May 9, 1900

Along with the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Wellesley and Bryn Mawr, President Taylor was among the 25 college presidents named by Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of New York University, as one of the four groups of judges to nominate members for the university’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The other categories in the body were: 24 professors of history and science; 23 publicists, editors and authors; and most of the 27 state supreme court chief justices, along with the chief justice of the United States, Rufus Wheeler Peckham.

MacCracken’s project was the first “hall of fame,” and its home, a sweeping open-air colonnade designed by Stanford White, was the centerpiece for New York University’s new undergraduate campus.

Four of Taylor’s choices—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—were among the 11 initial inductees to the New York University hall. His unsuccessful nominees were American historian John Lothrop Motley and abolitionist and Native American rights advocate Wendell Phillips.