by Andrea Mays
Any governmental project involving the two squares to the rear of the Library [of Congress] would assuredly be subordinated to yours (for the utilization of the northern strip which you control). With your intention made definite, the governmental undertaking (as respects the remainder of the area) would then become complementary and auxiliary to yours. Indeed, were your structure in existence, the government should acquire the remainder of the area (to Pennsylvania Avenue) in order to assure it a dignified background.
Putnam promised to keep Folger’s plans secret, but suggested that it was in their interest to take into confidence the influential congressman Representative Robert Luce of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Committee on the Library, who held sway over the legislation that would enable Congress to confiscate the Grant’s Row property for use by the Library of Congress.
Folger read the draft legislation, dated January 16, 1928, which was to become H.R. 9355, introduced in the first session of the Seventieth Congress. Section two contained the provision that targeted Folger’s property. Something would have to be done, and quickly.
Folger replied to Putnam: “Your telegram and letter were duly received, relieving my great concern about our plans.” Indeed, Putnam’s response reassured Folger. The Librarian of Congress had embraced the idea of a Shakespeare library within the shadow of his own Jefferson Building, and had agreed to subordinate his plans to Folger’s. Not only that, but Putnam offered to act as Henry’s unpaid advocate to influence Luce. Luce had the power to delay action on the bill, and then revise its language to exempt Folger’s property from its reach. That was perfect, replied Folger, for “my hope has been to locate [my library] where it would be undisturbed for many years.” Henry demurred on agreeing to an immediate appointment to see Putnam, explaining that he was “not quite ready to present in detail what we are trying to work out.” He promised to drop in on the librarian soon, the next time he was in Washington. He also reassured Putnam that he would not compete with the Library of Congress. He would keep his library within narrow limits, not “to go outside Shakepeariana and Elizabethan literature.”
Putnam repeated his request for a meeting. To avoid any interference with the Shakespeare library, Putnam wrote, “The pending bill should be modified” as soon as possible. Before that can happen, he informed Folger, “The Committee will naturally expect to have before it some expression of your interest which will explain the modification.” Henry authorized Putnam to show his original letter describing his plans to the House Committee. “After working on the Grant Row properties for eight or nine years,” he added, “I was only recently [able] to secure the last house. I was on the point of giving up the effort, as the delay was so disheartening. . . . My concern now is, will the location be left undisturbed in this use of it?”
Folger’s delay in coming down to Washington worried Putnam. Yes, “the site is perfect to the purpose as none other could be,” the librarian purred, but no action would be taken on Henry’s behalf until he made his case in person. “Come here and make known to the committee in general terms what you have in mind,” Putnam urged, “but come within the month!”
Before Henry Folger could travel to Washington, he had other important business to take care of in New York City. On February 9, 1928, he announced his resignation as chairman of Standard Oil of New York, effective in one year. Folger presented his letter to the president of Standard Oil of New York (and half brother to Charles M. Pratt), Herbert Pratt, and to the company’s board of directors: “I have been so happy in my position, and my fellow-workers in Socony [Standard Oil Company of New York] have made the work so easy, that the years have slipped by almost unnoticed. I owe them all a deep debt of gratitude and love.” Henry Folger had devoted half a century to the oil industry, and when he left, it was “amid the universal regret of his associates.”5
Business had been his first love. And it was the success of Standard Oil that had made his great collection possible. But now it was time, Henry concluded, to devote himself to another dream, building his Shakespeare library. The board tendered an affectionate reply, their words printed large and illuminated on vellum pages bound into a beautiful book presented to Folger. They knew he would appreciate this homage to his bibliomania.
The illuminated manuscript lavished praise upon Henry’s “thorough knowledge of every phase of the oil business, his long experience and unerring good business judgment.” The board recognized him as a titanic figure in the history of American industry: “[H]is business life has been contemporaneous with the great development of the oil industry; he has been actively and prominently identified with it practically since its inception.” And now, as Folger’s career came to a close, the board honored him with the words: “He is the last of the great pioneers of the industry to retire.”
