Hall of Fame for Great Americans
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans — the original "Hall of Fame"[1] — is a (secular) "national shrine" on the grounds of the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York.
Completed in 1900, as part of the original New York University campus at the site, the building was donated by Helen Gould[2] and was formally dedicated on May 30, 1901.
The Hall of Fame stands on the heights occupied by the British army in its successful attack upon Fort Washington in the autumn of 1776. Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, originator of The Hall of Fame and Chancellor of New York University once said:
- Lost to the invaders of 1776, this summit is now retaken by the goodly troop of 'Great Americans', General Washington their leader. They enter into possession of these Heights and are destined to hold them, we trust, forever.[citation needed]
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[edit] Design
The memorial structure is an open-air colonnade, 630 feet in length with space for 102 bronze sculptures, designed in the neoclassical style by architect Stanford White.
Carved in stone on pediments of The Hall of Fame are the words "By wealth of thought, or else by mighty deed, They served mankind in noble character. In worldwide good they live forever more."
The base to each sculpture holds a bronze tablet bearing the name of the person commemorated, significant dates, achievements and quotations. Each bronze bust must have been made specifically for The Hall of Fame and must not be duplicated within 50 years of its execution.
[edit] Nomination
To be eligible for nomination, a person must have been a native born or naturalized citizen of the United States, must have been dead for 25 years and must have made a major contribution to the economic, political, or cultural life of the nation.
- MacCracken wanted to make sure that the people enshrined in his Hall of Fame were truly famous, not just memorable. So he established a board of electors, composed of men and women who were themselves possessed of some measure of renown, ostensibly people of great character and sound judgment. Over the years that body would include the most respected writers, historians, and educators of their day, along with scores of congressmen, a dozen Supreme Court justices, and six Presidents; seven former electors have themselves been elected to the Hall of Fame. To ensure that nominees would be evaluated with adequate sobriety and perspective, it was decided that no one could be elected who had not been dead for at least twenty-five years. Everyone thought that was just fine; after all, as the old maxim holds, "Fame is a food that dead men eat".[3]
The Hall of Fame soon became a focal point for US national pride:
- It was a truly democratic institution — anyone could nominate a candidate, admission would be free, and although NYU served as a steward, raising funds and running the elections, the whole thing was technically the property of the American people.
- …and people took it very, very seriously. Newspaper publishers used their editorial pages to lobby for or against nominees, and groups like the American Bar Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy waged extensive, expensive campaigns to get "their" candidates elected. Installation ceremonies were elaborate events. For a while the term "Hall of Famer" carried greater cachet than "Nobel laureate", and a hilltop in the Bronx seemed, to many, the highest spot in the country, if not the world.[4]
[edit] Classification of honorees
The first 50 names were required to include representatives of a majority of 15 classes:
- authors and editors
- business men
- educators
- inventors
- missionaries and explorers
- philanthropists and reformers
- clergymen and theologians;
- scientists
- engineers and architects
- lawyers and judges
- musicians, painters, and sculptors
- physicians and surgeons
- rulers and statesmen
- soldiers and sailors
- distinguished men and women outside of these classes
[edit] First group
The first 29 people to be selected in the 1900's were:
[edit] Later groups
11 people were added in 1905 and 11 more were added in 1910.
The females were: Maria Mitchell, Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances E. Willard.
Males included: John Paul Jones, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Andrew Jackson.
[edit] Today
Along with the library dome at the Bronx Community College, the Hall of Fame was featured in the 2006 film The Good Shepherd as a backdrop for scenes taking place at Yale University.
- Today the Hall of Fame for Great Americans is forgotten. For twenty years [viz., prior to 1997], in fact, it has been too broke to hold new elections, too broke even to commission busts of the people it elected two decades ago, including Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, and Andrew Carnegie. It took nineteen years to raise the $25,000 needed to commission the bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
- In 1973 NYU abruptly abandoned its Bronx campus and the Hall of Fame. Eventually the state bought the whole thing, and it is now in the hands of Bronx Community College. In the late 1970s the state spent $3 million restoring the colonnade's crumbling foundation; a few years ago it spent another $200,000 restoring the ninety-eight bronze busts, many of which had deteriorated badly. But private gifts, which were always the Hall of Fame's primary source of support, stopped coming many years ago.[5]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Whilst it was the first to be designated "Hall of Fame" — the word "fame" was employed with the intention of transmitting the value-laden meaning that is very close to the word "renown" (rather than today's more common meaning of "celebrity" (Rubin, 1997, p.14) — other monuments of a similar nature, such as the Walhalla temple, are much older.
- ^ According to Rubin (1997, p.14), her gift was $US2,000.000
- ^ Rubin (1997), pp.14-15.
- ^ Rubin (1997), p.15.
- ^ Rubin (1997), p.18.
[edit] References
- Rubin, R., "The Mall of Fame", The Atlantic Monthly, Vol.280, No.1, (July 1997), pp.14-18.
