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Title: Give the Man Room
The story of Gutzon Borglum
Author: Robert Joseph Casey
Mary Borglum
Release date: September 2, 2024 [eBook #74349]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1952
Credits: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GIVE THE MAN ROOM ***
GIVE THE MAN ROOM
BY ROBERT J. CASEY
_Travel_
Four Faces of Siva
Baghdad and Points East
Easter Island
The Land of Haunted Castles
The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy
The Black Hills
The Texas Border
_Personalities_
Such Interesting People
More Interesting People
Mr. Clutch
_War_
The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears
I Can’t Forget
Torpedo Junction
Battle Below
This Is Where I Came In
_Mystery_
The Secret of No. 37 Hardy Street
The Secret of the Bungalow
Hot Ice
News Reel
The Third Owl
_Romance_
The Gentleman in Armour
Cambodian Quest
_Satire_
The Voice of the Lobster
_Technical_
Manual of Radio Interference
_Verse_
The Vest Pocket Anthology
BY MARY BORGLUM (MARY W. MONTGOMERY)
Told in the Gardens of Araby (with IZORA CHANDLER)
[Illustration: GUTZON BORGLUM]
_GIVE THE MAN
ROOM_
_The Story of Gutzon Borglum_
By ROBERT J. CASEY
and MARY BORGLUM
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC.
_Publishers_
INDIANAPOLIS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1952, by MARY BORGLUM
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 52-5804
First Edition
To
LINCOLN and LOUELLA,
MARY ELLIS and DAVID
Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form.
Its presence is unmistakable in Art or in Life. The measure
of its revelation depends on the measure of our own soul-consciousness,
the boundaries of our own spirit.
--GUTZON BORGLUM
_CONTENTS_
CHAPTER PAGE
1. MOUNTAINTOP 15
2. THE DIM BEGINNING 22
3. ALONE 30
4. CALIFORNIA 36
5. OVERSEAS ART 45
6. ENGLAND 55
7. QUIET IN NEW YORK 66
8. VARIETY OF LIFE IN A STUDIO 79
9. THE BIRTH OF A MYTH 87
10. PUBLIC MEMORIALS 94
11. STAMFORD AND POLITICS 104
12. CHICAGO CONVENTION 113
13. AND DR. TRUDEAU 126
14. AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATION 137
15. FLIGHT, PATIENCE AND SHERIDAN’S HORSE 151
16. WARS OF AMERICA MEMORIAL 159
17. STONE MOUNTAIN 171
18. THE IMPERISHABLE MONUMENT 182
19. THE EMERGENCE OF LEE 195
20. MONEY 204
21. AFTERMATH 214
22. BACKSIGHT 220
23. AND SO FORWARD 230
24. TRIBUTE TO WILSON 238
25. FOR THE PARKS 244
26. THE CZECHO-SLOVAK ARMY 250
27. THE NOBLE SPORT 255
28. FRIENDS AND HOME 263
29. SHRINE OF DEMOCRACY 275
30. DEDICATION 284
31. CARVING THE MOUNTAIN 293
32. CONVERSATION 300
33. --AND FINAL PEACE 309
INDEX 321
_LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_
Gutzon Borglum _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Interior of 38th Street Studio 30
Model of Angel’s Face 31
Borglum Working in First Improvised Studio at Stamford 40
“Dr. Trudeau,” The Beloved Physician 41
“General Sheridan” 56
“Wars of America” Model 57
“Abraham Lincoln” 64
Gutzon and Mary Borglum 65
Stone Mountain 96
Working Platform Near Summit of Stone Mountain 96
Model of Stone Mountain Group 97
Stone Mountain, Showing Superimposed Carving of Central
Group 128
North Carolina Memorial at Gettysburg 129
“The Trail Drivers” 160
The Borglums’ Daughter 161
Woodrow Wilson Memorial at Poznan 192
Torso and Leg of Dancer 193
Gutzon Borglum and Son Lincoln 224
Lincoln Borglum 225
Lincoln and Gutzon Borglum in Hoist 256
Plaster Model in Mountain Studio 257
View of Rushmore Showing Heads of the Four Presidents 288
F.D.R. at the Unveiling of Jefferson, August 1936 289
GIVE THE MAN ROOM
CHAPTER ONE
_MOUNTAINTOP_
If you are studying the history of Gutzon Borglum, the place to stand is
at Stone Mountain, Georgia.
It is an impressive spot, quiet, little visited, a vast bubble of
granite rising abruptly some 800 feet out of a grassy plain, and
thousands of feet long. Good roads lead to it from Atlanta. There is, or
used to be, a little information office at the foot of its towering
cliff, and usually there is someone about to sell souvenirs or to give a
sketchy and bewildering account of the mountain’s history. High on the
cliff there is a flat place from which several acres of surface rock
have been removed; and to the left of the flat is the somewhat
unidentifiable head of a man. The guide will tell you that this is the
representation of Robert E. Lee, as indeed it might be--Lee or anybody.
There is little left to mark the handiwork of man in this neighborhood.
Grass and brush have covered the fallen rock. The scaffolds are down,
the tool sheds and storehouses vanished. The steel hooks are gone from
the face of the cliff. There are no great funds in the hands of the
local patriots. But this is the place. It was because of his work here,
because of what he discovered about granite at Stone Mountain, and
because of his carving of the head of Robert E. Lee, which today nobody
can rightfully attribute to him, that Gutzon Borglum’s memory will be a
long time in dying.
Stone Mountain’s story is often repeated and seldom--very
seldom--authentic. What you see of the place today is mostly what was
here on one dire day in February 1925 when Borglum’s work on it came to
an end--forever. But there is much about it that anyone who cares may
know.
Mrs. Helen Plane, an aging Daughter of the Confederacy, had dreamed one
night that the history of the South’s Great Cause might be carved in
vast figures on the surface of this cliff, General Robert E. Lee,
President Jefferson Davis and a list of towering generals marching
forever across the granite at the head of the defiant troops. She
brought the matter to the attention of Borglum, and he was probably the
one artist in the world who would understand what she wanted done and
would find a way to get it done. That was in 1915. Borglum made a trip
from Washington to Atlanta and inspected the mountain.
In 1924 this fantastic undertaking was no longer anybody’s dream; it was
well under way. The first group of figures, Lee and Davis and Jackson
and the generals, had been outlined on the mountain, following the flag
to perpetual glory. Lee himself was appearing in a stature that Art had
never before given to anyone anywhere.
Machinery was in place for diagram projection, power, hoisting,
drilling, carving, hauling, dynamiting. The business of high-explosive
carving had been brought to a point of almost unbelievable fineness and
accuracy. After years of money shortage the Stone Mountain Confederate
Memorial Association was looking into a debt-free future with a million
or two dollars of surplus cash in the treasury. The last march of the
Confederacy was definitely on its way....
* * * * *
Up in Pierre, South Dakota, State Historian Doane Robinson, a scholar
with patriotism, an extraordinary love for beauty and very little
knowledge of magnificent finance, looked at the news photographs of the
Stone Mountain project and studied the rotogravure outlines of what the
sculptured cliff would look like when Gutzon Borglum finished with it.
And he wondered that nobody had ever thought of trying a similar scheme
in the mountains of South Dakota, the Black Hills. He wrote a letter to
Borglum inquiring why.
The sculptor wrote that he was perfectly willing to look into the
sculptural possibilities of the Black Hills if anybody in South Dakota
was willing to provide the necessary expenses. A few months later
Robinson wrote, somewhat erroneously, that the state of South Dakota
would underwrite this not too considerable sum; so Borglum came out,
looked at the Hills and toured their hinterland late in the summer of
1925.
* * * * *
In February 1925 the sculptor had a bitter disagreement with some of the
executive committee of the Confederate Memorial. He thought these men
careless in handling public funds. They made complaints and fired him.
He broke up his models and went away from Georgia. Without him the
mountain stayed uncarved.
That same year a group of Black Hills patriots guaranteed a fund of
$25,000 for a patriotic mountain carving. Gifts of $5,000 each were
received from Senator Coleman DuPont, Charles E. Rushmore--who gave his
name to the peak later selected for the memorial in the Black Hills--The
Chicago and North Western Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy
Railroad, The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway and the Homestake
Mine. Herbert Myrick contributed a donation of $1,500. The Northwestern
Public Service Company of Huron, South Dakota, had offered a power
plant. Doane Robinson sent out another call to Borglum, and Borglum made
a second trip to the Black Hills.
In the summer of 1927 Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States,
dedicated the Rushmore Mountain project. And before the ending of the
Second World War the carving of this peak was finished--the only thing
of its kind on the face of the earth.
* * * * *
From the top of Mount Rushmore four Presidents of the United
States--Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--gaze out
from an unbelievable block of hard rock into glowing sunlight, placid
but remarkably alive. Hundreds of thousands of persons have come from
the far corners of the world to look at them, and are still coming in
expanding companies. The money spent by the Treasury of the United
States for the carving of this peak has long since been returned to its
source through the gasoline tax of the tourists. The faces of four men
important in the history of the country will be preserved to us, barring
some unpredictable catastrophe, until the mountains are worn as flat as
the surrounding prairies. And an interesting feature of all this is that
there were only a handful of people in the world who believed it
possible until it was done.
It is safe to say that the carving of Mount Rushmore would never have
been attempted and could never have been carried out save for the early
experiment on Stone Mountain. Borglum had to learn how to remove large
masses of rock--more than 50,000 tons in his first twenty months in
Georgia. So he had learned how to carve with dynamite and had trained
stone workers so well that they could blast down to within three inches
of the surface to be chiseled. He learned about drills and their
sharpening. He learned how to suspend his workmen on slings that were
easily maneuvered and entirely safe. He found out how to project
patterns from a distance onto the rock to be carved. And he knew how to
do all these things quickly when, eventually, he moved on to Rushmore.
On the South Dakota memorial his fame now rests and probably will
continue to rest until the end of time. He might possibly have felt
bitter about that. The sculpture into which he poured his greatest
enthusiasm was undoubtedly the Confederate memorial. It had movement
instead of stasis. It told a story in a language that no man could fail
to understand. The piece of his carving that he himself loved best may
have been the seated Lincoln at Newark, New Jersey. None of his other
works--nor any sculpture in the world--is as big as the work on
Rushmore. But not at this time will any expert in sculpture come to
select one of the carvings of Mount Rushmore as Borglum’s masterpiece.
That is not to say that the Four Faces are not well done. They are.
Lincoln’s has the same pathos that marks Borglum’s head of him in the
Capitol at Washington. Jefferson and Washington come to us out of the
unphotographed past of more than a century ago as real men. Theodore
Roosevelt many of us knew when he was alive, and he is himself. But all
four of them are overpowering because of their size. They are the
product of an art that few men ever attempted before and none
accomplished.
It is a striking thing about Borglum that nobody knew very much about
him, even his friends. More people know of him now than ever did when he
was living, and to most of them he is a man whose sole work was the
carving of Mount Rushmore. Few of them know of the tragedy of Stone
Mountain. Virtually none has ever heard of his Wars of America Memorial
in Newark--forty-two human figures and two horses cast in bronze.
Some of his pieces that few people know about--his horses, his figures
of Lincoln, whom he devoutly loved, his statue to James McConnell on the
University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville, his simple tribute to
Edward L. Trudeau--show his genius as a sculptor. His other pursuits are
in dozens of record books, already dusty and forgotten.
For example, he was a member of the New York City Parks Association for
a dozen years, and until the day he quit he was a factor in keeping the
parks free from injurious exploitation. He organized a bus company in
Stamford. He somehow became a leader of the Progressive party in
Connecticut. He conducted an investigation of airplane manufacture
during the First World War. In the same war he gave the use of his
grounds and what money he could raise for the recruiting of a
Czecho-Slovak expeditionary force. He designed roads and reconstructed
historic old buildings. He contrived waterways and beautified highways
and rivers. He designed coins and medals. He invented projection
apparatus and hoisting machinery. He wrote magazine and newspaper
articles and built up an amazing file of information about sculpture. He
invented an airplane. He laid out a breakwater for Corpus Christi,
Texas. He experimented with dynamite so long that he could calculate
stone removal in ounces. And as he continued his work of mountain
carving he made himself an engineer in a new and difficult trade.
It is interesting to note that he did all of these things well. Some
have said that he had a touchy temper, but those of us who knew him,
say, over forty years didn’t think so. He could never understand that
money might have a different value to other people than it had to him.
He would get annoyed when the treasurer of one of his projects would
hesitate to empty the treasury for a power plant or some other machinery
at the moment he needed it. He got genuinely angry only at people he
suspected of being dishonest.
Neither did he make many enemies. One man, long a member of the
executive committee of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission,
probably knew him longer in irritating circumstances than anyone else on
earth. Once he came down from Mount Rushmore to Rapid City frothing at
the mouth.
“All he knows about money for this business is that somebody has to dig
it up,” he roared. “He thinks I make it out of something just because he
needs it. He’d bust the whole state of South Dakota in two weeks just
because he needs some dynamite or an A-rig.”
“But,” someone inquired, “do you think he’ll get this memorial
finished?”
“Hell, yes!” he roared. “And nobody else could do it either!”
One is surprised that such a diversified character could have had much
time left to spend in sculpture. As a matter of fact, he probably did
more of it than any other individual in his profession and time. He was
a prodigious worker as well as a talented dilettante in fields where he
thought his influence needed. His paintings between 1890 and 1901 seem
to have been virtually numberless. Many of them are appearing now and
then, more valuable than ever.
Some of his better sculpture has disappeared. One of his pieces was used
by a lady as security for a loan. It has gone from human ken. His study
of Woodrow Wilson at Poznan, Poland, was uprooted and no doubt melted by
the Nazis in the Second World War. A second artist took the hat off
Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain “because Lee would never wear a hat in a
place where ladies were present.” The face as one sees it today was
altered in this thoughtful improvement. Much of Borglum’s early work
seems to have passed through similar vicissitudes.
However, most of what he did throughout his creative years seems to be
with us still--statues in a dozen states, small ones, grand ones, but
always anatomically perfect ones. If he had never done anything but the
Newark Lincoln and the Wars of America group, he would have done enough
to put him among the leaders of his art. But beside those and a generous
scattering of bronze and marble all across the United States, there is
still Rushmore. His own criticism of Rushmore is still the most apropos:
“They’ll be a long time wearing that one down.”
CHAPTER TWO
_THE DIM BEGINNING_
The beginnings of Gutzon Borglum are not easy to trace. Until more than
fifty years after his birth nobody seems to have cared where he came
from or when. Nobody was much interested in who his parents were or how
or where he was brought up. By that time the evidence of his boyhood was
far away and hazy.
When in middle age he turned his head toward the Far West he had known
shortly after the Civil War he saw a past that was exciting, colorful
and glamorous. He was lyrical in talking about it and wrapped up in
memories of unbelievably noble inspiration. But the oddest feature of
his reminiscence is that, except for his stylistic urge, he never
wandered far from historic fact.
Gutzon Borglum was born in a frontier town in Idaho. His early childhood
was spent in Fremont, Nebraska, jumping-off place of the covered wagons,
haunt of wild Indians. And whatever hints he conveys about Gutzon, he is
probably telling the truth. He was never anybody but Gutzon.
He intended, when he sat down to recall his youth, to write an
autobiography. But writing an autobiography was just one more task that
took its place in a tremendous program of brass casting, airplane
design, mountain dressing, sea-wall building, picture projection, boxing
promotion, park improvement, old-building restoration, motor-bus
operation, horse raising, politics and--every now and then--colossal
sculpture. When he died he had written two chapters and several hundred
thousand words of notes and journals, an astonishing record, presenting
a picture of an old warrior battling for youth against a cynical world.
He said in his introduction:
This story is told to lend an encouraging, believing hand to all
lonely, creative souls who are wandering into the uncharted,
untraveled wilderness of God’s greater universe, finding through
their own understanding new and undreamed worlds; and to those who
continue alone to pour into unpeopled space their cry--unafraid,
expecting no answer. Courage to stand alone; courage to master, to
know, to do alone. Courage to spurn the tradesman’s reward and
popularity. Courage to be without great approval, in spite of
government, in spite of today’s laws, tomorrow’s threat--every
threat--in spite of Heaven. God’s greatest gift to us and His
supreme test is courage bestowed only on those He trusts entirely.
There are two points in this worthy of attention: his recognition of the
need for courage and the stressing of his loneliness. He had the
courage. No one in half a century of continuous battling had more. His
loneliness must have been in his soul, not literal. With friends and
enemies who included a line of Presidents of the United States,
senators, congressmen and public officials, artists, writers, singers,
politicians, sheriffs, policemen and such, all of them in vast numbers
and continuously present throughout the years, he could have been lonely
only in his more detached moments. He certainly had a full life. The
portions of it unfilled with other people were of his own choosing. In
his chronicle he wrote:
I should like to begin this story with Eric the Red, the great
warlike Dane, driven from Denmark to Norway, from Norway to
Iceland, and finally from Iceland. From there he drifted with the
tide before the chill winds southward in his Viking ships, dodging
the ice in the Atlantic Flow, the cooled Gulf Stream, circling up
by Greenland which he claimed and named. Or even better to have
been with our fellow Danes who invaded Greece and gave that people
their heroic age, left in their bloodstream the blue in the eyes of
Pericles, the gold of Helen’s hair, the short nose of Socrates and
the one blue eye of Alexander the Great. For I am as certain as I
am of anything, that the spirit and the ancient Danish or Borglum
blood were with and in the raiders of the Mediterranean who roused
the geese in Italy’s imperial city and awoke drunken Rome.
The fact that he had lived long enough to write these stirring words
probably justifies his admiration for his forebears. He must have sprung
from hardy stock. He had come through fifty years, part of it in the
parlous times of the new West, where only the good started and only the
strong survived. The family of which Gutzon was a part must have had
good ancestry. There were nine of them--six of them boys--and they lived
as the pioneers did, a routine without much luxury, and all of them
rounded out good long lives.
Gutzon doesn’t seem to be sure about their origins and early development
any more than he is sure of his own. He never gave a thought to such
things until he was about fifty years old and inquisitive admirers began
to ask questions. Somewhat confused, he gave some ill-assorted answers,
many of which remain puzzling today. In his notes, for instance, he says
that he was born on March 25, 1867. This, according to some evidence
given by his brother Solon, seems to be correct. Yet the biographical
sketch in _Who’s Who in America_, which he himself wrote, says that he
was born in Idaho on March 25, 1871. One must leave it at that.
Borglum was a man of great imagination, and he built up a fine character
for the men of the hardy North country from which his ancestors had
come. In his mind they came from “the North of Denmark, the land bending
eastward under the cruel winds from Greenland and Iceland, the
rendezvous of Vikings and high-sea rovers. There we have what are called
Black Danes.... They are unquestionably an exchange token from Spain,
Rome or Greece.... In our own family of blonds there are always some
with fine dark eyes and hair to remind us of our ancestral wanderings.”
The best Borglum’s father did for this family research was to locate a
prospective Borglum with Frederick of Sweden in his crusade to the Holy
Land. This man seems to have been named Reinhardt. But he saved the
prince from a charging goat in the south of France and was given the
title _de la Mothe_, “the one of courage.” This forebear returned to
Denmark and, Borglum’s father reported, “his arms carry the crusader’s
shield in the center.” The founder of the modern branch of De la Mothes
was a priest who, in due course, joined Luther and married a nun. Gutzon
wrote:
The menfolk became priests, soldiers, adventurers, and I have books
left by them in their own scripts. In this black dune, the
wind-swept northern part of Denmark, there is an ancient Norman
pile called the Borglum Kloster which, in the nineteenth century,
was a hunting lodge for the kings and nobles. The De la Mothe
family was closely connected with this cloister. On a visit not so
long ago I found in the great chapel, buried in its floor, the only
memorial tablet to our ancestors extant.
Some years ago, after the unveiling of Gutzon’s statue of Woodrow Wilson
in Poznan, he took his wife and two children on a flying visit to
Denmark. They arrived in Copenhagen about 8:00 A.M., and by 8:15 Gutzon
was a sensation. He was a great sculptor by that time, and he had an
international reputation. But the baggage carriers, the cabdrivers and
the early passers-by did not know that. He was interesting to them only
because he spoke to them unhesitatingly in archaic Danish, the Danish of
a hundred years ago. “I learned it at my mother’s knee,” he explains,
“and she had learned it in her youth, now a century past.” He was
linguistically one with the Danes of 1800. The romantic swashbucklers
of crusading times no longer seemed quite so close to him.