Along with the book, on February 29, 1928, the board presented to him a beautiful Tiffany & Company eighteen-karat, three-legged golden bowl, engraved with a phrase from Henry VIII, “Thy truth and thy integrity is rooted in us, thy friends,” spoken by King Henry to Archbishop Cranmer. Two legs of the bowl are engraved with stylized logos symbolizing the two enterprises in which Folger had served and the dates of his service: SONY (1911–1928) (Standard Oil of New York) and SONJ (1879–1911) (Standard Oil of New Jersey); the third leg was engraved with his initials, HCF. The gift harked back to the seventeenth century, when upon Shakespeare’s death he left to his daughter Judith a great silver bowl. But Shakespeare’s bowl was only silver; Folger’s was crafted of gold.
It was a bittersweet time. Letters from younger Standard employees reacting to Henry’s retirement poured into his thirteenth-floor office at Twenty-Six Broadway. Representative of them is a touching letter from F. S. Sales:
I confess I am thinking tonight more of my own personal loss than anything else. . . . My feeling of gratitude to you for your sympathetic and kindly help is far greater than I can express. I shall miss greatly the privilege of conferring with you, which I have done so often when the waters seemed troubled. We ought to be able to keep the old ship on an even keel with our years of training under your guiding hand but I wish you might be on the bridge forever, charting our course for us. You are practically the last of the original builders of our great company. Much of its success in all of its ramifications is due to your foresight and planning. . . . After nearly fifty years of faithful service, you certainly have earned a rest but I hope our paths may cross frequently and that you will continue to consider old “26” as your headquarters.
John D. Rockefeller had already sent a sentimental letter to Folger on January 2, 1926: “These long and delightful business relations mean to us inexpressibly more than the gold and silver that came from their great prosperity.”6 Rockefeller later wrote:
I of course regret to have you retire from the responsible position you have held in connection with our business interests for such a long time. I wish it might have been delayed a little to give the younger men the benefit of your long experience and steadying and quieting influence, and even now I am hoping you will continue to have the same sympathetic interest in the business as ever . . . [W]e shall not be separated far. We shall see to it that the pleasant paths in which we have walked together with such genuine enjoyment shall continue to the end.7
On February 16, 1928, one week after Henry Folger announced his retirement, he wrote again to Herbert Putnam, explaining that he preferred to have the legislation modified quietly, without publicity or newspaper coverage. As before, secrecy served his interests best. Did he really have to come to Washington to appear before the House Committee? Couldn’t Putnam get the job done quietly, with Folger’s letter alone? He appealed to Putnam:
I have persistently avoided all publicity, feeling that book buying could be done more cheaply and successfully if there were no advertising. And that is still true, so I shrink from making public any of our plans until it is absolutely necessary. Just at the moment I am negotiating for some twenty Shakespeare books of th
e very first rank, each unique, or practically so, to secure any one of them would be an event, and to obtain a score at one time is a stroke of almost incredible good-fortune. But I need not tell an experienced collector like yourself that in such matters the Friar’s counsel to Romeo is very opportune, “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”
On February 18, Putnam gave in. Henry’s letter would suffice. But he warned Folger that the report of the House Committee accompanying the bill “will of course have to explain the omission.” But the reason could be vague. “I think,” wrote Putnam, “that the explanation can be merely in general terms to the effect that the area omitted is to be developed in a project that will not merely not interfere with the utilization of the residue of the two squares for library use, but be fully consistent with it, and indeed prove cooperative with the larger purposes of the Library as an institution.” Putnam met with Congressman Luce the same day and, after presenting him with a redacted copy of Folger’s letter, cautioned Luce that should Folger not get his way, “He would feel constrained to abandon not merely the site, but the selection of Washington itself.” Luce agreed to implement the librarian’s scheme.
