RHODES MUST FALL | Oriel College, Oxford to Remove Rhodes Statue

A statue of Cecil Rhodes in Capetown being
removed to an undisclosed location. 

June 21, 2020—The shocking killing of George Floyd has had global implications. The long-time "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign for the removal of statues to Cecil Rhodes has been reenergized.

Here's the best discussion I have seen on how to evaluate monuments to past heroes. Were they working, within the constraints of their time, for a better world?

Rhodes had a dream of a "Capetown to Cairo" British Empire in Africa. He helped realize that dream and had two countries named after him for many decades—Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He created the famed Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford, won by such American political successes as the late Senators Richard Lugar (Univ College, Oxford) and William Fulbright (Pembroke College, Oxford), and President Bill Clinton (Univ College, Oxford).

The Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign looks at his achievements through the lens of his attitude and behavior toward black Africans. The RMF campaign was successful in Capetown, South Africa, where the statue of Rhodes was lifted from its pedestal. However, the campaign to remove a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford came to a screeching halt in 2015 when several alumni threatened to end their giving to Oriel if it acceded to the demands of the campaigners. (Shameless self-promotion: This is covered on page 63 of the 4th edition of Oxford College Arms.)

At the time, the RMF banner was not one that the Oriel Provost wanted, in the end, to fight for. The resolution at the time appeared reasonable, balancing the importance of keeping historical valuable monuments while facing up to the moral or other shortcomings of people who were once lionized.

What a difference the video of Floyd's killing has made! On June 9, a thousand RMF protesters descended on Oriel College. On June 17, the governing body of Oriel College voted to remove the statue to its alumnus, Cecil Rhodes. The next day (the 78th birthday of Sir Paul McCartney), Husayn Kassai, founder of the verification company Onfido, revealed that he promised to replace any funding commitments withdrawn by "racist" alumni donors who object to the removal of the memorial to Rhodes.

Back in the United States, even the statue of Oxford alumnus Robert Moses is being threatened. That would have been unthinkable by most people before his principal biographer, Robert Caro, famously (in The Power Broker) documented the man's aggregation of power and his use of it to preserve public spaces for relatively well off people. Moses was a New York City Parks Commissioner for 26 years. He built parks and parkways all over New York City and Long Island. He used his power to promote the automobile and higher-income residents. For example, he built bridges on his parkway with low clearance, to prevent busloads of poor people coming to use his park.

There is a Rhodes connection to Moses. After Yale, Moses went to Oxford (Wadham College), graduating with a degree in jurisprudence in 1911. He was not, of course,  himself a Rhodes Scholar, but he had strong opinions about Rhodes Scholars. The new campaign to remove his statue in Babylon gives new meaning to Paul Robeson's rendition of Go Down Moses.

Removing a desanctified statue poses new problems. If it goes to a museum, and other monuments follow, the museum could become a shrine for fans, or another flashpoint, or both. A statue of (Roman Catholic) James II that was dumped in a nearby river was rescued; the metal was cleverly "repurposed" to make bells for the Anglican church.

Meanwhile, Oriel has formed a Commission to make a recommendation by the end of 2020. Permission or signoff will be needed from English Heritage, as the Rhodes Building at Oriel is listed Grade II. (Meanwhile, what about Rhodes House? It's hard to disentangle the Rhodes Scholarships from the man who created them.)

HERALDRY: Oriel~ (Updated May 15, 2018)

Oriel College, Oxford
arms.

Blazon: Gules three Lions passant guardant in pale Or a bordure engrailed Argent. (A lion is passant if viewed from the side with his head facing the viewer. A lion is guardant or gardant if his front right leg is raised, although the passant lions tend to have only three feet on the ground. In pale means the lions are lined up in a column, one above the other.)

Authority: These Royal Arms of England were used by the Plantagenet kings, from Richard I ("Lionheart") to Henry III and Edwards I, II and III. We could find no evidence that the college's differencing by a bordure engrailed argent has been granted, but the arms have been used for so long that they are now "ancient".