The King of Denmark saw the Borglums after their return from Borglum
Kloster and “the black duneland of the North.” He sent his chamberlain
to the hotel with an invitation because Gutzon, fifteen years before,
had made a three-quarter bust of the king’s grandfather. It was proudly
displayed on a gilt mantel.
“Is it a good portrait?” asked the sculptor.
The king smiled. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It is a good portrait with just
a touch of American vigor.”
His Majesty then presented Gutzon with the Order of the Knights of
Danenborg. “Interesting,” the king said as he draped the ribbon about
Borglum’s neck, “to think that your people killed one of our kings.”
“I had heard of some disturbance in the old days at Borglum Kloster,”
Borglum said. “There was violence....”
“That was it. The king was seized. They took him to a prison and a week
later they hanged him. But you, of course, hadn’t much to do with that.”
“No,” admitted Borglum, “I hadn’t. I don’t know what to say.” The king
smiled again. “I’ll forgive you,” he said. “You know, Borglum, your
people, the Jutlanders, may be said to have saved Denmark. They were the
only ones the Swedes could not defeat.”
“That makes me feel better,” declared Gutzon.
But the king seemed not to have heard him. “Yes,” His Majesty went on,
“the Swedes took virtually all the country. They overran the villages
and cities. They captured Copenhagen. They took everything valuable.
But, of course, they never took Jutland. That’s where your people were.”
* * * * *
The financial situation in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth
century was what caused James Borglum, Gutzon’s father, to come to the
United States. The markets were bad, the crop yield had been none too
good and there was discontent in the family over the probable division
of what little would be left of Grandfather Borglum’s estate.
James de la Mothe Borglum at twenty-three was a Latin-and-Greek scholar
in his last year as a medical student. He took passage with his
sweetheart on a freighter from Esbjerg across the North Sea to London.
They were married in London and immediately afterward took passage in a
three-masted sailing ship on a voyage from Liverpool to New York. Of
this voyage Gutzon writes:
The trip was a nightmare. The ship was dismasted in a violent
storm. The passengers helped to clear away the wreckage and drop it
overboard. Then with a few spars for masts and sails made out of
bedding they gathered wind enough to carry them to the New World.
They were six weeks on the way, most of the time at the mercy of
the mad sea.
The honeymooners lingered only a day or two in New York. Steam trains
took them to Nebraska City on the west bank of the Missouri River. There
they joined an expedition of 126 wagons starting out for Oregon.
They were months on the road, rarely traveling more than ten miles a
day. The day’s course depended on the distance between water holes. They
traveled without incident until they came into the land of the Cheyennes
at the confluence of the North and South Platte rivers. The team boss
had died. James Borglum, who was an able doctor and popular with the
people in the train, was chosen to converse with some visiting Indians.
One of them asked permission to examine Borglum’s pistol and shot
himself with it. The chief blamed the mishap on the white spokesman
because he had owned the pistol. He demanded the surrender of Borglum’s
person and was refused. The Indians, loudly muttering, went away.
They spent a restless night, but the expected attack did not come.
Toward midnight a band of wild horses rushed into the expedition’s herd
of mules, horses and oxen. These animals were well tied and guarded and
there was no alarm save for the sudden screaming of a woman. Nothing
amiss was discovered until a check was made toward morning and the wife
of a teamster was found to be missing. Twenty years later she was found
in Montana, the wife of a chief, with grown children. She refused to
leave her adopted people or to return to the whites.
James Borglum never forgot the tragedy of this long trip. The desperate
hardships came near the end. There was scarcity of everything. It is
hard to realize the amount of food consumed by some 450 men, women and
children in four months, or the amount of water necessary daily on a dry
plain in midsummer to keep horses and oxen on their feet. Borglum used
to tell of a small group of voyagers who had joined his party in
Wyoming. They had been living on mule harness which they boiled to give
salt and “some strength” to the water.
James de la Mothe Borglum crossed the line into Idaho and reached Bear
Lake on the road to Oregon. There, literally, he dug in--half the house
in the ground, then sod, then log. That was in 1862--or maybe 1863. John
Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum joined the family there most likely, as his
unfinished autobiography says, in 1867.
Gutzon remembers his mother (Ida Michelson Borglum) as a great woman,
gifted and beautiful. She had one other son, Solon, born on December 22,
1868, the boy to whom Gutzon frequently referred as his little brother.
Not many years after Solon was born, Gutzon recalls, “She left us. I was
five. She turned to see me as she lay ill. There were tears in her eyes
and she was trembling as she took my hand.... And she told me to take
care of little Solon.
“I never forgot it, but I wondered why. I thought she was going to stay
with us. She and Father had always been with us. I could not
understand....”
Gutzon was a baby. He was at the age when children are said to be only
slightly interested in family changes, but he seems to have realized
that something had happened.
“By the time I was seven,” he says, “I knew what it meant not to have a
mother of my own. I thought I didn’t want to stay around things that
reminded me of her any more. So I ran away.”
CHAPTER THREE
_ALONE_
Gutzon Borglum was seven years old; so the time must have been roughly
1874. In the twelve or thirteen years since James de la Mothe Borglum’s
caravan had come to Bear Lake, Idaho, he had been singularly restless.
Gutzon had been born in Idaho, Solon a year later in Ogden, Utah. Father
Borglum had moved back eastward. He had another wife. He had acquired
horses and cows, a home and an office. When Gutzon ran away, home was in
Fremont, Nebraska.
The child left suddenly, accompanied only by his dog. He hadn’t thought
to provide himself with food. He had heard of Omaha; so he started in
that direction. He was three days on the way and had gone what seemed to
be miles and miles when the sheriff caught up with him and brought him
home. The sheriff dropped him at the Borglum house and went away.
Fearful and hungry, Gutzon slept that night in the dog kennel.
Next morning he had a memorable return to the bosom of the family. His
father was somewhere out of town, and his grandfather on his mother’s
side had come for a visit. The grandfather was a martinet who felt that
children should be taught that it is wrong to run away from home. He
took charge of Gutzon and Gutzon never forgot him.
“I was only seven,” the sculptor remembered, “but I made up
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF 38TH STREET STUDIO
At the left is “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” and at the right is
the “Mares of Diomedes.”]
[Illustration: MODEL OF ANGEL’S FACE
This is one of the offending feminine faces.]
my mind that I would get away from there and that I would keep trying
until I succeeded ... and, eventually, that’s what I did.”
For all his muddled childhood, Gutzon loved his father. James Borglum
was kind, tolerant and a philosopher. He sensed his son’s unhappiness,
even though he would have had trouble explaining it, and a great bond
developed between them. The boy went everywhere with him when not in
school, even on his sick calls out in the country. Gutzon remembered
that they would ride along for miles and miles in sunshine or cold or
wet, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, but always in perfect peace.
One afternoon the doctor called to him and asked him to help hitch the
horse. Gutzon at the time was a little over eight years old, but he did
what he could with the harness and thereafter believed that he had been
just as skilled and agile as any professional horse handler.
“I want you to come with me,” his father said. “There is a wounded man
out on Rawhide Creek and I may need some help.” And Gutzon saw nothing
wrong about that, either.
“We’ll fix him up fine,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to sew him up.”
“Sure,” said the doctor as he lifted Gutzon into the buggy.
Rawhide Creek was a stream with a sorry reputation. It had taken its
name from an English hunter who had turned away from slaughtering
buffalo long enough to murder a young squaw. Other squaws had tied him
to a cottonwood tree near the creek and skinned him alive. Gutzon
recalled in his chronicle:
As for our call for medical help, we found our man in the cabin
armed. He was stern, fine looking. I admired him greatly and what
followed made us lifelong friends. He was an outlaw on the run who
had been in some shooting scrape and had received a charge of goose
shot in his arm. Father had no anaesthetic for him. I doubt if at
the time there was more than a pint of it in the whole state of
Nebraska. The wounded man was bleeding terribly, his arm resting on
some blood-soaked blankets. A piece of rope, tightly drawn about
the elbow, partly stanched the flow. He was alone with two
inscrutable Pawnees. After they had washed the arm in warm water,
my father turned to me and said, “Gutzon, you will have to help
hold his arm.”
The Indians gripped the man’s hand; my job was to keep the
lacerations open so that Father could find the shot. We were still
working when there was a sharp knock at the door. Sheriff Gregg,
with a deputy at his heels, came in and put our patient under
arrest. Gregg and Father were friends and Father said, “He stays
here till this job is done, Bob.” And we went on doing what we had
to do.
The man, whose name was Fielding, was then taken to jail to be held
for trial. There I visited him frequently with Father and later
alone with the permission of the sheriff who liked me. Fielding was
an excellent draughtsman and I brought him red and blue pencils. He
loved to draw the American Eagle and the flag as we saw them on the
older coins.
Weeks later when his arm was well healed there was a sudden alarm
of “Jailbreak!” Fielding and another man had sawed through one of
the bars with a hacked table knife. It must have been the work of
many days. I prayed that he would escape. But posses went out and
caught him as he was crossing the river in an open skiff. Report
came back that the sheriff had killed him in midstream with a lucky
shot.
Fielding was a kindly man. He told me of his shooting trouble. He’d
been wronged, robbed and shot at. Why he broke jail I never knew.
He dreaded imprisonment. I shall always feel that he had a great
deal to do with awakening my interest in drawing and developing my
ability in that direction, although I really had no idea of
becoming an artist until I was fifteen. We never know where little
unsuspected impulses for good may lead, or what is back of them.
Often in a family of five or six children there is one who does not
want to work. He would like to write on birch bark, examine a
flower, get a little color on a board or canvas ... and there is an
artist. All very simple and natural, but it comes out of the lives
and struggles of perceptive men and women who follow these impulses
along. I believe music first started when some mother was trying to
get her little child to sleep when he was scared to death about
something. She found that certain tones were pleasant when she
repeated them. And thus the thing that is behind all instrumental
music--woman’s voice--brought harmony and sweetness to life.
Not all of Dr. Borglum’s errands had to do with wounded men, and the
little boy found that some of the simpler ones were more terrifying.
Once they went on a long quest that had something to do with a baby.
Gutzon stayed outside the house. He sat on a knoll, looking at the moon
across a ravine. Of this incident Gutzon writes:
I had watched it come out of the grass in front of me. It was about
three times its usual size as it came above the dull blue horizon.
My father came and I asked him, “What is the moon?” And without
waiting for him to answer I told him how beautiful she was and how
I loved the moon better than the sun, better than anything in the
world. He picked me up and said, “I’ll give her to you if you
promise never to take her away from us.”
I wriggled out of his arms and ran toward her. I stumbled, fell,
rose up, ran on, began to cry but kept on, faster and faster,
Father slowly following.... But the moon was retreating faster than
I could move. And then the knowledge came to me--I could not have
my moon. I stood weeping my heart out.... That moon has hung in my
heaven for well over half a century with the child fable written
all over it.... I have never reached it.
Fremont was a town of bewildering experiences. It was filled with
fantastic excitement--Indian alarms, the coming and going of prairie
schooners, visits of parties of Cheyenne and Sioux chiefs, gun fights
beyond the hills and reports of Indian massacres on the Niobrara.
Against all this the simple village life of the Swedes and Danes looked
like that of quaint foreigners. Yet there were tragedies among Gutzon’s
own people--sickness and death and evil times, thin crops and blizzards,
high winds and floods.
There was a brief school life at home, then school life at a distance.
Each year when the boy returned he would find that some of his Fremont
had vanished. Not exactly _vanished_, he felt; rather, the town had
grown and he had grown, and somehow they had parted. The doctor moved
his family after years of this to Omaha. There didn’t seem to be much
difference.
He had been gone a long time--or so it seemed to him--when he was
eighteen years old. The thought came to him that he must see his old
playground and playmates, swim in the old Rawhide, go graping or be once
more with the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. He bought a
train ticket for Fremont and long remembered how he could hardly wait to
reach the town.
The train slowed down at the platform and he was off before it stopped.
He looked at the crowd of strangers pressing about, and tried to catch a
glimpse of a familiar face. At last he found a few ... but very few.
He went into town and to the homes of friends. He found the girls he had
known. Their hair was piled high on top of their heads; their dresses
were long, their manners awkward. The boys stared at him and didn’t say
anything. He couldn’t tell what had happened to these people, and, he
realized later, they were puzzled in the same way about him. All of them
had grown.
There was no longer any school from which to play hooky, no occasion to
hang one’s clothes on a cottonwood and dive into mud from an old stump.
Gutzon was now a stranger to all that. And, though he refused to see it,
so were these close friends of a few years ago. None of them could
understand. He wrote:
I turned like one frightened and hurt and brokenhearted and ran
back to the station. There on the platform I sat for hours waiting
for any train to get away from Fremont. No--away from the reality
that had blotted out my magic world, the world that a boy of from
six to twelve lives in. And I have never had the courage to return.
The Fremont, Nebraska, of my boyhood days has gradually
reconstructed itself and still lives in my memory with its two
little streets and a half. Its quaint old citizens I know are still
trading, spinning yarns--the occasional Indian or more, single
file, quietly moving about. There are some prairie schooners and
the annual one-ring circus. And as I pass the town, as I have done
many times, it has always been at night--for which I have been
strangely glad. I watch in the dark for all the old ways and byways
I know so well, and the dark has always helped me to believe that
they are all there just as I left them.
Thus far the words of Gutzon Borglum. He ceases to comment on his life
in the forbidding period of early youth. He is hopeless about what has
gone by and terrified at what lies ahead. But he need not have been. He
was alone, a child of the night, only in his imagination. Actually, he
was one of the very few human beings of his period who were singularly
popular. He might have succeeded at anything he tried.
CHAPTER FOUR
_CALIFORNIA_
Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves
briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records.
But it is quickly obvious that the restless-footed doctor never moved
anywhere without being noticed. He assuredly left one heritage to his
son: an inquiring, seldom satisfied mind.
Eventually this adventurous, nervous, eager spirit settled down in Omaha
to a long, useful and almost uneventful life as a general physician. He
was much loved and quite successful, but few of the mourners who turned
out for his funeral had any idea of his questing past. He had come from
Denmark to the settlement called St. Charles-on-Bear-Lake, Idaho. He had
moved with his family from there to Fremont and on to Omaha. From Omaha
he had moved to Los Angeles and finally back again from Los Angeles to
Omaha.
His journey to Los Angeles in the middle eighties seems to have been of
little importance except that Gutzon was started definitely on his art
career. This was the father’s last gift to his son. Ever after, Gutzon
was independent and lived his own life.
The doctor, in his earnest search for religious truth, found time for
the less argumentative features of a good education. He tried to give a
firm basis in Greek and Latin classics to his son Solon Hannibal. He
sent two other sons, Gutzon and August, to St. Mary’s, a Jesuit college
in Kansas. He studied the Sanskrit Vedas and the doctrine of Mormon, and
once served as president of the Theosophical Society of Nebraska.
During his investigation of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, Russian-born
founder of the Theosophical Society of America, came touring from India.
She visited the Borglums in Omaha and sat for a portrait by young
Gutzon. This portrait hung for many years in the Borglum home, and the
brooding eyes of the lady seemed to follow the Borglums about the room
wherever they moved. Gutzon used to explain that this was a familiar
trick in painting and not hard to achieve.
Gutzon was interested in art while the family still lived in Fremont.
His schoolmates there recalled that the margins of his books were
covered with sketches and that he liked to draw maps and make
caricatures of his teachers or of local men in public life.
His teachers at St. Mary’s had readily noticed his talent. They had set
him to drawing saints and angels--subjects of which, at the time, he was
not particularly fond. He refers to his Kansas experience in an article
written in 1919:
My interest in the beautiful began before I came to St. Mary’s, but
it was due to encouragement there, and to a definitely expressed
desire on the part of two young men who were graduated the year I
left that the determination was awakened in me to treat seriously
what I had previously considered a delightful trick.
One of these men was named Murphy, and I shall never cease to
remember with profoundest gratitude his earnest talk to me as we
walked up and down during the evening recess. He talked to me of
the great masters. He got books for me. I came to know the whole
Italian school, painters and sculptors. And for years it seemed
that I knew little else. As a result I have never gone to Italy.
[Nor did he until 1931.] As I grew older I found I had a powerful
bias toward Italian art and its melodrama. But I did not want to go
there, even though I admire Italian and Grecian art more than all
else.
Murphy went out of my life and I have never heard of him since. He
may not--doubtless does not--remember what he did for me. But in
those evenings at school he set me afire. And the goal he painted
seems bigger, better, more wonderful and worthwhile now than it
did, even then. So he served. He may never have known it, but I owe
everything to his inspiring words.
The whereabouts of Murphy was never traced because his first name
apparently had been forgotten, and hundreds of Murphys passed through
St. Mary’s before it surrendered its charter and became a Jesuit
seminary sometime after the First World War. People who knew the place
in the eighties are not surprised at Gutzon’s declaration that his real
inspiration came from there. It was a small school that had grown out of
an early mission to the Potowatomi Indians, but it had few
characteristics that identify the tank-town college. Out of it in half a
century came a singular troop of famous persons, many of whom no doubt
crossed Gutzon’s path without realizing that he was a fellow alumnus.
Judges, lawyers, bishops, educators, engineers, builders, doctors,
merchants, chiefs, sailors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, musicians
and all the rest of them are included in the list. It is interesting to
note that Borglum is the institution’s only offering to sculpture.
His life at old St. Mary’s seems to have been perfectly normal. He had
several fights which he remembered ever after. He remembered, too, that
he was always in the right, which is likewise perfectly natural. His
chief exploit in fisticuffs was a wrangle with three rather hard lads in
the dining room, and there is a tradition that he won. At any rate, he
learned how to protect himself with his bare fists--a skill that he
always counted as a major asset.
He finished the academy course--the equivalent of high school--when, at
that period in the West, he was considered sufficiently adult to find a
job. Dr. James suddenly moved his family to California. Gutzon quit St.
Mary’s and went to work as a lithographer’s apprentice in Los Angeles,
and studied engraving and designing on stone. At the end of six months
he was producing work that he thought was good. That, of course, was
nothing to cause any emotional outbursts among the lithographers,
because Gutzon thought that everything he produced was good.
The young man wanted better pay, but he didn’t get it. The lithographer
said that if he stayed at his work he would someday be an experienced
hand. But Gutzon sacrificed this opportunity. He went to work for a
fresco painter, and he got more money. He rented a little studio and did
part-time work as he pleased.
On a ranch somewhere in the vicinity was Solon Borglum. Of all the
family he was closest to Gutzon because he had shown interest in art.
Gutzon eventually got him to leave the ranch and to take up the study of
painting and sculpture seriously. He contributed to Solon’s support and,
in time, to his tuition in a Cincinnati art school. But there is little
mention of this in his written record, for he was shy about such things.
California was a constant surprise to him. He was by himself and
supporting himself. He felt free and able, and he was proud of himself.
His father had gone back East with a family that in time totaled nine.
Someplace with that brood was August, Gutzon’s companion at St. Mary’s.
It was to be a long time before Gutzon would see some of his other
brothers and sisters. But no matter! California was warm in the winter,
and it didn’t cost much to get things to eat. And he kept meeting people
who interested him. While he was still with the lithographer he met an
artist named Eberlie, a really good painter of the Düsseldorf school.
Eberlie turned out beautiful ensembles that seemed perfect in color and
design. Gutzon yearned to do the same thing.
Something had awakened in him. He went on and on with his work in the
tiny studio, producing little that looked like anything, learning slowly
what was wrong. He couldn’t have quit. He was still there even after Dr.
Borglum and the family had moved back to Omaha.
Information about his early years in this paradise, however, doesn’t
come so much from him as from strangers. Charles F. Lummis, whom he knew
well and with whom he later wrangled extensively, wrote a piece about
him in _The Land of Sunshine_ (later, _Out West_) magazine in 1906. He
said:
It was a matter of nine years ago. Los Angeles was a country town,
just emerging from adobehood. This writer found a green, serious
lad belaboring canvas in a bare room on what was then Fort Street.
