals opted for the latter.

After his rejection, Rhodes sought admission to Oriel College. When he received Rhodes' application, Oriel's provost is reputed to have exclaimed either that, “all the colleges send me their failures” or “the Master of University sends me his leavings.” Finally the provost relented and said “I think you will do.”²

During Rhodes' periods of residence in Oxford over the next eight years, he took little part in either college or university activities. In desultory fashion he studied Latin, Greek, Politics, and Law, but, like many students, he attended few of the formal, optional lectures provided by the university. Once, when reprimanded for his lack of dedication, he supposedly responded: “I shall pass, which is all I wish to do.”³ Rather than live in college, he took digs (i.e., lived “off campus”). He joined the “smart set” in clubs like Vincent's and the Bullingdon and was admitted to a local Freemasonry lodge. One of his tutors, A.G. Butler, later eulogized Rhodes in a sonnet that goes in part:

Deep-voiced, broad-fronted, with the Caesar's brow, A dreamer with a diamond in his hand Musing on Empire!⁴

However, on another occasion, Butler more soberly characterized his student's academic record:

His career at Oxford was uneventful. He belonged to a set of men like himself, not caring for distinction in the schools and not working for them, but of refined tastes, dining and living for the most part together, and doubtless discussing passing events in life and politics with interest and ability. Such a set is not very common at Oxford, living, as it does, a good deal apart from both games and work, but it does exist and, somehow, includes men of much intellectual power which bears fruit later.⁵

The fact that Rhodes was tall and a few years older than the average undergraduate helped to make him stand out. But what really gave him some degree of notoriety were his diamonds. Rather than rely on bankers and checkbooks, Rhodes always carried in his pockets a supply of uncut diamonds either wadded up in bits of paper or kept in a special little box. He would sell these one-by-one as he needed funds. On one of the rare occasions when he attended a lecture he evidently became bored, decided to show his gems to students sitting near him, and then accidentally spilled the collection onto the floor. When the irritated lecturer inquired about the commotion, someone called out, “It is only Rhodes and his diamonds.”⁶

What did the young entrepreneur derive from his university experience? Oxford today abounds with statues, inscriptions, paintings, and buildings to remind one of Rhodes. But these are entirely the result of his later benefactions, not from any achievements of his student days. What Rhodes got was his degree and some measure of refinement – though his rough edges would always show. He appears to have made few strong friendships there, and in his later career he seldom turned to his Oxford acquaintances for help in business or politics. Oxford did, however, help to increase his appetite for reading. In his later years he had a special taste for the classics. He constantly reread the works of Aristotle and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. At great personal expense he paid for translations of many of the Latin works upon which Edward Gibbon had based his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (This indicates his interest in history but also reveals that his knowledge of the classical languages was below that of the average Oxford student at that time.) After he returned to Africa he could often be seen sitting on a chair or rock, overseeing his mine workers, while deeply immersed in a book. Once when he was about to make a return trip to Britain he asked how long the voyage would take. When he was told twenty days, he hurried into a bookshop and purchased forty books-one for each morning and afternoon.⁷

Oxford also nurtured in Rhodes some of the ideas important in days, he hurried into a bookshop and purchased forty books-one for each morning and afternoon.⁷

Oxford also nurtured in Rhodes some of the ideas important in his later life. One of the most influential personages at the university in the 1870s and 1880s was John Ruskin, who used his position as Slade Professor of Fine Art to expound ideas not only on art, but politics, history, economics, and culture in general. In his celebrated Inaugural Address of 1870, Ruskin extolled the virtues and future prospects of the English:

There is a destiny now possible to us – the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still an undegenerate race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey…we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history…

And this is what she [Britain] must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; – seizing every fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea….⁸

Some authors have claimed that Ruskin cast a spell over his eager disciple, Cecil Rhodes. The latter's connections with Ruskin, however, were probably slight or nonexistent.⁹ Moreover, Rhodes did not need to pick up such ideas directly from Ruskin, for similar notions were, almost literally, in the air – especially at Oxford. The university was one of the fountainheads of the spirit of “New Imperialism” that pervaded not only England but also France, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and other western powers from the 1870s until the First World War. Although rabid imperialists made up only a minority of the dons and students in Oxford, they were extremely vocal.¹⁰ Oxford graduates made up a disproportionate number of the men who staffed the colonial service in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. In addition to Ruskin, one of their chief spokesmen was Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College from 1870 to 1893. Jowett often preached that he wanted to “inoculate” the world with Balliol men and “govern the world through my pupils.”¹¹

The motives and accomplishments of western imperialists of that era look suspect, if not downright evil, to us today. When Ruskin, Jowett, the mature Rhodes and others spoke of the “superior” British race and its need to expand by taking land from “inferior” races, we might today be struck by their similarities to Hitler. He too spoke of a master race and its need for “living space.” But the late nineteenth-century champions of empire never proposed the extermination of entire races of “inferior” peoples. Given the circumstances and the mentality of that period, the vast majority of the politicians, clergymen, business leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens thought what they were doing was right.

Why did the British, French, Americans, and others rush to gain colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence in all those parts of the world where they had not already gained control? There was a combination of factors. The major Western countries were the only ones that had entered into the Industrial Revolution by the late nineteenth century. This gave them the economic and military power to enforce their wills on “backward” societies. It also created a need to find additional markets around the world for their finished products and 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 lea...