Nominee: The College was founded in 1324 by Adam de Brome during the reign of Edward II (ruled 1307-1377). Edward is the titular founder of the college, which is why the Royal Arms are used.  The Bordure may have been informed by de Brome's coat of arms, which includes the rare bordure engrailed argent.

College History. The College was once known as King's Hall and has absorbed both St. Mary's Hall and Bedel Hall Soon after the foundation in 1326 as the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it was given a property called La Oriole, on the site of the present Front Quadrangle, and gradually the college came to be called by that name. Oriel was Oxford's fifth college, and the first to be royally founded. It began with a Provost and 10 Fellows. Students could pursue Theology, Law and Medicine. Three Provosts went on to become Bishops. It was the college of Walter Raleigh and Thomas More. In the early 1500s the first undergraduates arrived. Oriel survived the turbulence of the religious Reformation. By the end of the century more space was needed. Between 1620 and 1642 the medieval buildings were replaced by the present front quadrangle, which housed some of the court of King Charles I while Oxford was briefly his capital before he was defeated and beheaded by Cromwell. In the 1700s Oriel attracted its first transatlantic students, sons of planters in Virginia, one of whom later regretted employing a young surveyor, George Washington. Oriel expanded into a second quadrangle and built its Senior Library to house a large gift of books. Oriel in the 18th century  produced famed parson-naturalist Gilbert White. From 1780 to 1830 Oriel led the way in reforming academic standards, the brilliant Noetic era and then the Oxford Movement to revitalize the Church of England. The Oriel Fellowships were opened up to competitive examination and many of those who arrived, like Dr Thomas Arnold and John Henry Newman, made their mark.

Recent History. From the 1980s on Oriel College has grown rapidly, like the rest of Oxford, as graduate professional and specialty studies flourished and women were admitted in 1985. Oriel now has about 50 Fellows, 300 undergraduates and 200 graduate students. In recent weeks Ntokozo Qwabe, a 24-year-old Rhodes scholar from South Africa, has led a campaign to remove an Oriel College plaque to Cecil Rhodes and also a statue of Rhodes. Oriel College has started a process for removing the plaque. Qwabe was reported two days ago by the British Daily Telegraph as claiming that:

• Students at Oxford endure “systemic racism, patriarchy and other oppressions” on a daily basis.
• The university’s admissions and staff recruitment systems systematically exclude certain groups of people.
• Oxford’s architecture is laid out in a “racist and violent” way. 
• The British media treat him and his supporters like “terrorists” for challenging the establishment.

Other Posts on Heraldry at Oxford etc.:  HERALDRY SUPERLINK.

RHODES: Oxford Monument-Trashing (Comment)

Plaque that Oriel is planning to remove, under pressure from
the "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign. It was placed by Alfred
Mosely, whose bio is in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906).

Dec. 25, 2015–Earlier this year, in April, a statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed from the University of Capetown in South Africa.

Rhodes is the man after whom were named Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford and Rhodes University in South Africa.

Rhodes built the British African empire "from Capetown to Cairo". He was described by his contemporaries at the peak of his power in 1895 as the "Colossus" of Africa and the "King of Diamonds". (The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient Greek world, is ironically being rebuilt as the latter-day Rhodes monuments are moved and threatened with obliteration.)

Based on quotes from his writing, Rhodes could be described fairly as a racist. At the end of 1895 he helped start the Second Boer War (1899-1902) by supporting the disastrous attack by Sir Leander Starr Jameson on the Dutch-speaking Boers in the Transvaal. African tribespeople were killed in large numbers in the process of the creation of Rhodes' empire.

The campaign against Rhodes' memory has spread from Capetown to Britain and the United States. A petition to Oriel College has a goal of 2,500 signatures and is about 80 percent there.

The petition quotes Rhodes using bitter language that should offend anyone. So do some of the advocates for the petition. Jack Renshaw of Cambridge, for example, calls Rhodes a "racist shit".

The New York Times today notes that Oriel College is responding to this campaign, called "Rhodes Must Fall". The College has reportedly started a process with the Oxford City authorities to remove a plaque honoring Rhodes and has opened discussion on the fate of a statue of Rhodes (see below).