A month later, on March 15, Luce submitted an amended report of the committee on the library. As promised, this report, Acquisition of Additional Land for the Library of Congress, never mentioned Henry Folger. But it did include, on page three, an interesting revision:
As introduced, the bill provided for the acquisition of the whole of square 760, as well as square 761. As reported it omits lots 1 to 14 inclusive, to the alleyway, constituting slightly more than one half of square 760. The omission is recommended upon information, received by the committee since the introduction of the bill, that the area omitted (the entire northern portion, fronting on East Capitol Street) is to be developed in a project that will not merely not interfere with the utilization of the residue of the two squares for library uses, but be fully consistent with it, and indeed prove cooperative with the larger purposes of the library as an institution [italics added].
The vague explanation for the carve-out had come straight from Putnam’s pen. He mailed the report to Folger on March 16, noting that the bill was now on the legislative calendar and would not attract attention until it was up for passage. If at that point it did provoke scrutiny, Putnam warned, “It is very desirable that this should not seem to be evaded.” In other words, he and Luce would have to identify Folger and his collection if the newspaper correspondents who covererd Congress started asking questions. Henry hoped it would not come to that. On March 23, Putnam reported that he had given the press a vague but “authoritative statement which would preclude erroneous gossip.” The librarian expected Washington and New York papers to publish the news soon.
Congressman Luce wrote to Folger on April 19, 1928, telling him that the bill would probably pass. Some members liked it because the omission of Henry’s land had reduced the total payout from $760,000 to $600,000, which meant less expenditure by Congress. Luce congratulated Henry and was not shy to remind him who deserved some of the credit:
Such a structure as you contemplate and such a gift to the scholarship of the nation make all of us who have any share in their acknowledgment grateful for the opportunity. Furthermore we are particularly pleased because your project promises still further adornment of the surroundings of the capitol and betokens impetus to the progress making toward creating here what in time will be the most beautiful Capital in the world.
On April 22, the New York Times broke the news in a story headlined: “GREAT FOLGER LIBRARY TO HAVE ITS OWN HOME—Shakespeare Collection . . . Will Be Housed in Washington, Contains Among Its Treasures One-Fourth of the World’s Stock of the Folios.” It was a huge, three-column article measuring 6.5 by 21.5 inches, and containing more than three thousand words. It was the longest story that had ever been written about Folger’s collection, and it underestimated the number of First Folios he owned. There was no hiding it now. The unprecedented publicity must have horrified Henry. But even the New York Times feature could not persuade him to abandon his reflexive compulsion for secrecy, by now a hopeless cause.
The Times assigned the story to the bibliographer George H. Sargent, who proved himself a careful student of Folger’s activities and purchases. Sargent greeted the endeavor with unqualified praise:
Recent announcement that Henry C. Folger was to erect a building near the Library of Congress . . . to house his magnificent Shakespearean library has its greatest significance in the fact that material heretofore unavailable will be made accessible to scholars. Whether the title is vested in the Library of Congress, the people of the United States or in trustees is of no consequence. The doors of the greatest Shakespearean library in the world are to be thrown open.
Sargent compared Folger’s trophy hunt against that of some of his competitors and ranked him as the winner: “The Henry E. Huntington Library presents a magnificent array of twenty-nine folios, four of which are the First. The New York Public Library has eighteen folios, with four Firsts. The Folger Library contains more than fifty copies of the various folios, including . . . no less than thirty of the First.” Henry must have smiled when he read that. Sargent had made a colossal mistake. Folger did not own thirty First Folios; he possessed more than seventy.
