First Election
The MacCracken book describes the first election from nominations to voting and analyzes the results. In keeping with promises made, the University declared the hall open and ready for work. Worthy resumes streamed in from individuals and every kind of organization imaginable: an unofficial national plebiscite. After ranking and screening, a list of 234 names was sent to the electors. No more than fifty were to be elected. Only twenty-nine made it.
When they were announced as incumbents forever, Dr. MacCracken conceded that “the reading public are not far removed from the carefully selected body of electors in their judgment of greatness.” The lists of the populace were compared with those of the electors, and the two were more alike than had been foretold. The stream had been well panned.
Only three of the hundred electors failed vote: Theodore Roosevelt, who had accepted before becoming a candidate for Vice President; Ambassador Andrew White, who wrote from Berlin that he was “hoping to get at the list” (he never did); and Dr. George Post, then head of the medical school of the Syrian Protestant College, whose response was “delayed in the mail.”
Asked why, when 50 places were to be filled, only 29 persons were elected and 21 places still vacant, the Chancellor replied, somewhat cryptically, that “no harm has resulted form this, only great gain.” One increment of gain is that the first 29 panels in the Colonnade are designed by none other than the great Louis C. Tiffany and associates at Tiffany’s, known worldwide. Another must have been the consolation of having to find support for only 29 effigies instead of the expected 50.
The 29 immortals were ranked by number of votes as follows with, to no one’s surprise, our greatest man leading the list, the only unanimous choice in the history of the Hall of Fame. A patchwork of 29 laudatory biographies occupies most of the pages of the “Official Book.”
| NAME | VOTES |
| 1. George Washington | 97 |
| 2. Abraham Lincoln | 96 |
| 3. Daniel Webster | 96 |
| 4. Benjamin Franklin | 94 |
| 5. Ulysses Simpson Grant | 93 |
| 6. Thomas Jefferson | 91 |
| 7. John Marshall | 91 |
| 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson | 87 |
| 9. Robert Fulton | 86 |
| 10.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 85 |
| 11.Washington Irving | 83 |
| 12.Samuel Finley Breese Morse | 82 |
| 13.Jonathan Edwards | 82 |
| 14.David Glasgow Farragut | 79 |
| 15.Henry Clay | 74 |
| 16.George Peabody | 74 |
| 17.Nathaniel Hawthorne | 73 |
| 18.Eli Whitney | 69 |
| 19.Peter Cooper | 69 |
| 20.Robert Edward Lee | 68 |
| 21.Horace Mann | 67 |
| 22.John James Audubon | 67 |
| 23.James Kent | 65 |
| 24.Joseph Story | 64 |
| 25.Henry Ward Beecher | 64 |
| 26.John Adams | 62 |
| 27.William Ellery Channing | 58 |
| 28.Gilbert Charles Stuart | 52 |
| 29.Asa Gray | 51 |
Noah Webster was a runner-up, defined as one receiving 30 votes or more, and ipso facto eligible to run without re-nomination in the next election, presumably in 1905, although more than once a follow-up election for 1902 had been announced.
With some amendments, chiefly increasing the majority required for election and changing the length of the waiting period from death — and some shifts in the screening committee — the rules for election were followed for the next 73 years.