The plaque, shown above right, was erected in 1906 by Alfred Mosely on property that the College owns. Mosely's bio appears in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) as follows:

English financier; born at Clifton 1855. He was educated at the Bristol Grammar School, and afterward went to South Africa, where he became one of the earliest settlers in Kimberley [capital of the Northern Cape Province in central South Africa]. He equipped at his own expense the Princess Christian Base Hospital near Cape Town for the relief of the sick and wounded during the South-African war. In 1902 he conducted an industrial commission from England to the United States to study the cause of American trade prosperity, and in 1903 he headed a similar commission to study American methods of education. He was made a C.M.G. in 1900. Written by: Joseph Jacobs, Victor Rousseau Emanuel.

Rhodes attended Oriel College in 1873, for one term. It took him eight more years of study and multiple return visits to Oxford before he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1881. Meanwhile he founded the De Beers diamond company and then became Premier of the Cape Colony, as it then was called, in 1890-96. His term was ended by his support of an ill-fated attack on the Transvaal (the "Jameson Raid") that in subsequent years led to the Second Boer War. He initiated the practice of apartheid ("apartness" in the Dutch language of the Colony) that was continued in 1934 when South Africa became independent of Britain (i.e., when the Boers essentially took over), and ended in 1994 when South Africa became independent of minority rule by Europeans.

Daily Mail: Oriel College Engaged in "Craven Surrender"

The challenge to monuments of Rhodes may be summarized by a statement by doctoral student Brian Kwoba:

Cecil Rhodes is the Hitler of southern Africa. Would anyone countenance a statue to Hitler?

Rhodes has also been called the George Washington of southern Africa, which should give Americans pause. On December 24, Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia and one-time Rhodes Scholar, responded, in line with many other published comments:

Oxford would damage its standing as a great university if it were to substitute moral vanity for fair-minded inquiry.

,

Statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College.
Its future is being debated.

Oriel's dons, however, have responded to student protests at Rhodes' racist words and actions and have posted a statement disclaiming Rhodes' views and giving notice that the college plans to remove the plaque. Removal of the statue is a more complex issue, and Oriel says it will initiate a "listening exercise" to gather views, because the statue

can be seen as an uncritical celebration of a controversial figure, and the colonialism and the oppression of black communities he represents.

The American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, Elliot Gerson, expressed a hope that the statue not be removed:

Our values today are opposed to the views of the world held by Rhodes, and much of his generation, but his bequest is forever deserving of respect.

Meanwhile, Oriel College is described today by the Daily Mail as engaged in “craven surrender” to a "PC Mob".

Sir Michael Howard, an Honorary Fellow of Oriel and former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford calls the campaign an "attempt to rewrite the history of the college and the university" and "fanatical iconoclasm", comparable to the destruction of historical sites by ISIS in Syria.

Comment

An alumnus of Oriel College, Jonathan Craven, wrote to me about this early on and I have obtained his permission to quote him, since he seems to speak for others:

Horrified. If political correctness is a prerequisite for being a donor to the college they can count me out of the 1326 Society. I've started writing a fuller explanation of why I feel this way which I'll be sending the college as part of their listening process; I'll probably post it in the blog as well since I'm interested to hear what my classmates think about it. I'm happy to see already though that a lot of people much more eloquent and influential than me have already begun making these arguments, so I am fairly confident that the statue will remain in the end. Erasing all traces of anyone we disagree with is a tactic more worthy of the Islamic State.

