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Toledo Museum of Art...

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UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

MEDAL OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS

Awarded to

CHARLES FOLLEN MCKIM

December 15, 1909.

Extracts from the addresses

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

We are here to do honor to the memory of an American leader in one of the great arts. My acquaintance with him arose from the fact that I was Secretary of War and had to do with that plan, in an official way, which he held most dear, I think, of all the subjects to which he devoted his great artistic genius-that plan for carrying onward the design with the respect to the laying out of the City of Washington.

I had the honor to propose him as a member of the Board to assist the Secretary of War in preserving what we could of the scenery of Niagara, and he devoted a great deal of time, with very little compensation, to planning out what could be done on the American side of the river so that the people on the other side should not think that it was the backyard of the United States.

No one could come in contact with him and not feel that generous, disinterested spirit of his in favor of the promotion of all art, and his willingness to devote time and effort to promote it everywhere. I feel so strongly the debt of gratitude that the nation owes to Mr. McKim for leading an art and for making ideals of that art even higher, and trying to make them national, that I am glad to lend any emphasis that I may to a memorial to him.

MIA OL

BY THE HONORABLE ELIHU ROOT

Charles McKim was a conspicuous member of the little group of men who in the planning and building of the White City by the Lake at Chicago, sixteen years ago, turned the current of American feeling and opinion upon all matters of art. No greater epoch in the life of art ever was than that which is marked by the influence and the new impulse in the minds of the millions of men and women of this great and rich and powerful and progressive country, who received a new impression of beauty and dignity in art by their visit to that wonderful exhibition. It has seemed to me that there was as great an influence upon the minds and characters of the men who did the work as there was upon the people who saw it and learned its lesson. There has been with all of them, and notably and pre-eminently, I should say, with McKim, from that day forth a breadth of public spirit and of devotion of their art to the public service, such as we never had before.

Charles McKim was peculiarly fitted by the habit of his mind, by his character and by the tendencies of his art, to correct some of the chief faults of the American temperament. He despised and shrank from the merely ingenious and fantastical, through which architects in the beginning of a desire for ornament are apt to express themselves. His tendency was to hold fast to all that was good in the past, to anchor in the great achievements, and to aim to adapt the established principles of art to the new conditions to which his problems related. The Commission for the Development of the Park System of Washington did not attempt to evolve something from their inner consciousness or to present some plan which should be marked by their names and lead all the world to praise their ingenuity or their inventive genius. They went back to the plans of L'Enfant and Washington, and with them in mind they went all over the world and studied all the great specimens of the past wherein similar problems had been worked out, and with this knowledge of the wealth of all the ages and a keen appreciation of our own history, produced a plan and developed L'Enfant's plan for the beautification of Washington and for the development of its park system which, I believe, is as certain to be followed as the sun is to rise tomorrow.

When McKim came to repair or restore the White House he found that there were plans which looked to the building of great pavilions at either end of the old White House. It would have been splendid, would have been much admired, would have redounded to the glory of any architect; but they would have dwarfed and pushed back into insignificance the plain, simple, old White House; and McKim, with his reverent spirit, his self-restraint, sought in the history of the White House and the history from the time of which it came, the spirit in which he was to work. Time and time again he has come to me and talked about what he found at Monticello, what he had found here and there all over the country in the way of remaining buildings that expressed the spirit of the time of Washington and Jefferson. He left us the White House a perfect expression, an enduring expression, of the days of Washington and Jefferson, a perfect example of an American gentleman's home on the banks of the Potomac.

All of his work illustrated not only McKim's character as an artist, but his unselfishness, his love of his country, his pride in the Capital City, which we all believe to be so beautiful and so noble. He loved his country and he was willing to spend himself without stint in order that his art might do its part in a noble and adequate expression of all that was best in his country's life. Many great and noble lives have entered into the structure of American government and American freedom, but none in executive chair or in legislative hall, deserves a higher need of appreciation and grateful recognition for noble service to our country, than the life of Charles Follen McKim.

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