New Members Address (2014)

I am pleased and honored to tell you new Centurions something about the institution that welcomes you to membership this evening.

You have already learned that this is a hospitable place. After opening the left-hand door at 7 West 43d Street and walking into the lobby, you’ve been greeted by Isidore Florio, Jose Ramos, and Cathia Charles. Like the rest of the staff led by our manager, Albert Brunner, they will always impress you with their attentiveness, competence, and graciousness.

You’ll see the same distinctive hospitality at the bar, where you dine, where you lounge, at the coatroom, and when you visit the club’s administrative offices. One of the Association’s delights is the staff ’s invaluable contribution to life here. They make this house feel like our home. You’ll be increasingly grateful to these dedicated men and women. If you haven’t done so already, intro-duce yourselves to them very soon. They’ll be as glad to meet you as you will be to know them.

As you walk up the stairs to the gallery and beyond, it becomes obvious, as you enter these gilded, golden rooms, that this is a very grand place. Our House Committee vigilantly and wisely attends to the care and use of this glorious McKim, Mead & White building. In its architecture, art, gathering places, and libraries, 7 West 43d Street, our clubhouse for 123 years, evokes the club’s origins in 1847 as a select association of professional artists and writers and amateurs of the arts. Like many of their successors, these amateurs were patrons, aspiring practitioners, connoisseurs, or enthusiasts. Since then, every muse has been heard from at the Century. Artists from all fields are on our rolls. The Association’s founders envisioned that, in one essential way or another, the arts and letters would be deeply woven into the fabric of every Centurion’s life.

Thanks to curator Jonathan Harding and the Committee on House Art, the Century’s justly famed collection of art is displayed to our best advantage. From the beginning, we have been more than fortunate to possess an exceptional trove of nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings. Works by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, George Innes, and John Frederick Kensett, Centurions all, grace these walls. Many of their dazzling, revelatory representations of our young nation’s spectacular natural vistas are found throughout the club. And so are some of their majestic portraits of that era’s prominent figures.

The Association’s distinguished painters, photographers, illustrators, and sculptors carry this heritage forward. The art of these Centurions, each with the signature of his or her own unmistakable style, as well as the art of their more immediate predecessors, is also at hand all around the building. The graphically challenged among us look on with appreciation and, sometimes, awe. Be sure to visit the gallery when our artist members and some of our gifted amateurs show their work here. Be assured that we look forward to seeing some of our new members’ work on display before too long.

Amateur and professional artists also meet at the sketch club, open to all Centurions. The members paint or draw their model, each working in silence, until it’s time to go off and share a meal together. They are bound by their yearning to make something beautiful and the deep satisfaction they take in doing so.

The Century is a serious place. History has been made in these halls. Fifteen Centurions have run for the presidency. Eight have been elected a total of fourteen times. In 1912, three of the four presidential candidates were Centurions. So it’s not surprising that forty-six Centurions have served as cabinet officers. Ten Centurions have been Justices of the Supreme Court. Three of them have served as Chief Justice.

From the White House to the courthouse to the statehouse, from the halls of Congress to city hall, public servants in our ranks have debated and determined public policy.

The Century itself has been the scene of countless such discussions. In the months leading up to World War II, for example, leading citizens of conscience from across the land assembled here to oppose the isolationists’ resistance to involvement in foreign conflicts. Some of them were Centurions, others weren’t. Still, they were known as the Century Group. This was a fitting venue for them to assert internationalist, humanitarian values. Their alliance helped inspire our nation to fight fascism and defend democracy abroad.

Much more recently, many proposed pieces of legislation or regulations to ensure equal rights for all regardless of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation; to set standards for urban design; to establish criteria for designating architectural landmarks and landmarks districts; to advance prison reform; and to protect the environment have been, to greater and lesser degrees, conceived and moved toward implementation in this place. So have plans for our community’s great museums, its performing arts organizations, our precious parkland, and the modernization and maintenance of our public transportation network.

Members of exceptional talent, wit, ambition, energy, and commitment to the public welfare have made such progress possible. Some of them were celebrated in the recent exhibit on the twenty-nine Centurions who have won Nobel Prizes, which was sponsored by the Committee on the Archives and the Committee on Exhibitions. But our ranks are marked by a diversity of noteworthy accomplishment, and the Association is enlivened by the collaboration and camaraderie of all its members as peers.

That collegiality characterizes the Centurions who sit on committees that serve up our banquet of literature, film, drama, and music evenings, which are announced weekly in season on the inviting, ingeniously designed Century website.

