Introduction
Sometime during the twentieth century, two once-famous institutions lost their fame. One is now dead, but in any case doesn’t need fame to bolster a great legacy. That institution is called Noah Webster, household word for dictionary. The other is an imposing edifice, showing signs of age and illness, but making a comeback, and worthy of more support than it receives: The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, on University Heights, in Bronx, New York.
If one had to pick, say, a dozen of the most famous men of the American Revolutionary period, one of them might, with little objection, be Noah Webster. He moved in the leadership circle of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the writers of the Constitution. As one of the earliest proponents of an independent America, he associated with, among others, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton.
Webster’s early writing, especially Sketches of American Policy, a plea for the formation of strong central government, had considerable influence at Philadelphia before the writing of the Constitution. The cogency of his argument was acknowledged by James Madison, who received a copy of “Sketches” from Washington, who had himself read it after getting a complimentary copy from Webster. “This is believed to have been the first movement toward a national constitution,” said Appleton’s a respected nineteenth century encyclopedia.
Even before the constitutional convention, Webster was famous throughout the colonies for writing, in his own hand, and publishing and peddling and even seeking copyright — all by himself — for the The American Spelling Book. This little volume, later titled the Elementary Spelling Book, quickly became the number-one speller in the colonies, with a sale that eventually rose, in the face of stiff competition and piracy, to over one hundred million copies before it was finally dropped, except in facsimile editions, long after Webster’s death. In one way or another, virtually everybody of Webster’s time and up to the generation that built the Hall of Fame — everybody who went to school in America — knew about Noah Webster, and many of them had learned to spell from his famous Blue-Backed Seller, as the book was commonly called.
He pioneered many another textbook in the American language for American school children, including a reader, a grammar, and a history. The founders of the Hall of Fame had with few exceptions known his American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. A large book of some 70,000 words, with definitions and derivations, it was written laboriously, with devotion, much of it by hand, over more that two decades — a feat not likely to be repeated by one person. It is admittedly the father of all subsequent dictionaries in the American language, superior to most, inferior to none — and still selling.
Webster was nominated at the very first election of the Hall of Fame in 1900. He failed to make it then, or in any election held thereafter, right to the day in the late 1970’s when elections were suspended and the Hall closed. Seventeen times he waited before a fast-closed door. His reputation at the Hall rests in his getting the highest number of rejections in the history of the elections.
Sixty-three years after Webster’s death from exhaustion, the Hall of Fame sprang full-blown, or so it seemed, out of the head of Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University. Every five years, beginning in 1900, elections were held (quinquennials); and periodically thereafter as a sufficient number of bronze tablets were set and busts were sculptured, small groups of American men and women, declared famous and great by vote, moved into the beautiful Colonnade to “live forever.” Immortality was confirmed by the unveiling of each tablet or sculpture to a loud blast of trumpets and a flow of high-sounding words before an assembly of dignitaries. The Hall of Fame on the whole, in both selection and presentation of the chosen few, became our national shrine; but for all the trumpets, flourishes, tuckets, comings and goings of its heyday, it is now virtually forgotten by those who knew it, and almost unknown to the present generation.
“The Hall of Fame? Which one, Cooperstown? No? Then what are talking about? Oh? Really? No.”