The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  Chapter 14

  “It Is the Key to Our Hearts”

  —EMILY C. J. FOLGER

  HENRY’S SUDDEN death after two minor surgeries shocked Emily Folger. His retirement from Standard Oil and total involvement in all aspects of the construction of the library had brought out in him the energy and enthusiasm of a much younger man. He had loved every moment he spent working on the project, relishing every detail from the mundane—toilets and heating—to the sublime—stained glass and marble sculpture. For weeks after his death, books Henry had purchased continued to arrive at Twenty-Six Broadway. Emily instructed Alexander Welsh to return those that had been sent on approval but not yet purchased.

  Despite Henry’s death, Emily had no doubt that the library would be completed. She knew that even before experts came in to analyze his will and tally his assets, and even while America was experiencing a severe economic downturn—and who knew how long that would last?—there would be enough money, whether the final bill was $750,000, as Henry had hoped, or double that. She also knew that Henry’s will established a generous endowment to cover the library’s operating costs for years to come.

  But how seriously had the stock market crash reduced the value of Henry’s estate? He did not possess major cash reserves. His principal assets, aside from the Shakespeare collection, were his investments, and of these holdings the most valuable by far were his shares in the Standard Oil companies. He had scrimped and borrowed for decades to accumulate them and they were the major assets upon which the long-term future of the library depended. Henry’s estate could afford to build it, but without his stock portfolio, Emily could not afford to perpetuate it.

  Regardless, she vowed to continue, even if she had to spend all her own assets. “On June 11, 1930,” she reminisced, “I was left alone to carry on his work. It was a grave responsibility. But we had been together so long and had been so much at one in our thought that I knew what he desired and was prepared to take up the task in his name.”1 It was as though Emily Folger sought to fulfill the lover’s promise in Measure for Measure: “What’s mine is yours and what is yours is mine. So, bring us to our palace; where we’ll show what’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know.”

  On June 24, 1930, the New York Times made public the terms of Henry Folger’s will: “$10,000,000 TO AID SHAKESPEARE STUDY/ Fund Set Aside in H.C. Folger Will to Finish and Maintain Library at Washington. BUILDING COST $2,000,000/ Edifice to House World-Famed Collection of the Oil Man.” It was a huge amount of money, especially during the Great Depression. Ten million dollars in 1930 would be the equivalent of one hundred million today. The Times continued: “Henry Clay Folger, former chairman of the board of the Standard Oil Company of New York, who died before realizing his ambition to establish a memorial home for his world-famous Shakespearean collection for the use of students of Elizabethan drama, made provision in his will for its completion and maintenance, it was learned yesterday.” Folger left specific bequests to his sister, two brothers, a nephew, and five nieces totaling $300,000. He dictated that an endowment fund for the library be maintained in an amount no less than $10 million to be administered by the trustees of Amherst College. One-quarter of the annual income from the fund would be paid to Amherst, with a floor of $100,000 and a cap of $250,000 per year. The remaining three-quarters would go to the library. Emily would receive an annuity of $50,000 per year during her lifetime.

  On Halloween, 1930, Emily Folger transferred the deed to the library and title to the collection to the trustees of Amherst. She paid off the $104,000 mortgage on the library, and agreed not to demand of the estate immediate payment of the $1.5 million in promissory notes that had accumulated as Henry had borrowed money from her to buy items for the collection.

  Henry’s instructions regarding the library were plain:

  Within three years from the date of my death said trustees shall install and establish my Shakespeare collection . . . as a permanent library in a building in Washington, D.C., said library to be known as the “Folger Shakespeare Memorial,” [Folger’s will predated his decision to change the word memorial to library] and shall thereafter maintain said library and all additions thereto as a separate and distinct library . . . for the promotion and diffusion of knowledge in regard to the history and writings of Shakespeare.

