Typical Controversy: Thoreau
NYU announced in February, 1959 that new electors would bring the total to 151 persons voting in the Thirteenth Quinquennial. When the event took place in 1960, three new members were voted in: Thomas Edison, Edward MacDowell, and Henry Thoreau. Edison rolled in with 108 votes, highest number ever, and Noah Webster got just one, his lowest ever.
Demons of controversy were released after the election by a news headline which read: “Spirit of Frugal Thoreau Resists Efforts To Get His Bust Installed.” When they found it would cost over $10,000 to put him on pedestal, members of the Thoreau Society called his election “a complete travesty of what the author of Walden Pond stood for.” One student started a fund to keep Thoreau out of the Hall, “which in my opinion he may find suffocating and no place for an inspector of snow storms.” The student probably forgot that the Colonnade, though covered, is exposed to the weather. It is a perfect place for watching snowstorms: “cold and lonely” as Robert Underwood Johnson had been reminded by another protester decades earlier, a place Thoreau would have loved.
Some members thought the cost of installation excessive, Thoreau having been a frugal man whose house cost him $28.12 1/2. Some objected to the item for refreshments. Theodore Bailey of Cleveland was able, after six frustrating months, to get only $1,000 in all. The rich, it was said, were indifferent to frugality. “I suppose,” said Bailey, chairman of the Thoreau Hall of Fame Committee, “he would relish being the only man elected who has no bust there.” The Times suggested, “Pay the sculptor, Malvina Hoffman. Dispense with the ceremonies. Thoreau would be pleased to be regarded as a Great American, which he is. But he regarded ceremony as barbaric, which it is.”
And so it was with Thoreau. In May 1962, to the singing of the NYU Glee Club and the principal address by Indian Ambassador B.K. Nehru, Henry David Thoreau, tutor to Mahatma Gandhi, took his place courtesy of “Individuals dedicated to the memory of Thoreau.”
The busts of four elected Americans have yet to be placed in the Colonnade.