He had no money and not many friends. The painting he was at had
many shortcomings and showed his lack of art education. Yet there
was in them a creative breath that promised to make him heard
from....
He was born in the West and was Western in every fibre. Soon after
graduation from seminary he came to Los Angeles, and presently
began the long, hard struggle of an unbefriended artist. By and for
himself, by sheer dint of pluck and brains, he hewed his way. At
last his pictures attracted the attention of one of the few
connoisseurs then here.... A couple have been sold to Easterners at
good prices....
Gutzon, however, was not long friendless. He appears to have been
discovered by George Butler Griffin, who had married a Castilian lady
from Colombia and lived in Los Angeles. They had several gifted
children, one of whom was the mother of the actress, Bebe Daniels.
Another daughter, Mrs. Eva Griffin Turner, herself a painter, was among
Gutzon’s early heralds. She met him first in the eighties and never
forgot a detail of their meeting.
She was twelve years old at the time and for a year or more had been
sketching and painting in her own fashion with a child’s color box. She
was allowed to trail along with him and a class he was instructing, and
she never forgot what he said as the pupils gazed at a sunset beyond Los
Angeles.
“The artist,” he declared--and it seemed to her that he was talking to
himself--“The artist should approach nature with great reverence.”
[Illustration: BORGLUM WORKING IN FIRST IMPROVISED STUDIO AT STAMFORD]
[Illustration: “DR. TRUDEAU,” THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN]
He left the class for a while when he went to work with William Keith,
an artist in San Francisco. Gutzon was an extravagant admirer of Keith,
who was called the “Grand Old Man of California Painting.” He stayed in
his class for several months. During that same period he took a short
course under Virgil Williams.
Mrs. Turner vividly remembered his home-coming and how his old students
reassembled with him for outdoor sketching. But he was not long for his
old ways. He had painted a picture called “Stage Coach” and some rich
man had seen it. There was an immediate furor over the picture and
Gutzon. And so presently he went to Paris to study.
“He won prizes,” Mrs. Turner mentioned, “and he was greatly admired.”
And then we have the memory of Bob Davis, onetime editor of _Munsey’s
Magazine_ and a columnist for the New York _Evening Sun_. In his
California days he was a printer’s apprentice with a job near Gutzon’s
studio. Davis describes Gutzon’s studio thus:
His walls were the most fascinating thing in my life. They were
hung with pictures of stage coaches and horses leaping at you from
every direction. These things were painted in oils and I thought
they were the finest things in California. He also modeled in clay
and chiseled a bit in stone. During the lunch hour I visited his
studio and struck up a friendly acquaintance. He confided that his
ambition was to excel in sculpture and that he painted only to get
the sinews with which to go on.
One noon I entered his studio and found him in high spirits. He was
rigging a large canvas on the easel and making great preparations
for something important.
“I’m going to do a life-size, seated portrait of General Frémont in
military regalia,” he told me. “Mrs. Frémont is bringing him around
this afternoon for the first sitting. Come around tomorrow at lunch
time and I’ll have the figure rounded in. He has a strong face and
I think I can make a pretty good picture.”
I saw the painting from the first touch of the brush. Frémont
always came in on the arm of his wife who seemed to be the one
person he wanted to please. She brought with her a military coat
adorned with gold fringe and epaulets, a garment the great Indian
fighter wore with dignity.
And it was a good picture. Day after day it assumed more life and
grandeur until it was finished and taken away to be exhibited in an
art gallery on Spring Street. I went to see it there. And I boasted
about my acquaintance with the artist to anybody who would listen
to me.
There seems to be no doubt that the Frémont portrait was one of the most
important works of Gutzon’s youth. It got him attention and acclaim. But
more than that it got him the friendship and advice of Mrs. Frémont. The
general was nearing death when Gutzon first saw him. The portrait was
finished in 1888 and Frémont died in Washington, D. C., in 1890. But the
motherly interest of Jessie Benton Frémont in the artist went on
unbroken for many years. She helped him with letters to important people
and with advice on how and where to sell his works. Some of these
letters were still in Gutzon’s effects when he died.
The most discriminating patron of the young artist in California was,
perhaps, Spencer J. Smith. Smith bought enough canvases to give Gutzon a
start toward his training in Paris. These pictures, tenderly cared for,
are still in the possession of Smith’s widow in the same house where the
artist saw them hung some sixty years ago. As then the house, surrounded
by gardens, stands like an oasis in the heart of busy Los Angeles.
Shortly before going abroad in 1889, Gutzon married Mrs. Elizabeth
Putnam, whom the family called “Lisa,” a painter of ability and a
teacher of art. Unfortunately, the details of the romance are lacking.
Gutzon never talked about such intimate matters. His father and other
members of the family met her only after the marriage.
Lisa seems to have loved her husband. At any rate, his worries during
the early years in Europe made little impression on her--nor on him.
Yet, that there was some difficulty in their relationship is evidenced
in letters written to Gutzon by friends of both of them. A young
sculptor pupil, Arthur Putnam, who lived with them at Sierra Madre,
mentioned the vague unhappiness he sensed in Gutzon and tried delicately
to probe into the matter. But, unfortunately, only the question of
Putnam is extant. Gutzon’s reply to his letter has not been kept.
From the sculptor’s diary, a sporadic and sketchy document, it is plain
that he was passionately anxious to have a child. It is probable that
the impossibility of this was the basis of whatever trouble he had with
Lisa. Moreover, she was twenty years his senior and did not care much
for his strenuous way of life.
Such was Gutzon’s fear of hurting her, and his almost abnormal dread of
publicity in so personal a matter, that the legal tie was not broken for
several years. Few of Gutzon’s friends of later years knew of this
marriage, and his own children were in their teens before they heard of
it.
A French servant, Jeanne, who had lived with the Borglums in Europe,
accompanied Lisa to California to live with her until her death. In 1931
she wrote to the sculptor about certain of his paintings that he had
given to Lisa and closed her letter with a significant and touching
thought.
“You have two beautiful children,” she said, “and you are at last happy.
You deserve it....”
Gutzon and Lisa bought a little house among the orange groves in Sierra
Madre, near the base of the mountains back of Pasadena, not far from
where the Santa Anita race track now stands. “Lucky” Baldwin, who had a
horse ranch on land that included the site of the race track, was a
great friend and allowed Gutzon to use his horses as models. Gutzon
loved this place. His favorite subjects for sculpture were horses, and
he never tired of looking at them. Mrs. Frémont, after seeing his
equestrian casts and drawings at his studio in 1889, summed up his
future with the gift of prophecy: “The boy is spirited. Here is one
sculptor who will ride to fame on horseback!”
That wasn’t quite true, but it was near enough. Within the year he was
moving. And never thereafter did he recognize the existence of anything
that could hold him back.
CHAPTER FIVE
_OVERSEAS ART_
Gutzon left California in 1890 accompanied by his wife and forty unsold
canvases. He was fairly happy. He had made a little money, he had
learned something about art and he had a growing circle of friends in
California. On the other hand, he gave little evidence that he might be
something other than one more simple art student from the Pacific coast.
That is what makes his progress remarkable.
He stopped in Omaha to visit with his father and, almost unaccountably,
left a pile of his canvases with a Mr. Leininger, a dealer and patron of
art. It is a little difficult now to identify or appraise these works.
This is a pity, for, good or bad, expensive or cheap, they all seem to
have found somebody who loved them. They never came back to haunt his
garret, nor, for that matter, did the ones we are told he sold “at an
exhibition in New York.”
There is little known about the “exhibition in New York” except that
Mrs. Frémont, the general’s widow, had been informed of it. She wrote a
note to the one person in New York who might be able to give a lift to
the young artist. And that’s how Gutzon met Theodore Roosevelt, then
Police Commissioner, who became a lasting friend.
Through some similar effort Gutzon also met Collis P. Huntington, one
of the builders of the Southern Pacific railroad. Their encounter would
be of no interest here save for the example it gave of the young man’s
purpose and directness and of his confidence in himself. Huntington,
impressed by Gutzon’s work and charm as well as his friends, wanted to
know what he could do to help him. Gutzon shook his head and smiled.
“Nothing,” he said. “When I get through with this exhibition I’m going
to Paris to study art.”
This was something new to Huntington--as it would have been to any art
patron in New York. “I am amazed,” he said. “Almost nobody comes to see
me that doesn’t want me to do something for them.” He bowed and went
away and Gutzon never saw him again.
* * * * *
Gutzon sailed on the _Bourgogne_ with plenty of hope and the proceeds of
his art sales in Omaha and New York. He admitted that he felt proud of
himself. He had been out of St. Mary’s seven years.
In 1891 a description of him was included in a passport issued by the U.
S. Embassy in Paris and signed by Whitelaw Reid. It gave his age as
twenty-four years; stature, 5 feet, 8½ inches; forehead, broad; eyes,
gray; nose, regular; mouth, medium; chin, round; hair, dark; complexion,
dark; face, oval--and it is a matter of great puzzlement to one who knew
Gutzon for forty years. It shows the picture of a somewhat thin,
energetic young man of dark complexion, regular features, broad forehead
and no great height. Yet, not until he had read this record did an old
friend realize that Borglum’s complexion was anything save that
contrived by weather and wind. Even more astoundingly came the
revelation that Gutzon was less than six feet in height. He looked to be
taller.
Nobody seems to have found much about Gutzon’s art studies in Europe
worth recording. He passed two years in Paris, studying at the Julien
Académie, at the École des Beaux Arts and under individual masters. He
exhibited in the Old Salon as a painter in 1891 and 1892. His picture
called “Clouds” attracted some attention. In 1891, through a
deliveryman’s mistake, a piece of bronze was taken to the New Salon. It
was accepted by the New Salon, which made him a member of the society.
The notice informing him of this unexpected honor was followed by a
personal letter of congratulation written by the celebrated painter
Puvis de Chavannes, who had succeeded Meissonier as president of the
Salon. Borglum’s work of sculpture was called “Death of the Chief”
(_Mort du Chef_) and represented a horse with lowered head beside the
body of a dead Indian. A copy of the group was unveiled in Los Angeles
in 1947.
The great experience of Gutzon’s life in Paris was meeting and forming a
friendship with Auguste Rodin. He said afterward that it wasn’t a new
experience. “It was rather a feeling of coming home,” he said, and
finding something he had dimly sensed in himself and was trying to
express. Rodin at the time was having trouble with the Academicians and
would follow a long road before being acclaimed the great master the
world now recognizes. Gutzon’s attitude toward life was much the same.
He was also committed to a long quarrel with that state of mind which
accepts stereotyped standards and resists change or improvement. Gutzon
wrote this about Rodin:
I hold Rodin to be one of the great individuals of history. He was
one of the rarest souls of whom we have any record during the last
3,000 years. He is passing and there will be nothing left to speak
for this man, who stands with Phidias, Donatello, Rembrandt and
Shakespeare, but a trail of broken fancies. The nineteenth century
has made no adequate use of his incomparable gifts.
He quoted Rodin’s remarks as recorded by M. Gsell in his book about the
master:
To any real artist worthy of the name, all nature is beautiful,
because the eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read
there, as in a book, the inner truth. Not a feature deceives him.
Hypocrisy is as transparent as truth. The beauty of the Greek ideal
is ever present and there is as much loveliness in the human form
today as when Phidias immortalized his race. But this loveliness is
passing into oblivion unrecorded, because the artists of today are
blind. That is all the difference.
Whether or not we follow what Rodin said, there is no doubt that Gutzon
did. He brought home with him from Europe nothing that so continuously
affected his life. Again he writes of Rodin:
Rodin meant more. He meant what I will add. The artists have not
seen, nor felt, nor understood the present, although they still
seem to appreciate the beauty of the Greek.
Great emotion, with great understanding, again united with mastery
over medium, are indispensable in the production of masterpieces in
song, form or color. Prophetic insight, coupled with great love and
trained to be a master in one of the mediums which the human race
has invented or discovered to express itself, is lost in our day,
as Rodin laments.
This paragraph seems to sum up Gutzon Borglum’s position on the matter
of art expression, and it explains his reaction to much of what is
called Modern Art. Years afterward he augmented it with another bit of
learning out of his two years of study in France. At a meeting in honor
of the French during the First World War he said:
France has been a foster mother and I shall always remember her, as
Hugo put it, as my second birthplace, because to be “educated in
another place is to be reborn there.”
So I was born in France at Auvers-sur-Oise. Here at Auvers I had a
quiet little home and for three years grubbed and labored with my
stubborn Americanism.
Finally I returned to America after having tried while there to
acquire French art. And then it came to me in an hour. I shall
never forget that hour. It came to me that the value and greatness
of French influence are in their superiority and their devotion to
the “inspiration” and not special concern for technique.
France has taught me respect for the sincere effort of other men,
courage in my own, and that originality lies in being true to one’s
self.
I learned that what is known as “French Art” is not the art which
has placed France as art mistress of the modern world. Rather, it
is Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Chavannes. It is not the Parisian
article, any more than it was Falguière or any other dozens of
masters of the technique, but Rodin and Dalou who helped French
sculpture to its high place in our century and fixed France with
the ancients.
Gutzon was not a pupil of Rodin, but he was a frequent visitor in his
studio. He used to tell of watching Rodin make quantities of water-color
sketches of his model, who was allowed to sit at ease and to change her
position as she wished. He gave Gutzon some of these sketches, which
have been preserved. They are inscribed “A mon ami, Borglum” and signed
“Rodin.” Letters from him across the years have also been kept. During
the First World War, when Paris was being bombed, Gutzon invited Rodin
to come to the United States and use his studio in Stamford. Rodin
declined and said he had decided to find refuge in Rome.
During this early period in Europe, Gutzon also passed an interesting
year in Spain about which his American friends seem to have known very
little. As a record of his stay, many spirited sketches of bullfights
are still extant. One of them is owned by O. R. McGuire, the art
connoisseur of Washington, D. C. He also made a copy of Velasquez’
portrait of the court jester, and a wood carving done by Gregory Pardo,
pupil of Michelangelo, in the Toledo cathedral. His studies of Cortez’
conquest in Mexico and the tragic fate of the Aztecs made a deep
impression on him.
He prepared background sketches for a large painting which he started on
his return to California. It depicted the gray dawn on the broken
causeway of Mexico City when the soldiers of Cortez were floundering
against the Aztecs in the gap. The episode, known to history as _noche
triste_, was a subject that haunted Gutzon through his life. But
although he first planned his picture of it for exhibition at the
Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, he seems never to have
finished it.
Other sidelights of his year in Spain are found in a letter to Mrs. J.
Seddon of Hollywood who bought a painting labeled “Don T., Toledo, Sept.
1892.” She had written to him for information about it, and his reply to
her query was this:
I am very much interested in the picture, and I have wondered what
had become of it. It ought to be in good condition, for it was
honestly and well painted.
It is the portrait of a Catholic priest, Don Tomas, pronounced
To-mass. He was the canon in charge of the great cathedral in
Toledo, a remarkable little man, very kindly and friendly, but he
belonged to the period of Philip II. He was extremely fond of
bullfights. He and I attended them regularly.
I first started to paint him smoking a cigarette, but when he saw
it, he threw the cigarette away and said it was undignified for a
priest. He is sitting in the outer room, the library room, which
forms the entrance to the Council Chamber where some 250,000 more
or less heretics and Protestants were tried, burned, exiled or
condemned to the galleys. The chamber beyond was like a court,
surrounded with seats against the wall in which the judges sat.
Into the middle of the room, the victim, or the accused, was
brought.
I don’t remember much of the carving of the background, but the
room was richly carved by Gregory Pardo, pupil of Michelangelo. The
work was done between 1549 and 1551, and this particular chamber is
called the Sala Capitula and was executed under orders of the
Archbishop of Toledo and in the reign of Philip II.
Gutzon returned from Spain to California in 1893 and brought a bit of
the Old World with him. He arrived to find a matter seemingly awaiting
his attention, as most matters did--the restoration of California’s
Spanish missions. It cannot be said that Gutzon Borglum ever came to
lavish his indignation over affairs with which he was unfamiliar, and
admittedly he was indignant over no small number or variety of them
before he died. In this instance he found a battlefield made to order,
because he had been studying the old records of the Spanish missions in
Spain.
His argument about the course and methods of the restoration became his
first recorded controversy, and was dragged out and redebated every time
he had a disagreement with somebody about something else. But, for all
that, it wasn’t much of a fight.
Charles Lummis, the editor, was at the head of a group of Californians
interested in restoring the ruined missions. He appears to have been
somewhat irritated when Gutzon came home from Spain and demanded an
important share in the work. The reconstruction plans, the sculptor
declared blithely, were prodigiously wrong. Incensed by this, Lummis
wrote several angry letters to Gutzon. Gutzon, never at a loss for
words, replied in kind. Unfortunately, some steps in the correspondence
seem to be lacking. There is no indication of how this battle came to be
resolved; however, the strong language presently ceased. Gutzon got his
way about the methods that should be pursued in restoring the buildings,
and he and Lummis became close friends. It appears that many of
Borglum’s arguments turned out that way.
Gutzon’s most important comment on the California missions never saw the
light until some time around 1927, when he was discussing the missions
of Texas. He wrote:
In the winter of 1893-1894 we organized in California the
Association for the Preservation of the Franciscan Missions,
founded or built by the followers of Junípero Serra. In preparing
for that work I made a trip to Spain and spent a year there
studying the Spanish civilization and securing the records of
Junípero Serra’s work in the New World, some original publications
and the records of the building of the missions.
On my return I recovered and re-established the boundaries of
perhaps the most beautiful ruins in America, San Juan Capistrano,
thirty or forty miles from Los Angeles and the only mission I hold
that is comparable to the San Jose Mission near San Antonio, Texas.
With the help of Indians who carried the dirt on their backs, I
removed the debris from the dome of the main church which had
fallen in during the earthquake of 1812, destroying some life.
Under the debris we found diamond-shaped flagging that formed the
floor. I made careful drawings of all the buildings, the pilasters
and cornices in place, cut beautifully by the Spaniards, much of it
of limestone.
In this work we came suddenly face to face with the very serious
question of how far we could go in the matter of
reconstruction--what constituted human rights in the work of
restoration, retouching and rebuilding, how much of our work would
immediately become vandalism--how far could we go without meddling
with the form and design and the actual work of the men who built
these fine structures. After much debate, the kind of debate that
took place in Rome many years later, it was determined that we must
do nothing more than save and preserve the work as we found it.
Where we found a stone that clearly had fallen out and where it was
recognizable, we might replace it. But to rebuild or in any way
reconstruct or restore what we conceived might have been the
character of the building at the time, all agreed would be
vandalism. There is no question that the Franciscan missions are
still a live subject of interest because they are not buried under
modern debris of cement and make-believe restoration. The late
Charles F. Lummis, president of the association since 1894, was
adamant in his resolution against any meddling with the ancient
methods of the work.
Of his art studies during this formative period Gutzon wrote:
As I became acquainted with the masterpieces in the fine arts, I
soon became aware that a landscape painter could not draw or paint
horses, cattle or sheep; that a cow painter could not paint a
convincing landscape equal to his cow painting as a matter of
creative production. The same applied to figure painting. I made up
my mind that I should master each of these subjects, and I began at
once. As I painted and drew almost exclusively in my first twenty
years of art work, I drew and painted incessantly dogs, cattle,
horses, portraits, figures, and never had to turn to a fellow
artist and ask him to draw my figure or cow or horse or sheep.
Reflection on this caused me to note that most men, as well as
artists, were one-track minded--that the average layman knew
nothing of art, nor the place in civilization held by the masters
of the fine arts, or even that civilization in its crudest forms
was solely the product of the arts, or that the reaching urge in
all civilization was the expressed mood of nature, seeking through
them an outlet.
The reaching, enveloping soul of musical harmonies is the prelude
to an understanding of the creative impulse. And again, who is
insensible to the tremendous power of words? The marriage of words?
The Milky Way of words which language conjures up and creates? Who
has not been conscious of the strange beauty of words ancient as
Lancelot--of heart, love, soul loneliness, craving and conflict?
And as these thoughts grew on me I became aware that the circle of
any human group was too small to live deeply within; that all moods
of life were something alive in the cosmic in which the creative
mind moves in limitless orbit, sensitive to every impression; that
the larger the spoken language, the greater, more comprehending
became one’s expression.
