Private Bogey

For its latest and wackiest campaign--against Rhodes Scholars--the Chicago Tribune this week got an angry but considered answer. It came from an organization of which the U.S. public seldom hears: the Rhodes Trust.

Reason for this unusual break into print was that the Tribune had been bug-eyed for weeks over a private and patently ridiculous bogey: education of U.S. youths in foreign countries. No one was much surprised that the Anglophobiac Tribune saw the greatest menace of all in U.S. students at the great English universities.

Rhodes Scholars, solemnly charged the Tribune, are a group of subversive masterminds and intellectual saboteurs banded together in a "secret society" which constitutes a national peril.* Said the Tribune, wheezing with rage: "The Rhodes Scholars, whose education was intended to promote the betrayal of the U.S., have infiltrated our Federal Government. . . . The Scholarships were created to corrupt Americans."

Among those the Tribune rapped: Arkansas's Representative J. W. Fulbright, whose plan for postwar international cooperation gives Tribune Publisher McCormick ideological chills & fever; OWI's Elmer Davis, whom the Tribune accused of having majored in the "tactic of vilification" while at Oxford; OONR (a Tribune tag meaning "Old Oxonians Not Rhodes Scholars") Marshall Field III (Eton and Cambridge), editor of the Tribune-rivaling Chicago Sun; OONR Henry R. Luce (Hotchkiss, Yale and Oxford), editor of TIME.

Cried the Tribune: ". . . it might be a good idea to have them fingerprinted. . . ."

Answers. Scholarly Frank Aydelotte, American Secretary to the Rhodes Trustees, onetime Swarthmore College president, now director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., branded the attack as "impertinence" and "an old story." Said he: "It was made in 1916 by George Sylvester Viereck, who has lately incurred Uncle Sam's displeasure for his pro-German activities. . . . The Tribune places under suspicion several signers of the Declaration of Independence.* ... The Tribune publishes a list ... of 49 Rhodes Scholars engaged in civilian war work. It is characteristic of the Tribune's carelessness as to facts that this list should be so short. . . . The truth is that about 135 Rhodes Scholars are employed in civilian war jobs. . . . Most outrageous ... is the fact that [the Tribune has] ignored some 250 (of fewer than 350 of military age) who are enrolled in the armed services. . . ."

Said the Nation: The Tribune's campaign "may be good yellow journalism at that, and no one has ever denied that McCormick as a journalist is good and yellow."

*Rhodes Scholarships (two from each U.S. State and Territory, three from each of 18 British colonies and others from Germany) were founded under the will of Cecil John Rhodes, Briton who made a fortune mining diamonds, became Prime Minister of South Africa's Cape Colony at 37, died in 1902 famed as the "Empire Builder." The first Rhodes Scholars went from the U.S. to study at England's Oxford University in 1904. The Scholarships have been discontinued for war's duration.

* Suspected Signers: Richard Henry Lee, Button Gwinnett, Benjamin Rush, among others.

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