Frank Ridgeway Aydelotte KBE (Rhodes 1905)
Administrator. Educator. Indiana University. Sigma Nu. Phi Beta Kappa. Harvard University. Rhodes Scholar, University of Oxford. Council on Foreign Relations.
American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust.[3]
He served on the boards of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, establishing fellowships that would enable British scholars to reverse the Rhodes trajectory and study in the United States.[3]
1 Jan 1946 - Published, The American Rhodes Scholarships. A review of the first forty years that reviews the seven wills of Cecil Rhodes the creation of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups from the first and the Rhodes Scholarships from the last.
In late 1945 to provide funding for what would become an Institute signature project, John von Neumann’s proposal to build the world’s first stored-program computer, an expensive undertaking that required staff and a new building. The Institute appropriated $100,000, and Aydelotte obtained comparably large grants toward it from the Radio Corporation of America. Research … David Sarnoff (Freemason) and the U.S. Navy.[3]
After WW2, in recognition of his long-time work for refugee scholars, at U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s request, Aydelotte spent the first four months of 1946 serving on an Anglo-American Joint Commission on Palestine, which tried unavailingly to devise and recommend an acceptable solution for the contested British mandate of Palestine, while providing for the future of displaced Jewish refugees in Europe.[3]
Sep 1940, IAS - Understanding international affairs and planning for the postwar world rapidly became top Institute priorities. In an arrangement funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and brokered by Aydelotte after the German blitzkrieg of Western Europe earlier that year, most of the staff and files of the Economic and Financial Secretariat of the League of Nations arrived in Princeton. Aydelotte negotiated this move and obtained State Department and White House approval for it …[3]
… Led by the Scotsman Alexander Loveday, whom Aydelotte bore off for a round of golf immediately after he arrived, a cosmopolitan group of assorted League financial experts were based in the newly completed Fuld Hall for the next five years, paying a token daily rent of one dollar as they drafted plans that contributed to the creation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary arrangements, and the 1947 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, as well as the United Nations that replaced the League of Nations in 1945…[3]
… Their work supplemented other projects in which Aydelotte was a central figure, especially several summer conferences at the Institute on proposals for the postwar world order that led to the establishment in 1943 of the Harvard-based Universities Committee on Post-War International Problems and a comparable group at Yale University. Meanwhile, the Institute’s Edward Mead Earle worked with the Office of Strategic Services research office, drafted German surrender proposals, and proved a key figure in the development of the discipline of international relations within the United States, promulgating thinking that underpinned the long-term expansion of U.S. overseas commitments at the end of World War II.[3]
Upon Retiring 1940, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS’s 2nd Director). Notable faculty included Albert Einstein (theoretical physicist), Kurt Gödel (logician, mathematician), John von Neumann (mathematician. Manhattan project) and James Waddell Alexander II (Mathematician and Topologist). The Institute’s founding Director, Abraham Flexner, then heading a Louisville preparatory school, began what would be a lasting association with Aydelotte when he tutored the underqualified young man in Latin and Greek, helping to ensure Aydelotte’s success in joining Oxford’s second intake of American Rhodes Scholars.[3]
1940 to 1941 - Involvement in the World War II pro-Allied organisations Fight for Freedom and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies [presumably related to Lend-Lease .. Search mind map]
At the beginning of August 1939, Einstein and several other top scientists had written to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging that the United States should launch a massive program to develop nuclear weapons. Their pleas were a major factor driving the wartime Manhattan Project that invented the first atomic bombs. As staunch an interventionist as he had been in the previous war, Aydelotte was an influential figure in both major pro-Allied nongovernmental organizations, Fight for Freedom and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.[3]
1930s - More darkly, in the following decade, as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis tightened control in Germany, Aydelotte served on the Rockefeller-funded Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, which helped over five hundred intellectuals in political jeopardy to leave Europe. Even when permanent positions were unavailable, a significant number took up temporary appointments at Swarthmore and other universities, giving themselves breathing space to negotiate more stable affiliations.[3]
1927 to 1956 - Trustee of World Peace Foundation.[6]
1922 to 1953 - Trustee of Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching.[4]
1921 to 1940 - 7th President of Swarthmore College
Preceded by Joseph Swain (6th and 9th President). Succeeded by John W. Nason.
1920’s - Educational Adviser to the Guggenheim Foundation, he was central in establishing the Guggenheim Fellowships, which support Americans studying the arts and humanities.[3]
As the war ended to 1952, American Secretary to the Rhodes Trust.[3]
WW1 - A poorly set broken arm led the U.S. Army to reject him for active service; instead the War Department employed him to devise an interdisciplinary and relatively evenhanded War Issues course, which became the foundation of Columbia University’s postwar Contemporary Civilization course.[3]
1915 to 1921 - Professor of English at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Louisville Male High School, Lousiville, Kentucky.
Teaching, Vincenes University.
English Professor, Teaching College, California University of Pennsylvania.
From 1905 - Rhodes Scholar, Brasenose College, University of Oxford.[1]
Indiana University. Sigma Nu. Phi Beta Kappa.
Died 17 Dec 1956, failing health. Aged 76.
Son … William O. Aydelotte, an American Historian that focused on the British Parliament.
[2] - FYI - Wiki - Frank Ridgeway Aydelotte KBE (Rhodes 1905)
[4] - Biographical Dictionary of American Educators edited by John F. Ohles
[6] - World Peace Foundation Biennial Report
[7] - The American Rhodes Scholarships: a Review of the First Forty Years by Frank Aydelotte
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