Gutzon, in this period, was no finished sculptor. He did some work with
stone and metal--but sporadically--for some three years. He painted
tirelessly. He was back at Sierra Madre, and life was placid and
pleasant.
His friends made much of the Baldwin ranch. Mrs. Frémont had already
sent to him there, before he went abroad, young Philip Rollins, who
became his lifelong friend. Rollins was much interested in horses and in
pictures. He had seen a painting of Gutzon’s in Mrs. Frémont’s
possession which he said was worth a thousand Corots. “I have never
looked so far into the sky in any painting,” he said. And he brought
that admiration into his friendship.
In San Francisco Gutzon had a little trouble with the estate of Leland
Stanford. Mr. Stanford, during his lifetime, had ordered three pictures
from Gutzon, who was then in Paris. One of these was a small canvas
priced at $500, accepted and paid for. The others were larger. Stanford
accepted them but died before any payment had been made.
Rollins brought suit against the estate for Borglum, but the claim was
rejected. The widow declared that there was no written contract. Mrs.
Frémont was much incensed and wrote Gutzon a very gossipy letter about
the worth of widows who needed written contracts.
In 1896 Borglum left California again, expecting to settle in England.
His last act before leaving was to model a bust of his dear friend and
patron Mrs. Frémont. A photograph of the bust is the frontispiece of
Mrs. Phillip’s biography of Mrs. Frémont and is credited to “John Gutzon
Borglum, 27 years old, painter and sculptor, recently returned from
Spain, following his triumphs in the Paris salons of 1891 and 1892.”
What Borglum thought of this credit he does not say. He was headed for a
permanent berth in a foreign country, and for once he didn’t seem to be
quite certain of where he was going.
CHAPTER SIX
_ENGLAND_
There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember
“the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the
histories point out briefly that they were with us. Depression had begun
to spread in 1890. The banking house of Baring, badly entangled with
Argentine investments, closed its doors. The British began to dump
American securities. The gold reserve began to disappear. And, in
general, that is how things went for five or six years.
Nowhere in Gutzon’s record of the times is there much mention of panic
or money shortage. This may be a good place to record that in London he
did show some concern about dollars--what they were and how they were
kept. One gathers, indirectly, that he liked to be working. That he
really enjoyed the pleasure of others in the things that he painted or
carved was fairly obvious. Against that, he knew all that was to be
known about hunger. His movement to England at a time when living in
California was beginning to look difficult may indicate that somebody
was taking thought.
Life in England appears to have been no complete idyll. Gutzon himself
was quite happy. There was work for him to do and he had plenty of
English friends, but one gathers that Mrs. Borglum found the exile a bit
painful.
In 1897 Jessie Frémont wrote this to him:
If you come away or go away from London, I shall be sorry and
disappointed in you. English people _demand_ stability. And there
is to be no talk even of preference for any other place. The time
will surely come when you can put your preferences into execution,
but it does chill and turn away interest to have a vanishing
prospect.
Mrs. Borglum has too much sense and far too much affection for you
not to see that this is for your true interest. You cannot re-cast
a national mold and England is set to its “slow-and-sure,” sure
being its complement to slow. I do not blame Mrs. Borglum’s
American impatience, but “stay where the money is.”
The artist’s prevailing mood during 1897 seems to have been one of
profound melancholy and disillusionment regarding Europe. He kept a
diary at this time which, with his letters from Mrs. Frémont, is the
chief source of information concerning his life in England.
Mrs. Frémont’s letters gave him great cheer and comfort. General Frémont
had an artistic and sensitive nature with frequent ups and downs of
mood. Circumstances beyond his control had ruined his dreams for
developments in California. The United States government itself had
taken land from him for war purposes in 1861, and he had never been paid
for it. His widow was still hoping to have her claim settled thirty-six
years later. She knew the value of money, the need for patience and
diplomacy; and she could sympathize with a struggling artist in language
that he could understand.
Gutzon’s diary opens with an indication that he needed the sympathy. He
begins:
Now, at last! I feel some--enough--desire to make notes of steps
and landings in this, this curious life that we are doomed for a
certain time to bear. I must be honest with myself--else why
record? Lies, trivialities and the daily doings of the body are not
worth thinking of much less making memoranda of. But it’s not
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of E. K. Edwards_
“GENERAL SHERIDAN”
This statue is in Washington, D.C.]
[Illustration: “WARS OF AMERICA” MODEL]
for the public--not for one single soul. For I am alone and who
would understand?
Six years ago I said to myself, “I’ll be great at thirty, or
never.” I am thirty. I have had the disturbing pleasure of being
called “master” by the French critics and some Americans, yet at
the moment I cannot spend sixpence without wondering where the next
one will come from. Art is not self-sustaining until it becomes
commercially valuable, and a man is not to be counted until he is
in popular demand.
Gutzon’s reach was far beyond his grasp, and his Heaven was far away.
Undoubtedly he was extravagant. He loved beauty and costly things, rare
books, rich stuff and tapestries. But the problem of where the next
dollar was coming from began to worry him less and less. He got big
commissions in America, in England and all through his life. His trouble
was not that he failed to make money but that he never learned how to
keep it.
He never seemed to know the value of a dollar, nor did he care. His real
extravagance was in putting into commissioned work added richness of
detail or extra figures that he thought would add to the effect. That
was why he rarely came out of an undertaking with any great profit to
himself and was hounded by debt all his life.
He rarely spent money on his person, except for small lovely things that
he could carry in his pocket. He often had holes in his shoes, and his
unpressed clothes were always a distress to his friends. To emphasize
the sacrifices of a struggling artist, he used to tell of buying baked
potatoes on the street corners of London to keep his hands warm. The
potato-buying story was undoubtedly true, but it was hardly a record of
a typical condition.
Building was his chief delight--always. In London, after he had lived
for months in a studio apartment in West Kensington, he rented a villa
in St. John’s Wood and proceeded to make repairs and additions to it,
regardless of cost. The villa had a rose garden, and he frequently
talked of how he mowed the lawn early in the morning before starting
the day’s work. All his life he enjoyed the work of beautifying his
surroundings. During the years he built at least six other studios and
houses for himself without ever being satisfied. His ideal home, which
he was always ready to describe in detail and with feeling, was a
fabulous sort of place that existed only in his restless mind.
In his diary he mentions having gone shopping with the painter Frank
Brangwyn to consider taking over Sir Edward Leighton’s studio. They
decided it was too pretentious. In Paris he rented a studio in the
Boulevard Arago. He still found some of his old friends and business
acquaintances in the neighborhood when he visited it in 1931, thirty
years after he had moved out of it. It was a place of rare memories. He
had fitted the little stove with a red isinglass front, and he had
burned a solitary candle in it in those freezing days to give the
illusion of rosy warmth.
In Gutzon’s reminiscences it seems always to have been cold in the
neighborhood of Boulevard Arago. A sculptor, living in one of the
garrets with which the region seems to have been plentifully supplied,
fashioned a masterpiece. It was still in the wet clay when the
thermometer dropped below freezing. The artist was frantic. In the
bitter cold of night he began to fear for his statue. He got up and
wrapped it in rags of clothing and finally in his only blanket to keep
the ice away. He died of the cold. But the statue for which he froze to
death now reposes in warm, serene quarters in the Luxembourg.
Frank Brangwyn, some of whose work may be seen in Rockefeller Plaza in
New York City, was the one artist who made a deep impression on Gutzon
in England. The Borglum diary is filled with notations such as this:
“November 19, 1897--Short half hour with Brangwyn.... He belongs to
_art_ and will do work that will live.” And the feeling was mutual. In
later years Brangwyn wrote, “I admire those strong virile things of
yours. It is like a strong sea breeze on a hot and listless day to see
your honest works....” Each foresaw for the other a greatness that he
could not hope for himself.
The sculptor met Ruskin briefly and was so impressed with his features
that he made a statuette of him. The figure is seated with a rug over
the knees and was one of Borglum’s most successful pieces. A copy of it
is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
He also met George Bernard Shaw, although little of art figured in their
association. In a letter years later he mentioned Shaw’s attendance at
meetings of what he called the “Kingsley Society.” “This,” wrote Gutzon,
“was a lively debating society and we visited once a week at one
another’s homes. I debated with Shaw on ‘The Ignorance of Educating Me.’
I forget which side. Shaw likes to play smart, but at heart he is a
serious, lovable, great man.”
Gutzon may have been right about most of these points, but he made an
error in naming the club. It was probably the Fabian Club. Shaw denied
that he had ever heard of the “Kingsley Society,” and mentioned that for
that matter he had hardly heard about Kingsley.
Gutzon remained in England until the turn of the century which,
considering the intensely modern impact of his life, seems like a long
time ago. The days of quick success had become fewer in 1897, and they
lessened rapidly thereafter. There was trouble on the horizon and the
people of England were uneasy and crotchety.
In the controversy preceding the Boer War, which broke out in 1899, he
was loudly critical of the British for their oppression of “the intrepid
band in the Transvaal,” and freely forecast that they would pay for it
dearly. And they did. General Baden-Powell, another of Borglum’s
friends, was besieged with his troops in Mafeking, a little town north
of Kimberley. There, holding what appeared to be a hopeless position,
they came closer to starvation daily while England prayed.
Years afterward, in an article about the Boy Scouts, which Baden-Powell
founded, Borglum recalled the turning point of that war:
I was in London. I was sitting in the New Globe theater. Duse, the
magnificent, was giving one of her superb performances. And during
one of the curtains the director came onto the stage with an
announcement.
At first he said, “I hope that everyone will remain in his seat. I
hope that you will be quiet and let the play go on.” The audience
was dead still, trying to understand. And then the man said:
“Mafeking has been relieved.”
The play ended right there. I never saw a sedate audience so
completely surrender to joy. Believe it or not, every man
everywhere in the theater kissed the others, kissed the women,
shouted and cried. They poured into the streets and jumped up and
down. They crawled onto the tops of buses and danced. And then and
there Mafeking became historic.
Mafeking had been relieved, and that relieved the heart of Great
Britain. The siege, with General Cronje commanding the Boers, had
lasted about six months. It was lifted by Lord Methuen and sixteen
thousand troops, and it brought a new day to England....
Gutzon’s work in England was widely talked of though little of it now
remains. One of his principal commissions came to him after he had left
the country, and the work was executed in the United States. A somewhat
incongruous product of the Thirty-eighth Street studio, it was a series
of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England, nearing
completion with advertising accompaniments that said it would be the
finest in the British Isles. The order, placed by the Midland Railway
Company, owners of the hotel, was remarkable in that it broke what had
long been considered an untouchable precedent. It was the first large
order for fine art work ever placed by England in America, and brought
the painter wide publicity at a time when it seems to have been
considerably needed. Twelve panels were included in the series, and the
Midland Railway Company agreed to pay $25,000, a sum almost incredible
in those hard times; but the fee was payable on delivery.
The Midland’s art committee knew what it was getting. In 1898 Borglum
had painted a series of panels for the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, another
property of the railroad. They were a graceful, joyous group, and Gutzon
admitted in his diary that he was a little proud of them.
They represented the four seasons with lithe, slender maidens as the
central figures. They were pleasant-looking and the critics liked them.
For “Spring,” they danced with garlands of flowers, the trees and
background shrubbery in harmony with pale spring colors. For “Summer,”
the same girls were shown relaxed on the bank of a bubbling pool with
young Pan playing his pipes for them. The “Autumn” panel pictured them
dancing out the juice of the grapes. And in “Winter,” Pan, now old and
gray, sat on a bleak shore gazing at the hardly visible wraiths of the
maidens as they pirouetted away over the ocean. These panels are still
extant.
The group of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester was finished in
1903, and it seems to have pleased the critics even more than it did
Borglum, who admitted that he was pleased with it.
The central figure in a panel twenty-seven feet high showed Sir Lancelot
escorting Guenevere to King Arthur’s court. Lancelot, “the chief of
knights and darling of the court,” and Queen Guenevere, the loveliest of
the ladies, were in the foreground on horseback, traveling through a
leafy English wood. Mounted men in armor followed at a distance.
The eleven paintings that accompanied Lancelot and Guenevere back to
England were scenes from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_--Queen Titania
asleep with Oberon’s love potion in her eyes; Titania’s encounter with
Bottom, the weaver; her adventures with Quince, the carpenter,
Starveling, the tailor, Snout, the tinker and Flute, the
bellows-mender--all in a fine, fantastic humor. Gutzon was still at work
on this group on June 30, 1903, which was the day before he started for
England to make delivery and supervise installation. He was very ill
with typhoid fever that year, and his cash had disappeared. Friends
about the studio took up a collection to pay his steamship fare to
Liverpool.
Borglum’s last years in England were marked by a tremendous emotional
depression. His journal, in places, becomes almost incoherent as he
attempts to analyze mental suffering. He found relief in work, and he
worked incessantly.
He painted murals for private homes and made the illustrations for at
least two books, _The Spanish Main_, with pictures of old war galleys,
and _King Arthur_, with especially fine drawings of oak trees a thousand
years old. He had some success as a portrait artist. He painted the
likenesses of a large number of the aristocracy at whose country houses
he was entertained. One of these was the portrait of Lord Mowbray, which
was exhibited at Liverpool with the Lord Mayor taking part in the
ceremonies. He mentions in his diary the painting of the composer,
Clarence Lucas, who thought it a good portrait “that possibly might also
be a work of art.”
There is also some evidence that during the late nineties he was doing
more and more work with sculpture. In his journal he mentions a lost
piece, “The Return of the Boer,” which brought considerable attention to
his carving. It showed a man on horseback returning to his ruined home.
He was a figure of complete dejection, his shoulders drooping, his head
bent down. His rifle was before him across the saddle. The horse was
sniffing at the burned bits that remained of a house. The statue brought
plenty of criticism and discussion but no money. The Parisian who cast
the group said it was _trop personnel_ to be a financial success.
Gutzon’s only copy of it was borrowed by the dancer Loie Fuller for an
exhibition and later left by her in a New York bank as security for a
loan. Presumably it lies forgotten in some vault.
Another bronze group, “Apaches Pursued,” had greater public appeal and
was exhibited in several shows in Europe. It was decidedly popular in
Turin, and a copy was bought for Kaiser Wilhelm II. It shows two horses
in full gallop, one of the riders holding to a third man whom he has
lifted off the ground in his flight. The critics were pleased by its
composition, which was as striking as its animation.
Oddly enough, this group came back into public view in 1946 in an art
dealer’s window in Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. It was found to
have been purchased by a Philadelphian at an auction sale of the effects
of “Diamond Jim Brady.” A copy made from this is now in the Witte Art
Museum, San Antonio, Texas.
All in all, in 1900 Gutzon Borglum was one of the most popular artists
in England. He lived in a comfortable villa, he had plentiful work, and
what he did was enthusiastically received. And mental dejection did not
keep him from having a rather full and varied social life.
In a letter to Mrs. Frémont he mentioned meeting a Madame Helen Bricka,
who brought his work to the attention of the Duke and Duchess of Teck of
whose household she was a member. Gutzon visited the Duke and Duchess
and so met, and threw into the air, a little boy who grew up to be the
Duke of Windsor and, for a time, the King of England.
Through Madame Bricka he was summoned by Queen Victoria to bring his
work, both painting and sculpture, to Windsor Castle for an exhibition.
But for a young man born on the shore of Bear Lake, Idaho, the
invitation was not clear enough. One may be permitted a bit of
speculation as to what might have happened if he had caught the
meaning--if he had paraded with his work under royal patronage before
the aristocracy of Great Britain. But it is futile thought. He sent his
art to Windsor for an exhibition, but he never met the queen. It never
occurred to him that a queen might want to see him.
He had a very successful one-man show at Macmillan’s in Bond Street,
and he made many friends in England and France, some of them American
artists. Some of these appeared later in his life and in his
correspondence in the United States. One of them was Carl Sobieski,
descendant of the famous Polish general. Another, who noted his
experience entertainingly, was the writer R. M. Eassie. He told Gutzon
of hearing of his connection with the Angels of St. John the Divine, in
the heart of Africa, thirty-five miles from the nearest whites.
One of Gutzon’s last entries in his London journal tells of a party in
1901 at his home, “Harlestone Villa,” in St. John’s Wood. It is worth
mentioning in that it honored Isadora Duncan and marked her debut as a
dancer.
Gutzon had known the Duncans in California. Isadora’s father had
recently been in London and was on his way back to America when his
ship, the _Mohegan_ foundered off the Irish coast. The sculptor had gone
from England to take charge of Duncan’s body and to see that he was
properly buried.
Isadora, her brother and sister had come from California after their
father’s death. August Borglum, Gutzon’s brother, was a guest at the
party and always recalled the impression Miss Duncan made as she danced
out from the studio onto the lawn, scattering red rose petals that she
had been gathering in the villa garden. Isadora, Gutzon observed,
brought an active revival of memories from home. “The fresh western
breeze that came with her,” he said, filled him with nostalgia.
Very likely it did. Shortly afterward he had gone over to Paris and was
standing idly on a street corner. It was a day like any other in his
life except that he had had a brief meeting with a casual American
tourist in a café, and that there was an unusual amount of cash in his
pocket.
Suddenly there came to him an irresistible urge to return to the United
States--to go home. All his pent-up irritation over spiritual
repressions and his grievance over decadent art conditions in Europe
surged over him at once. He leaped at a passing
[Illustration: “ABRAHAM LINCOLN”
This statue, in front of the Newark courthouse, was Borglum’s own
favorite.]
[Illustration: GUTZON AND MARY BORGLUM]
cab, offered double fare if he could get to the Gare du Nord in time for
the boat train ... and so, presently, he had passed through Cherbourg
and was on a ship headed for America.
This ended an era in his life and marked, definitely, the beginning of
another. He was never to return to Europe except for the placing of work
he had produced in the United States.
CHAPTER SEVEN
_QUIET IN NEW YORK_
The first thing Gutzon Borglum did in New York was to join--or, perhaps,
originate--a movement whose object was to make American art distinctive
and national. This was a bit out of the ordinary. Gutzon, so far as he
had expressed himself, hadn’t much concern about American art. What he
had seen of it annoyed him, and he didn’t intend to give much time to
its promotion. He was presently to return to England ... but somehow he
could never find time to book a passage.
In the early days of the twentieth century his journal mentions, and
many of us unfortunately remember, European and classic influences were
dominant in art. Our public buildings were often Greek or Roman temples
adorned with sculpture right out of Homer’s mythology. In New York the
extreme example of this tendency was a building erected by some art
society on Lexington Avenue which was decorated across the front with a
frieze from the Parthenon in Athens. The New York version of the frieze
was so exact as to include all the mutilations that the march of
hundreds of years had inflicted on the original.
Artists--painters, sculptors, musicians alike--had to have studied
abroad before they could get a hearing in America. But, unfortunately,
most of the people who patronized art learned about the subject from a
few simple home rules. They were breaking out of the awesome,
gewgaw-enveloped homes of the eighties and nineties and moving into
chateaus imported by the boatload from France. But there is no record
that any art dealer ever succeeded in selling an American house to some
customer in Paris.
It often happens that a convert to a religious sect is more fanatical in
his beliefs than one born into the fold. Gutzon’s father had come to the
United States from Denmark to escape the ancient fetters of thought, and
Gutzon himself had become thoroughly disillusioned by his years abroad.
He considered America to be the last stronghold of freedom for the
spirit. And he believed that the time had come for the country to
express itself culturally. He had a theory that many people are born
Americans though their physical birthplace might have been Denmark or
Poland or Timbuktu. He insisted that although America was comparatively
a young nation, the significance of her discovery, colonization and
development offered rich sources for the painter or sculptor seeking
decorative themes. He wanted architects to stop copying classic models.
He was a great admirer of Louis Sullivan’s individual art, and he
understood it. Once, driving through a small town in Ohio that he had
never seen before, he suddenly stopped the car and went back to look at
a red-brick building. “Built by Sullivan,” he said. And so it was.
The subject of the Prix de Rome scholarships, in his opinion, was
debatable. He thought it a mistake to send talented young artists to
Rome during their most formative period and expose them to the
overpowering influence of the great masters. He lived his theory, for he
did not see Italy until late in life, rather than lose his individuality
in the presence of those giants, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Donatello,
whom he deeply revered.
