Meet Me in St. Louis

While Harvard's President (1869-1909) Charles W. Eliot won renown in Boston, his first cousin pioneered in St. Louis. The Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, who had toiled in a post office dead-letter department before becoming a Unitarian minister, founded not only St. Louis' first Unitarian church and Washington University but also an influential family; among his grandsons is T. S. Eliot. Last week, fittingly enough, Washington University (fulltime enrollment: 6,000) named a Boston Eliot as its twelfth chancellor. He is Thomas Hopkinson Eliot, grandson of Charles W. and fifth cousin of Poet T. S.

A hearty, pipe-smoking man of 54, Cambridge-born Tom Eliot was never much of a proper Bostonian anyway. A son of Samuel A. Eliot, the famed Unitarian minister, he pronounced himself a Democrat at the age of ten. He alone voted for Woodrow Wilson in a class poll at Browne and Nichols School, and after earning a magna cum laude in government at Harvard in 1928 and a Harvard law degree in 1932, he enlisted in F.D.R.'s New Deal.* As a Labor Department lawyer, Blueblood Democrat Eliot helped arbitrate the San Francisco general strike in 1934. As general counsel of the Social Security Board, he helped defend the Social Security Act before the Supreme Court. At 33, he was elected to Congress--only to lose after one term to Boston's James Michael Curley.

Lawyer Eliot went on to run the Office of War Information's British Division in London, later served on a special commission that pruned the overgrown state agencies of Massachusetts. In 1952, after lecturing on government at Harvard, he became chairman of Washington's political science department. A practical scholar ungraced by a Ph.D., he co-directed a $300,000 study of St. Louis' urban problems, last year became dean of Washington's liberal arts college, and then a vice chancellor.

Chancellor Eliot is in the tradition of two admirable predecessors: the late Physicist Arthur H. Compton (1945-53), and Republican Lawyer Ethan A. H.

Shepley (1954-60), now chairman of the board of directors. Both men gave Washington a name for academic freedom, added luster to its faculty and first-rate medical school. Eliot's job is to bring the main 165-acre campus up to the standards of the medical school, which has harbored nearly all of Washington's six Nobel prizewinners, gets much of the income from the university's $100 million endowment.

Eliot aims to boost faculty research, hold down enrollment to get better students.

A good start has already been made.

Washington's admission standards have risen sharply; its students come increasingly from all over the U.S. And, as a sign that sports will not compete with scholarship, the football team remains emphatically de-emphasized: it has lost its last 16 games.

* His equally unproper brother, City Planner Charles W. II, shocked purists in the 19303 by building a flat-topped house in Ipswich.

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