My own reactions to all this are:

• The idea of a "listening period" appeals to me, even though at Oriel it applies primarily to the statue, not the plaque. The question is whether it is just buying time and whether the issue is in danger of festering rather than being discussed.
• The plaque erected by Alfred Mosely seems to have some merit, reminding us at very least of Mr. Mosely, who seems to have done some important humanitarian work in South Africa and England.
• Destroying monuments should not be a form of speech, although it seems sometimes to be perceived as such. In the 1950s I lived for three years in Dublin. The central monument was Nelson's Pillar, a tall Doric column topped by a statue of a great Englishman, Admiral Lord (Horatio) Nelson. It was the terminus for the green CIE buses that I used to take from Blackrock and then Dalkey. Irish Nationalists never liked having an English naval hero at the center of Dublin and in 1966–nearly 50 years ago, and 50 years after the Easter Rising–the Irish Republicans blew it up. I can fully understand Irish sentiment against the Pillar, but condoning extra-legal violence on the basis of one's sympathy for the objective is dangerous. I am glad that the monument-toppling at Oxford is proceeding within a framework of law.
• When the statues of Kwame Nkrumah and Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin were toppled, on the other hand, few tears were shed. These were rarely of any artistic or historical merit, although I am told some Lenin statues are now worth real money because of their scarcity.
• The Islamic State (aka ISIS) is doing something much worse than blowing up propaganda statues. It is destroying ancient monuments of great artistic and historical importance, like the Palmyra Temple, in the name of their ideology. One hopes that if the Rhodes monuments are indeed removed from Oriel, they will find a home in a museum.
• At Harvard Law School, students are proposing something much more cautious than at Oxford. They are asking their officials to remove the wheatsheafs from the Law School shield, on the basis that the arms are derived from a donor to the Law School who was a slaveholder.  
• If Americans were to go all the way down that road, we would endanger the future of the Jefferson and Washington monuments and even the name of the nation's capital, since our Virginia forebears were slaveholders.
• But I wouldn't mind replacing a few of the long-forgotten men on horseback who grace some Washington, D.C. parks and replacing them with fresher candidates. For example, why not put a statue of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Stanton Park on Capitol Hill? 

Morality-based trashing of national heroes can be based on ignorance of the importance of their positive contributions, anachronistic application of modern standards, and failure to appreciate deep flaws in alternative heroes who are suggested as new icons. Above all, we should be cautious about destroying any monuments of artistic merit or historical significance. To these ends, Oriel College's proposed "listening period" makes some sense.

Postscript

Oriel College has heard enough. The statue will stay. Oriel's decision has been tied to the Yale University free speech incidents. University administrations are sorting out where the lines should be drawn. If free speech becomes a license for A to bully B, what has happened to the free-speech rights of B?

HERALDRY: Harvard Shield Shamed (Postscript March 6, 2016)

Harvard Law School Shield,
Now But Not Forevermore

November 4, 2015–The following story is excerpted from a story in the Harvard Crimson on November 1, 2015. (There is also a story in the Harvard Alumni Magazine.) By "seal" (which is in the realm of numismatics, not heraldry) the author, Andrew M. Duehren, means "shield".

At Harvard Law School, Students Call for Change of Seal
A new student movement at Harvard Law School is organizing to change the seal at the school, which the students argue represents and endorses a slaveholding legacy.
The seal is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a slaveholder who endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard. Dubbed “Royall Must Fall,” the movement styles itself after a student activist movement in South Africa that lobbied [successfully] to remove imagery of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist, from the University of Cape Town’s campus.

Banner of the Anti-Shield Lobby

At Harvard, activists formally began their effort for change with a rally of about 25 people on the Law School campus on Oct. 23. [...]
Students involved in the effort argued that imagery from a slaveholding era has no place at today’s Harvard Law School. [... They] pointed to the research and scholarship of visiting Law School professor Daniel R. Coquillette, who recently published a book about the first century of Harvard Law School, as inspiration for the movement.
In the book, Coquillette details the relationship between the Royall family’s slaveholding and the endowment of the Law School. While Coquillette said he was sympathetic to their aims, calling Royall “a coward, and a brutal slaveholder,” he said he does not think the Law School should change its seal. [...]

The article piques my attention as an example of the importance that some students attach to the coats of arms under which they compete and study. This was the subject of my recent article (pp.  45-50) in Oxford Today on the coats of arms of the Oxford colleges.

Crimson staff writer Andrew M. Duehren can be reached at andy.duehren@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @aduehren.