  Up to this point, the text of his last will and testament was strictly business, and spoke in the dry language of the law. Then Henry added a sentimental bequest—it was more of a tribute—for Emily:

  My wife, Emily C. J. Folger, has from the beginning aided me greatly with her advice and counsel, and has shared in developing my plan . . . and has assisted me in the selection and care . . . of my collection. I therefore request that the trustees . . . will permit my . . . wife to borrow books and other items from said collection freely and without restriction and that they consult her in the case of all plans of the . . . library and all regulations and expenditures pertaining to the same.

  To this day, Emily remains the only reader ever to have enjoyed the privilege of borrowing a book from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was his silent partner, his equal in their calling. He knew it, which explains why, of course, the name Henry is not carved in wood or stone anywhere in the library. Instead, the walls bear only the name they shared, Folger.

  Henry’s death did not delay the construction. “Architects and builders,” Emily wrote, “went on with their duties. Again and again we met to discuss developments as they occurred. I lost myself in the work, and . . . was happy.” Indeed, the day after the New York Times story appeared and only fourteen days after Henry died, the “Daily Reports” from East Capitol Street on Wednesday, June 25, record a busy scene: “Temperature 76 degrees at 7:30 a.m., skies clear. 122 men employed for carpentry, brickwork and concrete. An additional 36 men employed by sub contractors for plumbing, heating, and ventilation.” Three days later, on June 28, twenty flights of iron stairs were installed.

  Work continued through the summer and fall of 1930. Emily corresponded with Cret about a new decorative element she wanted to install in the reading room, in a niche not far from where the Salisbury portraits would hang—a bronze tablet honoring her husband. On October 21, Cret asked her to approve the design of the engraved and enameled memorial he had fashioned. Cret wrote to Emily on February 29, 1931, to thank her for selecting him as their architect: “Now that the building is from week to week taking better shape, I feel still more my deep obligation to Mr. Folger and you who gave me the opportunity to be interpreter of your thoughts in honoring genius.” She had one more idea, she confided to Cret; it was something that Henry did not request. In a modest, even tentative voice, her letter asked whether the architect thought it might be appropriate to commission a marble bust of her husband, to be placed on permanent exhibit somewhere in the library. Of course, Cret replied, and he could suggest several places for it, including the exhibition hall. Emily engaged John Gregory, who was still busy sculpting the nine high reliefs for the East Capitol front of the library, to create a white marble bust of Henry.

  Baird’s construction crew put in a hard season of work in the summer of 1931, bringing the library almost to completion. From time to time, Emily Folger took the train down from New York to watch the building rise. “By the autumn of 1931,” she observed, “the outer shell of the library was complete, and the interior well advanced. It was a busy scene . . . as the marble rose around the steel armature, I spoke of the building as being like a pearl, and The Pearl became a common synonym for the Library.” As Henry had foreseen, 1931 turned out to be the critical year.

  He had not predicted another milestone—the settlement of his estate. On September 23, 1931, the New York Times announced the news: “$13,719,635 ESTATE LEFT BY H.C. FOLGER/ Former Head of Standard Oil Owned Securities Valued at $9,005,020 in Appraisal/ $4,355,373 LOST IN SALE.” The article explained that, to date, $12,781,599 had been paid out of the estate. Folger’s largest holdings were 151,167 shares of Standard
Oil of New York valued at $5,077,521, 25,340 shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey valued at $1,843,485, plus other stocks. The Shakespeariana collection was valued at $4,265,000.2

  The value of Henry Folger’s stock portfolio had decreased by half between October 1929 and the time of his death. What did this mean for the library? He knew the stock market had crashed, and that the money he had provided in his will for the library’s ongoing operations might not be enough to support the institution he was building. He included in his instructions to the trustees at Amherst that if the endowment’s value fell below $10 million, the income from it was to be used only for operations, not acquisitions. Henry need not have worried. Emily shored up the library’s finances, donating money as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in IOUs she held against Henry’s estate at the time of the library’s opening.