Folger noticed that few of the highlights of his collection had escaped Sargent’s attention. Yes, the Vincent, Burdett-Coutts, and Hoe copies of the First Folio; Titus Andronicus and other precious quartos; the Pavier false folio—“said to have cost more than $100,000”—they were all there. But Sargent was far off the mark when he estimated that the collection held only 25,000 items. Only Henry and Emily knew that the true number—unknown even to them—dwarfed that guess. Sargent was right in his assessment of the library’s importance: “Works by and about Shakespeare fill 232 pages of the British Museum catalogue, and the Folger Library rivals this. No one man will ever live long enough to read all the Shakespearean books in the Folger Library. Nor can any living man hope ever to accumulate another such collection.”
On May 8, Putnam notified Folger of great news: “The bill passed by unanimous consent.” On May 10, Folger finally invited Putnam to visit him at Twenty-Six Broadway, in his new office on the twenty-fifth floor. Henry told him he expected to be at work there three or four days a week, and that his door would always be open. They agreed to meet on May 21. The next day, President Calvin Coolidge signed H.R. 9355. Henry had saved his land from confiscation. Now he could build his library.8
Henry had retired not to rest, but to work. All of his energy was directed toward the library and collecting. He admitted, “I find it so engrossing that I cannot undertake anything outside of it.” Starting in 1928, he brought to bear on his library project everything he had learned in fifty years at Standard Oil. During his long and spectacular rise at the greatest industrial enterprise yet known to man, Folger had been at the center of the action. He had seen it all: oil fields clogged with sticky mud and black crude; leaky barrels strapped to wagons pulled by straining horses; steam engines dragging railroad tank cars groaning with tons of oil; hitherto volatile and explosive kerosene tamed by Standard’s refining processes; the epochal changeover from lighting fuel to gasoline; the transition to electric lighting; the invention of the internal combustion engine; and the proliferation of automobiles and airplanes. Henry Folger had mastered every aspect of the petroleum industry—he could calculate the cost of a barrel of oil down to a fraction of a penny, and then recite off the top of his head the scientific process used to refine it. Knowledge was the source of his power.
Over the next couple of years, his work on the Shakespeare library would showcase all the characteristics—intense concentration, meticulous attention to detail, an iron grip on expenses, dedication to quality, expertise in several fields, making important decisions personally, cultivation of a self-deprecating collegiality—that marked his tenure at Twenty-Six Broadway. He served as the unofficial general contract
or for his own pet project. He involved himself in all matters, whether aesthetic or practical. From stained-glass windows to coal-heated boilers, Henry Folger was interested in the details, and usually had something to say.
The construction of the library involved several phases. The first thing Folger needed was an architect. After the April 22, 1928, New York Times article had revealed his plans, he was inundated with letters and proposals. Shreve & Lamb, who built Twenty-Six Broadway, hoped they had an inside track in becoming the architects for the new project. Dozens of letters from architects, stone quarries, and real estate agents (oblivious that Henry had already bought his land) poured into Folger’s office. Folger did not want a fuss. Nor did he want to stage an architectural competition of the kind that newspaperman Colonel Robert McCormick had held in Chicago for his new Tribune Tower. A contest would create publicity and might even result in the premature publication of the winning design. Henry wanted to keep the project under wraps—the fewer people who knew any details, the easier he could guard its secrecy.
Besides, no group of architects, now matter how famous or talented, knew what ideas already percolated in Folger’s mind. Without his input, their designs could never match the library of his dreams. No, Folger thought, better to make discreet inquiries among people he trusted. Henry already knew Alexander Trowbridge, a consulting architect who acted as a project manager specializing in all matters—large and small—in bringing buildings to completion. In 1897, Trowbridge had married into the extended Pratt family (his wife was George Pratt’s sister-in-law). In 1913, his company, Trowbridge & Ackerman, built “Killenworth” in Glen Cove for George Dupont Pratt, half brother to Charles M. Pratt. The large house was a Tudor, with thirty-nine paneled rooms, more than a dozen bathrooms, a dozen fireplaces, a tearoom, and a swimming pool. The house was made of seamed faced granite, ranging in color from gray to gray-green.