Dan Ackman - Hall of Fame

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Fame's Fortune
A forgotten museum of great men depicted in bronze.=

BY DAN ACKMAN
Friday, October 12, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--The Hall of Fame for Great Americans sits on a b= luff in the Bronx overlooking the Harlem River. A sweeping 630-foot open-air colonnade, designed by Stanford White, on what is now the campus of Bro= nx Community College, the hall enshrines 103 great Americans, though the l= ast bronze busts were added in 1973 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was voted in.

The Hall of Fame's story tells much about America, somethi= ng about the changing fortunes of the Bronx and a lot about fame. America boasts at least 100 halls of fame, and the total count could easily be twice that. Most halls confine themselves to proclaiming the famous in a particular activity: the National Mining Hall of Fame & Museum in Leadville, Colo., or the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., for example. Others catalog fame according to geography, as in the South Da= kota Hall of Fame. Some, like the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame and the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in Birmingham, Ala., do both.

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Sports and music halls have a built-in fan base, but the H= all of Fame for Great Americans, filled with presidents, authors and engine= ers, has faded into obscurity. The Bronx hall was conceived in 1900 by Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of New York University, and by White, w= ho had been commissioned to design a library for NYU's Bronx campus. The lavish library, reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome (not to mention Columbia University's Low Memorial Library, built around the same time = by White's partner and rival Charles McKim) needed a retaining wall. But rather than settle for a wall, White decided to build a sweeping arc ar= ound the building and turn it into America's first hall of fame, according to Art Zuckerman, who serves as its curator.

The hall's bylaws provided that elections would be held ev= ery five years, starting in 1900, and that no one would be eligible who had= not been dead for 25 years. The electors--who in 1955 included John Dos Pas= sos, Herbert Hoover and Reinhold Niehbuhr--were themselves luminaries. =

Jay Oliva, a former president of NYU, says the hall was in part "a hype job" by Mr. MacCracken to draw attention to NYU's campus in what was then the countryside. But it was also "an Ameri= can idea," Mr. Oliva says, born from the Gilded Age notion that America was emerging as a great power and that its history should be carefully recorded and celebrated.

Elections to the hall became "a huge deal," Mr. Oliva says, and the Bronx building became famous itself: The New York T= imes dutifully reported its elections and even its nominations, which came f= rom the public. Senators and Supreme Court justices spoke at the unveilings. Soon, the term "hall of fame" entered the lexicon. When Dorot= hy's house lands on the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939),= the Munchkins serenade Dorothy: "From now on you'll be history. . . . You will be a bust . . . in the hall of fame." The Munchkins weren't singing about Cooperstown, where the baseball folks opened their hall in the same year the movie was release= d.

The Bronx hall is a window on early 20th-century ideas of greatness. The class of 1900, for instance, contains some obvious entra= nts like George Washington, Eli Whitney and Ben Franklin. But there are a f= ew less remembered figures like Asa Gray (a botanist) and William Ellery Channing (a Unitarian preacher). The hall contains sections devoted to statesmen, inventors and authors. There is also a section for teachers.= But there are just two actors (Edwin Booth and Charlotte Saunders Cushman) = and three composers (Stephen Foster, John Philip Sousa and Edward A. MacDowell).

Now the hall, despite its history and its glorious architecture, sits unloved and scarcely visited. In part, this is becau= se NYU sold the campus to the city and left the borough. But a larger reas= on is that ideals of fame current in the early 20th century have slipped f= rom favor. The belief in transcendent glory is "a very Roman idea,&quo= t; says Leo Braudy, a professor at the University of Southern California a= nd author of "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History." The people who made it into the hall shaped history, like Roman generals and emperors, and were thought worthy of preservation in bronze. Today, the "great man" theory of history is itself archaic and "fame can be 100,000 Google hits," as Mr. Braudy says.

Modern Americans seem much less willing to proclaim greatn= ess in an all-encompassing sense. It's easier to do so in a specialized fie= ld, Mr. Braudy notes, and many of today's halls of fame are devoted to niche talents such as stock car racing, the rodeo or softball. Apart from the urge to build tourist attractions--which certainly plays a part--the vo= lume of halls of fame today stems from our culture's urge for self-congratulation, the idea that everyone should get a prize for something, Mr. Braudy says.

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Selecting individuals for glory can be at least partly political, and that also makes today's Americans uncomfortable. There is less consensus now than in Mr. MacCracken's time for these sorts of choices. Even back in the day, there was a lot of lobbying for Stonewall Jackson, who made it, and for Jefferson Davis, who did not, Mr. Oliva, = the former NYU president, says.

After 1973, when FDR and George Washington Carver were ele= cted (and when NYU decamped from the Bronx), the hall stopped admitting new members--the money dried up. Mr. Zuckerman, who heads an organization called Friends of the Hall of Fame, is trying to revive interest and be= gin elections anew.

But in our Warholian age, who would make the cut? Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein would be shoo-ins. But would electors h= ave to give a nod to sports, adding Babe Ruth and Joe Louis? Could they not acknowledge pop culture, adding Elvis, Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong?= If Armstrong is in, what about Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison? And if you st= art admitting movie stars, where do you stop: If Dorothy is in, can Judy Garland be denied?

Mr. Ackman last wrote for The Wall Street Journal about Egyptian squash champions.