Quinquennial of 1915
At the next election, nine more personages were made immortal, including Daniel Boone, who had been given fame by English poet Lord Byron as a champion of nature in its battle against civilization. In Don Juan, his long satirical poem, Byron described Boon (as he cleverly called or misspelled him) and those like him:
And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city’s pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain: the green woods were their portions;
No sinking spirits told them they grew grey,
No fashion made them apes of their distortions;
Simple were they, not savage; and their rifles
Though they were true, were not just used for trifles.
The stories of “Boon’s” accomplishments are many and varied and largely true. He was nature’s gift to America. On the border line of illiteracy, he had nevertheless, been a magistrate, colonel of militia, land agent, Virginia legislator, hunter and Indian fighter, husband, tavern keeper, father, sheriff and patriot. He was put up for the Hall of Fame in the company of “Missionaries and Explorers,” and of the 27 nominated in that category was the only one ever to be admitted. By the time of his death the tales of his feats had already embodies in him the spirit of pioneer America. For generations of Americans what Noah Webster was to words Boone was to deeds.
Also admitted, on his second try, was Mark Hopkins. Mark Hopkins, president of Williams College for 36 years; Mark Hopkins, who earned an M.D. degree but practiced medicine for only a few months, who attended no seminary but was ordained into the ministry and preached for years; who in his day was widely respected as thinker and talker, but is not well remembered as reader. According to a letter in the Readers Forum of American Libraries (Nov. 1991), Hopkins once said, “I don’t read books, in fact I never did read books.” The letter writer adds, “Perhaps Hopkins did not require book learning; his teaching was largely restricted to a second semester course described as ‘a mixture of religious orthodoxy and personal opinion.'”
Hopkins’s fame was spread by a Williams alumnus, President James A. Garfield, who put him into the Hall of Fame and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations with loose but memorable sentiment on the true value of a teacher. It quickly became current in one version or another. No text having been left, no one version can be called the correct one. But the following seems to have gained the acceptance of most scholars and is still found in Bartlett:
Give me a long hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus and libraries without him.
Despite the hyperbole, the buildings and reputation of Williams College have both survived among the fittest. At the Hall of Fame, the bust of Hopkins was unveiled in 1922 by President Garfield’s son harry, president of Williams. The bronze tablet beneath it revealed words representative of Hopkins’s lofty thinking but to some viewers more nebulous than the log story and less memorable:
What higher conception of virtue can we have than at every point of a man’s life his conscience should demand and he should render that love which is the fulfilling of the law.