Between October and May, renowned novelists and poets give us portions of their latest work. Prize-winning biographers and historians read and discuss sections of their books, stirring us with their scrupulous, uncompromising research and irresistible narrative power that makes the past come alive and illuminate the present. Composers of stature premiere their compositions. Actors you’ve admired on stage, in films, and on television for years present theatricals in this very room — for us.

And the films that are shown here: a 1930s screwball comedy you’d heard had the funniest, most stylish screenplay ever but hadn’t gotten around to seeing; Orson Welles’s F for Fake, the scintillating director’s diverting view of deception; previews of PBS documentaries on the history of Western art and the Civil War, introduced to us by those who produced them. Panels of filmmakers and specialists who seem to know every frame discuss what we’ve just seen in the most rewarding way.

And the music: the Century Singers, known to back up rock cover bands with amazing results, also lead us in the sea-son’s favorites at Christmastime, an evening that features con-certs by choirs offering exquisite lesser-known pieces that have ranged from ancient Spanish madrigals to French carols. Eine kleine Hausmusik gives us wonderful programs from the chamber and theater repertoire in an elegant, yet almost domestic setting. Thanks to the Committee on Music, James Levine has played Brahms here. At this podium, Wynton Marsalis raised his trum-pet to render the call-and-response that gives jazz some of its most mournful and ecstatic moments. Rosanne Cash and her band have delivered the very best of Bob Dylan. On such nights, too, the Century is surely a thrilling place.

As the founders intended, our membership includes Centurions whose creativity and imagination have shaped careers outside the arts. We have luncheon forums where they provide us with privileged glimpses into the worlds of industrial development, science, technology, education, medicine, jurisprudence, public finance, and other fields of great interest and utmost importance. The Century is also a festive place. We mark the solstices with winter and spring dances. Speaking of pagan rituals, our Committee on Wines enthusiastically raises many a glass to Bacchus several times a year. We celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday and the liberation of the Bastille. On these and other occasions, Centurions dress these halls and stage pageants with fanciful flare.

What you’ve seen tonight tells you that Centurions love a great party, a touch of ceremony, fine company. You’ve listened to some of our leaders—our secretary, Michael Leahy, who distills the essence of our meetings with a journalist’s certain grasp of the heart of a story; Beth Sapery, chair of the Committee on Admissions, which was understandably very impressed with all of you; and André Bernard, our president, whose introductory remarks at our monthly meetings capture the soul and the substance of the Century so eloquently, so intelligently, and so poignantly.

But amid its festivities, ceremonies, and vast, varied dimensions, the Century can be a startlingly intimate place. I’ll give you two examples.

On learning of their election, new members often feel relief, followed by a surge of gratitude to the Admissions Committee and, of course, to their proposer, seconder, and the other letter writers who vouched for them. After a few visits here with a friend or two, you might find yourself easing into the place with a touch of self-satisfaction . . . until the moment when you think about having lunch at the long table for the first time.

Whom will you meet? Suppose you’re sitting there with just one person, someone very reserved or distracted, and deservedly famous?

Many years ago, that happened to me. My random lunch companion was the embodiment of why so many recently minted Centurions have approached the center of the members’ dining room with extreme trepidation. It took the brilliant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., unique among the American historians of his generation, two years to ratchet up his courage before visiting the long table, and now I knew why.

The self-preoccupied eminence, dining in peace and solitude until I showed up, was Clifton Daniel, the former managing editor of The New York Times and, not so incidentally, Harry S. Truman’s son-in-law. He continued to stare off into space as I sat down across from him. I knew that he had reported from London during the Blitz. Coincidentally, there had been a story about England in the paper that morning. I decided to ask him about it. His response was, to say the least—and he did—concise. But I persisted. I told him I’d known about his tour of duty in the embattled British capital and asked him how that experience affected his sense of that country’s current condition. All at once, the air of gravitas that made him seem so distant dropped away. He didn’t answer my question directly, but his eyes now shone with a youthful sense of wonder. He recalled for me having had dinner one night in a great house in Mayfair with senior officials in the British government. Through its tall windows, he could see the Luftwaffe’s bombs setting the sky on fire as he interviewed his sources. Becoming increasingly animated, he described his excitement at taking in that scene, trying to absorb the information he was getting from his dinner companions and composing the lead of the story he would file within the hour. Those months under siege, he told me, made him a great believer in British resilience. It was an intense, if somewhat one-sided conversation, but I was so grateful for his firsthand, passionate account of a pivotal moment in the modern era. My relative youth and my absolute obscurity, as it happened, didn’t matter. He turned out to be a most courtly man.

