The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [94]
After passing the initial Rhodes examination, Hubble became one of the two finalists in Illinois. He may have won the slot once the judging committee saw the glowing letter of recommendation written by Millikan. Hubble had served as a laboratory assistant in Millikan's elementary physics course at the University of Chicago. To Millikan, Hubble was a “man of magnificent physique, admirable scholarship, and worthy and lovable character…. I have seldom known a man who seemed to be better qualified to meet the conditions imposed by the founder of the Rhodes scholarship than is Mr. Hubble.”
Hubble arrived at Oxford in October 1910, living for the next three years on an annual stipend of fifteen hundred dollars. There he walked the very halls where Edmond Halley once strode and joined a cozy club of privileged young men from England's wealthiest families, who were training for select positions in the military, banking, industry, government, and diplomatic services. With continued pressure from both his father and grandfather, Hubble dutifully studied the law and completed the jurisprudence coursework in two years instead of the usual three. He received second-class honors. But, always in the background, astronomy beckoned. He couldn't let it go, so deep was his passion for the celestial specialty. Sensing it would create a ruckus, he didn't let his parents know that he was cozying up to Oxford's top astronomer, Herbert Turner, visiting his home several times.
A Rhodes official jotted in Hubble's record that he showed “considerable ability. Manly. Did quite well here. I didn't care v[ery] much for his manner—but he was better than his manner. Will get A.” His “manner” had become decidedly British, but in an exaggerated, almost cartoonish way. It was during his Oxford sojourn when Hubble underwent his bewildering metamorphosis, adopting a distinct style that he maintained for the rest of his life. Becoming a full-fledged (some might say rabid) Anglophile, Hubble began to regularly speak with an upper-crust accent, smoke a pipe, brew a proper cup of tea, and wear a black cape with great flourish. Some were not impressed, including Rhodes scholar Warren Ault, who believed that Oxford “had transformed [Hubble], seemingly, into a phony Englishman, as phony as his accent.”
This theatrical transformation clearly signaled that Hubble was desperately in search of an identity, as well as a profession in which he could make a lasting mark. In his third year at Oxford he chose to specialize in Spanish, a respite from his grueling law curriculum. “I sometimes feel that there is within me, to do what the average man would not do,” Hubble had earlier written his mother, “if only I find some principle, for whose sake I could leave everything else and devote my life.” His ambition was unmistakable. When a classmate declared he'd rather be first in the provinces than second in Rome, Hubble snappily replied, “Why not be first in Rome?”
In January 1913, Hubble's father died, after years of fighting nephritis, a disease of the kidney. When first hearing of his father's declining health, Hubble had wanted to return home, but his father ordered him to stay. Though a devastating event to any child, his father's passing was in many ways a liberation for the Rhodes scholar. He was no longer shackled by the career path preordained by his stern father, although a full emancipation took some time. Upon finishing his studies in Great Britain at the end of May, Hubble first returned to Louisville, Kentucky, where his widowed mother and siblings were now settled, to help out his family and figure out what he would do next.
When writing about this point of his life, right after his return from Oxford, Hubble's early biographers uniformly noted that he soon passed the Kentucky bar examination and briefly practiced law in Louisville. That was the story that Hubble told everyone, and it became the standard line for all of his life and several decades afterward. But in