Borglum came to America a sculptor. He painted very little after 1901.
Among his first direct contacts with American art methods on the
Atlantic coast was a competition for an equestrian monument to General
Grant to be placed in Washington. He devoted a great deal of time and
thought to the making of a model and worked it out in fine detail. Grant
and two other officers on horseback were mounted on a high pedestal,
Grant a little higher than the other two. Around the base of the
pedestal and extending out on both sides was a rich frieze of figures
more than life-size, showing events leading to the Civil War, the
struggle itself and the period of reconstruction.
Gutzon was told afterward that Augustus Saint-Gaudens, all-powerful in
the selection, had thrown out the model because he felt that no sculptor
in America could carve so elaborate a frieze and that he suspected
foreign help.
Subsequent steps in the contest are interesting as an indication of how
memorials were sometimes produced in those days. The jury could not
decide which of the two remaining models was best, so each sculptor was
asked to submit a second model. It happened that Solon Borglum had made
the horse on which the principal figure was riding in both models. The
two sculptors called for help and Solon said that he would do what he
could for whichever one got to his studio first.
The disappointed contestant went to Gutzon and asked him to provide a
horse, but Gutzon refused to compete with his brother. As it turned out,
the one who received Solon’s help a second time was given the
commission.
Neither of the brothers thought that Gutzon’s unwillingness to enter a
contest was anything but routine. Solon and he were devoted to each
other. Gutzon had called him away from ranch life to develop an art
sense that became remarkable. Gutzon had instructed him personally and
had helped to finance his career in Cincinnati. He believed himself
personally responsible for giving Solon a chance at a sculptor’s career;
he could never consider himself free to accept any commission in which
he thought that his brother might have an interest.
Only once again, in Cuba, did Gutzon Borglum enter a competition. He
steadfastly refused to accept attractive offers on the ground that the
principle was wrong. A sculptor, he said, should be selected for his
known ability to do what was asked of him and should be allowed to offer
a variety of designs, if necessary, until he produced one that was
satisfactory to the committee. He declared flatly that it was unjust to
ask an artist to risk his best effort on a gamble, to ask him to spend
his time, energy and money on something that might only be thrown away.
It is interesting to note that his ultimate declaration on this subject
was made after his Cuban experience. That was something that he failed
to talk about.
The question of talented artists losing their identity in work for other
artists, sometimes of less or even mediocre ability, was a grievous one
to him and caused many heartaches with which he frankly sympathized.
Often talented artists could not even _get_ a job in another studio, no
matter what their ability. Such a one was Paul Nocquet.
Paul Nocquet was a Belgian of real ability who had known Gutzon in Paris
and had come over to be near him. Eventually he lost his life in a
balloon ascension which he had undertaken in sheer despair. In an open
letter to the _Evening Sun_ he called attention to the humiliating role
played by unrecognized artists in this country, all of which gave Gutzon
Borglum new voice. Borglum wrote:
I have read with astonishment and pleasure the letter by Paul
Nocquet pleading for the sculptor’s art in America. It is no
exaggeration to say that a large part of the sculpture in this
country is produced under false pretenses. Much of it is from the
studios of celebrities, the labor, the thought and even the basic
ideas of poor devils who are paid so much a day.
That the abuses Mr. Nocquet speaks of exist, there is abundance of
proof. A glamor has been thrown about sculpture here that is not
deserved. For a century the bulk of us have ambled along timidly,
following a single lead, sniffing the trail, only to assure our
questioning souls that we were on the beaten path. We fear a new
lead. We placard our homes with safe, old sentiments. We permit no
passion, no action, nothing to disturb the even tenor of a
puritanism that has hardly warmth enough or blood enough to produce
great sculpture and that rarely ventures beyond the meaningless
nudes that disgrace our museums.
If this were not so, Mr. Nocquet would have no complaint. If
character and individuality were even tolerated in American
sculpture, our production by proxy would cease in a fortnight. Let
the people have what they feel the need of. There is something deep
in the souls of all of us which seeks the real thing. Then our
ideals, our lives and our passions will be expressed in our art.
When that is done each man will express himself, and a new value
will be placed on every work of art.
Such outspoken criticism inevitably brought from the caves all the winds
of controversy. They merged in a tempest in 1908 when the sculptor wrote
in _The Craftsman_:
With the passing of Saint-Gaudens the standard of good work was
taken from us.... Not _great_ work, for he was not a great artist
like Rimmer, Rodin, or Meunier, nor was he a great poet. Nor was he
a great technician like Falguière or a dozen other Frenchmen. But
he had a quality that persisted to the end and wrought, with few
exceptions, something beautiful, often noble, something that left
the whole world better because it was made. He gave us Farragut (in
Madison Square) and one or two other great statues. Then he dropped
to the architect’s standard, the lay figure, and there he remained.
Curiously his Farragut contains figures in the base that appear to
have been made years after the figure of the Admiral, so quickly
does he seem to have lost his youthful spontaneity.
Saint-Gaudens’ sense of refinement led to conventions, and his lack
of imagination to a repetition of these conventions. Another
thing--I do not recall in all his work one single group of creation
that may be called a “pipe dream.” In other words, I do not know of
one work of Saint-Gaudens that was not commissioned, that was not
suggested to him and produced for another.
I speak thus because I believe few people realize how little
sculptural art is shown in this country that is purely the output
of the sculptor’s imagination, produced creatively because the
sculptor has something he must say. Saint-Gaudens, master that he
was, was a great workman; he was not a creator. It is but natural
that his following should, in their effort to catch his spirit,
acquire only his style. His reserve becomes in their hands more
reserved, his architectural and impersonal manner more mannered,
and we have a pseudoclassic school which for dull mediocrity is
without a rival in the whole field of art.
This analysis of another man’s work did incalculable harm to Gutzon’s
position in New York art circles. The controversy became nationwide when
the newspaper headlines announced, “Borglum Attacks Saint-Gaudens.”
Partisans joined the argument with more zeal than discretion, and the
wrangling went on without end.
Another controversy that swirled about George Gray Barnard and his
undraped figures on the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg caught up
Gutzon in its progress. Borglum had a wholehearted respect for Barnard
and took up cudgels in his defense, thus further antagonizing the
“sourdoughs,” as he called the Academicians.
Long afterward when Barnard was excluded from his studio on the Billings
estate, which had been bought for a public park, Gutzon offered him his
Stamford studio to work in and, at Barnard’s request, appeared before
the New York City Board of Aldermen in an effort to iron out his
troubles with the city.
Barnard’s “Two Natures” and Gutzon’s “Mares of Diomedes” were the first
pieces of American art purchased for the Metropolitan Museum. Of the
former, the sculptor wrote:
“The ‘sourdoughs’ took ‘Two Natures,’ perhaps the finest marble in its
dimensions by an American in our country, and as quickly and quietly as
possible relegated it to the basement. Not long after my ‘Mares of
Diomedes’ followed the same descent.”
His antipathy to the National Academy was based on his observation that
there was too little fraternity about it and always a lack of _esprit de
corps_. It followed too much the general tendency of all academic
organizations against anything new, he said. It was probably his
undiplomatic manner of expressing his convictions that aroused the
enmity of the older set, who successfully kept him out of any monumental
work in New York City.
One grievance the younger artists did have. There was no place where
they could exhibit their work. In harmony with Gutzon’s desire to
establish a fairly representative American art was his crusade to obtain
a fair deal for young American artists. In 1912 he helped organize a new
Association of American Painters and Sculptors which would provide
exhibition space for new and unknown youngsters.
A novel feature of the constitution of the new society was that it
declared against juries. Every member was entitled to exhibit; only the
amount was to be decided by a committee. A certain amount of space was
reserved to invited work and no work not invited might be shown. Should
any member wish to invite the work of a nonmember and fail to get the
approval of the committee, he was permitted to give up some of his own
space to the stranger.
Gutzon was delegated to publish this statement of the principles of the
organization:
We have joined together for the purpose of holding exhibitions of
our own work and the best procurable examples of contemporary art,
without relation to school, size, medium or nationality.
We shall make our exhibitions as interesting as they will be
representative of American and European Art activities.
We have no canons but honesty and ability to express one’s self. We
do not believe that any artist has ever discovered or will discover
the only way to create beauty.
Unfortunately, at its first exhibit the association was split on the
very rock that was to have been its bulwark--the representative quality
of the work. This was the exhibition, at the Armory, made famous by the
“Nude Descending a Staircase,” in which neither the nude nor the
staircase made much difference. The painting was an orgy of color and
distortion.
Gutzon had no quarrel with that. He lived by Voltaire’s principle: “Sir,
I absolutely deny the truth of your statement, but I shall defend to the
death your right to make it.” What hurt and angered him was that, by
election, he was responsible for the exhibit, and that the committee had
rejected work which he had approved and had accepted work that he had
not even seen. Their excuse was, “We don’t care about the constitution.
We are trying to get up an exhibition.” Sadly the sculptor resigned
saying that no other course remained to him.
He came home to Stamford profoundly dejected. After a silent dinner he
remarked: “I wish I had a million dollars in cash.”
“What in the world for?” Mrs. Borglum inquired.
“I’d shut all those struggling young painters in a room and throw it at
them,” he replied. “It would keep them while they were hunting up
something to do besides art.”
He told of some of the studios he had visited while organizing the new
association and of the hard time some of the students were having.
Nearly all successful artists have been through such trials but not many
of them remember.
The National Sculpture Society had elected Gutzon to membership in 1903
shortly after his return from Europe. Here, too, he found among the
younger set a feeling of revolt against the older members. He suggested
changes in the constitution that enlisted strong support from some of
the members. However, President J. Q. A. Ward took exception to this
threat to his power and refused to let the report of the committee
favoring changes come to a hearing. Promptly the sculptor denounced such
tactics as “unfair and discourteous,” which did not add to their
friendship. Most of the reforms were later adopted.
With the National Arts Club his relations were more pleasant. When the
club had to move to other quarters he helped make the selection of the
Gramercy Park site and was given full charge of the food department
which had fallen deeply into debt. Under his personal management the
dining room soon showed a profit--a most difficult thing to achieve in
any art club.
Borglum belonged to the Salmagundi Club, to the Fencers, (where he used
to take lessons from a Cuban fencing master in the studio) and to
numerous flying clubs. His lifelong memberships in the Players of New
York and the Metropolitan of Washington gave him constant pleasure and
satisfaction.
He taught one year at the Art Students’ League in New York and returned
the fees he received for teaching as prizes to his pupils, several of
whom are now outstanding sculptors. At the time of the San Francisco
earthquake and fire in 1906, he joined with other New York artists in
donating works to a public auction for the relief of artists caught in
the disaster.
Through his old friend Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, he got
the fund through to California in record time. Another of his old
friends, Arthur Matthews, San Francisco painter, was the custodian of
the money. He did so good a job of spending it that a considerable sum
was left over. The balance lay in a bank for forty years until it was
turned over to a new committee by the State Banking Commission in 1946.
The chairman of the committee was William B. Faville, the architect,
another good friend. But by that time both Arthur and Gutzon were gone.
* * * * *
The sculptor became involved in so many outside matters that one wonders
how he could have found time for them. His answer was that life and art
are inseparable.
He wrote for a magazine in 1908 that the three elements absolutely
joined for the production of great art are sincerity, individuality and
reverence. He said:
Of reverence, I doubt if there is enough in all the United States
to build one great temple. I doubt if there are men enough in all
this land with unselfishness enough and love enough to build one
great and beautiful shrine for commerce or industry, for liberty or
art, for religion--from the bottom up, perfectly good, like an
altar upon which the most sacred thing in our lives shall be
offered to all the rest who follow.
Gutzon was a poet, but he seems also to have been an observing realist.
He continued:
Art applied to utilitarian purpose is, proportionately, a larger
interest in our lives than what have come to be termed “Fine Arts.”
I see no difference between them myself. I find in my study of art
that the real artist is nine tenths of the time a craftsman. It is
only in that small one tenth of his time that he rises to the
elevated position of prophet and master.
The question of art education in general involves what I call
“betrayal by democracy,” though perhaps I speak with the prejudice
of personal experience, being one of nine children who had no
college degree. When democracy came into the American world the
great mass of the people felt that the only advantage aristocracy
had was “higher education.” The world has taken that up in as blind
a way as it takes up so many other things. While higher education
goes on apace, machinery has to step in to supply the instant need
of many things that before were made by hand, and all kinds of work
that we used in the building of our homes has deteriorated.
In man’s essential world the water color has changed to the
lithograph, the drawing to the Kodak, and so on down through life.
Man no longer sees. His eyes no longer search the form, line and
color of any piece of work. His fingers no longer test the art and
finish found on old master crafts.
I never look at a spoon or a knife or a fork, a table or a chair,
but I wish to correct and improve it. I think our spoons are badly
made. The prongs of our forks are too long and the blades of our
knives are too long and badly shaped. It amazes me that such
utilitarian articles are not designed for the purposes that they
are intended to serve.
Some years ago I was sketching in California. A man wandered by and
watched me a little while. “Why do you do that?” he asked. And
when I wanted to know what he meant he told me. “I mean painting,”
he said. “Why do you do it at all?”
With reference to art, that is the most astute question I have ever
heard asked. _Why do we do it at all?_ I hope that those of you who
care anything about art will never forget it. That question ought
to be put to you in all you do in art, and it ought to guide you in
your work.... _Why do you do it?_
On the subject of art schools he wrote bitterly:
I have said, that the higher education we were promised has failed,
for it has taken away from the great body of the people their only
opportunity to express themselves. That is why I am hammering on
the value of craftsmanship for the real leaders in fine arts. We
have taken from the race that great body of workmen from whom
artists should come, and in order to supply a place for the man of
an artistic temperament we have built art schools--institutions
which, so far as I have been able to find any record, had no
existence at all in the time of Phidias or during the great period
of the Renaissance. We are teaching art as a fine art--a subject
that cannot ever be taught at all.
He urged reforms in art education--reforms that have since come about.
On this subject he wrote:
The art schools of this country turn out young men and women by the
thousands every year, and mostly they aren’t worth fifty cents a
day to any artist or sculptor. It is a very sad fact.
The economic independence of every human being who feels that he or
she wants to study art is something that we should not lose a
moment to assure. I think the sweetness of life is not so much
affected by any other dozen causes as by the present inability of
the race to express its emotions in a creative way. If sociologists
and humanitarians could help this great body of youths to put their
little heartaches into some beautiful, individual expression by
creating some article in daily use, this pent-up tension,
everywhere at the breaking point, would be used up at its source,
as are springs of living water. And their work, their contentment
and their power would be felt in every home.
The message seems important because so patently the truth. Gutzon
Borglum was certainly a master craftsman, from the design of tools to
the art that was his profession. It is significant that while he always
preached a doctrine of change and modernity and was soundly berated by
the academicians, he never produced anything cabalistic. Down deep in
him was the understanding of what people were thinking about and what
they could understand.
They understood him best, perhaps, when he was denouncing something. He
had a keen eye, a vibrant voice, and, undoubtedly, a fine vocabulary
with which to do the denouncing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
_VARIETY OF LIFE IN A STUDIO_
Gutzon’s first studio in New York was originally a barn that extended
across the rear of some ancient brownstone-front houses in Thirty-eighth
Street near Third Avenue. He transformed it into one large room with a
high skylight and a narrow balcony across the end opposite the entrance.
Under this, behind the spiral stairway, was a dressing room, then a door
leading to a little fountain and a storage place for clay and coal, and
finally an inglenook with built-in seats on both sides of the fireplace
and shelves above them for books and bric-a-brac.
To enter the studio you passed through a green door opening from
Thirty-eighth Street, along the old driveway bordered by geraniums to
the proper entrance which led into a small anteroom. On the street door
was a sign gruffly announcing that visitors were received “By
appointment only.” But it was easy to get to the anteroom; and no matter
how hard a secretary might try to carry out orders, Gutzon would
certainly call out a welcome to anybody who owned a voice he recognized.
His studio was only a step from Grand Central Station; so many of his
friends dropped in just to watch him work. And because he had decided to
love all mankind and knew that many of these people had come from a long
distance, he would never let them be turned away.
There was always something going on in this place until the day he moved
to Stamford--politics, social reform, park improvements, drama, and
sometimes sculpture. And in the background was a phalanx of New York’s
clever people, studio helpers, secretaries, models, friends and
acquaintances. They flowed in and out at all hours of the day and night,
and there seemed never to be any end to them.
Among his early helpers were Marian Bell, daughter of the inventor of
the telephone, and her friend Alice Hill of Washington. Gutzon probably
enjoyed making the pair of them sweep up the studio and mix clay. Once
he made them dye untold yards of muslin until their hands were
completely discolored. Art was difficult, he told them, because it was
made up of so many different, disagreeable things. But, somehow, they
liked his instructions, and they looked on the studio as a second home.
Alice was married there to Frank Harris, a musician and inventor of an
electronic pickup system to transmit music over the telephone. It was
demonstrated successfully before an audience in the American Museum of
Natural History in New York.
Other helpers developed into sculptors with independent studios of their
own. Among them were George Lober of New York; Merrill (“Bud”) Gage of
Santa Monica, California; “Bob” Garrison of Denver and New York; M. F.
Malin of Salt Lake City; and William Tolentino of the Philippine
Islands. Tolentino had been recommended by Mrs. Woodrow Wilson.
Malvina Hoffman, though never a studio helper, was a familiar
practitioner in it and often a guest of the Borglums. Gutzon gave her
occasional technical advice, beginning with her first attempt at
carving. She had modeled a head of her father on the end of a piece of
lead pipe with no proper armature, and was copying it in marble. Another
New York sculptress, Ethel Hood, whom he met later, impressed him so
much that he invited her to work with him in the Black Hills, but by
that time she was too busy in the East.
Perhaps the most indispensable worker and helper was Robert (“Bob”) A.
Baillie of Closter, New Jersey. Gutzon repeatedly called him “the best
marble carver in the United States.” He started in the Thirty-eighth
Street studio to work on the carving of figures for the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine, and remained there steadily for ten years. When Gutzon
began to be called away more and more from New York on distant
commissions Baillie’s work for other sculptors increased, and in time he
was one of the most sought-after assistants in New York.
The models, too, were interesting, but only a few are remembered now.
There was a man with a white beard who had posed for many sculptors,
including Mr. Barnard. There was Lord Methuen’s former valet who had
lost the weekly payroll while returning from the bank. Best of all was
sweet, gentle Julia Percy, who posed for some of Gutzon’s best marbles.
She married a sculptor who had worked in the studio and went with him to
California. Unfortunately the marriage was not happy and ended in
divorce. Long afterward, in 1947, she wrote a few recollections of her
life in the studio:
During my youth while working as a model for Mr. Borglum, his talks
to students talented enough to be invited to the studio were always
of a constructive nature. He gave advice as to their outlook on
life and conduct of living. The younger ones were told that they
could set an example in their schools and be a help at home. His
reverence and respect for womanhood were well known by all who were
acquainted with him.
Talent and sincerity were what he looked for. He had no use for
plagiarists--“cribbers,” he called them--especially in the field of
architecture. He had a keen sense of humor and many a laugh we all
had at the way he would tell of an amusing incident he had seen.
One of his sayings when referring to someone who lacked initiative
was, “You can’t pick up custard with a hook.” He also could tell a
man’s character by a look at his clothes. If worn for any length of
time, he said, they seem to take on the lines of the body.
When making a statue or a portrait bust in marble, he would first
model it in clay from life. Then a plaster cast from the clay
figure was made by the studio help. The stone cutter used the
plaster figures to measure from and, with the aid of a pointing
machine (with three points), he would cut the stone to within an
inch of the finished surface in some parts. Then Mr. Borglum would
take over, working with mallet and chisel direct from the model
upon the marble. If a defect in the marble showed up (which in my
experience occurred only in the cream-colored Maryland marble), he
would cut deeper and set the whole figure back or change the pose
slightly to escape the flaw.
To do the finishing he used fine tools and sandpaper, every now and
then wetting the marble with a sponge to help bring out the
lifelike effect he was striving for. His high ideals inspired me to
do my best to express in the pose the spirit of the idea he was
portraying in the marble. I consider it an honor and a great
privilege to have worked for him.
