A Quick Bit about MDI's Connection with Dr. C.W. Eliot.
He may not be a household name, but he should be.
Dr. C.W. Eliot might not be an instantly recognizable name, but by the time that he died at 92 in his summer home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, Dr. Eliot had changed the political landscape in a way that still has pretty big ramifications.
The summer that he died, Dr. Eliot had been in delicate health, but he still stayed in Maine, a place where he’d summered since the early 1880s rather than heading back to Cambridge, Massachusetts and its urban connection to Boston and those stellar hospitals.
In Dr. Eliot’s obituary, the New York Times wrote,
“Through his lifelong active participation in public affairs, his sturdy independence in politics, his voice of ideas and ideals not only in education but also in the fields of capital and labor, religion and international peace, Dr. Charles E. Eliot came to be regarded as the personification of a strikingly national type and has been characterized as ‘the first American.’ ”
The first American. What a bizarre moniker with so many Euro-centric implications, but I think what the obituary writer meant was that Dr. Eliot was about the ideals of America, what America was supposed to symbolize.
For forty years, Dr. Eliot was the president of Harvard College, beginning at 35. At the time he was the youngest person to fill that position.
“He found Harvard a college and left it a great university,” the Times wrote.
Charles was born in Boston in 1834 (March 20) to Samuel Atkins Eliot and Mary Lyman Eliot, the fourth child in a group of seven. He was the only boy. His house is now where the left wing of the Massachusetts State House sits. His grandfather, Samuel Eliot, was one of the most elite merchants in Boston. His mother’s father, Theodore Lyman Sr., was another elite merchant who focused on trading with East India.
So, Charles came from money.
Charles’s own father, another Samuel, walked through the city almost exclusively in a black swallowtail coat and dark pants. Samuel was a treasurer at Harvard College and wrote a short history about it. A politician, he was in the state legislature and Congress and became the mayor of Boston, directly after the position was held by Theodore Lyman Jr., his brother in law. Samuel did have a misstep, becoming a partner in a dry goods commission firm that failed spectacularly and sunk him into poverty. By then, Charles was able to house them, and take care of his parents.
Charles first went to Boston Latin School and then Harvard, eventually becoming a tutor in math while he studied chemistry with J.P. Cooke. He eventually because an assistant professor and he studied for two years in Europe, focusing on education and chemical use in laboratories.
When he returned to the United State, a large Massachusetts manufacturing company, which focused on cotton, offered him a position with a $5,000 yearly salary, but he turned it down to become a professor of analytical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They didn’t pay nearly enough. He went back to Europe to learn more and became a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. The entire time, he criticized how Americans educated their students. This thinking brought him to the forefront of who should be the president of that board.
He began reforming immediately. He established a graduate school right off. Written tests were replaced with oral exams. There was no longer any forced and required religious worships. Lectures were now recitations. He revitalized the law school. He made the medical school good again. The divinity school became a training school for Unitarians.
“President Eliot revealed throughout this movement deep, self-sacrificing sympathy for teachers and students,” the Times wrote. “Among the undergraduates he was held in great reverence for they had in him a stanch friend, who, when they were in dire trouble, proved to be a genial executive.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “He is turning the place over like a flapjack.”
One of the biggest things he did to change Harvard was that he prioritized individual choice. Instead of being told exactly what courses they had to take, students could pick the courses themselves.
When he retired, President Taft (also known to hang out on Mount Desert Island and with its summer residents) offered him an ambassadorship to the Court of St. James’s. He said no. He told the president that he “preferred to spend the evening of his life in the serenity that only freedom from official responsibility could give.”
So, he toured the world twice with his wife and granddaughter, promoting peace, and also entered the lecture circuit. He was like an Energizer bunny, never stopping, always thinking of the future and what it held for humanity.
He liked rowing and kept at it in even after his retirement. He also liked bicycling.
In his last public message of May, the year he died, he was interviewed in Collier’s Weekly and said, “If I had an opportunity to say a final word to all the young people of America, it would be this: Don’t think too much about yourself. When all you can think of is yourself, you’re in a bad way.’”
He also said it would be good to allow wine and beer to be sold again. It was, the Prohibition Era, and he was a summer resident of MDI. To be fair, he was always against the prohibition though he eventually because a teetotaler himself at 83.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1926/08/23/98852316.html
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/charles-w-eliot-harvard-university-president/