Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite. Thomas J. Schaeper

      INTERWAR YEARS

       Society and Study

      If only those gates would open.

      If only those gates would yawn.

      Down the Turl I would be lopin'

      Before you even knew that I was gone.

      But they're not, so what's the use?

      I've got those claustrophobia blues.

      If only this town had a woman

      Who would sell herself at reasonable rates.

      If only Oxford were human,

      I could get my mind off those gates.

      But she's not – a screw is loose.

      I've got those claustrophobia blues.

      Those walls are creepin' up upon me.

      They're gettin' closer every day.

      I can't see the stars for the bolts and the bars,

      Oh-de, oh-de, oh-de-ay!

      If only this damn monastery

      Would burn to the ground or such!

      If only the porter had a fairly decent daughter

      Who'd be susceptible to the touch.

      But he hasn't, I've hidden the booze.

      I've got those claustrophobia blues.

      Claustrophobia blues!

      “Claustrophobia Blues,” song by Walt Whitman Rostow and Gordon Craig

Déjà Vu

      The Rhodes Scholar experience of the 1920s and 1930s retained many similarities and yet was remarkably different from that of the earlier years. Like their predecessors, most of the Americans of this generation too were from small towns and had traveled little previously.

      J. William Fulbright (1925) later admitted that going from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Oxford was a “tremendous shock,” like Alice in Wonderland.¹ At the University of Arkansas he had been an avid golfer and a star on the tennis and football teams. In later life he admitted that his Rhodes Scholarship owed more to his athletic prowess and to the campaigning of his mother with members of the selection committee than to his academic record.² Initially he was embarrassed by his intellectual inadequacy. He found his essays “hard as the dickens to write” and he felt like a “bonehead.”³ But he loved the friendly atmosphere at Pembroke College. He had the good fortune to study history under a brilliant young Scotsman named Ronald Buchanan McCallum; Fulbright happily reported to his family that his tutor had “not yet acquired the academic air.”⁴ Within a few weeks he settled into a comfortable routine of tea, rugby, lacrosse, conversation, reading, and cultural outings. He spent most vacations roaming through France, Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Balkans. He was elected president of the Teasel Club and the Johnson Literary Society. He made many close friendships, though occasionally he was taken aback by the British tendency to belittle Americans as “a bunch of rich damn fools.”⁵ Decades later he recalled that in Oxford he had “a hell of a good time.”⁶ By the time he returned to Arkansas he had become a pipe-smoking, tweedy intellectual.

      Dean Rusk's introduction to Britain was equally dramatic. He was born in Cherokee County, Georgia, in 1909. His father had been a Presbyterian preacher until a voice ailment had forced him to give that up. The elder Rusk then became a farmer, a schoolteacher, and finally a mail carrier. Dean was the fourth of five children. The doctor who delivered him was a veterinarian, and as a small boy Dean wore underwear made out of flour sacks. Once his sixth-grade teacher sent him home because he had come to school barefoot. Defiantly his mother sent him back to school the following – still without shoes. His grit and native intelligence made him a star high school student. He worked his way through Davidson College and won election to Phi Beta Kappa. All through college he planned to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, for he knew that it might be the only way for a boy from a poor family to do graduate work. In order to meet the athletic part of the criteria, he taught himself basketball and made the Davidson team.⁷

      Before he reached New York City in 1931 to board a ship for Britain, the farthest he had ever been from Georgia was North Carolina. As the Cunard liner pulled out of the harbor a deck steward offered him a ham sandwich. Rusk took one bite, tasted the English mustard, and threw it over the side. “This rube from Georgia had a great deal to learn,” he wrote many years later in his memoirs.⁸ During the next several days at sea an Englishwoman made him the center of attention. Learning that he was from Georgia, she asked, “Oh, isn't that the place where you butcher your Negroes?” Trying to maintain his poise and offer witty repartee, he answered, “Oh, yes. And we consider them rare delicacies.”⁹

      Upon arrival in London he was taken aback by some of the risqué signs and advertisements. One large billboard displayed a stork with its beak pointed skyward. The message below it declared: “GUINNESS'S STOUT KEEPS YOUR PECKER UP!” (Actually, what Rusk interpreted as a smutty double entendre was an innocent British colloquialism, meaning “keep your chin up.”) He noticed on urinal stalls, in Greek letters, the warning, “Players with short bats should stand close to the wicket.” Even before he reached Oxford he could see that Britain “was a far cry from Georgia Presbyterianism.”¹⁰

      Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Rusk soon adapted to life at St. John's College. He grew a bushy red beard during a trip to the Lake District and wrote home that Oxford life was the most pleasant he had ever experienced.