An entertaining character who worked in the studio and slept there was a
Japanese called “Humbo” by the others; and there was another student
from Japan, scholarly Takamura, who was admitted by an introduction from
Daniel Chester French and a somewhat exceptional letter written by
himself. This notice had begun:
If you will not take me, I must greatly disappoint myself. I must
have no work, no study, no hope, no pleasure. My coming to this
country must end by all in vain. Please, please let me have your
favor, just like Mr. Honpo. I do not care much of money. I shall be
quite satisfied with only a little, if you could. I will do
anything you order. Pray accept my request, sympathising with a
lonely little soul from a far country over the sea.
Other models included young Lieutenant Phil Sheridan, who spent many
hours posing for the equestrian statue of his father in Washington.
Among the horses were Smoke, a Virginia hunter, and Halool, a
thoroughbred Arab imported by Walter Davenport, the cartoonist. These
horses wandered about the studio on the days they were needed, and were
perfectly gentle. They were kept at a riding academy in the park where
Gutzon occasionally rode bareback with a group of army men.
Edith Wynne Matthison, the actress and a dear friend, posed for the
heroic-sized figure called “Rabboni” in Rock Creek Cemetery at
Washington. That figure is in startling contrast to the beautiful,
brooding figure of the Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the
same place. The “Rabboni” expresses joy and hope, while the other is
complete negation. Still others who came to pose were the Mortimer
Schiff children of whom the sculptor made a portrait relief to accompany
the portrait of the Jacob Schiff children made in the previous
generation by Saint-Gaudens.
One of the sculptor’s most revered friends was John S. Clark, much older
than himself, who came all too seldom from Boston. He was engaged in
writing a life of John Fiske, the historian, and took a great interest
in the sculptor’s work. He liked most of all the marble figures of
“Conception,” “Motherhood” and “Martyr,” which he spoke of as a trilogy.
In a letter written in 1907 Clark makes this interesting comparison of
literary and sculptural work:
I daily realize that I am engaged in a task not unlike several you
have in hand. I have really to create an imaginary portrait of a
great man with mere words. My task is to create so distinct an
image that it can be realized by the imagination as a truthful
representation of the real man. In the process of work I have to
employ many of your methods for producing effects, and I can see
more clearly than ever before how widely different is genuine
artistic work from imitative work of literal reproduction.
Whether you come to Boston or not, know this--that you stand in my
heart as one of my dearest friends and that there is no success or
honor that comes to you that does not warm the “cockles of my
heart” to a ruddy glow.
In those early days in New York, before Gutzon became involved in many
big public memorials, he had more time to express his creative fancies
or “pipe dreams” in marble. A larger than life-size nude figure of a
woman which he called “Conception” or “Inspiration” caused some stir and
was considered too daring in certain circles. To him it represented the
holiness of creation, and his small marble called “Wonderment of
Motherhood” was produced in the same reverent, humble spirit.
A second marble figure symbolic of motherhood represented a woman on her
knees, holding up her infant child in her arms as if offering it on an
altar. This was a step toward his marble “Atlas,” a female figure on her
knees, about four feet high, holding a globe representing the world in
her arms, lifting it up to God instead of balancing it on her back as in
the old mythology. Of his “Conception,” which with other of his works
was exhibited at Columbia University, George Luks, the painter, said:
Here in all the sublimity of majesty we see the symbolism of life,
the symbolism of love, affection, devotion and piety. Like the
chrysalis that liberates the butterfly, we see the soul that hovers
above this classic piece of marble. We seem to feel the same thrill
as we watch the distended lips that drink the breath of life. We
wonder. There is something in this appealing countenance that
strikes us with peculiar awe. We see a soul rising above passion.
We feel the same admiration that we do for a flower that forces
itself up through the muddy soil into a new life and light--a sort
of emancipation. We see the early morning sun break through the
skies of splendor, the unfolding of the rose, the _Wille zum
Guten_, the revelation.
The group called “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” was produced in
the studio at about this time, but never during his life got out of the
plaster stage because Gutzon could never afford a large enough piece of
marble when he had the time to carve it. The thought of it had been in
his mind a long time. The initial idea, he said, had come to him at a
concert where Ysaye, the violinist, had been playing. The way the women
stood up at the end of the concert, arranging their furs and chattering
about where they were going next made him feel that the music had passed
completely over them, leaving no impression. He exhibited the female
figure alone as a pastel sketch in Boston in 1901, where it elicited the
following description of the group from Lillian Whiting, poet and art
critic:
It is the ideal figure of a girl, her hands thrown up and clasped
to the right, the head turned a little to one side, and the
countenance bearing the most inscrutable expression. She has been
piping to Pan, who lies at her feet unmoved, unrecognizing, until
she drops the pipes and the melody ceases. Then he is aroused and
turns to see why the music is heard no more. It is one of the most
typical interpretations of life. The artist paints his ideal
vision. The poet offers his dream. The musician sings his song. And
the world goes on, careless, unheeding. At last, saddened and spent
for want of that sympathy which should have made life all joy and
ecstasy, the painter turns his canvas to the wall. The poet drops
his pen. The song of the singer is heard no more, and the world
turns to ask the meaning of this silence.
Since Borglum’s death the figure has been carved in marble and is in
California.
In the meantime a very large “pipe dream,” something made for his own
pleasure, the sculptor said, was gradually taking shape in his New York
studio. His love for horses and the exceptional opportunity for studying
their movements at the Baldwin ranch in California were still bright in
his mind. They always were. He said once that he never saw a horse
anywhere that he didn’t study it and learn something new.
In his studies for the Grant competition he had become acquainted with
army equipment, and he later began a group of artillery horses with
their trappings. Because such externals were bothersome to his
composition, he abandoned them and concentrated on horses alone, adding
the figure of an Indian for interest. He was familiar with the ways of
those expert riders--how a man could decoy horses out of a corral and by
riding around and around them until they followed his mount could lead a
dash into the open. That was the moment chosen by the sculptor for his
group--five wild horses in full gallop.
The group was cast in bronze by the Gorham Company and exhibited in
their window on Fifth Avenue. Not only because the action of those
horses was very lifelike but because the plan was wholly American in
both subject and design, it attracted instant attention and was
purchased by James Stillman and presented to the Metropolitan Museum. It
happened that Sir Purdon Clarke, an Englishman, was director of that
institution at the time.
For a long time it stood in the entrance hall and was almost the first
thing that caught the eye of the visitor. Near it was Rodin’s “Age of
Bronze,” a slight figure which was one of Gutzon’s favorites. School
children, who were taken on regular tours through the museum, used to
vote the horses as their favorite exhibit. The name “Mares of Diomedes”
was given to the group by some classical scholar who recalled the story
of Hercules and the wild horses of King Diomedes. The sculptor never
cared much for the name; it harked back too loudly to outworn mythology.
More and more Gutzon’s sense of the bigness of America, of her value to
the world, of the importance of her heroes, was growing upon him. He had
bought a large block of marble and one day began to carve the head of
Abraham Lincoln--his first experiment in colossal sculpture. He worked
on it for weeks until it became a perfect likeness of the man, but still
he worked while watchers feared that one more stroke of the chisel might
ruin the whole work. And then a miracle happened. Suddenly a real
character seemed to look out from the carved features. The face became
inhabited.
A colored woman, whose duty it was to sweep the studio and to whom that
huge block of marble had always been a nuisance because she couldn’t
push it around, at last raised her eyes from the floor and exclaimed in
astonishment: “How’s Mista Bo’glum know ol’ Abe was in dat rock?”
The head was taken over to Gorham’s and exhibited in their window.
Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, happened along and he also
exclaimed in astonishment, “I never expected to see Father again.” Later
he wrote that he considered it the best likeness of his father that he
had ever seen. Truman Bartlett, who had made a study of all the known
portraits of Lincoln, went farther, saying there had not yet been
sculptured a head of Lincoln that could compare with it.
It was the centenary of Lincoln’s birth, and Gutzon, as a matter of
sentiment, asked President Theodore Roosevelt if he would let the head
stand in the President’s room at the White House during Lincoln’s
birthday. Roosevelt welcomed it and after it had gone back to New York
wrote to inquire what had become of it. He said he wished it could be
kept in Washington permanently.
The letter was brought to the attention of Eugene Meyer, Jr., who bought
the colossal head and presented it to the nation. Congress, in accepting
the gift, specified that it should be placed in the rotunda of the
Capitol, never to be removed. As a demand for replicas began to be
heard, the superintendent of the Capitol grounds allowed the sculptor to
make a copy of it in plaster. Bronze duplicates of it are now at
Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, in the Hall of Fame in New
York, in the University of Southern California and in the collection of
the Chicago Historical Society. The sculptor made another head for
himself, which is now at the Detroit Museum of Art.
The carving of this head in marble, done as a labor of love, had
far-reaching consequences. It brought to Gutzon friends and admirers. It
led, undoubtedly, to his making the seated figure of Lincoln in front of
the courthouse in Newark and finally to the carvings at Stone Mountain
and Mount Rushmore.
CHAPTER NINE
_THE BIRTH OF A MYTH_
The building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at Morningside
Heights, New York, might have been done for Gutzon Borglum alone. At any
rate, it had his close and abiding interest for a number of years.
“It is a fine example not only of medieval art but of the spirit of the
early churchmen,” he said. “It is something out of another age untouched
by pretentiousness and vanity.”
So he was immensely pleased in 1905 when he was asked to make the
statues for the structure and to supervise the carving on the Belmont
chapel, the first section of the cathedral to be finished. It was a
definite honor that must have been coveted by most of the sculptors in
New York, and out of sheer enthusiasm for the work he agreed to make
models of a hundred saints and angels. The fee wasn’t anything that
could be called remunerative in itself, and Borglum was presently to
learn that medievalist sculptors had about as many troubles as moderns.
It was in this pious undertaking that he laid the groundwork for the
first of the stories about his alleged evil temper. He was profoundly
disturbed by this development because, he argued, he didn’t have any
evil temper at all. He could have admitted, however, that he was saltily
vigorous in defense of what he decided was right. But anyway, the
longevity of what he titled an unfounded legend frequently puzzled him.
He knew from the beginning that he had a large order. In addition to the
topmost figures on the outside of the chapel there were larger, more
detailed ones of the Virgin, the boy Christ, two saints and two angels.
About the inside were any number of historic church dignitaries, bishops
and saints. And there was a concourse of other symbolic figures in the
King and St. Columbia chapels. Altogether there were twenty life-size
statues outside and about seventy-five smaller ones inside. It has been
pointed out by one shrewd observer that the chances for disagreement
between the sculptor and the architects and committee members were
virtually unlimited.
Heins and Lafarge, the original architects, had listened to discussions
ten years before any of the building was started. They had listened to
the reports of sundry committees who never came to them with anything
but grief. And, if they were like other men, they must have become
fairly callous and a little deaf to each new sound of woe.
G. L. Heins, State Architect and a member of the firm that had designed
St. John’s, seemed to have some doubts about Borglum. It is not quite
clear whether he thought the sculptor too headstrong or too
argumentative. Gutzon wrote to him a singularly polite letter at the
beginning of his commission, outlining the Borglum theories of
ecclesiastical art. And by that nobody could have been offended.
“There it will stand to praise or damn us,” Gutzon said, “not so much
concerned whether we have been wise or not, but whether we have been
sincere or not.” Heins replied to that but, unfortunately, his letter
has been mislaid. One gathers the purport from the sculptor’s answer.
Gutzon wrote:
I agree with you about making the figures as archaic as possible.
Still, if a little of the unstudied natural charm that was
creeping into sculpture about the time of Donatello should appear
in the figures of Christ, the Virgin and the two saints, I think
that the gain in real beauty would be a great advantage.
It will be interesting to hit upon a character of interpretation in
the sculpture of this great church that will be at once religious
in the best sense, profiting even by the mannerisms of the Middle
Ages, yet clearly a distinct product of the larger, modern view.
The sculpture should be what I feel you are making your
architecture, no slavish interpretation of what has preceded, but
an intelligent adaptation of what has proved best, not forgetting
the large human view that our western civilization, in its best
moments, holds in all matters religious.
That seems to have ended the architect’s worries, although the sculptor
appears to have had plenty left. Shortly thereafter a visiting English
architect, E. W. Hudson, wrote this in the journal of the Royal
Institute of British Architects:
Mr. Borglum’s work shows a marked originality, tending even to
impressionism. His determination not to sink his individuality has
brought upon him the criticism of a passing generation of
contemporaries working in Gothic, whose sympathies are with the
archaeological exactitude of the Revival, and who strive to get as
near as possible to the effects of a past age. On this account Mr.
Borglum will probably have to wait awhile for full appreciation, as
M. Rodin himself has had to wait. He seems, however, indifferent to
praise or blame, and appears determined to retain his
individuality, although it has involved the refusal of commissions
for collaborating with architects whose buildings in American
cities require as the _summum bonum_ exact compliance with
conventional precedent.
This critique seems a little out of step in view of Gutzon’s declaration
that the figures on the cathedral should be “made as archaic as
possible.” But he never took notice of it. He went on for months with
his work, vigorous and pleased with all that went on about him.
When he raised his voice, however, all of New York heard him. He had
discovered that John Barr, the contractor, was sending his models to a
Hoboken stoneyard to be finished by machinery under contract. This, of
course, had not been written in the bond. The machine treatment may have
made the pieces look more archaic, but it also made them look cheaper.
Some of them looked less like saints than gargoyles, and Gutzon was
angrily indignant.
For once the art committee gave him a quick hearing, and presently he
was allowed to exercise general supervision over the contractor’s work
and accept it or reject it as he saw fit. But that wasn’t the end of the
controversy. The contractor, it seems, wasn’t so much interested in the
shape of an angel as he was in the price of rock. He began to change the
position of arms and legs and wings to suit the contours of his blocks
of stone. Borglum declared that these revised figures were caricatures,
and he condemned them. The contractor wouldn’t listen to him. The
committee gave him no satisfaction; so this time he carried his
complaint to the press.
Borglum seems to have been his own best public-relations agent. He
demanded that the carving of the stone should be done on the cathedral
grounds under his own eye. Inasmuch as this was strictly in keeping with
the medieval tradition in church building, he had one faction of the
cathedral’s congregation backing him to start off with. The art critics
generally thought his point well taken, and thousands of people who knew
nothing at all about sculpture wondered what was the use of models if
they weren’t to be followed.
Borglum won his point. A working studio was established on the cathedral
grounds, and there Gutzon supervised the carving. He shared honors with
his assistant sculptors, Price and Gregory, who had come over from
England. Their names are signed to the work they shared in. Only the
contractor thought that the sculptor was hard to get along with.
Many of the statues which Gutzon had condemned were recut and properly
placed. The seventy-odd interior figures were one of the largest
collections of images of religious leaders ever gathered under one roof
since the beginning of the Christian era. They were also the largest
collection ever carved by one artist. And as revised, they began to look
somewhat respectable. Every detail of miter, chasuble and coat of arms
was perfect. There had been much correspondence to determine the finger
on which the pontifical ring should be placed.
By this time Gutzon had worked amicably with the cathedral authorities
for two years. His early arguments about machine-cut statues were
forgotten. And then came an incident which made people conscious of him
again. A bit of newspaper confusion gave him a reputation for bad temper
that he carried for the rest of his life.
It began in the meditations of Dr. John Peters, canon of the cathedral,
in a bourn far from newspapers and street-corner arguments. Dr. Peters,
all of a sudden, had become a little uncertain about the sex of angels.
He wasn’t at all controversial about the matter, but he thought that he
should convey what he had learned to Gutzon Borglum. So, in an innocent
way, he did. In a letter to Borglum he wrote:
Dr. Huntington calls my attention to something that in the
execution of the statues I had quite overlooked. He points out that
the Angel of the Incarnation is named in the Bible as the Archangel
Gabriel.
Now Gabriel is a masculine name, and, in point of fact, unless I am
mistaken, the archangels are thought of as masculine--Michael,
Gabriel, Raphael, etc. I am perfectly aware that in art one meets
frequently a feminine angel type bearing the lily of the
Incarnation, but is that really correct? Should not the heads of
both these angels and the figures in general be made if not
distinctly masculine, at least not distinctly feminine?
There you have all the correspondence on one side of this important
controversy. Gutzon’s reply is appended because it is all that was said
on the other side. He wrote this to Dr. Peters:
My Dear Dr. Peters, I have your letter referring to the feminine
character of the angels. I fully recognize the correctness of your
criticism from the standpoint of the Bible, though art and
tradition have practically ignored this. I shall change them as you
suggest.
One might have thought that Gutzon’s quick acquiescence would have ended
the “controversy” over the angels. But things seem to have been
different in the rarefied atmosphere of the cathedral grounds. Severe
trouble was on its way the moment Dr. Peters dropped his letter into the
mailbox.
Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with the sex of the angels. The model of
the Angel Gabriel was still in soft clay. It was a simple matter to
remove the offending face and model one with sterner features. Gutzon
kept the original face, had it cast in silver and used a photograph of
it as a Christmas card. It brought to the Borglum home a signed
photograph of Bishop Potter. Everything was sweetness and light until a
reporter noticed that Gabriel’s countenance had quit being pretty and
amiable and was now a little hard ... and analytical and dour. The
discovery pleased him and he made a quick departure for his office.
The next morning his story appeared under a headline that didn’t seem to
fit it:
BORGLUM SMASHES ANGELS IN A HUFF
Other newspapers took up the cry and soon the subscribers were filling
the press with their personal, and no doubt authoritative, opinions on
the intriguing subject: Were angels men or women?
Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with this argument. He didn’t think it
concerned him. And, save for the fact that the first story had pictured
him smashing up things in a rage, he was probably right. It seemed good
fun, but twenty years later, during the Stone Mountain disagreement, a
reporter dug up the original story to prove that Gutzon’s temper was
ungovernable and always had been. The Atlanta _Constitution_, trying to
ferret out the truth, telegraphed the cathedral and got a reply from Dr.
Peters: “Angels still stand serene in their places where Borglum put
them,” he said. “We never had any trouble with the sculptor.”
The story of how Borglum smashed the inoffensive angels went on,
however, for years and years--and it still goes on. The evil that men
do, somehow, never lives as long as some of the evil that they never
thought of doing. Borglum, however, did think that destruction might
have been a good idea.
The last time he heard reports that he had gone berserk in his studio on
the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he sadly shook his
head. “I didn’t think of it soon enough,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN
_PUBLIC MEMORIALS_
It isn’t remarkable that Borglum had virtually all the work he could do
in the early 1900s. Nobody in New York seems to have been talking about
anyone else. He was no mute and long-suffering artist. He was somebody
who knew how to answer back ... and he did ... and the press loved him.
Gutzon was not disturbed because many of his commissions came to him
through people who knew nothing whatever about sculpture except that it
was expensive.
“It’s no matter,” he would say. “If they knew anything about it, they’d
probably be calling for somebody else.” Nevertheless, it is true that
the commissions came from people and localities as varied as those he
had to do with in his own swirling life. There is, for instance, the
story of the John Mackay statue in Nevada. It begins with the revival of
his boyhood friendship with Bob Davis, and it is typical of how things
came to him.
One day in 1908 in some puzzlement he answered a telephone call from
_Munsey’s Magazine_ and heard the explosive voice of Editor Bob Davis, a
voice he hadn’t heard in nearly twenty years.
“I knew you in Los Angeles--remember?” the editor began. “I have
something in your line I want to talk to you about. Can you have lunch
with me?”
So they had a reunion at a hotel near the studio and a pleasant meal
during which nothing at all was said about sculpture. Gutzon thought
that Davis was going to ask him to write an article and had quickly
decided to do it. Then suddenly Davis came to his subject:
“Borglum,” he said, “would you like to make a statue of John Mackay?”
“Of course,” Gutzon answered in astonishment. “Who wouldn’t make a
statue of a citizen like that?”
“Well,” said Davis, “my brother Sam is in town. The state of Nevada has
trusted him with a commission. The state has authorized and voted some
money for the statue, but Clarence Mackay has taken over the
responsibility of financing it. So if you will take the job----”
“Let us go and see Sam,” Gutzon suggested. The next day, after a meeting
with Mackay, he got the commission.
Gutzon was more than ordinarily pleased. He was doing a lot of work but
nothing spectacular. He had known of Mackay since boyhood and felt that
a statue to him would attract national interest.
