Sapping the Country — Where Our Big Men Come From

How New York City Draws on All Creation for Its Brains, Energy, Enterprise and Accomplishment.

NEW YORK city has not given birth to most of its great men. The country has furnished energy and brains for the metropolis. Though 272 years have passed since Peter Minuet purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians the very great majority of those who have been most active in its welfare — the controlling spirits, the men of prominence and the men of accomplishments — have come from beyond its borders. They have not been urban by birth, but rural.

Write a score or more of names that come first to your mind when you think of the prominent men of New York, then go to your biographical dictionary and you will find that ten out of every dozen were born outside the city, and that eight out of the ten came from rural districts.

Not Even Native Mayors.

It is so now, and it has been so from the beginning. Though about 1,800,000 persons have been born in New York during the present century, and in that time the city has had thirty-nine Mayors, beginning with Richard Varick and ending with Robert A. Van Wyck, only twelve of these Mayors were born on Manhattan Island.

This same thing has run through the city’s history. Take the great men who have lived in New York since the nation began and it is emphasized. There were Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Robert Fulton, Gouverneur Morris and so on down to Samuel F. B. Morse, Cyrus W. Field and others, all born outside of New York, and nearly all on farms.

Another quite remarkable fact. The State of New York has furnished eight men to the Presidency and Vice Presidency of the United States, and though the population of the city has been from one-third to one-half that of the State, and nearly all of these men at some period in their lives lived in the city, not one of them was born on Manhattan Island. These were Martin Van Buren, Vice President and President, born at Kinderhook; Millard Fillmore, Vice President and President, Cayuga county; Chester A. Arthur, Vice President and President, Fairfield, Vt.; Grover Cleveland, President, Caldwell, N. J.; Aaron Burr, Vice President, Newark; George Clinton, Vice President, Ulster county; Daniel D. Tompkins, Vice President, Westchester county, and Levi P. Morton, Vice President, Shoreham, Vt. Even Samuel J. Tilden — “the Sage of Gramercy Park” — was born in New Lebanon.

Men of To-Day.

Then take the men of to-day and those who have left us so recently that their work keeps them constantly in the public mind. There is the genial Chauncey M. Depew, whom New Yorkers claim as their own, but he was born in Peekskill. Joseph H. Choate, the jurist, as ready with his pleasing tongue as is the other, was born in Salem, Mass.; Elihu Root came from Clinton, N. Y., and Judge Noah Davis from Haverhill, N. H.

J. Pierpont Morgan, with a national reputation as a financier, was born in Hartford, Conn.; William C. Whitney in Conway, Mass.; Roswell P. Flower in Theresa, N. Y.; Russell Sage in Oneida county, and Darius O. Mills in North Salem, N. Y.

The names of these men call up visions of dollars and bring memories of the founders of the three great New York fortunes — John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, who were born, respectively, in Germany, on Staten Island and in Roxbury, N. Y.

In Other Fields.

When one thinks of the progress of the city in other directions one calls to mind Morris K. Jesup, of the American Museum of Natural History, born in Hartford; Andrew Carnegie, Scotland; Robert Hoe, England; Abram S. Hewitt, Haverstraw, and Richard Croker, in Ireland.

Then there are such men as Augustus St. Gaudens, born in Ireland; Nikola Tesla, of Austria-Hungary; the late Colonel George E. Waring, of Pound Ridge, N. Y.; the late Henry George, of Philadelphia; Seth Low, of Brooklyn; Carl Schurz, of Prussia, and George Francis Train, of Boston.

So, go into any channel of the complex metropolitan life and one finds the same thing. This is true of preachers, teachers and reformers. Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan was born in Newark, Bishop Henry C. Potter in Schenectady; Gustave Gottheil, Poland; Charles H. Parkhurst, Framington, Mass.; Reginald Heber Newton, Philadelphia, and the late Dr. John Hall, Ireland. Robert G. Ingersoll was born in Dresden, N. Y.

All from Other Places.

There are scores of names more that come to mind of men who have left the stamp of progress on the city and who cannot be forgotten. Austin Corbin, Horace Greeley and Charles A. Dana came from rural districts.

And so one might go on through the list of the dead and the list of the living, almost without end, into all of the ramifications of metropolitan life, and the further one goes the more one will be astonished at the evidence that the great men of the city, in an overwhelming majority, have come from beyond her borders.