(Additional Contributors Are Alex Skelton And Donald H. Wa...)
Additional Contributors Are Alex Skelton And Donald H. Wallace.
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(Excerpt from Western Political Heritage The marked trend...)
Excerpt from Western Political Heritage The marked trend toward general education courses that deal with the historical development of political ideas and institutions that have shaped our Western culture seems to bear out this conviction. The emergence of the idea of constitutional government and the refinements in the development of that concept have been generally accepted as one of the most necessary parts of the study of the foundations of Western culture. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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William Yandell III Elliott was born on May 13, 1896, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was a son of William Yandell Elliott Jr. , a lawyer, and Annie Mary Bullock, a librarian.
His father died when his son and namesake was three years old. As a result, William and his brother were reared principally by their mother in Murfreesboro and in Nashville, where she became librarian of the Vanderbilt University Law School.
Elliott attended the Webb School, a private academy in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, that emphasized the classics, and entered Vanderbilt in 1913.
He concentrated on poetry and philosophy; edited the Observer, a literary magazine; served on the student council; and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Also at this time, Elliott joined an informal group of young poets that met regularly to read and discuss their poetry.
Called the Fugitives, the group, which included future literary lions Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, disdained the mythology of the Old South and possessed, according to Elliott, "the peculiar mixture of classic humanism, tragic irony, and a wry but courtly wit. " Though poetry did not become his calling, Elliott continued to write verse, and his friendship with the other Fugitives lasted for the rest of his life.
After receiving his B. A. in 1917, Elliott enlisted in the United States Army and went off to war.
When World War I ended, he was a first lieutenant with the 114th Field Artillery, Thirtieth ("Old Hickory") Division, of the American Expeditionary Force in France. Following the armistice, Elliott remained in France long enough to earn a certificate in French literature at the Sorbonne. Returning to Nashville in 1919, he enrolled in graduate school at Vanderbilt and resumed his association with the Fugitives.
Elliott earned his M. A. in 1920 and was teaching English at his alma mater when he won a Rhodes Scholarship. At Balliol College, Oxford, Elliott studied political philosophy under A. D. Lindsay, a highly respected tutor who had published a translation of Plato's Republic and works on the thought of Henri Bergson and Immanuel Kant. Elliott flourished in the unstructured environment of Oxford, absorbing, as he later wrote, "unhindered, the cream of a rich tradition of scholarship. " He was awarded his D. Phil. degree in 1923.
He also indulged his poetic interest during his stay at Oxford as part of a circle that included Robert Graves, Anthony Eden, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and William Butler Yeats.
Elliott returned to the United States in the fall of 1923 to become an instructor in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
He was promoted to assistant professor in 1924, and a year later he moved to Harvard University as a lecturer and tutor in the department of government.
After serving as an assistant professor from 1925 to 1929, he advanced to associate professor in 1929 and was made full professor in 1931. Elliott became Leroy B. Williams professor of history and political science in 1942. The 1920s and early 1930s were Elliott's most productive years as a scholar.
Elliott turned out a spate of journal articles based on his doctoral work at Oxford and ultimately published an expanded version of his dissertation, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics, in 1928.
In 1936, Elliott joined the academic recruits flocking to Washington, D. C. , as a member of the research staff of the President's Committee on Administrative Management, chaired by Louis Brownlow.
In 1937, Elliott was appointed to the Business Advisory Council, a sounding board for economic policy assembled by Secretary of Commerce Daniel C. Roper and headed by investment banker W. Averell Harriman; he served on it for five years.
Elliott must have found his employment in relatively minor New Deal posts fulfilling. For nearly thirty years thereafter, he set aside scholarship to commute between Harvard and the nation's capital, moonlighting as an all-purpose government expert.
Elliott had entered public service in the 1930s in the belief that the government of the United States had to be enlarged and strengthened as a bulwark against the "isms" infecting Europe. One of the earliest American critics of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, he spoke out frequently on the need for war preparedness and other measures to deter German, Italian, and Japanese aggression.
At one point, he suggested that the United States and Great Britain corner and put an embargo on the world's supply of nonferrous metals and other war materials to prevent aggressor nations from obtaining the means with which to wage war.
After serving on the National Defense Advisory Commission for a year, he went to work for its successor agency, the Office of Production Management (OPM).
As an adviser on raw materials and international trade, Elliott argued strongly in favor of stockpiling tin and rubber in anticipation of Japanese actions cutting the United States off from its Asian sources.
When the OPM was collapsed into yet another entity, the War Production Board (WPB), in 1942, Elliott was made the director of its Stockpiling and Transportation Division. An able performance in that job resulted in his promotion to WPB vice-chairman of civilian requirements in May 1944.
In this capacity, he was to oversee a new policy, propounded by WPB chairman Donald M. Nelson, allowing the unlimited manufacture of more civilian goods by small businesses.
However, Nelson's replacement in August 1944 by Julius A. Krug, who was more amenable to the demands of the War Department and big business to slow the pace of industrial reconversion, limitedElliott's role in overall WPB policy.
Thus, his protests against the "inroads being made on nonmilitary programs" to the detriment of the civilian economy went largely unheeded until his resignation in August 1945.
Later in 1945, Elliott became principal adviser to the House Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning, chaired by Mississippi Democrat William M. Colmer.
From this post, he targeted Soviet Communism as the successor to fascism as the principal enemy of American democracy.
The Herter Committee's detailed report of European conditions, the writing of which was supervised by Elliott, helped pave the way for congressional passage of the Marshall Plan in 1948. The Truman administration availed itself of Elliott's wartime experience by making him assistant director of the Office of Defense Mobilization during the Korean crisis (1951 - 1953).
