The Press Runneth Over
On the day after the dedication, the press too gave us a taste of the fulsome. Even St Clair McKelway, one of the discerning and wise electors and in his daily work a sober man, wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
At last the aspiration of years is realized . . . As it goes on decade by decade this colonnade of University Heights will become more and more a national landmark. The ceremonies of yesterday by which it was so happily dedicated will stand forth as an historical occasion which supplied a new ambition to every American worker who believes there is more in life than money and power. In the midst of materialism so splendid that the traditions of Babylon and Rome dwindle by comparison, the inauguration of a monument to all those labors of mankind which are nobler and not merely richer is timely.
It is an achievement to rank with the great things in the fields which Senator DePew truly said engrossed so much of the energy of this generation of Americans as leave us almost without commanding leaders in literature and the arts. If his prophecy that the day of the poets and the artists will return comes true, not the least of the stimulus will come from this Hall of Fame.
The thoughts of McKelway and the Senator on money and power were not everywhere objectionable. During the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, one preacher could and did talk about The Ministry of Wealth; and another, Thomas W. Higginson, could lecture on The Natural Aristocracy of Wealth. God and Mammon often ran neck and neck.
The thoughts of Miss Gould on the events of opening day, if they were released to the public, have not been widely circulated. Meanwhile, hard at work accumulating wealth and power, were numbers of materialistic Americans who created a system of private philanthropy the like of which the rest of the world had never seen. Many gave to New York University.