The Concept
To get more open space on the limited acreage of the new campus, the architect placed the first building as close as possible to the western edge of the Heights. The rear view, as seen from below on Sedgwick Avenue, was uninviting, and Mr.White proposed a skirt like device be wrapped around it, for aesthtic reasons, in the form of a marble colonnade. But how to justify the extra expenditure for what some trustees would call decoration? While architect and chancellor paused for a reply, the idea came for the Hall of Fame.
It may indeed have sprung from the head of Chancellor MacCracken, as did Athena from the brow of Zeus — or, to follow Christian mythology, as did Sin from the head of Satan — an ad hoc idea to turn a problem into a triumph, or at least turn away the wrath of the University Council. Or it may have lain dormant in the mind of the Chancellor ever since he had visited the pantheons and shrines of Europe, all containing monuments of one sort or another to gods and great men, chiefly kings and warriors. Why not the same or better for an America growing ever more mature and powerful, a memorial to the great men who had made us the leader in the arts of both war and peace — an educational object for the future. Better yet, for all time.
The 1981 report of the New York Landmarks Preservation says flatly that “an ambulatory, later redesigned as the Hall of Fame, was placed to the rear of Gould Library to take advantage of the spectacular views to the West.”
Whether it was constructed for aesthetic reasons or redesigned and rationalized for educational reason, the Colonnade was made long enough and wide enough to hold bronze tablets and busts between the pillars and given the title Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Dr. MacCracken tells us about it himself. His book Hall of Fame, called the “Official Book,” is a combination of description, exposition and argument — part promotion and part tourist guide. Authorized by the University Senate in October, 1900, it was apparently put together in some haste and was published in the spring of 1901.
“The Hall of Fame must be visited to be known,” the Chancellor says. We understand why when we discover that the name, and “the object and the reason” of the edifice are carved into stone in sequence of eight clusters of words, on eight pediments running around the outer edge from south to north. To read them, we are told by MacCracken, the sightseer would have to walk about a quarter of a mile around the entire structure. Panel, by panel, it reads as follows:
The Hall of Fame
For Great Americans
By Wealth of Thought
Or Else by Mighty Deed
They Served Mankind
In Noble Character
In World Wide Good
They Live Forevermore
There in just twenty-nine words, if the founding principle, one which has evoked over ninety years of approval and perpetual interpretation. The panels have troubled both admirers and critics. They set forth a list of virtues required for admission, virtues which together are sufficiently ambiguous to allow electors adequate margin for judgment for or against aspirants.
We can think of many great men who have committed mighty deeds but were themselves mightily bad men, of far from noble character in their treatment of the men around them, let alone all mankind.
Or simple men and women of noble character and wealth of thought –or at least wealth — whose needs were far from mighty or world-wide but highly significant for some portion of mankind.
All who qualified under whatever combination, were declared famous and immortal. The troublesome words were on the first panel and the last: fame and evermore.
MacCracken speaks of the origin of fame. According to him, it is fallacious to assume, as one writer did at the founding, that, “it is the great mass of men and women in any nation who give fame.” Not so, suggests the Chancellor. “The birthplace of fame is in the minds of the discerning and wise. In this sense, it is a heavenly voice . . . Fame flows down to the many from the mature judgment of the comparitively few.”
That is somewhat jarring, and in sharp contrast with the definition of poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who advised us in the fourteenth century that fame can come from anywhere until, traveling in ever wider circles it reaches the House of Fame, described in his poem of that title. In the NYU “hous” it will be first created by “approved scholars.” They are the “few who act as interpreters and oracles.” Thus, the “voice of the few becomes the voice of the people.” (See Poems and Preface)
This does not square with the announcement made by one newspaper that first prize in a public contest for guessing the names of the winners of the first election went to a young school girl who had picked 27 of the first 29 voted in by the “discerning and wise” electors.
Through the Chancellor’s eyes, fame was a virtue. He took his first definition from one in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The condition of being much talked about, chiefly in a good sense; or reputation derived from great achievements.” And he asserted that “whether or not decisions of the Hall of Fame judges ought to prove a creator of fame, the fact cannot be denied that their decision is making fame.” Which leads us straight to his own definition in his own words: “Fame is the opinion of the wise in regard to great men accepted and held by the multitudes of people.” Thereafter, fame at the Hall was subject to many a challenge.
In his greatest work, the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), Webster tells us that fame (from Latin, fama, report) means (1) public report or rumor, and (2) favorable report. As time went on and new editions rolled off the press, new meanings or qualifications of meaning were added, and the Third New International Dictionary gives half a column to fame.
Words grow old and die. Their definitions change with time, chiefly by a shifting consensus among both readers and recorders. No law fixes definition. If we all believed in the appeal to authority — as some do — we would by now have formed a High Court of Definition, rather like the French Academy, to tell us right from wrong. If a high court exists, it exists by unspoken consent of the intelligentsia. If a court or academy were institutionalized, some dictionary makers would doubtless go out of business. As they themselves say, lexicographers describe rather than prescribe, they sell by showing new styles. And one way or another, they live off one another, at least in part, by copying one another with variations.
In Webster’s day, lexicographers examined works from a predecessor’s work — as Webster did from, say, the great Samuel Johnson — and on the basis of their own book learning and experience, either dropped a word, let it stand with slight alteration, or updated it to reflect current usage as they perceived it, or simply to suit themselves. Or they lifted whole with disarming simplicity.
Dictionaries today are made by teams of professionals numbering in the hundreds with slips of paper and networks that provide from public print or broadcast new meanings with enough endorsement to be considered for adoption. They go tacking in the winds for new words. Never again will one human being sit down and produce on his own (and with his own pen), a dictionary of 70,000 words. Such a task requires learning, devotion, patience — and most of all, rump.
Few persons in a reading population have read a whole dictionary. In fact, many with substantial vocabularies regularly use words they have never “looked up.” It is possible to go through life comfortably and to read and write acceptable English without ever owning a dictionary. Some of our national leaders at times create the impression that they too have plucked works out of the atmosphere, preferring high sound to precise meaning.
James A.H. Murray, famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, which took about 50 years to complete, called Noah Webster “a born definer.” Webster’s prime comment on definition is that “there is a primary sense of every word from which all others have proceeded, and whenever this can be discovered this sense should stand first in order.”
The first meaning of fame in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is still in use today: “Public estimation of a person or thing.” Since Webster, change in the definition of fame has been a matter primarily of qualifications, without which the word is ambiguous.
As we see and hear it, fame means “public estimation,” favorable or unfavorable, short-lived or long-lived, local or world-wide, or variations thereof.
These days, then, fame is an old, tired word that will not die but can scarcely stand on it own. It is supported and defined by the kind of company it keeps.
At virtually every election following the Chancellor’s definition, someone was sure to ask, “What is fame?” And after every election, more so in the early years: “Is one put there [in the Hall] because he has fame or because he deserves it through his greatness?”
(“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean, no more and no less.”)
Dr. MacCracken, what mischief have you wrought with one little word cut into the south entrance of the Colonnade?
The last pediment on the exterior of the Colonnade bears the inscription, “They Live Forevermore.” MacCracken does not elaborate on this. He assumes it, and adds variety here and there in his book with such expressions as for all time, immortality, and eternity. Some of the immortals in the ambulatory have already been forgotten.