More Winners, More Waiting
The Class of 1905 included the first three women to be elected:
–Mary Lyon, who in 1837 had founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), with an enrollment of 80 students the first year; and a five-fold increase the second. It was a noteworthy achievement, and her salary was $200 — year.
–Maria Mitchell, largely self-taught astronomer, discoverer of a new comet. Without any teaching experience, she became the first professor of astronomy at Vassar college and later was heaped with honors by kings and learned societies, including the Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which she was the first woman member.
–Emma Willard, pioneer in equal educational opportunities for women, introduced to the New York State Legislature her plan for improving education for women, and in 1821 opened the Troy Female Seminary, which later took her name. Writer of textbooks, including one on respiration (“want of good breathing is the cause of cholera”), she also composed a volume of poems, one of which was Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep. Set to music, it made good pocket money for basso profundos at school assemblies.
Noah Webster was 14 votes short, running behind the newly anointed John Quincy Adams, James Russell Lowell, James Madison, William Tecumseh Sherman, and John Green leaf Whittier.
Through the years there were often long waiting periods between one’s election and the mounting of his bust. George Washington, “first in war, first in peace,” first in our hearts, and first to be elected to the Hall, appeared fourth on a pedestal, more than two decades later (1922), behind Horace Mann, Robert Fulton and Ulysses S. Grant.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century. With all their faults his melodious lines were memorized by school children well into this century. He was loved in England, awarded honorary degrees by Oxford and Cambridge, and after his death was the first American to win a place in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey. Grateful Americans elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1900 — and waited 29 years before unveiling a bust of him in the Colonnade.
In 1910 there were ten winners, all deserving worthies including two more women: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances Willard, teacher, college president and temperance leader. Webster did better than he had in either of the preivous elections (38 votes, tied with Louisa May Alcott and just ahead of the extraordinary Margaret Fuller and Helen Hunt Jackson); but still he missed.
Dr. MacCracken, with his son John Henry’s help, remained through the election. He then retired as head of the university but stayed on as Chancellor Emeritus, as well as chairman of the Committee on the Hall of Fame, and in effect its Director.