He subsequently served the Eisenhower administration as a member of the Policy Planning Board of the National Security Council from 1953 to 1957 and advised Vice-President Richard M. Nixon and secretaries of state John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter.
In the Kennedy administration, Secretary of StateDean Rusk retained Elliott as a consultant. Outside of government, Elliott chaired the foreign policy study group of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Committee on American Education and Communism, which advanced a program to teach the youth of the country the "cold, basic, hard facts about international Communism. "
In 1951, as director of the Harvard Summer School, Elliott appointed Kissinger to head a pet project, the Harvard International Seminar, which brought young public officials and journalists from all parts of the world to spend the summer at Harvard, where they could learn that the United States was not the forbidding place portrayed by Communist propaganda.
Through the seminar, which he made his own from 1952 to 1968, and his editorship of Confluence, a European-American foreign policy journal backed by Elliott and the Harvard Summer School, Kissinger was able to make important contacts that helped shape his later career.
Elliott retired from Harvard in 1963. He then spent six years as a university professor of philosophy, politics, and religion at American University in Washington, D. C.
He died there.
"Wild Bill" Elliott became a dominating figure in the department of government almost from his arrival at Harvard. He contributed memoranda on presidential staffing to the Brownlow Committee's study of the federal government, which inspired the Reorganization Act of 1939 and the creation of the Executive Office of the President. Although he was an established scholar with a long resume in government, it was as a teacher, first and foremost, that Elliott made his mark. For thirty years he was in charge of the introductory course "Government 1" at Harvard and also taught political theory, comparative government, and international relations during his long career.
(Excerpt from Western Political Heritage The marked trend...)
(Additional Contributors Are Alex Skelton And Donald H. Wa...)
Elliott's dissertation, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics, was a spirited intellectual defense of rationalism and constitutionalism and a sharp critique of pragmatism, which Elliott believed undermined democracy and paved the way for fascism, syndicalism, and even Communism.
He viewed pragmatism and social behaviorism as mechanistic dogmas little concerned with the vital question of moral personality. Although the controversial book vexed some of the followers of John Dewey and Harold Laski, it propelled Elliott to the front rank of young American political thinkers.
His next two works, The New British Empire (1932) and The Need for Constitutional Reform (1935), were well received in academe. The New British Empire, based on a series of lectures, was a sweeping economic, social, and political analysis of the transformation of a centralized colonial system into an association of cooperating nations.
The Need for Constitutional Reform was a brief for a greater concentration of power in the American presidency and central government. One of Elliott's more provocative proposals advocated changing the states of the union into administrative units called "regional commonwealths. "
After traveling with the committee to Europe for meetings with Joseph Stalin and other leaders, Elliott produced a hard-line report recommending that the Soviets be required to disclose their production figures, withdraw occupation forces from Eastern Europe, and open their society to Western journalists before they were granted American loans.
Long skeptical of Stalin's intentions, he believed that the Soviet government was ignoring the needs of its people in the postwar period and using its vast resources to build up its armaments for the confrontation with the West.
At the same time, Elliott backed American economic assistance to war-ravaged Europe in order to prevent the continent's further deterioration in the face of the Communist threat.
He had an opportunity to advance this view more forcefully during the Republican-dominated Eightieth Congress (1947 - 1949) as staff director of both the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Select Committee on Foreign Aid, headed by Christian A. Herter of Massachusetts.
Mr. Elliott was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a member of the research staff of the President's Committee on Administrative Management
By 1940, Elliott's attacks on Charles A. Lindbergh and other American advocates of appeasement, and his support for President Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to aid the beleaguered Allies had made Elliott an object of derision at heavily noninterventionist Harvard.
Before Pearl Harbor changed the climate of opinion, he was regularly denounced by the student newspaper, the Crimson, and when Roosevelt sent fifty older destroyers to the British in exchange for the use of bases in the Western Hemisphere in the fall of 1940, Harvard protesters taunted Elliott with signs reading: "Send Fifty Over-Aged Professors to Britain. " Beginning in 1940, Elliott became a fixture in the labyrinth of government agencies created to ready the country for war.
A polished, though somewhat undisciplined lecturer, Elliott preferred the tutorial as a pedagogical method. Even during his busiest government stints, he found time to meet with the most gifted of his students to discuss assigned readings and essays in weekly one-on-one sessions, not unlike those he experienced at Oxford.
In appearance, Elliott was tall, robust, with bushy eyebrows, outsized features, and booming voice.
His eclectic background, erudition, and charisma set him apart from most of his colleagues and generally attracted bright and ambitious undergraduates and graduate students.
For his part, Elliott paid homage to another time-honored Oxford ideal by prepping his elite charges for careers in academe and important public service.
Among his prize pupils were United Nations official Ralph Bunche, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and noted political scientists Samuel H. Beer and Louis Hartz.
Of these, Kissinger was Elliott's favorite. The towering, flamboyant southerner and the short, austere, German-Jewish immigrant were an improbable but eminently successful match. Kissinger, who entered Harvard in 1947, regarded Elliott as a "man of great passion, great flashes of insight, " more worldly and interesting than the rest of the faculty.
Elliott, in turn, recognized in the younger man an "unusual and original mind" and soon came to view him as "more like a mature colleague than a student. " He urged Kissinger to read widely and steered him toward political philosophy.
Beyond fostering his intellectual development, Elliott encouraged Kissinger to attend graduate school, found him a job as a teaching assistant, and sent him to present papers at scholarly conferences as his mentor's stand-in.
Quotes from others about the person
"Man of great passion, great flashes of insight, I owe importantly to his inspiration" - Henry Kissinger
"Whatever I have achieved, I owe importantly to Elliott's inspiration. "
On June 28, 1923, Elliott married Barbara Pinkerton Foster; they had three children. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he wed Mary Louise Ward on August 26, 1936; they had two children.
