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its top side that would add a positive visual quality (MacCracken, 1900, pp. 4 7).
Structural and architectural necessities thereby created another opportunity
for Henry MacCracken. Opportunities are the mother’s milk of Bureaucratic
climbers especially if they can be complementary with their other zealous
inclinations.
Once Stanford White had determined that there would be a terrace plaza
area behind the library, Chancellor Henry MacCracken put his mind into high
gear. Opportunities might be opportunities, but they still had to be justified
considering the high costs necessitated by the construction. MacCracken had to
“find” an educational use for the plaza.
Without any outside driving pushes or pulls, MacCracken unveiled his idea.
America needed a pantheon to honor its greatest citizens. That pantheon would
be a hall of fame on the new Bronx campus of NYU. MacCracken returned to
Jay Gould’s daughter and he received a donation of $250,000 to complete the
structural work atop the retaining wall to allow creation of our Pantheon. The
structural changes on the plaza area behind the Library included a 630 foot-long
curved walkway, 10 feet wide and enclosed by a set of columns (a colonnade),
between which would be placed busts of the greats on pedestals. This walk
between the famous was to be combined with a basement museum area that
together would constitute the Hall of Fame of Great Americans. Today there are
98 busts in place at the location (MacCracken, 1900, p. 72; MacCracken, 1901,
pp. 563-564).
MacCracken’s inspiration for the Hall of Fame came from several places:
Westminster Abbey in London, the Ruhmeshalle near Munich, Walhalla Temple
in Regensbur g, Germany, and Pantheons of Paris and Rome. He also considered
Statutory Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Yet he wanted something
unique. While moved to duplicate the shrines of Rome, Munich, Paris, London,
and Washington, D.C., MacCracken found flaws in the organization of each. He
wished the Hall of Fame for Great Americans to be distinctive in several ways.
His overall theme was that the Hall should be a democratic structure with open,
at least to some degree, elections for membership, and with membership
extended over many categories of the citizenry.
In an essay that MacCracken penned in 1900, he outlined five features that
would make the Hall uniquely American. First, the membership would be
selected through democratic elections, albeit ones with final selections made by
selective elites. Placement in the Hall would not be by royal decree or by chief
executives or legislative bodies. Rather choices for membership would be by a
body of national electors chosen for this one function alone. Second, the Hall
would not be reserved for political leaders, but rather for those displaying
greatness in a wide variety of fields. The constitution of the Hall which was set
into place by the senate of New York University, indicated that members would
be drawn from 15 categories of citizens including statesmen, authors, educators.