| U of M Alumni Association | U of M Twin Cities |
 |
| ||
| |||
|
5/5/2005
Charles Burke Elliott was a struggling young Minneapolis lawyer, working as a part-time editor for West Publishing Company to supplement a measly law practice. It was 1885, and Elliott felt his legal career was going nowhere fast, so he decided to jump-start his future by becoming the University of Minnesota's first candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy. That plan was his first step down a path toward brief and unexpected renown in the nation's Capitol. There was a touch of audacity in the idea; Elliott didn't even have a bachelor's degree. But he had studied at Marietta College in Ohio and was a brilliant law student at the University of Iowa, where he took a bachelor of law degree (it was possible, at the time, to get a B.L. without having a B.A.). Further, he'd published a number of well-received legal articles since his graduation and he reasoned that these, along with his law degree, ought to substitute for the missing B.A. He approached Cyrus Northrop, recently appointed the second president of the University of Minnesota, with his idea, guessing that Northrop might be a man with a sympathetic ear. The new president had grand ideas about putting the still small University of Minnesota on the nation's higher educational roadmap, and one way to do that was to boost a graduate program that to that date had not produced a single Ph.D. Not many colleges in the nation had. German universities, the model of educational enlightenment in the late-19th century United States, had been minting doctors of philosophy for many years, and the usual pattern for aspiring American academics was to do their doctoral work in Deutschland. That had changed somewhat, beginning in 1861, when Yale awarded this nation's first three Ph.D.s. The trend continued in the 1870s, when Johns Hopkins University opened with the mission of promoting graduate education in this country. Even so, in 1876 only 25 institutions in the United States awarded Ph.D.s, and these were handed out to a grand total of 44 students. Northrop was himself a Yale man, and keen on educational reform. Despite the B.A. problem, Elliott was an appealing candidate. His substitute credits were accepted in lieu of the degree. The young lawyer soon began his course of doctoral study. Elliott's major field was to be history, with studies in Roman law, international law, and the constitutional history of England and the United States, with an emphasis on the diplomatic history of these two nations. Elliott would work under the direction of Harry Pratt Judson, professor of history; William Watts Folwell, professor of political science; and George Edwin MacLean, professor of the English. It was a prestigious crew. Folwell, Northrop's predecessor as president, was already an institution at the U; Judson would one day serve as president of the University of Chicago; and MacLean would serve as president at the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska. “From time to time I met these gentlemen at their homes, where my work was examined and reading directed,” Elliott wrote in his unfinished autobiography almost 50 years later. “Each took great interest in his only
By the second year of Elliott's studies, it was time to choose a subject for his dissertation. At Judson's suggestion, Elliott decided to write on the ongoing diplomatic controversy between the United States and Great Britain over the Newfoundland fisheries, specifically, the extent to which Commonwealth state Canada could claim proprietary fishing rights to the waters off of Newfoundland. While the topic might seem distant to a midwestern lawyer, it was pretty hot in 1886. From the birth of the republic, the United States and Great Britain had maintained diplomatic relationships that were sometimes bellicose, sometimes surly, and sometimes merely fussy. England tended to be arrogant in its foreign relations, and the United States tended to be thin-skinned. One of the niggling bones of contention was the matter of fishing rights. And just as Elliott decided to write about the same, U.S. President Grover Cleveland's administration had made a treaty with Great Britain that “gave much dissatisfaction to certain elements in the United States,” Elliott wrote. Cleveland was a Democrat. The “dissatisfied elements” were mostly Republicans from the New England states. The conflict revolved around the question of what rights Americans had to fish in Canadian waters. Not surprisingly, New England fishermen thought not enough and Newfoundlanders said too many. In late 1886, Elliott went off to libraries in Washington, New York, and Boston to research the history of this question. The contentions escalated as he studied. Canadian warships seized American fishing schooners and arrested crews for casting their nets in Dominion waters. To retaliate, the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress passed a bill in spring of 1887 authorizing American ports to bar Canadian ships and goods. Hotheads began spouting off about the possibility of war, a prospect that a poetic editorialist for the Detroit News warned could change the map of North America: We do not want to fight, But, by jingo, if we do, We'll scoop in all the fishing grounds And the whole Dominion, too. Back in Minneapolis, Charles Burke Elliott was putting the period to his thesis with a cooler head. To his doctoral committee he presented a dissertation that turned out to be a careful and thorough examination of past fishing treaties signed between the United States and Great Britain. It tended to support the New England contention that terms of the major accord governing fishing rights in Canadian waters (the Washington Treaty of 1818) were generally unfavorable to the United States. Not only did Elliott's dissertation prove satisfactory to Judson, Folwell, and MacLean, but also “the University decided to publish and distribute it as sort of a public document,” Elliott wrote. It was now the fall of 1887, and in Washington, D.C., the Cleveland administration was trying to ease tensions over the fishing disputes by hosting a joint commission of British and American diplomats. Three representatives from each country began hammering out a proposed agreement that would appear in February 1888 as the Bayard-Chamberlain pact. But even as