Postscript (March 6, 2016)

A committee of the Harvard Law School charged with responding to a student request to remove the wheat sheaf charge from the Law School shield has decided to drop the wheat sheaf, because it is associated with Isaac Royall Jr., who endowed the first law professorship at Harvard, and his father, who was a prominent user of slaves on plantations that he owned.  Harvard's corporation is described by the New York Times (which continues to misuse the word "crest" in its reporting on the shield) as likely to approve the proposed change.

The committee decision (which won 10-2) came with a "passionate" dissent from Prof. Annette Gordon-Reed, who has conducted scholarly research on the intimacy of Thomas Jefferson with his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson's paternity via Hemings has been supported by DNA research. Gordon-Reed argues that the wheat-sheaf charges should be retained but the narrative should be changed to include the slaves who worked for Mr. Royall:

People should have to think about slavery when they think of the Harvard shield; but from now on, with a narrative that emphasizes the enslaved, not the Royall family.

On the other hand, no one has yet noted anywhere a huge advantage created by the removal of the wheat sheaf. It creates a fantastic opportunity for the Harvard Law School to reward a new donor by inserting a new charge on the shield that relates to a new gift. After all, what has Isaac Royall Jr. done for Harvard lately? If I were a billionaire with loose millions in change ready to invest in my immortality, I would see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plant my flag, or at least a charge associated with my name, on a platinum-quality institution. I am available for consultation on the specifics. I plan to post the following on Craig's List:

UNIQUE DONOR OPPORTUNITY. With the pending removal of a shamed symbol from the shield of a world-famous academic institution, a vacancy in the space has been created for a limited time only. Act now before a person less worthy of immortality sweeps this prize from the table! If you are a billionaire seeking immortality, please contact the undersigned ASAP for suggestions on Next Steps. Contact: YourFameMyJob.

Or am I being too cynical?

Here Are Links to Some of My Posts on the Arms of Oxford Colleges and PPHs: Original Article in Oxford Today . Heraldry as Branding . Heraldry as Fun .  Coat of Arms vs. Crest . Sinister Questions . Visit to the College of Arms . Windsor Herald Talks to New Yorkers . Shaming of Harvard Law Shield :: Rapid Expansion of Oxford's Colleges and Halls . Oxford Stars . Links to Heraldry, Oxford, GW . Harris Manchester College . Linacre College . St Catherine's . St Cross College . St Edmund Hall . Trinity College :: Regent's Park College . St Benet's Hall . 

AMERICAN OXONIAN: 2014, Spring–Swan Song (Updated Dec. 21, 2015)

Spring 2014 issue just out. Worth reading!

Oct. 22, 2014–I just received my Spring 2014 issue of The American Oxonian, a 152-page book crammed with interesting information.

The alumni quarterly is sent to all Rhodes Scholars plus other Oxonians who pay annual dues of $50. The annual directory includes all Rhodes Scholars, plus the other Oxonians who subscribe. (The directory is extremely useful. It would be even more useful if it included all American Oxonians.)

The Centennial Year of The American Oxonian was a tour de force, and this issue is the swan song or farewell issue for outgoing editor Todd Breyfogle, who must be exhausted from his effort putting out this publication. The last paragraph of his introduction to the last issue reads:

It has been a great and humbling privilege to have been the editor of our collective autobiography, to have been custodian of a time of that interior dialogue of higher responsibility. There are, alas, obituaries and articles unwritten, opportunities missed, conversations that I would like to have pursued. But most of all, I'm grateful for the gift of a constant, sometimes nagging, demand to reflect – in such remarkable company – on what it means to learn, and what it means to live.

This final issue under his editorship is well worth taking time to peruse. I will discuss three articles. Regarding the first one, the outgoing editor says:

Rhodes Scholars, like most if not all high-achieving professionals, have a substantially higher incidence of suicide.

