A Press Club exposé: Princeton has so much artwork of random old white dudes they forgot who this bust is
On Tuesday night I was studying in the A floor of Firestone, alternating between doing my history reading and scrolling through my Twitter feed in horror about the ascendancy of Donald Trump as the heir-apparent of the Republican Party. On my way back from a trip to the water fountain, I noticed a bust of what seemed to be an old, assumedly white man out of the corner of my eye.
Intrigued, I walked closer to the bust.I had no idea who it was.I looked around the bust for clues. There were none. No plaque, no label on the wall that would possibly say something like, “this is a bust of Rutherford “Trick” Williamson, class of 1943, in honor of his 53rd reunion.” Nothing.This bodiless man, preserved in perpetuity on the A floor of Firestone, is a total mystery.
Generally, a nameless bust like this would be amusing to a small, particular audience (i.e. me). But, lately the issue of public artwork at Princeton has become a more widely discussed subject, specifically after the Black Justice League’s Nassau Hall sit-in this past November. Students brought up Princeton’s decision to decorate the walls of the university’s buildings, as well as its public spaces, with statues and paintings of white men. In December, Urvija Banerji '15 wrote a guest op-ed in the Prince entitled, "A call for more diversity on Firestone's walls."This trend of homogenous artwork is most noticeable in the third floor reading room of Firestone in which, after its recent renovation, was suddenly and inexplicably filled with random portraits of dead white men. While some of these portraits are of recognizable dead white men of historical import, others are of totally nameless, seemingly unimportant dead white men.
Yet, while I have felt the urge before to write about the strangeness of these portraits, it was not until I came across Mr. Bust that I realized that I needed to finally take things into my own hands.The first thing I thought to do was to review the library materials available on every floor of Firestone in search of some clues. I grabbed a pamphlet entitled, “Guide to the Library 2015-2016” and a map of the A floor. The map proved to have no guide for the artwork on the A floor and the guide pamphlet proved to be entirely useless altogether. I was feeling discouraged and my history reading wasn’t done, so I called it a night, planning to return to my hunt for truth the following day. WednesdayOn Wednesday afternoon, I returned to the scene of the crime. I walked up to Mr. Bust and began to poke around. Looking like a total idiot, I started to squat behind the bust in an attempt to see if there were any clues hidden out of view.I noticed that there seem to be words on the back of the man’s head but I couldn’t make them out because the bust is inches from the wall and it was very dark. I decided to turn on my flash on my camera and take a picture.I was in business.The photo comes up with a name: “Walker Hancock.”
Not Rutherford “Trick” Williamson but eerily similar, including the connection to an important figure in American history.I do a quick Google search of Walker Hancock and the results are promising. He somewhat resembled Mr. Bust.It turns out that Walker Hancock was actually a famous American sculptor, best known for his role as one of the “monument men” in World War II, which earned him the distinct posthumous honor of having John Goodman play a character loosely based on Hancock in the eponymous 2014 film.The bad news was that Hancock’s noted career as a sculptor made it far more likely that he was the man who created Mr. Bust as opposed to Mr. Bust himself. As my friend pointed out, they were similar in as much as they were both old white men.At this point, disheartened, I remembered that I could use the ever helpful “ask a librarian!” feature on the library website, which allows you to talk, in real-time, with a real librarian without the hassle of face-to-face communication. I logged in and I explained to the anonymous librarian that I was trying to identify this bust and I sent a picture of the bust, which somehow was successfully sent through late-nineties-early-chatroom interface of “ask a librarian!”The following conversation ensued:
Strange. Almost as soon as I began to inquire into the name of this bust the librarian cryptically wrote “I have to log off.”Unfortunately, the mysterious librarian said he/she would get back to me by email but proceeded to write down my incorrect email.An hour later, I logged back into “ask a librarian!” and went through a similar discussion with a different on-call librarian.Almost immediately after I explained my predicament, the librarian responded, “I’m afraid I am going to have to get back to you on this. gsfisher@princeton.edu?”Luckily, only fifteen minutes later, I received the following email from the librarian:
“We are trying to identify this bust.”Translation: “we have no fucking clue who this guy is.”Another day, another unsuccessful search for answers.ThursdayI wake up with an important email in my inbox. The librarian had an answer.Booth Tarkington.Here's the email I received:
You may be wondering, who is Booth Tarkington? I had the same question.A quick glance at his Wikipedia page gave me some very important answers.No, his name isn't Rutherford “Trick” Williamson, but Booth Tarkington was an illustrious member of Princeton's class of 1893. (Side note: this name is too good to be true. I mean, even my made up name wasn't as ridiculous as his actual name. This is why I can't write fiction.)At Princeton, Tarkington was an early member of the Triangle Club as well as a member of the illustrious Ivy Club where, his Wikipedia page maintains, he began his lifelong friendship with the one and only Woodrow Wilson, then a young graduate member of Ivy.It turns out, Tarkington would go on to become one of the most prominent American novelists of the early half of the 20th century, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, before his death in 1946.The question then becomes how could this two-time Pulitzer prize winning novelist end up as a bafflingly unidentifiable bust on the A floor of Firestone?How did neither I, nor anyone else I consulted--including numerous friends, multiple librarians, and two tenured professors--have any idea who this man was.It turns out I wasn't the first person to ask. An Atlantic magazine story from 2004 fittingly titled "Hoosiers: The lost world of Booth Tarkington," explores just this question.The author writes:
Entirely absent from most current histories of American writing, Tarkington was generally scorned by those published just before or after his death. Vernon L. Parrington summed him up as "a purveyor of comfortable literature to middle-class America.”
This is before he lays on the real insults, calling Tarkington's writing so "uneven" that "the quality is so sharply up and down as to seem the result of a blood-sugar problem, or some seasonal affective disorder," before finally asking our central question:
"How does such a ubiquitous and, for a time, honored figure disappear so quickly and completely?"
Ouch.Well, here's to Booth Tarkington.No matter what we think (or don't think) about his legacy as an American novelist, at least we can admire his disembodied head for the rest of time on the A floor of Firestone.And, maybe, one of these days, there will actually be a plaque honoring this forgotten man.
Next in this investigative series on Princeton's inexplicable public artwork, what the hell is a painting depicting Aaron Burr freaking killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel doing in Frist?!
Seriously. Who thought this was a nice thing to hang up on the wall in our campus center???