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A MONUMENT TO ADAM
Some one has revealed to the TRIBUNE that I once suggested
to Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, of Elmira, New York, that we get up
a monument to Adam, and that Mr. Beecher favored the project.
There is more to it than that. The matter started as a joke,
but it came somewhat near to materializing.
It is long ago--thirty years. Mr. Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN has been
in print five or six years, and the storm of indignation raised
by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals. In tracing
the genesis of the human race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had
left Adam out altogether. We had monkeys, and "missing links,"
and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam. Jesting with
Mr. Beecher and other friends in Elmira, I said there seemed to be
a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the monkey,
and that in the course of time Adam's very name would be forgotten
in the earth; therefore this calamity ought to be averted;
a monument would accomplish this, and Elmira ought not to waste
this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favor and herself a credit.
Then the unexpected happened. Two bankers came forward and took
hold of the matter--not for fun, not for sentiment, but because they
saw in the monument certain commercial advantages for the town.
The project had seemed gently humorous before--it was more than
that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it.
The bankers discussed the monument with me. We met several times.
They proposed an indestructible memorial, to cost twenty-five
thousand dollars. The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village
to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without
any such help, would advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth--
and draw custom. It would be the only monument on the planet
to Adam, and in the matter of interest and impressiveness could
never have a rival until somebody should set up a monument to the
Milky Way.
People would come from every corner of the globe and stop off
to look at it, no tour of the world would be complete that left out
Adam's monument. Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim
ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways;
libraries would be written about the monument, every tourist would
kodak it, models of it would be for sale everywhere in the earth,
its form would become as familiar as the figure of Napoleon.
One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars, and I think
the other one subscribed half as much, but I do not remember with
certainty now whether that was the figure or not. We got designs made--
some of them came from Paris.
In the beginning--as a detail of the project when it was yet a joke--
I had framed a humble and beseeching and perfervid petition to
Congress begging the government to built the monument, as a testimony
of the Great Republic's gratitude to the Father of the Human Race
and as a token of her loyalty to him in this dark day of humiliation
when his older children were doubting and deserting him. It seemed
to me that this petition ought to be presented, now--it would be
widely and feelingly abused and ridiculed and cursed, and would
advertise our scheme and make our ground-floor stock go off briskly.
So I sent it to General Joseph R. Hawley, who was then in the House,
and he said he would present it. But he did not do it. I think
he explained that when he came to read it he was afraid of it:
it was too serious, to gushy, too sentimental--the House might take it
for earnest.
We ought to have carried out our monument scheme; we could
have managed it without any great difficulty, and Elmira would
now be the most celebrated town in the universe.
Very recently I began to build a book in which one of the minor
characters touches incidentally upon a project for a monument to Adam,
and now the TRIBUNE has come upon a trace of the forgotten jest of
thirty years ago. Apparently mental telegraphy is still in business.
It is odd; but the freaks of mental telegraphy are usually odd.
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