The Electors
Meanwhile, let those immortals rest in the peace they have earned and turn with MacCracken in his book to those who put them there: the Electors of the Hall of Fame, a kind of court invented by the sovereign Chancellor, a circle of authoritarians to vote people into eternity. There were to be one hundred electors, divided into four classes
1. First were university of college presidents, for the reason that they are “required by custom” to be “encyclopedic.” They cannot serve well all the departments of knowledge “without knowing something about each,” and they must be all things to all men “that they may by all means save the university from making serious mistakes.” A heavy requirement indeed to be laid upon a profession by one of its members, whose own career of good intentions reflects an occasional shortfall.
2. Probably best qualified were historians, who more competently than most judges could sort out what candidates for fame had from what they were said to have done. Scientists were included because they were the best historians of achievements in science. Oftimes yes, sometimes no.
3. The Chief Justices of the United States, and those of the States, composed another class: the easiest to identify as electors because “they could not have been placed in that high office without possessing a reputation for ability to investigate important questions and for fairmindedness” in decisions. This is a fair approximation of what, fortunately, has over time proved true, with some shocking exceptions. One question not addressed by MacCracken was why the Chief Justices of Alabama, Idaho and Washington apparently never got the notice of the first election. In those times as in these it was a common trait of the lettered class to return no reply rather than a negative one.
4. All other electors were fitted into a category called Publicists and Editors. Today, publicists are thought of as hired press agents and promoters of good will, or as commercial publishers. When MacCracken wrote, publicists were, according to Webster, experts who wrote on international law and other public affairs. In any event, they seemed to fit into the Chancellor’s catch-all category of “encyclopedic personages.”
Among them were such “publicists” as:
- Borden Browne, philosopher, of Boston University;
- Grover Cleveland, as himself, son of a Presbyterian;
- U.S. Senator and Speaker of the House, George Edwards, also a constitutional lawyer and author of the bill suppressing polygamy in Utah;
- Edward Eggleston, Methodist clergyman and novelist (The Hoosier Schoolmaster);
- John F. Hurst, Methodist bishop and church historian;
- Thomas Higginson, Unitarian clergyman, soldier and writer;
- George P. Fisher, Professor of Divinity at Yale and authority on the Reformation.;
- Moses Tyler of Cornell, Congregational minister and Professor of English;
- George E. Post, Presbyterian clergyman and physician, author of a textbook on surgery and a dictionary of the Bible;
- Publisher Charles Dudley Warner of the Hartford Courant, co-author with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age;
- William Sloane, president of W. & J. Sloane Furniture Co., and of Presbyterian Hospital, New York;
- Woodrow Wilson, before elevation;
- Anson Judd Upson, ordained Presbyterian minister and president of the University of the State of New York;
- Famous newspaper editors St. Clair McKelway and Richard Gilder.
Tucked into another category was Roman Catholic prelate and educator, Thomas J. Shahan, “who exercised considerable influence over American Catholic thought,” and served for the first seven elections (to 1930), during which time he was Rector of Catholic University and founder of the Catholic Encyclopedia, among many other endeavors.
The religious preference reflected in the composition of the first electoral body has,as far as we know, never been described as coincidence.
Like the Chancellor himself, all were men of “port and worship.” Only three were women. The imbalance is another measure of the temper of the times, and of the MacCracken predisposition for college presidents. All three women had been or were presidents of women’s colleges. Alice Freemen Palmer and Caroline Hazard of Wellesley and M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr.
Be that as it may, if a referendum were taken today on the names that the first electors (the MacCracken retinue of friends and Protestant persuasions) chose to declare great, the guess is that there would be a majority approval. The question of who should be on the ballot to finish the century is best left open. Former U.S. Commissioner of Education Harold Howe II once said that “in an open election in today’s multi-cultural society, Madonna would probably become a member.”
One persistent complaint was not that the electors admitted the unqualified, but that they omitted too many qualified persons. Another was that they seemed not to have paid more than lip service to vox populi. If so, the attitude is traceable to Dr. MacCracken himself. In a viable democracy, opinion is supposed to percolate, as it were: it bubbles up and filters down. Apparently the Chancellor saw democratic process as an automatic drip from the top. Nevertheless, looking over the names on the ballots for all elections leads us to conclude that the judgment of the electors and the NYU Senate prevented many an embarrassment from appearing in sculpture “for all time.”