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Rhodes's Results. Some Oxford men have long regarded Rhodesmen as disagreeable blighters, scarcely fit even for one another's depressing company. Gentler observers reflect that Oxford does not represent all of England. Its young men are mostly of the gentry. And British gentry are alien to youths from big U. S. cities, not to mention those of the U. S. hinterland whence most Rhodes Scholars come. Cecil Rhodes's will provided that Scholars be chosen two from a State, which has sometimes resulted in thinly populated States sending up indifferent candidates. In 1929 Parliament was persuaded to make a change. Candidates are now chosen from eight districts of six States each.
No Rhodes Scholar has yet become President of the U. S., member of the Cabinet, Governor of a State or mayor of a great U. S. city. There are only 20 Rhodesmen in Federal service; 195 are in law. But the rise of pedagogs to high government positions under the Roosevelt Administration may point toward the fruition of Cecil Rhodes's idea, for the biggest group of Rhodesmen (40%) have become educators. Eight are college presidents, 13 deans, one (John James Tigert) was U. S. Commissioner of Education from 1921 to 1928. Other distinguished Rhodesmen include Minister to Austria Gilchrist Baker Stockton, onetime Amateur Boxing Champion Edward Francis ("Eddie") Eagan (now a lawyer), Rev. Arthur Lee Kinsolving of Boston, Stanley Kuhl Hornbeck who advises Secretary Hull on the Far East, Police Commissioner J. K. Watkins of Detroit, Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble of Mt. Wilson (whose conception of the expanding Universe is called the "Hubble Bubble"), Chairman Francis P. Miller of the World's Student Christian Federation, Pulitzer Prize Historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt, Geneva Newsmen Clarence K. Streit (New York Times) and Lewis Rex
Miller (Christian Science Monitor), Authors James Saxon Childers, Walter Stanley Campbell ("Stanley Vestal"), Elmer Holmes Davis, Christopher Darlington Morley.
Host & Hostess. At Swarthmore this week many a Rhodesman would hasten to shake the hand of Sir Francis Wylie. He, a wrinkled onetime philosophy don, never forgets the name, college and home town of a Rhodes Scholar. Once he presented 250 Rhodesmen to Edward of Wales, remembered them all. Lady Wylie always presided at tea, had every Scholar to dinner once a year. Sir Francis, wise and tactful, was knighted in 1929 for his Rhodes work. In 1931 the current crop of Rhodesmen gave the Wylies a silver salver, a scroll, a dining room suite.