CHAPTER IX. Reputation in 1857

REPUTATION IN 1857

Although in his Walks and Talks the public had ample evidence of Mr. Olmsted’s taste in scenery, he was known principally as a literary man, a writer on agriculture, and a student of our social and economic conditions. His reasoned observations had been widely circulated through his letters in the New York Times and the books subsequently made up from these, which are still considered to give the truest picture of the South before the war. Mr. Raymond of the Times is quoted in 1854 as thinking “highly of his powers of observation and detailed reporting, giving just the facts that people want.”

Among his intimates he was known as an enthusiast and keen analyst in debate. It is pleasant to quote two references to these qualities in letters, which were prophetic, in spirit if not in exact detail:

BOSTON, May 8, 1847.

(From F. J. KINGSBURY to J. H. OLMSTED.)

“It is pretty much all true what you say about Fred. But living and growing and experience will have to answer for him instead of college discipline. He is an enthusiast by nature though, and all the Greek and Latin in the world wouldn’t have driven that out of him. Well the world needs such men, and one thing is curious, disappointments never seem to trouble them. They must in the nature of things meet with them often and yet they go right on in the same old way just as if it had not happened. They never get disheartened. I think Fred will be one of that sort. Many of his favorite schemes will go to naught but he’ll throw it aside and try another and spoil that and forget them both while you or I might have been blubbering over the ruins of the first.”

And in the Life and Letters of Charles Loring Brace, there is a letter probably late in 1848:

“I must say Fred is getting to argue with the utmost keenness,--a regular Dr. Taylor mind in its analytic power! But what is queerest, never able to exercise that power except in discussion! He is another Taylorite in his virtue theory. I shouldn’t be surprised if he turned out something rather remarkable among men yet....”

Although he had not had a chance to prove his executive ability in any public capacity, he was known as a capable manager in the handling of farm labor. Very early in his agricultural career, there is an evidence of this in a letter (1848) to his brother:

I finally got things fixed so I could leave without much anxiety. Robert returned, pretty well recovered; and work cut out, with written directions, for every man of such sort that they will be profitably and seasonably employed ’til I return, without much need of judgment.

His democratic ideals in general were well understood from his writings. There are some passages from letters written early in his career as a landscape architect which further interpret these with special regard to his chosen profession.

The letter of 1860, addressed to a subordinate who had referred to the difference in their “stations in life,” contains the following:

The phrase “stations in life” is ordinarily used with a meaning the propriety of which I am not accustomed to recognize. That I have enjoyed greater advantages of education in some respects than most of the keepers is true, but so far as this means book-education, there is no man among you who has it not in his power to obtain a better education than mine, during the ordinary period of reserve duty, within a very few years. As for my education in other respects, I mean in those respects which if anything entitle me to my present position, I have obtained it by reason of no advantages which many of you might not have had. The best of my travelling has been done on foot at a cost of 70 cents a day, or working my passage as a common seaman. My practical horticultural education, I mean that not gained by reading, was in part acquired while engaged as a laborer, looking to working men as my masters and teachers. It is then impossible for me to have any hearty or habitual respect for the superiority of one man over another in station in life except as superiority of station means higher responsibility and larger duty.

In 1863, when the political situation on the Central Park made it difficult for Mr. Olmsted to entertain the idea of returning to his work there, he wrote to Mr. Vaux from California:

But you know that the advantages offered in the office of the Superintendent for spending a good deal of my life in the park, being with the people in it, watching over it and cherishing it in every way,--living in it and being a part of it (whatever else there was),--were valued by me at a valuation which you thought nonsensical, childish and unworthy of me; but it was my valuation of them and not yours which was concerned. And that this was something deeper than a whim you know, for you know that it existed essentially years before it attached itself to the Central Park as was shown by the fact that while others gravitated to pictures, architecture, Alps, libraries, high life and low life when travelling, I had gravitated to parks,--spent all my spare time in them, when living in London for instance, and this with no purpose whatever except a gratification which came from sources which the Superintendence of the Park would have made easy and cheap to me, to say the least, every day of my life. What I wanted in London and in Paris and in Brussels and everywhere I went in Europe--what I wanted in New York in 1857, I want now and this from no regard for Art or fame or money.

Mr. Olmsted’s own summary of his fitness for the opportunity which presented itself in 1857, he gave in Spoils of the Park, written in 1882, to be reprinted in full in Volume Two of this work.

It is worth while also, perhaps, to give in conclusion two of the endorsements submitted with his Central Park application in 1857. (See facsimile opposite.)

Similar petitions bear the signatures of Russell Sturgis, Horace Greeley, George H. Putnam, Henry Holt, Whitelaw Reid, William Cullen Bryant, Bayard Taylor, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Schuyler, John M. Scribner, August Belmont, Morris K. Jesup, Henry Havemeyer, E. D. Morgan, Roosevelt & Co., and many others.

Pleasantest of all was the letter from Professor Asa Gray:

“HARVARD UNIVERSITY “BOTANIC GARDEN, August 24, 1857.

“TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS OF THE NEW YORK PARK

“DEAR SIR

“I have just learned that F. Law Olmsted, Esq., is about to offer himself as a candidate for the superintendency of the Central Park, New York.

“I desire very simply and sincerely to say that I know Mr. Olmsted well, and that I regard him as eminently fitted for that position. I do not know another person so well fitted for it in all respects, both on practical and general scientific grounds and I have no doubt that if the choice falls upon him, he will do great honor to the situation and to his own already high and honorable reputation.

“I have the honor to be

with great respect Your obedient faithful servant “(sgd.) ASA GRAY. “Professor of Botany &c. “Harvard University.”

FOOTNOTES:

Seaboard Slave States, Journey in Texas, and Back Country.

Published 1894, p. 61-62.