A Sandburg Stumper

[Rob Wick]

You are correct Bill!

From the New Yorker article:

Charles Francis Adams' dislike of the new, if not his vanishing taste for the old, was typical of the early Academy. Carl Sandburg, for instance, made the Institute in 1933 (and the Academy in 1940), but his election took place in the face of strenuous opposition from the Old Guard, led by Secretary [Robert Underwood] Johnson, whom Father Time was beginning to take care of. (Johnson died in 1937.) "As for the Institute dinner, the election of Carl Sandburg ought to have been recorded in the Goncourt Journal," Van Wyck Brooks wrote to Lewis Mumford in 1933. "You should have heard poor old Mr. Johnson rising to read aloud a poem of Sandburg's on shaving in a Pullman car, to show that the election of such a man would represent the ruin of the ancient faith. It was a great scene."

Good job Bill. You win a membership in the Academy, provided you can get Sandburg to vote you in.

Best
Rob