Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,683

This is the grave of Charles William Eliot.

Born in 1834 in Boston, Eliot grew up at the peak of the Brahmin elites of that city. This was a super wealthy family, the money mostly coming from shipping and merchant activity and banking. Eliot went to Boston Latin and then Harvard, where he finished in 1853. Still, he kind of struggled through mid 30s to live up to the family name. He taught math and chemistry at Harvard for awhile, engaged in some level of academic infighting, etc. This all sounds pretty good to me, but he was too elite to be a fine professor at Harvard. He wanted the big named chair and he couldn’t get it. Frustrated, he left Harvard in 1863, and without the kind of financial resources he once had because his family had lost most of the fortune in the Panic of 1857.

But let’s not feel too sorry for our poor unfortunate chap. There was still a legacy from his grandfather to burn through. I assume he bought his way out of the Civil War, spending those last two years of the war studying educational systems in Europe on said legacy. He studied these educational systems pretty thoroughly too and came to the conclusion that they would have to serve the wealthy in the US since the state was not going to support higher education. Harvard certainly hasn’t changed that mission to the present!

Eliot was key to why that hasn’t changed. He returned in 1865 to take a chemistry position at the new school of MIT. This was a moment when the rising business elite of what would soon be the Gilded Age wanted to move away from classical education model and train their kids in “practical” matters. So the traditional colleges and modes of study were in real crisis and the new, and mostly idiotic, new capitalists, threw their substantial weight around to get what they wanted. Higher administration completely caved to the demands of the rich guys. Wait, are we talking about 2024?

Eliot was happy to oblige the nouveau riche donors. He came back and from his MIT perch, ranted about how the education system was broken and we needed more practical education to fix it. The rich loved it. When Harvard needed a new president in 1869, Eliot made sure everyone knew he wanted the job. He got it too, only 35 years old.

Now, I don’t want to be too harsh on Eliot here. He wasn’t Gordon Gee. He did believe in traditional educational values, but believed they needed to be updated for the modern world. A lot of what he wanted was universities to develop modern research facilities to serve the needs of the world, which mostly meant industry, yes. I don’t think any of us are unhappy that American universities are home to some of the greatest researchers in the world in basically every field. We might be more unhappy that bringing in money from outside sources now constitutes success in academia, but that is more a post-2008 thing than something from 1869. The other part of what Eliot pushed was modern specialization. He believed the age of the do-it-all Enlightenment man had passed and in order to succeed in the modern world, one needed to specialize.

Looking back, Eliot was probably right. But Harvard’s traditional scholars were really angry. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison said of this:

It was due to Eliot’s insistent pressure that the Harvard faculty abolished the Greek requirement for entrance in 1887, after dropping required Latin and Greek for freshman year. His and Harvard’s reputation, the pressure of teachers trained in the new learning, and of parents wanting ‘practical’ instruction for their sons, soon had the classics on the run, in schools as well as colleges; and no equivalent to the classics, for mental training, cultural background, or solid satisfaction in after life, has yet been discovered. It is a hard saying, but Mr. Eliot, more than any other man, is responsible for the greatest educational crime of the century against American youth—depriving him of his classical heritage.

Well, maybe.

Another thing about Eliot at Harvard–he hated football. Now, we have to remember that football was created by Theodore Roosevelt types to prepare our effeminate young elites for war, which came out of the same cultural soup as the Boy Scouts, hunting laws, the Marquis of Queensbury rules of boxing, and other such programs to create warlike mentalities among young men. Football was lunacy level dangerous in these years and people died on the field. Eliot opposed football because “the weaker man is considered the legitimate prey of the stronger.” Uh, yeah, that’s kind of the point. In fact, he hated all sports. He considered baseball evil because of the curveball. Seriously. He said “This year I’m told the team did well because one pitcher had a fine curve ball. I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.” Oh no, not Harvard! That school would never throw a curveball at the world!!!!

Despite this foolishness, we can’t overestimate Eliot’s influence on 20th century higher education. He helped create the modern prep school world, setting standards to help their students get into Harvard. He helped found the College Entrance Examination Board. He also hated the idea of educating women and had no interest in Harvard admitting them. But some faculty wanted it and so a Harvard Annex was created that did let in some women and this of course became Radcliffe. Eliot was also a big time believer in eugenics and segregation, despite a few African Americans such as WEB DuBois getting through. He also strongly encouraged Harvard students to serve as strikebreakers. Some have called Eliot “the greatest labor union hater in the country,” which says a lot for the time! On the other hand, he supported allowing Jews and Catholics into Harvard and it wasn’t until after his presidency that the restrictions against them became harsher.

Eliot stayed president of Harvard for 40 years, finally retiring in 1909. He was an elite’s elite by this time and considered a key thinker of nearly every issue in the country, despite the fact that he was a horrible human on many of them. He finally died in 1926, at the age of 92.

Charles William Eliot is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Part of Eliot’s eugenics bit was founding what is today the American Sexual Health Association. In the modern context, this is a good thing, but historically it was, uh, problematic. If you would like this series to visit other people involved with the ASHA, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jane Addams, who was very much into this sort of thing with her work in Chicago, is in Cedarville, Illinois, and Thomas Hepburn, father of Katharine, is in Hartford. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.