David McCullough, historian and litter Prize-winning author, was the est speaker at the rededication of the Nott Memorial. Here are excerpts from
his remarks:
What a thrilling setting we're gathered. in. Look at this building-look at this expression of exuberance and confidence and, yes, a little excess. Look and see how Victorian it is, how Venetian it is, and how very American.
It was the work of a young man, a mere apprentice, whose name is certainly not a household word-Edward Tuckerman Potter. Look what he was able to do. There's nothing like it anywhere else-not just anywhere else in New York or anywhere else in the United States, but anywhere in the whole world. It was built when New York was the Empire State, and that was an idea taken literally-the Empire State, the state of the New York Central Railroad, the state with the Brooklyn Bridge, the state of H.H. Richardson's City Hall in Albany, and this Nott Memorial.
There was a rather grouchy figure on this campus for many, many years named Jonathan Pearson, and his diaries are in the archives of the College. They're illuminating and highly entertaining. Mr. Pearson was intermittently a professor, a librarian, the treasurer, and the general business manager of the College. I just want to read very briefly some of his observations back in the year 1858 and later on.
“Saw Dr. Nott this p.m. Among other things he spoke of the contemplated Graduates Hall. From what he said there seems no doubt he still thinks of the absurd old pepperbox plan of Ramee. He says Ed Potter, Blatchford's
son-in-law, inclines to this plan. One thing is quite certain. If the matter is left to that young New York architect's apprentice, instead of $25,000,
$75,000 will be needed, and instead of a decent building for use we will have a huge pantheon for show.”
That was June 5. On June 12, a Saturday, he writes,
“Call from Dr. Nott to come to his study when he preferred the singular request that I should procure the cornerstone for the Graduates Hall to be laid at Commencement by the alumni. What
makes the oddity of the thing more striking is the fact that no plan for a building is yet fixed upon, and that the circular plan is as likely as any to be the favorite and it has no corner.”
The time clock speeds forward and ifs many years later and the Nott Memorial is a fact. “Now what is all this great building for? In fact it's a mere show building, ostensibly for books, for which it is entirely unfitted, but really for pictures, etc., a mere museum. It is all show, all to catch the vulgar eye, to be talked about, published in the papers, and gazed at by the passing stranger.”
And yet it was built, and here it is today, and it's still, of course, all show
but what a show. What a feast for the eye-and the eyes have it.
Think of the eyes that have gazed on this building. Imagine, in theory, in the mid-1870s when it opened, the oldest eyes among the ancient citizens and ancient alumni at the opening ceremony could have been born when Thomas Jefferson was president. Conversely, if you then come forward, the youngest eyes that gazed upon the structure at that time could have lived
to see men traveling in space as reproduced on television.
But I think more even than the eyes, one comes into a building like this thinking about echoes. What voices from the past a building like this evokes. What voices does the building itself speak with. This is a language we're looking at. Just as an eighteenth-century chair speaks of the world of the Founding Fathers and attitudes toward form and simplicity, just as the Brooklyn Bridge is in many ways the most vivid of all the icons of late nineteenth-century America, this building speaks in the language of a bygone culture.
What did they believe in, the people who built this structure? Well, they believed in America, they believed in expansion, they believed in possibilities, they were visionaries. Eliphalet Nott was, in many things, the ultimate visionary. They believed in the perfectibility of society and they believed fervently that the basis of our way of life has to be an informed public. They believed in education. And we must, too.
We look at this building and we learn from it. We leave this building today and we will not be the same for having been here. In a country and in a culture that is becoming increasingly the same, where every airport looks the same, where every bottle of ketchup, every sitcom, and every magazine rack looks the same-how much more important it is to come into a structure where the idea is not to look like anything else.
Civilization does not exist without continuity; it doesn't exist without inspiration. And in this time of such skepticism and attack on everything, isn't it wonderful to be here to celebrate so obvious and so memorable an expression of good, strong, perpetual, and perpetuating American optimism.
I congratulate all of you who had a part in what's happened here. I'm going to leave this campus and tell everybody I know that if they're in the vicinity of Albany and Schenectady-don't miss going over to the Union College campus to see the new, spectacular, thrilling Nott Memorial.