  On September 23, the same day the New York Times published its article about Henry Folger’s estate, William A. Slade, who had been hired with Emily’s approval as the Folger Library’s first librarian, wrote an important letter to Emily: “The furnishings are in. . . . The actual moving in of the collections will now begin in only a few days . . . [we will soon] start the first lot of material.”3 Slade’s excitement was premature. Before all the books could be moved, they had to be found.

  On October 21, 1931, the Times announced: “FOLGER BOOKS MOVED BY ARMORED TRUCK/ Five guards take First Lot of $4,265,000 Shakespeareana to New Capital Library.” On Monday, October 19, an armored car from the United States Trucking Corporation had driven the first shipment of Henry’s books from New York to Washington. The vehicle carried a small lot of just 350 titles, a tiny portion of Folger’s vast collection, but this grouping included some of his most rare and valuable books. They were the easiest ones to find because Henry had stored his best volumes in bank vaults, instead of scattering them in warehouse storage rooms all over New York. The Times story named several of them: “The Vincent Folio of 1623 . . . the most precious book in the world” and worth $100,000; “ ‘Venus and Adonis’ from 1599 and valued at $75,000”; the Titus Andronicus of 1594, “valued at $45,000, and the Pavier Quarto from 1619 and valued at $100,000.”4 If anything happened to that truck, the library could lose more than half a million dollars’ worth of Folger’s most famous and valuable treasures in an instant. The armored car departed New York at 10 AM. The drive took twelve long hours—almost three times what it would take today via modern highways and bridges—and it was not until 10 PM that night that the truck rolled into the curved driveway at Second and East Capitol Street.

  There was no single “moving day” on which Folger’s entire collection was brought from New York to Washington. His vast holdings made the logistics of that impossible. The first armored car kicked off what can only be described as “moving season”—a period of six months, from the fall of 1931 through the spring of 1932, when the collection was transported to Washington. And it took time to find all the books. In New York, multiple storage rooms in several commercial warehouses disgorged their crates of treasures. Henry Folger’s intricate, hand-drawn plans—like a pirate’s treasure map—traced pathways through the labyrinthine storage vaults and marked the locations of individual crates. Without Henry’s meticulous record keeping, some of his collection might have been lost. By the end of 1932, the warehouses in Brooklyn and Manhattan had surrendered 2,109 crates of books, artworks, manuscripts, furniture, and other objects. No one save Emily knew exactly what the boxes contained. Rosenbach was sure there would be revelations as the materials were unpacked: “There will be surprises innumerable. Hidden in the profound depths of this collection there will be, I am sure, much new material.”5

  The records of just one warehouse reveal the staggering scale of the Folgers’ storage system. The first store room they rented was at Eagle Warehouse, and if they kept it until the library was ready to open—and all indications are they did (there are invoices paid by Henry from as late as September 1929 and it is likely that the next invoice for storage was paid for by the estate, then by the trustees of Amherst College under the terms of Henry Folger’s will)—then they occupied this storage room for thirty-four years, from 1897 to 1931. The rent was $4 a month for four years, $12 per month for the next eight years, and at least $16 a month for the next twenty-two years; $5,280 is the low estimate for the charges for thirty-four years just for that one room. And the Folgers had rented several other rooms in that one warehouse. And more rooms in other warehouses. Most of these storage rooms had gone undisturbed for decades.

  The task of locating every single crate of Henry’s hoard and driving it to Washington was difficult enough. But once the containers arrived at the library, they had to be unpacked, their contents catalogued, and the books shelved. This would take thousands of hours. Until it was done, the building on East Capitol Street would be a library in name, not in fact. How thrilled Henry would have been to watch the first volumes placed on their shelves, breathing life into the library.

  It is easy to picture him plunging his hands into crates that he had sealed twenty or thirty years before, unpacking books, removing their protective paper wrappers, holding them tight, and greeting them like old friends. He would have loved it. He had lived without them for so long, possessing only his typewritten lists of what each carefully labeled case contained.