1. "The Incomprehensible." This brave and helpful. Patrick Shea (Utah and New College '70) tells about the impact on him in his last term at Oxford of finding out that his stockbroker father had just committed suicide. Apparently his father entrusted much of his savings to a group of Canadian con men who bought up penny stocks in Utah, recruited two Utah State football stars to front for them, and unloaded the stocks on his father and his father's customers. It was not a victimless crime. Patrick Shea's father, uncle and grandfather all committed suicide both because of their own financial loss and because they had recommended the stock to customers. Writing 40 years later, Shea is still struggling with his feelings. He cites Durkheim and Freud and gives us a powerful paragraph on what's wrong with suicide as a way out:

Suicide is the ultimate egotistical step. The individual who commits suicide fails to recognize, does not want to recognize, or is incapable of recognizing the permanent, indelible scar he or she is leaving on those around him or her, friend, family, or stranger. The survivor's pain is unspeakable. It is as if a permanent question has been imprinted in one's psyche, which repeats itself daily, if not hourly. WHY would someone kill him or herself and hurt those around them? ...

2. "Raise Good Men." Christopher B. Howard (Texas and St. Anne's '91), President of the all-male Hampden-Sydney College, talks about the special problems of educating young men today. When I was a student, women were a minority. At Harvard, women were in the same classes but they were a minority, lived a segregated life and received a Radcliffe degree. This changed the year after I graduated, in 1963, but is indicative of the status of women at the time (the Class of 1962 has welcomed Radcliffe alums to our class reunions). It used to be that co-ed education was considered better for boys, but women benefited from all-girl schools because they had a chance to exercise leadership and excel. Today:

Boys are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with an attention-deficit or learning disorder. They're likely to score worse on reading and writing tests, more likely to be held back, more likely to drop out of school, five times more prone to suicide, and sixteen times more likely to go to prison. In college, young men make up only a third of students in volunteering, studying abroad, using tutoring, or taking advantage of counseling or health services. They get lower grades and fewer honors than female counterparts. Currently women comprise 60 percent of the undergraduate college population, and we could soon reach a "70/30" female/male mix in the not so distant future.

These facts are from a book of essays published as What Works, published by Hampden-Sydney College. We may be at a point where the arguments used for single-sex education apply more to men than women.

3. "Honoring a Legend." John W. Kennedy, who is not an Oxonian but served as assistant to President of the Naval War College, then-Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner (Illinois and Exeter '47).  He writes to honor Professor John B. Hattendorf (Pembroke '73). It is a nice idea to honor people while they are still alive and can hear some nice things said about them! Kennedy describes a conference at All Souls earlier this year at which someone examined the tradition of requiring others to dip their flag at sea out of respect to the British Navy and dated it back as far as 1293. But not till Edward III took the throne – and the inclusion of Scotland in Great Britain and the St. Andrew's cross in the Union Jack took effect independent of who was on the throne in Scotland – did it became an offense not to dip the flag to the Union Jack in the English Channel. The first Anglo-Dutch war in the 17th century was initiated by such an offense. Dipping the flag has now devolved as friendly gestures between armed vessels.

The rest of the issue is composed of:

• A reprint of a speech at the Chicago Boat Club Dinner.
• An illuminating article about Rhodes Scholars in a 1947 issue of Pathfinder.
• Photos and stamps "from the Archives" featuring the image of Cecil Rhodes.
• An 1896 article about the exploitation of the riches of southern Africa by the British, especially the Cape Colony by Cecil Rhodes.
• Book Reviews, Class Letters, Obituaries (of which I wrote two, on George Goodman and Peter Darrow). 

On p. 131 are two postcards showing "college crests". They should be described as "college shields". I refer you to another post on that topic.

A measure of the achievement of an editor is the quality of his or her successor, who is Kathrin Day Lassila, a 1982 matriculant at Trinity College, Oxford (20 years after I was at the college).  She was elected a Rhodes Scholar from Iowa and Yale. From 2003 to 2014 she was editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine, with a circulation of 130,000, and is President of the Ivy League Magazine Network.

To subscribe to The American Oxonian, send an email to amsec@rhodesscholar.org or send a $50 check to AARS, 8229 Boone Boulevard, Suite 240, Vienna, VA 22182.