The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-08-21
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Il the Hall of Fame" in which the author deals historically. critically and disap- provingly of the failure or refusal of the prominent men who comprise what we may call the Board of Selection to elect Cooper and Poe to place in the Hall of Fame This Board is composed of college presidents. historians and scientists. publicists and chief justices. in all numbering one hundred men of prominence and standing in public life. | Out of this number of men. widely scattered as to locality, occupation and sentiment. Cooper received thirty votes and Poe thirty-seven.
 matter it is an unsolved and unsolv- able mystery not only as to some of the names selected but of those who | were not. There were men chosen of whom the great body of discerning American people will have a hard time deciding why or on what hypothesis they were considered worthy of the high place given them by the one hun- dred voters. All of them may have been good and worthy men. and all pos sessed some claims to consideration, but that they should have taken sucn a leading place in the contest is not to be understood. It is as much of a | kA fA afh He is a member of the Board. and sup. ported both Cooper and Poe through out, and expresses his wonder that he had been so deceived in the senti- ments of the Board. He thought they would feel as he did about it and be almost unanimous in support of Ghe two men named.
 | Whatever may have been the feeling in former days it is now admitted that Poe was the finest literary genius this country has yet producedi Had his life been extended quarter of a century longer, and his mental powers devel- | oped as might naturally have been, expected. he would have been the won- der of the age as a writer of both prose and verse, but especially the lat ter. MT. stedman calls him '"The Fa- ther of American song." and who shall say that the title was not worthily be- slowed?
 How, then, are we to account for the fact that he received but little more than one-third of the total votes cast? We can only account for 1t on the discreditabiss theory that section alism was at the bottom of his rejec- tion. In his feelings, sentiments and expressions Poe was a Southerner of the old South, and the same feeling of anti-South sectionaNsm that controls in other respects evidently dominated a majority of those who composed the Board. With littleness and prejudice not at all creditable to the members they could not tolerate the idea that one of the south's bright men should Aoconpy a pr0tninAntsplaca among the ffavorsd literary men or the self-ele- vated sentiment of the dominating North. His statue in the Hall might have been distasteful to some Puritan who has been honored above his de- serts.
 But it is just possible that another cause had something to do with Poe's rejection. and that cause lay in the stories--most of them false and mali cious-relating to his personal habits. During his troubled, pathetic life, and after his death, it was common and popular for ignorant. envious or mali cious critics to hold him up to public view as an immoral, irreligious being, given over to dissipation in all its forms. and a man to be summed 1y | good men and women. That most of these charges were untrue and others vilely exaggerated has long been es- tablished, but they served to embitter his life and to cloud his fame after his death. Evidently they also served to control the action of the Board of selection-not at all to the credit of its members.
 But whatever may have been the dominating cause for the rejection of Poe we cannot thus explain the other rejection. James Fenlmore Cooper was one of the finest writers of fiction and romance that has been produced in America. He was largely the pioneer in that line of literary work and some of his novels have not been surpassed by any one who has followed him. He was not a Southern man, so that the sectionaIIsm which defeated Poe could not have influenced the board in his case. nor, so far as we are aware, could they have been controlled in their &C., tion by unfavorabIe criticisms on the life and character of Cooper. And yet. out of the ninety-seven votes sent in he received but thirty. It is even more difficult to account for this re- suit than it is In the case of Poe. more especially when we consider some of the names of men of letters who were thought worthy of high place among