The Winds of Influence: Well Seeded Clouds
In the early seventies, the pace and vigor of competition for admission into the Hall picked up, and ended up as very tough lobbying. Chancellor MacCracken had, in effect, plainly, if innocently, invited it in 1900 when he offered “abundant space for decoration” and opened the financing of sculptures to the public.
Robert Underwood Johnson had voiced his opposition to “crashing the gates” through “voluminous correspondence or documents . . . by zealous relatives and partisans.” It was imperative, he felt, to discriminate between “temporary vogue and substantial merit of high order.”
On watching Lillian Wald, founder of New York’s Henry Street Settlement, run a bad second to Jane Addams in 1965, philanthropist Aaron Rabinowitz determined that he would work harder, and that come 1970 she was going into the Colonnade. If electors from the West could put Jane Addams in, and if a President of the United States could electioneer for Colonel Thayer, he, Rabinowitz, could at least put on some steam for Wald. He had joined the Henry Street Settlement as a poor boy from the East Side of New York, and had been associated with Wald for more than forty years. He knew the high caliber of her work and of the woman herself. He stepped up the pressure. The committee he formed and chaired wrote letters and leaflets; they talked and pushed hard, very hard. They worked on Major John Lindsay, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Commissioner Robert Moses.
One day in 1966, a letter went from the Hall of Fame offices to the consulting architect of New York University, asking an estimate of the cost to complete the last wing of the Colonnade, which at the going rate of elections would soon be filled. “At this time,” said the writer, Freda Hliddal, by then curator of the Hall, “we have some indication from an interested individual who might be willing to underwrite the completing.” It was no other than Mr. Rabinowitz, who had written “Be good enough to keep in touch with me.”
Mrs. Wald was elected in November of 1970, over George Washington Carver and over Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had until then never lost an election. It was reported that Rabinowitz couldn’t believe it. Nor could NYU President James M. Hester. According to a news story of November 8, that year, Dr. Hester said to Rabinowitz, “I never thought you’d [sic] make it.” When asked how much it cost, Mr. Rabinowitz would say only “considerably.” The Hall of Fame got Lillian Wald, but no Lillian Wald Wing at the south end of the ambulatory.