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Yale's
Tallest Tales
Institutions
laden with traditions often develop some that are pure hooey. Yale
has lots.
March
1998
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Each Member brought a Number of Books and
presented them to the Body; and laying them on the Table, said these
Words, or to this effect: "I give these Books for the founding of a College in this Colony."
It is
Yale's version of the book of Genesis, the founding story that has
moved generations of alumni to match the generosity of the ten ministers
who met in Samuel Russel's parsonage
in Branford to part with their most prized possessions, the legendary
"40 folios."
The
only trouble is that it probably never happened, at least not the
way 18th-century Yale President Thomas
Clap described it above. The late Yale historian George Wilson
Pierson '26 devoted an entire
book to Clap's story, concluding that, while it had elements
of truth (some of the ministers did give books before and after
the founding), Clap had engineered the tale to score a legal point.
Embroiled in a dispute with the Connecticut General Assembly over
control of the College in 1766, Clap sought to show that the College
had been founded privately before it received its charter from the
colony. The ploy worked, and the story endured for more than 200
years. It is depicted in wood and stone in the Branford Chapel and
Sterling
Memorial Library, and is even the origin of the name of Branford
College. It is, in short, the mother of Yale's tall tales.
While
we know the source of the "40 folios" story, there are
a number of other Yale tales whose veracity is no less dubious,
but whose origins are a bit cloudier. Many of these stories find
their way into the daily campus
tours led by undergraduates. (The more responsible guides are
careful to label them as legends.) But while Clap sought to aggrandize
Yale, these contemporary yarns aims to humanize the place. Like
Greek myths, which showed their gods to be as fallible as mere humans,
Yale's tall tales are filled with half-mad donors, avaricious administrators,
and remarkably incompetent builders. What follows are a few of the
stories that have made the circuit in recent years—and, where
possible, the truth behind them.
The
College With Two Faces
When the University expanded across York Street to build two
new residential colleges in 1930, architect James
Gamble Rogers decided that red-brick Georgian architecture would
be more appropriate to the scale of the neighborhood than the previously
favored Gothic. (The Georgian style also happened to be cheaper
to build.) But since one of the two, Davenport College, would face
York Street, where Rogers had already orchestrated
a Gothic streetscape for Branford
and Saybrook, he dressed that facade in sandstone and gave it
Gothic details.
A straightforward
enough story—too straightforward to make a really good saga,
so Yale mythmakers have created family dramas worthy of Aeschylus
to explain the dichotomy. One tale has it that Mrs.
Stephen Harkness funded Harkness
Tower with the provision that everything built within view of
its top must be of the Gothic style, resulting in the York Street
coverup. (One problem: The interior of Davenport is plainly visible
from Harkness.) An explanation with Oedipal overtones posits that
James Gamble Rogers died during construction, and that his son,
taking over the job, promptly overthrew his father's beloved Gothic.
(But Rogers lived until 1947, well after the college was completed.)
A version that combines both stories has a Gothic-hating Edward
Harkness bucking his mother's wishes after her death.
Knaves
of the Cathedral
Why
does Yale have a Gothic gymnasium?
You could easily say "Why not?" but that would leave the
University a fable poorer. One myth holds that Mrs. Payne Whitney
wanted Yale to build a great cathedral with her money, but that
the University preferred a gym. Since she was getting old, the story
goes, administrators thought they could get away with a bit of subterfuge.
They instructed architect John
Russell Pope to design a gym that could pass for a cathedral.
Then, when it was completed, the President drove Mrs. Whitney past
the finished building. She died not long after, content in the knowledge
that she had given Yale such a grand house of worship—and not
what came to be known as "the cathedral of sweat."
The
Incredible Disappearing Library
It was originally
to have been made of green onyx to celebrate the fortune the donor
made in S&H
Green Stamps. Its sophisticated fire-prevention system automatically
sucks all the oxygen out of the book stacks in case of fire, sacrificing
any library personnel unlucky enough to be inside. And best of all,
the whole building can be lowered deep into the ground to protect
it from a nuclear holocaust. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is customarily the last stop on
the official Yale tour, so the guides have clearly worked hard to
come up with a kicker for departing guests. For the record, the
Beineckes did own S&H Green Stamps, but the marble was never
intended to be green. The original fire-prevention system—which
has since been replaced—was designed to flood the stacks with
carbon dioxide, but it was to be activated only after the area was
evacuated. Curator Christa Sammons (who claims to have originated
the green marble story) says that sinking the building into the
ground wouldn't work so well: The high water table below the building
would leave the books unscorched, but soaked.
The
Man Who Loved Vanderbilt
Legends
tend to rise—and evolve—-concerning stops along the prescribed
route that tour guides follow. Fifteen years ago, tourists were
often told that Vanderbilt Hall's courtyard faced the "wrong" way (toward Chapel
Street) because the builders had poured the foundations while
reading the plans upside down. The opulent "Vanderbilt suite"
above the archway—-reserved for members of the Vanderbilt family
when attending Yale—was mentioned in passing. These days, the
upside-down plans story has been discarded (it was apparently too
much even for tourists) in favor of the purely fictional tale of
how, after many years, a Vanderbilt scion claimed his right to live
in the suite—in the same year the building was designated as
housing for Yale's first
female undergraduates. The story has it that the young man threatened
to sue before Yale agreed to let him live there, and that the happy
result was that he met his future wife in Vanderbilt Hall.
Foot
Fetish
One of the most striking testaments to the mythmaking powers of
tour guides is Theodore Dwight Woolsey's toe. Some time in the last
ten years, someone invented a "tradition" of rubbing the
toe of the Woolsey statue on the Old Campus for luck, explaining that students employ this
practice before exams. Similar
traditions exist at many other institutions, but it's difficult
to find an alumnus over the age of 30 who has ever heard about President
Woolsey's toe. Nevertheless, tour guides spread the story diligently,
inviting visitors to give it a try themselves. As a result, the
statue, the rest of which is a dull gray-green, has a left toe that
has been rubbed shiny, and the story seems for all practical purposes
as old as the statue itself.
Watch
Your Step
Like the
Woolsey statue, the millstone embedded in the sidewalk in the Branford College courtyard near
Harkness
Tower has fairly recently become the subject of a superstition.
It is said that if an undergraduate steps on the millstone, he or
she will never graduate. (A similar legend exists about walking
through the nearby Memorial
Gate.) The reasons for this curse are sketchy, although one
version has it that a construction worker fell from Harkness Tower
to his death on that spot. More creative was the tour guide who
told a true story about how, in 1718, the people of Saybrook had
sabotaged the ox-carts that were to transfer the Yale library to
New Haven. "And that," the guide added, pointing dramatically
at what is unmistakably a millstone, "is a wheel from one of
those ox-carts."
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