Here’s another such moment, although one I shared along with the rest of the audience at a monthly meeting, one of the first I ever attended. The speaker that evening was the physicist I. I. Rabi, one of our Nobel laureates. His humility was memorable. He spoke softly of his origins growing up on the Lower East Side as the son of Eastern European refugees. He rose to a professor’s rank at Columbia and then become the associate director of M.I.T.’s Radiation Laboratory, where he worked on the development of radar and the atom bomb. He expressed his gratitude for being an American, for being a New Yorker, for being a Centurion. Toward the end of World War II, like several of his generation’s greatest scientists, he was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, when the most destructive weapon yet devised was first tested, a weapon that his genius, too, was conscripted to create.

I. I. Rabi spent some of his later years in search of peacetime uses for atomic energy, he told us. Yet, he confessed that the nuclear arms race always weighed upon his conscience. His admission of such complex feelings about the outcome of his extraordinary achievements was riveting, unforgettably and profoundly personal, even for those of us who, like me, never exchanged a word with him.

Some of what I’ve told you about the Century tonight has concerned its members’ roles on history’s stage. The Century’s archives contain a wealth of material that documents the Association’s place in the cultural and civic leadership of our city and our country. These treasures describe the club’s evolution and attest to its continuing vitality. Your proposer’s and seconder’s letters—the correspondence that introduced you to us—are now in those archives, the first chapter in your lives as Centurions. You have become a part of a special procession. On his last appearance here, though stricken with an illness that would carry him off in just a few weeks, Arthur Schlesinger reminded us that history is to a nation what memory is to an individual. The same is true of an institution’s history—an identity we forge by collecting, preserving, arranging, and presenting the evidence of what happened and reflecting, over the years, on its meaning and value.

The archives house the story of the Century Association, a story each generation of Centurions and each member helps to write in his or her own way. You will be one of this story’s authors. And the most relevant thing I have to say to you this evening is that this hospitable, grand, serious, ceremonious, festive, thrilling, and intimate place—this civilized place—is now your place to be enriched by and to enrich.

Your possibilities here abound because the greatest dividend of membership—beyond the Century’s traditions, its heritage, its pageantry, its gilded, golden rooms, and intellectual and artistic vigor — is the Association’s portal to friendships, new relation-ships that can summon your versatility, originality, talents, and capacity for refreshment, renewal, and reinvention. Those friend-ships will be a blessing. As time passes, you’ll come to know how great a debt you owe to those who put you up for the club. They gave you this array of splendid companions. And, eventually, you can reciprocate by bringing us the company of those you think would make splendid companions, too.

How transforming and inspiriting those friendships can be, sometimes blooming suddenly over just a few moments of the sort of informed, genial, and worldly conversation so lavishly abundant here, or sometimes arising from shared or newly discovered interests.

Some members have told me that they credit their experiences at the club with motivating them to make art in a new medium, study with a vocal coach, travel up a new avenue of knowledge, write a book, take on an assignment in public service. Centurions also gather together around a commonly held source of fascination. Over several years, one such community of learned engagement within the Century read and discussed every one of Anthony Trollope’s forty-seven novels as well as his autobiography.

Here is yet one more: A few years ago, two Centurions—Betty Sargent and Genevieve Young—lamented that, not so long ago, ours had been a self-entertaining nation. Bill Zinsser, our cherished pianist and accompanist then, agreed. A piano in the home was one marker of America’s ascent as a country with a ripening popular culture of true quality. Some played that piano, some loved to sing at its side, and some did both. It was all about joy.

Betty and Gene printed out the lyrics of many standards from the Great American Songbook, the mother lode of an extraordinary era of songwriting. Unforgettable tunes were seamlessly wedded to lyrics that capture the vitality—high and low—of our spoken language. New Yorkers born within a decade or two of one another wrote most of these songs. And some of those superb songwriters were Centurions, too.

To conclude this welcome, I invite those here this evening who, like me, turn up monthly to sing those songs—whose friendships were born here through their love of sharing and singing them — to join me at the piano and give us the lyrics of the late Centurion Betty Comden and her writing partner Adolph Green, and the music of Jule Styne. The song I have in mind is “Just in Time,” because whenever you become a Centurion is just the right time.

Warren Wecshler
An Address to New Members
November 6, 2014

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