Part of being a student — even an old one, like me — is spending time in the library. As I write this, I am sitting in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, looking up at a wall festooned with names of honored, illustrious alumni and super-rich donors, two categories that do not always, or even mostly, intersect.
On the wall directly in front of me are the names Donald Rumsfeld, George Will, and Paul Sarbanes (that last one might need a memory jolt: He was a senator from Maryland for roughly 800 years). And while those names carry a lot of associations, they’re basically normal-sounding modern American names, unlike, say, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who was an English professor at Yale in the last century, and whose name was on a few walls there.
Now that’s a name. And if you wander around some of the fancier colleges on the East Coast, you’ll encounter a lot of Marquands. There are Marquand chapels and Marquand this and Marquand that, and I recently saw in the Princeton University Chapel a lot of Marquand names on the wall — casualties of World War I, although it wasn’t called World War I on the wall because when those names were inscribed, the idea that there would be a sequel to the Great War was unthinkable.
But there are a lot of Marquands up there, and I’ve seen a few of them on the World War I remembrance wall of a church I go to in Manhattan. That may explain why there don’t seem to be a lot of them around anymore — a lot of them went off to save Europe from the Kaiser. I like to think that one or two of them sat in a Yale English class with professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, reciting Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote … before signing up for the muddy trenches of France.
A friend and I have fallen into the habit of texting each other classic names from past centuries that we see on memorial walls or donor scrolls. I was in Alexandria, Egypt, over the summer and spotted this one on the wall of the old Anglican Cathedral of Alexandria: Captain James Govan Argyll Hewat, of the 6th Black Watch, who died in France in 1918.
English war memorial names, for some reason, always seem glamorous and tragic. They’re the dark side of those hilarious names you find in P. G. Wodehouse novels — Gussie Fink-Nottle and Tuppy Glossop, for instance — some of whom, had they not been fictional, would no doubt be on the walls of churches and colleges libraries themselves, casualties of the second war to end all wars.
Modern war memorial names, at least in the United States, seem a lot more diverse and democratic. My father’s cousin, John Henry Sotheron Long, is on the walls of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. It’s an indication of the cultural and social openness of the U.S. that his name, which isn’t really all that plummy, is among the more Chauncey Brewster Tinker-ish names on that monument.
The names above me on the wall of the Firestone Library aren’t tragic or heroic. Mostly, they’re either famous or rich. And as they move through history and get closer to the present day, the Forbeses and the Firestones are gradually replaced with more ethnic-sounding names, some made up mostly of consonants, or Roman alphabet approximations of East Asian vocal tones. You don’t picture those names dashing over the top of the foxhole, bayonets fixed. You picture most of them, instead, at a Bloomberg Terminal watching the trades scroll by and the money piling up. As your eye moves along the wall and you get closer to the 2000s, it’s easier to picture those names building apps and data analytics tools.
Which is an improvement, I think. Many of the names on institutional donor walls today represent people who are still robustly alive and still raking it in. Instead of having 1916, The Somme after their names on a wall somewhere, they’ve got summer places in Maine and Netjets memberships. Instead of being mourned and memorialized, they are ordering tasting menus and wearing Loro Piana. No one gave Captain James Govan Argyll Hewat that option, though I suspect with a name like that, he felt it was his destiny to put on a uniform and battle the Hun.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