John W. Mackay, lest people of our war-tossed world forget it, was an
international personality for several reasons. He was, among other
things, one of the Big Four of the Comstock Lode, a silver king and a
builder of the first cable laid across the Atlantic. He had been a
consistent fighter with a tough constitution and no feeling, ever, that
he could fail to win.
Gutzon told Clarence Mackay that he would need all the photographs that
might be available of the man and also all the data, news and rumor
about him that might still be extant. Mackay saw the point. He not only
gathered up all the information that his agents could find, but he
visited the studio every morning on his way from Long Island to Broadway
and spent a half hour reminiscing with the sculptor. Gutzon presently
began to feel that he knew John W. Mackay pretty well.
The statue, inasmuch as it had to stand in the open, was scheduled to
be eight or nine feet tall. Because of the static nature of the
material, Gutzon said, anything less than that would look smaller than
human. He made careful sketches to determine position, expression and
general composition, and all of this took several months.
“I want to show my father as he was,” Mackay said, “a workman in the
mines out of which his wealth and his position in life came.”
Because of this the model showed the capitalist in the dress of a
miner--top boots, loose shirt open at the throat and shapeless working
trousers. The left hand was grasping a pick handle against which the
body leaned. The right hand was upturned, holding a piece of quartz.
Clarence Mackay liked it. When it was done he asked Gutzon to take it to
Nevada and find a place to put it. “It is very difficult work to make a
statue,” he said. “I think it is more difficult to find the right spot
to display it. And I think the man who is qualified for one job is best
qualified for the other.”
Thus began a new and complicated adventure. Gutzon met Sam Davis and
went to Carson City, Nevada, carrying letters of introduction to state
officials. There they met Governor Sparks, who looked interested but
extremely puzzled.
Carson City was without parks, city squares or, for that matter, any
cultivated landscape. The governor scratched his head and said, “Doesn’t
seem to be much place where you could put a statue around here ...
unless you want to stick it out in the middle of the street.”
The local organizations--patriotic, political, business, social--all had
something of the governor’s attitude but were guided, in public action,
by good old Western individualism. Each one suggested where Gutzon could
put his statue, but no two could reach an agreement. The sculptor
labored with them for several weeks and got very annoyed. He began to
think that there was no reason for locating the work in Carson City. The
right place for it, he
[Illustration: STONE MOUNTAIN]
[Illustration: WORKING PLATFORM NEAR SUMMIT OF STONE MOUNTAIN]
[Illustration: MODEL OF STONE MOUNTAIN GROUP
This was the model which Borglum destroyed.]
thought, was Virginia City, where Mackay had operated. But Virginia City
was in worse shape than Carson.
He came one night to the home of Sam Davis, after a weary day with a
government committee, and asked if he would object to communicating with
Mr. Mackay about where to put his father’s statue. Sam burst into
laughter. “You’re growing up,” he said. “Go as far as you please.”
Gutzon picked up the telephone and called Joseph Stubbs, president of
the University of Nevada at Reno. He never could explain why he picked
President Stubbs except that he had met him and found him to be just the
sort of man to develop a university in that sort of town. At any rate,
he called and asked, “Would it interest you to have a statue of John W.
Mackay on the campus of your university?” And Stubbs said, “Certainly
... or is this a joke?”
At Gutzon’s suggestion the president sent a telegram to Clarence Mackay
asking him if he would consider having the statue in Reno on the
university campus. Next morning the sculptor received a telegraphic
order to call on President Stubbs. A place for the memorial was located
at the upper end of the campus facing the sun. It was behind a
corrugated-iron shack which bore the label “School of Mines.”
In a short time the statue was dedicated with proper ceremonies and a
tremendous turnout of important people. Clarence Mackay, who brought his
friends from New York in a private car, didn’t like the School of Mines
structure as a background for his father. So he telegraphed architect
Stanford White in New York to come out and lay plans for a new one. The
result was a new building which cost, before Mackay equipped it,
$475,000. After that came a second and a third building which, with
Mackay’s endowments, cost somewhere over $1,500,000.
That, to all intents and purposes, was the beginning of a new life for
the University of Nevada. The statue that led to it cost, complete and
erected, $12,000.
And it led to other things, too. Clarence Mackay was obviously a
satisfied customer. He wrote to Sam Davis that he was so pleased that he
had tried to discharge some of his debt of gratitude by recommending the
sculptor to the sponsors of the Sheridan Memorial to be erected in
Washington. Gutzon was definitely gratified. His study of the Civil War
in preparing the model for the Grant competition had made him familiar
with its leaders. And he loved Sheridan’s saltiness, activity and
audacious courage.
He respected the general’s reputed ability to swear and his genius for
making his men understand tirades that must have sounded like
jabberwocky.
“A great general!” declared Borglum. “And unusual!”
Unfortunately, the United States government had already placed the
commission for this memorial and the field was now open to all because
the original artist had not yet produced a model satisfactory to the
committee. He had been at it thirteen years.
A second misfortune lay in the fact that this sculptor was J. Q. A.
Ward, president of the National Sculpture Society, who had failed to see
eye to eye with Gutzon on many subjects, chief of which was the
controversy over reorganizing the society. In spite of this he and
Gutzon had exchanged letters expressing sorrow that there had been any
bad feeling. The last thing Borglum wanted to do was to give further
offense to the distinguished leader of the New York sculptors ... but he
did make the memorial. Art was art, and he got it done on schedule.
Gutzon found it easy to open correspondence with the committee in charge
of the memorial. He had long been acquainted with President Theodore
Roosevelt, and he had met some of his military aides through their
common love for horses. It was arranged to have Mrs. Sheridan and her
son visit the Thirty-eighth Street studio. They came and reported that
they liked what they had seen--the model for the Grant monument with its
three horses, the dashing horses of the “Mares of Diomedes” group, the
marble head of Lincoln.
There was still some delay about the granting of a new contract. Gutzon
was interviewed. He sent photographs of his work to the committee.
Presently, however, he was contemplating his old annoyance. The
committee suggested a competition. Gutzon Borglum refused.
“I shall be happy to make a sketch model for the committee’s
consideration,” he said, “but only after I have received a contract.”
After much discussion the committee gave in. The contract was awarded,
and Gutzon made the sketch model as he had agreed. The sketch was
eventually cast in bronze and presented to the Officers’ Club of Rio de
Janeiro as a gift from the Officers’ Club of Washington.
The uncovering of the general’s life brought contacts with many of his
old comrades in arms, including a close friend, General George Forsyth.
Colonel Royal E. Whitman, an old Indian fighter who had ridden with
Sheridan in the Civil War, wrote Gutzon dozens of letters covering all
sorts of details. He even declared he could produce the actual
accouterments of Sheridan’s horse.
Sheridan’s horse, as is well known, is preserved stuffed and mounted on
Governor’s Island. Borglum wasn’t much interested in it. It was
unthinkable to him that a dead horse could pose for the one that carried
Sheridan on his wild ride to Winchester. Through Colonel Whitman he had
bought a Virginia hunter named “Smoke” who had the run of the studio and
was a tractable pet. In due course “Smoke” qualified as Sheridan’s
mount.
One remarkable thing about the memorial--an innovation that now has
become almost commonplace in art--assured its success. Sheridan was
presented not as the older man he lived to be, but in his prime and at a
supreme moment in his career--the turn of the Federal retreat at
Winchester. Gutzon pictured the moment when the general, returning from
a conference with Lincoln, came galloping to meet his fleeing soldiers.
In the statue he has pulled up his horse and is waving the men back into
the fight. There is fury in his eye and, as the sculptor felt, a
historic phrase on his lips: “You will sleep in your tents tonight or
you will sleep in hell!”
Gutzon modeled the horse and rider in clay, in the size that they would
have in bronze, which was another important characteristic of his work.
He never turned over a small model to others to have it enlarged by
mechanical process, as was being done by some sculptors. He wanted his
own modeling, the imprint of his thumb, to appear in the finished work.
He wanted to get the spirit of the action and pose. If he were to expend
creative effort on a sketch, he declared, he would have lost interest by
the time he came to make an exact copy on a larger scale.
There has been considerable controversy over Sheridan’s ride to
Winchester. Some writers, like Joseph Hergesheimer, have maintained that
the wild gallop was only a mild trot. General Crosby and General
Forsyth, brother officers of Sheridan, favored the accepted version. So
would any cavalry officer. No matter how he might have been riding at
the start, he was certainly riding as fast as the horse could take him
when he came up with his defeated command. An eyewitness of the ride,
Private Frederick Bullis of the New York State volunteers, reported:
I was near enough to him to touch his horse when he got there.
There were lumps of foam as big as my fists on the horse’s face,
and his nostrils were bleeding. Sheridan stood up in his stirrups
and yelled “Face the other way! Face the other way!” He kept
yelling it over and over. He was swinging his sword and swearing
like a demon.
The monument was unveiled with much pomp and circumstance on November
25, 1908. Mrs. Sheridan herself pulled the cord that held the draperies
in place. There was a parade of the armed forces that included every
branch of the services. There were speeches by notables and concerts by
brass bands. There was also a long account of the event in the Omaha
_Bee_. The correspondent identified Gutzon Borglum as an Omaha boy,
which, indeed, he once had been.
The turbulent figure of Sheridan was acclaimed as one of the greatest
military statues in America. Critics noted the anatomical perfection of
the horse and the faithful picturing of the general as a young man. But
their praise was for the terrific action in bronze sculpture--the
captured fear and climax of battle. It is hard to imagine that this
memorial and the monument to President Lincoln in Newark were both the
work of the same artist. Lincoln, shown in a moment of deep dejection
during the Civil War when the news from the front was bad, is pathetic.
He is every man’s friend just as he is every man’s other self, face to
face with unhappiness, harried by disaster.
It was Lincoln’s custom to visit the War Office late at night to get the
most recent dispatches, and the memorial in Newark shows him after such
a call. He is sitting on a bench, his tall hat beside him, dispirited
and alone. Borglum’s idea for the statue was inspired by a letter from
Lincoln to a friend shortly after his election. “I could appreciate the
feelings of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.... I am now in my Garden
of Gethsemane.”
Borglum received the commission to make this statue as a result of the
exhibition of his marble head of Lincoln in the Capitol. Amos Van Horn,
Civil War veteran and citizen of Newark, had bequeathed $150,000 for
three public monuments, one to Washington, one to Lincoln and a third to
the soldiers and sailors who had fought in the War between the States.
He appointed three executors, chief of whom was Ralph E. Lum, a Newark
lawyer who knew nothing of Borglum or his work except the Lincoln head.
That seemed enough evidence. He gave the sculptor the commission for
the Lincoln Memorial and thereafter was always his steadfast friend.
The work was carried out under pleasant, amicable, understanding
relations. There was no competition. The executors had virtually no
suggestions. They knew that Gutzon Borglum was a competent sculptor, and
they left the details of the production to him. He submitted a small
model which they considered and accepted. After that he made a
full-sized model in clay. The location chosen for the memorial was in
front of the Newark courthouse where much grading and change was needed.
The city lacked a thousand dollars of enough to pay for what was needed;
so Gutzon advanced the money to Park Superintendent Carl Bannwort. The
architect who drew the plans for the setting was an old friend, William
Price. The architect, Bannwort and Gutzon contrived to give the statue a
perfect environment, and Bannwort seemed surprised to see it finished.
“It’s the first time,” he said, “that I ever heard of a sculptor ever
giving back a part of his own pay.”
Work was begun in 1909, and a year later the Gorham Company announced
the arrival of the full-sized plaster model at their foundry in
Providence, Rhode Island. The sculptor had asked that they cast the
bronze in one piece, which cost forty per cent more and took more time.
He thought it worth the extra expense because there would be no seams in
the bronze and no danger of breakage due to extremes of heat and cold.
Gutzon was pleased with the work when it appeared in bronze. “Lincoln
never left the Garden of Gethsemane,” he said. “He went right from
Springfield to the labor of war. And Lee had hardly surrendered when
Lincoln was shot. It is a curious and charming picture when you realize
that he wandered away constantly into this garden alone.”
There was much favorable comment on the work after it was set in place.
The sculptor himself thought that he had never made a finer thing. The
appeal of the statue is evident in the actions of the children who
cluster about it. All day in summer they come here to play. They sit in
Lincoln’s lap, clasp their arms about his neck, roll about his feet,
completely pleased. They could not say why. They don’t know much of who
this man is supposed to be. They don’t know much about Lincoln. But they
know his sadness and they feel his gentleness and friendliness.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt was principal speaker when the
monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1913. Wildly cheering throngs of
men, women and children lined his way of march and gave him an inspiring
tribute all the way from New York City, an experience which Gutzon
declared was what gave Roosevelt the idea of running for President for a
third term.
Nobody seems to have remembered what he said as he pledged the country’s
support to what Lincoln had stood for--Lincoln who sat with bowed head,
worried and disconsolate, on a bench before him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
_STAMFORD AND POLITICS_
In 1909 John Gutzon Borglum married Mary Williams Montgomery, to
nobody’s great surprise. Mary Montgomery was born in Turkey of
missionary parents and had lived there twelve years. She was educated at
Wellesley and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Berlin. She
could argue with Gutzon, sometimes successfully.
Their meeting, in a way, was accidental. On her way back to the United
States after her Berlin studies, she had boarded a ship at Rotterdam. It
turned out to be the same one that the sculptor barely caught at
Cherbourg. He joined her party for shipboard games and poker, and they
were quickly friends. He met her family and she became well acquainted
with his sisters; and a family association went on for years.
Miss Montgomery taught French for a year in New Haven, then joined two
other girls in a literary agency that did translations, research work
and special articles until they married and broke up the partnership.
She worked with Dr. Henry Smith Williams on _The Historians’ History of
the World_ and there met Rupert Hughes, another friend of Gutzon’s. She
also worked with Dr. Isidore Singer as manager in the preparation of
_The Jewish Encyclopedia_. Much of her life was spent in the vicinity of
Thirty-eighth Street. After leaving Dr. Williams she did secretarial
work, some of it for Gutzon, and became acquainted with many more of
the Borglum friends. She learned a great deal about the operations of
the Thirty-eighth Street studio.
So, in 1909 they were married at Short Beach, Connecticut, with a New
Haven divine, Dr. T. T. Munger, and Miss Montgomery’s two brothers
officiating. The Borglums went for a honeymoon to some trout stream in
Canada and thence to a place on the Gunnison River in Colorado. By that
time Mrs. Borglum was certain that her life was going to be vastly
different.
And so it was. In 1910 Gutzon announced that they would move to
Stamford, Connecticut, where they would cultivate peace and associate
with gentle, quiet people. Almost overnight he was making speeches for
the common man and beating the drums for politics.
In Stamford he was promptly introduced to the famous Connecticut Town
Meeting and was intensely interested because he had never heard of
anything like it. He went home with staring eyes to write that he had
just learned the part an individual could play, first in his home town,
next in his state and finally in his native land. He rewrote a pair of
sentiments from his diary: “A man’s first love is his mother; his
second, his sweetheart; his third, art; his fourth, _all_.” And he
underlined this warning: “No individual’s life is worth the immortality
he seeks unless he articulates the voice of his tribe.”
You may take that as typical of Gutzon. He had been in Stamford one or
two nights and he belonged to it as much as the oldest inhabitant.
The moving from the old duplex apartment in New York to the country was
a momentous undertaking. The two horses, Smoke and Halool, were taken to
New Rochelle for the night by the faithful Banks. The next day Gutzon
and a friend, like knights of old, rode on horseback to the new domain.
The feat wasn’t so startling to beholders as it might have been in New
York. Horses in Stamford in 1910 were regularly in view and
continuously in use. Gutzon himself became a familiar figure in the
countryside as he drove Smoke back and forth between the railroad
station and home. Wife and furniture arrived in Stamford on that first
day by train and van.
Most of the stable equipment came from the old establishment of Colonel
Whitman in Washington. Much of it accompanied the colonel, who arrived
to spend the summer. The procession of visitors who came to luncheon, to
dinner or to spend the week seems appalling from this distance of time,
and emphasizes the contrast of that era when there was no difficulty
about entertaining. Stamford grocery stores of the day were primitive.
They made no delivery to the Borglum ménage six miles away; so hampers
of foodstuffs were shipped by express twice a week from New York.
The old farmhouse was completely rebuilt, partitions pulled down and new
rooms added. The house stood on a slope, and one large living room was
dug out of the bank after the master bedroom, above, had been finished
and was being lived in. The barn, which had been close to the house, was
hauled a thousand feet and placed beside a brook. The brook was dammed
to make a pond. Gutzon took an active part in all the digging, trimming
of trees and laying out of roads.
Road building had always been one of Gutzon’s hobbies, and in later
years he was to become associated with national highway-building
projects. On his place in Stamford he built a road, cutting the arc on
the Wire Mill Road, which until that time had passed close to the
Marshall House, the new home. The town accepted the sculptor’s changed
road and thirty-five years later it was still in use. After the passing
of those years a local highway engineer located and unearthed an old
drainpipe, placed there by Gutzon. “Well,” he said, “Borglum was known
throughout the town as a good builder.”
Filled with the old Town Meeting spirit, the sculptor quickly organized
the neighbors living along the main road leading into Stamford as an
association to beautify and improve their grounds bordering on it. Next
he managed to get lighting for the road from the town electric company
and a similar gift for the Long Ridge Road, which was equally important.
By studying the town, county and state road-building and bonding
regulations, he discovered that the town could borrow money against the
stipulated return to it of the same amount from the state or county,
thus securing funds for the building of improved roads at once. The
matter was taken to the Town Meeting, of course, and it caused much
debate. But eventually it passed, and both High Ridge and Long Ridge
roads were benefited.
Then, presently, he had a new and interesting idea. He founded a bus
company “so that,” as he said, “the farm women might have a chance to
come to town when their husbands are using the horses in the fields.” He
was very happy in the designing of bus bodies to be fitted onto Reo
Truck chassis and in arranging a suitable pageant to celebrate the
beginning of the service.
There is a lamentable lack of detail in available information about the
bus company. One doesn’t know if the farm wives were able to ride into
town on it more frequently, or if Gutzon was able to pasture his horse.
He got out of it after a while and turned his attention to new and more
stirring projects. The general belief is that he operated it until it
needed rewinding.
One of the amazing things about him is that his art work always seemed
to survive his other projects. Soon after moving up from New York he
built a temporary studio out of glass cold-bed frames and there began a
monument for North Carolina of the first soldier killed on the Southern
side in the War between the States. He also started a creative “pipe
dream” in marble called “Orpheus and Eurydice.” The boy who had been
guiding the oxen for much of the heavy work on the place was asked to
pose for Orpheus. His wife’s remarks, as repeated by Bill the husband,
were striking. When she was informed of his new and startling occupation
she demanded, “Did you have to stand in your underwear?” “No,” he said,
“I just had to take everything off.” She prefaced her critique with a
ladylike sniff. “Well,” she said knowingly, “you must have been a
sight.... Just a perfect sight!”
At this time a location for the permanent studio was chosen across the
Rippowam River, nearly half a mile from the house. The corner rock was
christened in champagne, accompanied by a stirring speech from Colonel
Whitman. For years the only way of reaching the studio by carriage or
automobile was through a cement-based ford, devised by Gutzon. There was
a swing bridge for pedestrians. At the very outset of the work Gutzon
had brought out his architect friend William Price of Rosedale, near
Philadelphia, who had helped him with the Newark Lincoln and other work.
On the river, at some distance below the ford, a group of campfire girls
used to have a summer camp under the guidance of Mrs. Lanier, whose
husband was the son of Sidney Lanier, the poet. On Sunday mornings the
sculptor used to give the girls talks on art and life which are still
remembered.
The studio was built entirely of stone from huge, pinkish granite
boulders which Gutzon had located within a few hundred feet of his
location half buried in the soil. These were dug out, cut and scraped by
a crew of Italian stonecutters who came from a neighboring town the
first of every week and returned on Saturday, camping out in the woods
near the work. The fireplace was unique. It was made to accommodate
six-to eight-foot logs and was open to a height of ten feet from the
floor, where sandstone blocks formed the mantel. The size of the
building was forty by sixty feet, and the style was Tudor Gothic.
