to school. Of course, a student who was from Massachusetts and attended Harvard University had but one choice to make. However, a student from North Dakota who attended Harvard had two options. This remains true to the present day.
Following this, each student had to pass a qualifying examination in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. Then, upon recommendation by his college or university, he and other candidates met with the selection committee for an interview. After a day of interviewing the finalists, the committee notified the winner. The future Rhodes Scholar then listed several Oxford colleges, in order of preference. This list was sent to Wylie, who did his best to win admittance for the student in one of the preferred colleges. The following autumn the student traveled to Oxford, at his own expense. (Nowadays the Rhodes Trust pays for transportation.) Once in Oxford, he received a yearly stipend-set initially at £300. This sum was sufficient for college lodging and other fees plus all personal expenses, but only if the student was frugal.
A process for selecting Rhodes Scholars that looked fine on paper proved to be anything but that during the next dozen years or so. One problem resulted from the criteria mentioned in the will. Rhodes Scholarships differed from all others in that the recipients had to demonstrate more than just academic ability. They also had to show character, concern for their fellow human beings, leadership potential, and an interest in “fighting the world's fight” in some form of public service. How could one evaluate all these intangibles? Parkin and the committees agreed that each scholar must be “superior” in at least one of the areas and “good” in the others. But whereas one could assess academic performance by grades and other solid evidence, how could one gauge character and leadership ability? Addressing a conference of university and college presidents in Chicago in 1903, Parkin answered this query in straightforward fashion. All that committee members had to do was select the man whom they envisaged becoming president of the United States, chief justice of the Supreme Court, or U.S. ambassador to Great Britain!15 This advice provided a lofty ideal. It would also haunt the program in later years, as the careers of Rhodes Scholars came to be measured against it.
Despite the initial flurry of publicity the program received when Rhodes' will was made public, recruitment remained a nagging problem through the First World War. Again and again the selection committees and Parkin lamented the fact that many potential applicants were not aware of the scholarships. Indeed, most Americans quickly forgot about them or became hazy about their details. This was true even of the New York Times. In 1909 the newspaper misleadingly announced the appointment of a woman Rhodes Scholar.16 Of course, having a female scholar would have violated Rhodes' will. Not until 1976 would an Act of Parliament permit amending the will in that fashion. What had happened in 1909 was that an organization called the Society of American Women established a fund to send one female student per year to study in Britain. There was no connection to the Rhodes Scholarships at all.
Besides insufficient publicity, another serious obstacle was the qualifying exam. Between 1904 and 1918 some two thousand students took it, but only about half passed.17 Of course, many other likely candidates shied away from the examination and never applied at all. Most candidates had little problem with the mathematics or the Latin; the big hurdle for most was the Greek. Virtually all British students had studied both of the classical languages in secondary school. In the United States most applicants had studied Latin in high school or college, but few outside of classics majors had taken Greek. Some successful candidates claimed that the language exams were not too difficult and that any intelligent young man could easily pass that section of the test if he studied Greek privately for a few months beforehand.18 Nevertheless, not too many wanted to invest so much time preparing for an examination, particularly when a passing grade in itself did not guarantee winning a scholarship. After years of complaining, Parkin was able to get the Oxford colleges and the Rhodes Trustees to agree to a compromise. After 1909 candidates could take the initial qualifying exam in mathematics and Latin and postpone the Greek part until after they were notified of their appointment to a scholarship.19 The new Rhodes Scholars, however, were still required to take the Greek section prior to arrival in Oxford.
Even with this compromise, however, the number of applicants did not increase markedly. Through the First World War the number of qualified applicants who could be considered by the committees averaged only about one hundred per year. That was an average of two or three candidates for each scholarship. In some states, especially the less populated ones, the number of candidates might be none or one. In situations where only one or two candidates presented themselves, the committees sometimes judged that no one was worthy. This meant no scholar was appointed that year. From 1904 to 1918, when the selection system was changed, there was only one year (1916) when all of the available scholarships were distributed.20 In 1905 ten of the available forty-eight slots went unfilled. In short, some of the recipients won their scholarships virtually by default.
To make matters worse, there were many examples of blatant abuse or laxity by the committees. In many states the appointment of Rhodes Scholars became a rather cozy, gentlemanly rotation among the handful of prominent universities. Thus in a given year the scholarship might go to the candidate from university “A,” the next year to the choice of university “B,” and so on until the series began again.21 Parkin did his best to curtail this practice, but with only limited success.
Few of the committee members had any first-hand experience 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