When Davis was sent a copy of Elliott's thesis, simply called “United States and the Northeastern Fisheries,” he found just the right sword to help Republicans make a few thrusts at the Cleveland administration. Be cautious with the Brits, was Elliott's learned summation; they've taken advantage in the past. Davis quickly put a copy of the book in the hands of every one of his colleagues in the Senate, and it soon became the talk of the Capitol. Senators were making speeches in the chambers with Elliott's book propped open on their desks, freely quoting from this grad student from the University of Minnesota on the Senate floor. Elliott received warm letters of praise from some of the leading political and intellectual lights of the day, including Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge; famed historian and diplomat George Bancroft; and diplomats John Jay, a descendant and namesake of the original co-author of The Federalist Papers, and James Russell Lowell, a former minister to England, who wrote, “I have read with great interest & instruction your History of the Fishery Question. It seems to me a thorough & fairminded statement of the whole business.” Any doctoral student camped in some lonely library carrel can appreciate Elliott's sentiments on January 6, 1888, as he pondered the circumstances that brought him and his work to the attention of so many notables. He kept a diary during these heady days. And on that Friday, he indulged himself by describing how, as a 17-year-old youth in Ohio, he began his first job as a teacher. Now, 10 years later, he asks himself: Have they been successful years? I think I am safe in saying that they have not been altogether wasted. . . . Within a month I have received personal letters from some of the most distinguished men in the land, unsolicited, all speaking in flattering terms of my work. . . . Surely, without vanity, I may feel that there is some distance between the poor muddy youth of seventeen, standing on that hill side in Ohio ten years ago, and the young lawyer of 27 here in this great Western City. Senators of the United States did not then write to that youth, “You have done yourself and the State great credit.” In the modern age, Elliott would surely have been whisked away to Washington for a season in the sun: a round of interviews on the public affairs programs, testimony at Senate hearings, think tank offers to consider. But back in 1888, the clock was already ticking on his 15 minutes of fame. Though Washington continued to debate the pros and cons of the Bayard-Chamberlain pact,
And, oh yes, he still had the obligations of an upcoming oral examination to fulfill the requirements for his Ph.D. During the height of his romance with the Senate, Elliott's enthusiasm for the doctoral work began to wane and his diary notes growing frustration with the faculty: “During May I suppose I will have to pass an examination for my Degree of Ph.D. if the faculty ever get the matter arranged.” And, “If they go to adding any further requirements I will withdraw as my time is too valuable to give much more of it to this kind of amusement.” But as the weeks and months passed and Elliott's celebrity faded, his obligations remained. His days consisted of mornings at the courthouse, afternoons reading, and evenings attending to family matters. He kept abreast of activities in Washington and continued to receive congratulatory letters for his book, but discussion of the Bayard-Chamberlain pact ground to a halt in the Senate (the treaty would ultimately be voted down by Republicans in August 1888), and the fisheries matter was no longer Topic A in the Capitol. By May, Elliott was back with his nose fully to the doctoral grindstone. And as the date for his oral exam neared, the man who just months before had been brimming with confidence and self-satisfaction, was suddenly weak-kneed: “Am very much disgusted with my Degree business,” reads his May 21 diary entry. “Am unable to get time to study and will have to face a severe examination without the necessary preparation. I am a fair specimen of an ass, to attempt any thing of the kind while running a business at the same time.” Elliott's concerns turned out to be unfounded. On Saturday, June 2, 1888, he went to the home of Professor Judson where he had supper with his examining committee and then proceeded to face their questions from 8 o'clock in the evening until 10. He learned his fate just a half-hour later. Congratulations were in order for Elliott, who'd just been awarded the first doctor of philosophy in the history of the University of Minnesota. “It has been a long hard course of study,” Elliott wrote in his diary that night before going to bed. “I am well pleased to be free from it.” Elliott remained in Minneapolis after his June commencement. There he began a long and distinguished legal career that included stints on the municipal bench for the city of Minneapolis and as a state Supreme Court justice, where he sat from 1906 to 1909. In that year, President William Howard Taft appointed him as a federal judge in the Philippines and he wound up spending the next several years in the Pacific, first on the bench and then as a cabinet officer. Elliott helped shape the judicial system in the newly democratic government of the Philippines. In 1917, Elliott published a two-volume history of the relationship between the United States and the Philippines that was well-received in scholarly and diplomatic circles. There is no record, however, of anyone passing out copies of it on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Tim Brady is a St. Paul freelance writer. | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
Last modified on 10/20/2008 2:04:05 PM ©2009 by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association. The University of Minnesota Alumni Association is an equal opportunity educator and employer. | Trouble seeing the text? | Contact Alumni Association | Privacy |
Print View