  The resurrection of Folger’s long-buried books brings to mind Ben Jonson’s invocation “My Shakespeare, rise!” Day after day, for six months, the library staff unpacked and began to catalogue the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, the largest assembled collection of each of the Folios, First through Fourth,6 one-third of the known surviving copies of the First Folio, a magnificent collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean works, Shakespeare’s primary sources (what would have been available in the grammar school curriculum in Elizabethan England—Ovid, Seneca, Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans), allusion works (works that mention Shakespeare, or, as in Christopher Marlowe’s 1598 Hero and Leander, works Shakespeare “borrowed” from,7 and Renaissance books, manuscripts, and objects related to all subjects: history, science, economics, politics, religion, law, theater, and the arts. Two hundred fifty-six thousand books; 60,000 manuscripts; 200 oil paintings; 50,000 watercolors, prints, and photographs; dozens of sculptures; half a million playbills; plus theater programs, musical instruments, costumes, and more. Each book, artwork, and artifact spoke to the others in a magical resonance that recreated the spirit of Shakespeare’s age.

  Rosenbach marveled at what Folger had accomplished. Even this important dealer who kept close watch on his clients’ purchases was astonished by the size of the collection: “At first the mass of it alone seems overwhelming. It does not seem possible that in the short span of a lifetime one could gather so much. It must not be forgotten that every piece in this collection whether it was a book, manuscript, costume or picture was handled directly by him. He examined carefully every piece before it was packed away for the future use of scholars.”

  On Henry’s behalf, Emily Folger bore witness to it all. She experienced the joy of watching their collection fill up the bookshelves, vaults, niches, and walls of the library. An undated photograph captures her in a moment of contemplation standing in the reading room, gazing up at Henry’s portrait hanging next to hers. But the completion of the library did not end her quest. She wanted to buy more treasures, and proved to be as insatiable as Henry. In March 1931, she purchased the Ashbourne portrait, which she believed to be of Shakespeare.8 She continued to collect and advise on library acquisitions. And she wanted more First Folios. “Every page of a First Folio is precious is it not,” she asked one of her librarians in her dispassionate assessment of a copy on the market, “but as a copy of a book the one offered is surely a sad cripple. It ought to be acquired at a low price indeed; according to your findings.”

  Emily Folger and the
trustees of Amherst College chose April 23, 1932, William Shakespeare’s 368th birthday, as the official dedication day of the library. Emily came down from New York for the great event, which was attended by numerous dignitaries, including members of Congress; the ambassadors of England, France, and Germany; justices of the U.S. Supreme Court; Amherst president Arthur Stanley Pease and George Arthur Plimpton, chairman of the board of trustees of Amherst; leaders of numerous other colleges and universities; and President Hoover and his wife. King George V sent a cable from Windsor Castle in honor of the man who had, more than three centuries before, known and entertained two monarchs who once sat on his throne. Also in the audience were the architects Cret and Trowbridge, the builder Baird, and some of the construction workers. The Washington Post reported, “The service was attended by as distinguished an audience as ever gathered in Washington for any cultural reason.” Emily, Pease, Plimpton, and President and Mrs. Hoover took their places on the stage of the Elizabethan Theatre, which was filled to capacity. A schedule of the day’s events survives. The event was broadcast across the country on AM radio. Dr. Pease presided. After an invocation by the Rev. Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, who had also delivered Henry Folger’s funeral eulogy, a reading from Ralph Waldo Emerson followed in homage to the author who had first inspired young Henry’s great interest in Shakespeare.

  At the climax of the ceremony, Emily Folger rose from her chair and handed the key of the library to George Plimpton, who accepted it on behalf of the trustees of Amherst College. Then she spoke. “Her voice shaken with emotion,” the Washington Post noted, “[she] offered the key . . . as the symbol of the respect and love of her husband and herself towards Shakespeare’s memory.” Emily spoke just two sentences, including a line from Henry IV Part 1: “Shakespeare says for Mr. Folger and me, ‘I would you would accept of grace and love’ this key. It is the key to our hearts” (Act IV, Scene iii, lines 114). The Post reporter observed that at this moment, “tears glistened in the eyes of many in the room.”