Hall of Fame for Great Americans

How "great" can they really consider themselves if Oprah's not on the list?

It’s an election year, which means that a lot of the country is thinking seriously about what makes someone— particularly, what makes a potential leader— a great American. Is it kindness? Charisma? Cleverness? Does patriotism alone make someone a great American, and just how far would you go for that patriotism? If only there were some sort of definitive list we could turn to of truly great Americans of our past that we could all stand to be inspired by.

In 1900, notable philanthropist Helen Gould commissioned the Hall of Fame for Great Americans to be added to the campus of what was then the New York University Heights campus. The intention was that the space would open with fifty carved busts of Great Americans, voted on by a group of electors, who would then also select one Great American per year to add to the hall for the next one hundred years. It never went quite according to plan— the original electors were only able to agree on thirty Great Americans— and the development fully ground to a halt in 1976, after New York University sold the campus to City University and it became the grounds of the Bronx Community College.

The entrance to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans

It is a bit of a spooky place to be right now! Something about the whole Overgrown Ruins of it all combined with the eerie stillness and silence combined with the rows of sculpted long-dead men and women whose eyes seem to follow you as you walk through….

Edgar Allen Poe: “A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites by elevation the soul”

Walt Whitman: “In this broad Earth of ours, amid the measureless grossness and the slag enclosed and safe within its central heart, nestles the seed perfection”

Every section of the hall was delineated with a tile announcing a particular grouping of the section— authors, scientists, teachers, artists, statesmen and soldiers, I believe.

It was a healthy collection of people considered Great Americans for all sorts of different reasons. I think I recognized about half of them, and the other half either do not retain the same interest in our culture as they evidently did at the time of their installation or just fell through the cracks of my personal field of knowledge!

Alice Freeman Palmer: “The smallest village the plainest home give ample space for the resources of the college trained woman”

Booker T. Washington: “The highest test of the civilization of a race is its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate”

Edwin Booth: “Hamlet was the epitome of mankind, not an individual. A sort of magic mirror in which all men and women see the reflex of themselves.”

The demographic makeup of the Great Americans is an interesting one, and by that I mean it is approximately 85% white men. There are a handful of white women, maybe around ten, and I counted two total black men. Sometimes when you leave the pick of Great Americans to a committee of professors of the early twentieth century that’ll happen(a number of them refused to vote for any women on principle, meaning that any woman who got a spot had to win the majority by that much more).

Gilbert Charles Stuart: “The portrait of George Washington was undertaken by me it had been indeed the object of the most valuable years of my life to obtain the portrait” (side note: the vast majority of the busts were wearing shirts, so the handful that went for the Pecs Out option were somewhat off-putting)

Stephen Collins Foster, with the sheet music for the first bars of “Old Folks At Home”, a song that was in fact written for a blackface minstrel show in 1851. Lyrics read “Way down upon de Swanee ribber, far far away,”

In the years since they were erected, two of the busts have been removed from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans— those of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. These were removed by the Bronx Community College in 2017, following the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Franlin Delano Roosevelt: “…it is not enough to clothe and feed the body of this nation, and instruct and inform the mind, for there is also the spirit. And of the three the greatest is the spirit… it is our faith in America.” FDR is the only one who is just a head, and it’s really not made clear why that is.

James Kent: “We ought not to separate the science of public law from that of ethics states or bodies politic are to be considered as moral persons having a public will capable and free to do right and wrong” As you can see, some enterprising young vandal has put a googly eye over one of his eyes.

The matter of the demographic makeup of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, and its inclusion of what we in the modern understanding would consider racist and un-American figures, is compounded by the fact that approximately 97.2% of those attending the Bronx Community College are students of color. Certainly an institution such as this has more pressing matters to worry about than the upkeep of a largely defunct sculpture gallery, but in my wildest fantasies of having an infinite amount of money I’d like to pull a 21st Century Helen Gould and donate enough money to commission the college to expand upon the current Hall of Fame in order to celebrate some Great Americans who better reflect the community they’re in.

John Quincy Adams: “I live in the faith and hope of the progressive advancement of Christian liberty and expect to abide by the same in death”

George Washington Carver: “Of course it has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of my people possible and to this end I have been preparing myself for these many years feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden doors of freedom”

Joseph Henry: “I may say I was the first to bring the electro-magnet into the condition necessary to its use in telegraphy and also to point out its applications to the telegraph” After so many stately speeches about god and country under the leaders and soldiers its very fun that a few of the scientists’ quotes are just something along the lines of “I invented a thing and this is the thing that I invented.”

It is also just in my research for writing this substack post on the Hall of Fame for Great Americans that I learned that it might not even technically be considered a museum anymore— in its heyday it had exhibition spaces in the buildings around it, which gave more details and background on its honorees. In the years since, those spaces— the proper Museum part of the thing— have become classrooms and storage spaces, so possibly this is now just a vaguely creepy sculpture garden. Oh, well! I went and took pictures and learned things, and now you, my devoted reader, get to learn those things to.

James Buchanan Eads is shirtless and his plaque reads “I cannot die I have not finished my work” all of which feels kind of threatening!

Alexander Graham Bell: “All great inventions… are the products of many minds. No one man could have made the telephone so practical and so useful.” Readers who followed along when I went to the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum will recall that there is a strong argument to be made that it was in fact Meucci who was the first to invent the telephone, so this is kind of a shady pick for a quote!

A Great American is, in my estimation, someone who tries to make America a better place for all Americans. A Great American is someone who stands up for their community and is unafraid to give a hand up to someone who needs it. A Great American creates a thing of joy and usefulness and puts it into the hands of others so that it might be spread. What does it mean to be a Great American to you?

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Hall of Fame For Great Americans

ADMISSION: $0

GIFT SHOP: No

BATHROOM: No

WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE: Yes

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Sept 16: Heller Museum

Sept 21: Grolier Club

Sept 27: Harbor Defense Museum

Oct 5: Grey Art Museum