When it was time to lay the sills of the studio doors, before the roof
with its heavy steel was up, Gutzon invited the officers of the Masonic
Grand Lodge of both Connecticut and New York, together with members of
his own Howard Lodge, to take part in the dedication. It was a grand
affair although something merely on the rim of the arts. Gutzon was
gradually increasing his interest in other matters. For one thing, he
was being inducted into a knowledge of the working of an elected group
in a community, chosen to govern the finances and public interests of
the electors. This was his conception of the meaning of politics.
Another matter to which he had given attention was the often debated
question of consolidation of the town and city governments of Stamford.
He worked out a scheme which he placed before the town selectmen in
1912, whereby, in successive steps, the selectmen would be placed in
charge of departments as commissioners thereof, and eventually the city
government would be abolished. The selectmen-commissioners would take
over its powers. Thus a joint-commission form of government would be
acquired for both town and city.
He wrote to Frank Butterworth, a prominent Progressive of Connecticut:
I enclose herewith a scheme that was put before the selectmen of
Stamford.... We cannot get rid of the town form of government in
Connecticut, so it has occurred to me and a great many before me
that we had better take the principle of town government with
selectmen, which from the very fact that it is primitive is good,
and develop that. My plan here is to bring everything in town and
city under one government.
In all these dealings Gutzon had come into close touch with the
political situation. It was common gossip that both town and city, more
particularly the latter, were boss-ridden and that it did not make much
difference whether a Republican or Democratic administration was in
control. The same machine went on and on, and expenditures for services
rendered were out of all proportion to values received.
The time was the dawn of the Progressive movement which aimed to do away
with bossed and machine-controlled government, demanding honesty and
efficiency in high places. A new national election, that of 1912, was in
the offing. Gutzon’s old friend, Theodore Roosevelt, was running for
President on a third-party Progressive ticket. What was more natural
than that the sculptor should enter this campaign with gusto. He became
chairman of the Progressive Party of Stamford, and nearly wore himself
out trying to arouse the progressive element in the citizenship of the
whole state of Connecticut.
There was a strong element of drama in the campaign as waged in the city
and town of Stamford. In the first place, the “Old Guard” was not going
to allow a newcomer to meddle unchallenged with their ancient customs.
One of the most respected members of the community wrote an indignant
letter to the Stamford _Advocate_, the only local paper, protesting
against the upstart sculptor who “had not been able to achieve fame in
his own calling” and was trying to gain a little notoriety by attaching
himself to Roosevelt’s kite.
Gutzon addressed mass meetings from the Town Hall steps. He spoke on
street corners and in front of the huge Yale and Towne Lock factory
where men and women were going home from work. He got to be a ready
speaker and learned to think on his feet. One incident was memorable.
Some heckler had asked why Roosevelt had suddenly changed his mind on a
certain question. “Don’t you know,” Gutzon shot back at him, “that Saint
Paul lived to be fifty-two before he suddenly changed his whole way of
life and became a Christian?”
People in Stamford still remember the picturesque and effective fight
carried on by the Progressives under the leadership of the imaginative
Gutzon. On one occasion a torchlight procession was arranged in which
the Borglum donkey, “Shamrock,” a large, gray, intelligent creature,
appeared as a symbol of both the old parties, wearing on his rear end an
elephant head, the trunk of which concealed his tail.
Two Stamford citizens, who were Gutzon’s chief lieutenants in the fray
and remained his friends ever after, were featured in the press of the
day as “Handsome Harry” Abbot and “Young” Arthur Crandall. The latter
lived and worked with Borglum at one time and never got over his
youthful reverence for Gutzon, which was not diminished by close
contact. When he heard this book was being written he said: “Don’t
forget to mention his real humility,” which was a side of the sculptor’s
nature revealed only to those who knew him best.
Joseph Alsop was state chairman of the Progressive Party of Connecticut,
and Gutzon developed a deep friendship with him. Mr. Whittaker, editor
of the Stamford _Advocate_ for many years and a reactionary and
autocratic individual, came to the Borglum farm one night about midnight
to try to influence the sculptor to change his attitude. The mayor of
the city, Charles P. Rowell, came out at dusk, wearing a big black hat
and a long cape, like a villain in a play.
He would not come into the house, where someone might hear what he had
to say, but asked Gutzon to come outside. They talked by the footbridge
on the way to the studio. Mr. Rowell tried to make a deal, and when the
sculptor refused he exclaimed with conscious drama, “Then it’s a
fight--a fight to the finish!”
“Yes,” agreed Gutzon solemnly, “and a sword to the hilt!”
A few days after the election S. E. Vincent, the newly elected
Progressive congressman, wrote to Gutzon.
With election over it is now time to figure up and take inventory
of conditions. If I have a clear idea of how the Progressive party
stands, that party has every reason to be proud of the results
accomplished in a campaign of only ninety days, without funds or
party machinery, with all the papers against our cause and some of
them not overcareful about telling the whole truth.
Herbert Knox Smith, a Connecticut leader of the party, wrote on November
4: “I cannot let this fight close without sending you my heartfelt
personal thanks for what you have done. It has certainly been fine, and
I appreciate it more deeply than I can say. Best regards to you.”
And the colonel wrote from Oyster Bay, November 12, 1912:
My Dear Borglum: In this great fight for elementary justice and
decency, for fair play in the industrial no less than in the
political world, and for honesty everywhere, there are many men to
whom I feel peculiarly grateful, not only personally but because of
what they have done for the people as a whole. You come high among
these men; and in this very inadequate but far from perfunctory
manner, I wish to express my profound acknowledgment.
Faithfully yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.
In his records Gutzon somehow fails to note that the Progressives,
despite Roosevelt’s defeat, did rather well in Connecticut. After all,
what interested Gutzon was the fight.
CHAPTER TWELVE
_CHICAGO CONVENTION_
The First World War started in August 1914, and was catalogued as
somebody else’s trouble by nearly everybody in the United States. Its
effect on local politics was to start arguments about whether or not our
government should spend money to rearm.
Anyway, the situation in 1914 was different than that of 1912. Woodrow
Wilson, who had become President largely as a result of the
Progressive-party movement in 1912, was being looked at askance by
manufacturers, bankers, shippers and conservative politicians who
thought that he was a mistake.
Borglum, still standing fast by the Progressive banner, figured that
another election would see his party in power if enough people got
interested in the prospect. At the moment, he pointed out to those who
would listen to him, the policies of the federal government involved
something besides a waste of money. Human lives were concerned. He
declared that if England had been prepared, the Kaiser would never have
invaded Belgium, and that he would certainly have stayed at home if the
United States and England had been prepared and had showed they would
support France. Theodore Roosevelt had always advocated preparedness.
His words, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” were well known and
often quoted.
In the crisis during the Congressional election of 1914 the sculptor did
not advise Progressives to return to the Republican party. Instead he
tried to persuade Republicans to nominate candidates whom Progressives
could support. In Connecticut the Progressives held the balance of
power. Gutzon did not believe that they should put a ticket of their own
into the field. They should keep their identity, he felt, and place
their power as a group behind the best candidates nominated by other
parties.
At the same time, he believed that the Progressive element was stronger
in the Republican than in the Democratic party. He advised adopting a
liberal attitude toward Republicans to avoid a further breach with the
parent organization. By following such a policy in the 1914 election, he
hoped that by 1916 it would be possible to elect Theodore Roosevelt
President. At all events, he considered a strong Congress essential in
1914.
After careful consideration Gutzon decided to support for Congress
Ebenezer J. Hill of Fairfield County, a man who had previously been in
Congress and had been defeated by the Progressives in the 1912 election.
He chose Hill because of his stand on the nonpartisan tariff board,
which he favored, and his open quarrel with boss rule.
The sculptor’s stand for Hill was strongly opposed by Herbert Knox Smith
of Connecticut and George W. Perkins of New York, national leader of the
Progressive party. Gutzon and Perkins had an argument over the matter on
Mr. Childs’s yacht on Long Island Sound one night about midnight. Other
Progressives were there, including Colonel Roosevelt, who appears to
have been noncommittal on the subject of Progressives supporting
Republicans. Gutzon always believed, however, that Roosevelt approved
his action.
The sculptor was concerned only with what he believed to be right. He
walked out of a meeting in March 1914 when Herbert Knox Smith had put
through the state central committee a resolution that only enrolled
Progressives could vote in the primaries. Smith’s methods were unfair,
Gutzon declared, and he wrote an open letter accusing him of gag rule.
Despite such difficulties, however, he did take time to prepare and
deliver a resolution of welcome and allegiance to Roosevelt at a public
rally held in Hartford in August 1914.
There is some evidence that to him politics had begun to look less like
a fine tournament. To Isaac Ullman of New Haven he wrote: “I am pretty
sick and discouraged with what is called politics. You know only too
well what I mean--the sordid and selfish side of the little ones and
their own personal advancement. The best we can do is to do our best,
and I try to do that all the time....”
Another disappointment to the sculptor in this campaign was the placing
in the field, by the state central committee, of an independent
Progressive ballot which he had consistently opposed. The fact that he
was named candidate for one of the offices in no way placated him. He
refused to let his name appear on the ticket, and he was bitter in
giving his reasons.
In the 1916 campaign Gutzon again supported Mr. Hill, who had been
elected two years before with about eighty-five per cent of the
Progressives voting for him. But by that time the sculptor had become
conscious of the political boss John T. King, who had appeared at the
first Bridgeport meeting sponsoring Mr. Hill. The congressman entered
into long correspondence with him explaining Mr. King’s motivation.
A year later when Colonel Roosevelt met Mr. King in Stamford the
sculptor wrote an open letter of protest to Roosevelt. The former
President took the rebuke good-naturedly. When a reporter in 1918,
during the aircraft investigation, asked Roosevelt if it was not true
that Borglum was a traitor on account of his charges against the
administration, Roosevelt snapped back, “What! Borglum a traitor? If he
isn’t a patriot there aren’t any!”
“But Colonel,” the newsman persisted, “didn’t Borglum criticize even
you?”
Roosevelt laughed. “Oh, that,” he said. “Nothing! Borglum just didn’t
like the company I kept.”
As for the national situation after 1914, the chief question was: “What
will Theodore Roosevelt do in 1916?” It was discussed wherever men
gathered. Come to think about it, 1916 is now some thirty-six years
behind us, and to much of the populace the interesting characters of
that season’s presidential campaign are merely a confused collection of
names.
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, veteran of the Spanish-American War,
governor of New York from 1898-1900, had been drafted to run for the
Vice-Presidency of the United States in William McKinley’s 1900
presidential campaign. He became President in September 1901, after
McKinley was killed by the terrorist Leon Czolgosz, and was re-elected
in 1904.
Roosevelt was a man of vision. He was popular and he was fearless. He
was also an experienced and naturally shrewd politician. He began his
service as President with an outcry against Big Business in politics. He
dissolved the Northern Securities Company and other corporations for
violation of the antitrust laws. In 1903 he instituted the Department of
Commerce and Labor. Also in 1903 he promoted the Elkins Act which
forbade railroad rebates to favored corporations. In 1906 he sponsored
the Hepburn Act which regulated railroad fares. That same year he was
behind the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act. And it was his
influence that made possible the Reclamation Act and the employers’
liability laws. He mediated the peace between Japan and Russia in 1905
and won the Nobel Peace Prize. By recognizing Panama he made possible
the construction of the Panama Canal, which was started during his
administration. He was a great showman and singularly active, and most
Americans loved him whether they liked his political philosophy or not.
In 1908 he got the presidential nomination for his friend William Howard
Taft, and Taft was elected. But there was some difficulty during the
next four years. Roosevelt turned a bit sour on the President because
he thought Taft wasn’t liberal enough. A real political crisis came in
1912. Taft wanted the presidential nomination and he got it. Roosevelt,
it seems, also wanted the presidential nomination. So he walked his
delegates out of the Chicago convention and organized the Progressive
party. Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate, was elected.
The Progressives turned out to be a pretty strong organization, and they
made some gains during the next four years. The split in Republican
thought was still pretty wide when it came time to think about the 1916
campaign, and Theodore Roosevelt was still one of the biggest men in the
country. There were some indications that in his promotion of harmony
between the Progressives and the regular Republicans he might accept a
nomination and run for a third term.
Gossip had touched on two other men who might be considered by the
delegates--Charles Evans Hughes, who had been governor of New York for
two terms, and Major General Leonard Wood, former Chief of Staff of the
U. S. Army, commander of the Department of the East and close friend of
Theodore Roosevelt. Hughes was an old-line Republican. Wood was a
Progressive.
To the former President, Gutzon sent a five-page letter showing his fear
for the disunity between the different groups and the certain disaster
it could bring to the nation. He said:
You can be the next nominee for the Presidency of the U. S. if that
is what you wish. But it will be wrung from the powerful grip of
powerful forces, and I very much question the result that would
follow such a conquest.
I think you should boldly and frankly name a man close to you, a
man long known and tried by you, a man who would include you in his
private councils. There is another advantage in this besides
quieting the antagonism and putting the lie to a million or more
irreconcilables. You would enter for good that position so enviable
as the First American.
There was no doubt whatever that General Leonard Wood was the man Gutzon
had in mind when he made this appeal. He had been on friendly terms with
the general for years, and had boundless respect for the abilities he
had shown as a soldier and as the chief administrator of Cuban affairs
after the Spanish-American War. He had never been more cheered than when
a newspaper reported that Colonel Roosevelt had himself proposed General
Wood as a nominee to be considered by the Chicago convention. Promptly,
in April 1916, he wrote to Roosevelt, “In naming Leonard Wood, your
lifelong friend, you have given the conservatives and the
irreconcilables the key to the threatened deadlock, or, as some have
boasted, ‘deathlock.’ You have said the first thing that has been said
to make impossible a bitter struggle.”
He had many friends who did not share his belief that Roosevelt would
turn out to be altruistic at Chicago. It is interesting to see how he
clung to his faith in his hero despite all indication that for once he
might be wrong ... and it is also a little pathetic.
Meanwhile, he went about the country on artistic commissions,
interviewing Progressive leaders on the way for the information of
George W. Perkins. He was on his way home from Atlanta in May when he
got a mysterious call to stop in Washington. There he learned that
Progressives had made overtures to the Republicans asking that a
representative acceptable to both sides be chosen to act as a
confidential go-between for the inside leaders. An approach had been
made to Colonel Roosevelt by Congressman William B. McKinley of
Illinois, who asked if Borglum would be acceptable. The colonel had said
that he would. Gutzon was notified. And that is not the least fantastic
thing that happened at this fantastic convention.
Old Guard Republicans would not allow Roosevelt to be nominated, but
they knew they couldn’t win without his aid. They were willing to accept
Leonard Wood if Roosevelt wanted him, and they were glad to have
Borglum to carry such important messages.
The sculptor called on McKinley, then interviewed Colonel Roosevelt and
General Wood. Their agreement, plainly stated, was that if Roosevelt
could not be nominated, he would throw his influence to Wood. Others
aware of this agreement were John A. Stewart of New York, and E. B.
Johns, correspondent of the _Army and Navy Journal_ in Washington.
Gutzon went to Chicago early in June and registered at the Union League
Club. There he met Speaker Joe Cannon, Representative McKinley and other
high-ranking Republicans with whom he kept in constant touch. Also, he
visited Perkins and Governor Hiram Johnson and other Progressive leaders
at Progressive headquarters. He was as widely and officially informed of
the situation, he thought, as any man could hope to be. Everybody was
friendly and straightforward. His great advantage, he felt, was that, as
a well-known artist who had no political ties or aspirations, he was to
be trusted. Well, maybe....
Most of the lads he was meeting had never in all their lives trusted
anybody. What Gutzon seems never to have realized is that he was
squarely in the middle of what amounted to a species of civil war. The
Republican party was definitely split--make no mistake about that--and
its two factions, after giving the Presidency to the Democrats, had been
doing well enough in other elections to survive. Neither side was as
good as it said it was. Neither side could stand any losses. So the
leaders of each side wore broad, confidential smiles in public, and in
private they moved in the fashion of morose and wary conspirators. Each
side feared the other with a real, practical fear, and each side looked
on a messenger from the other as a self-seeking ferret who must be
lulled by soft--and wrong--answers.
Excerpts from Gutzon’s detailed report to General Wood give one coherent
account of the convention, many details of which are still the subject
of controversy after more than thirty years. The sculptor shows himself
to have been an able observer, though puzzled; and he seems to have
overlooked one fairly evident feature--that Roosevelt in the midst of
turmoil was serenely waiting for a miracle, well aware of his importance
and convinced that in the failure of others he might well grow stronger.
He certainly would have liked to be nominated ... and who can say that
he overestimated his chances?
In the beginning of his report to Major General Wood the sculptor said:
I had been in Chicago hardly twenty-four hours when I found out
that the Progressives would not have anything to do with
Republicans. They were playing a foolish game of waiting to be
called on. They had even turned down the proposition of entering
the convention on equal terms for the first few ballots and
adjourning at will. Apparently they were afraid to run the risk,
although they were boasting that they had as high as 400 votes.
Where they could get half that number nobody knew but themselves.
On the subject of the Progressives’ failure to join Republicans in
presenting favorite sons in the early balloting, the sculptor wired
Colonel Roosevelt on Thursday, June 8:
ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL INDIANANS JUST SAID THAT IF YOU DECLARED
NOW PUBLICLY FOR ANY CANDIDATE, THE REST MIGHT AS WELL GO HOME. HE
ADDED THAT THIS POSITION CAN’T LAST. HAVE SEEN LEADERS OF OHIO,
PENNSYLVANIA, NEW YORK, NEW JERSEY, INDIANA, ILLINOIS, NEBRASKA,
CALIFORNIA, MASSACHUSETTS; ALSO HITCHCOCK, WHOM I KNEW PERSONALLY.
BAD EFFECT CREATED BY PROGRESSIVES NOT DARING TO WORK ON FIRST
BALLOTS WITH FAVORITE SONS. PROGRESSIVES PASSIVE TOWARD HUGHES. OLD
GUARD SAY THAT UNDER NO CONSIDERATION WILL THEY ACCEPT HUGHES
UNLESS FORCED.
Before this message he had sent two to the colonel on Wednesday, June 7:
The first message read:
FAVORITE SONS SUCCEEDED IN PASSING RULE TO GIVE A MAN AS MUCH TIME
AS DESIRED FOR NOMINATING SPEECHES. NUMBER OF FIVE-MINUTE SPEECHES
UNLIMITED. THIS GIVES US TIME TO ARRANGE FORCES BEHIND WOOD IF YOU
WANT HIM.
And the second read:
CRISIS REACHED. IF ANYTHING BUT PULLING DOWN TEMPLE ON OUR HEADS IS
TO BE DONE WE MUST DO IT NOW. IMMEASURABLE CONSEQUENCES TO OUR
COUNTRY AND VAST INEVITABLE ADJUSTMENTS FACING AMERICA HANG IN THE
BALANCE. THEY WAIT FOR YOU. DELAY MEANS SUICIDE.
But there was no response from the big man in Oyster Bay.
On Wednesday and Thursday Gutzon received two telegrams from General
Wood on Governor’s Island. Both were hopeful. The first one read:
NO INDICATION ANY CHANGE IN ATTITUDE OF COLONEL. REMAIN IN TOUCH
HERE FOR FEW DAYS.
And later:
SAW THE CHIEF YESTERDAY. POLICY AND ATTITUDE UNCHANGED.
The sculptor, putting all this together, continued his report to General
Wood. Here is part of that revealing document:
Before three o’clock the next morning (Friday) I was awakened by
’phone call telling me that the favorite-son group had over 518
votes and that they did not need the colonel. That was the first
definite rebuke, and my telegram of Thursday indicates my feeling
at the time. I am of course bearing in mind what I learned months
ago, and I cannot understand why Progressive leaders do not know
it, or why the colonel did not know it--that he never had a chance
in Chicago. When I found that he was not willing, or that his
agents in Chicago were not willing to risk their ability on the
floor of the convention against the favorite sons, I felt, and many
felt, that they were simply playing poker with the threat of an
independent Progressive convention back of them.
Thursday night I sat with a number of gentlemen at Union League
Club. We went over the entire situation regarding the colonel’s
candidacy. There were in this group men representing three states
that had favorite sons. Finally, after their declination to
consider the colonel on any terms, I urged upon them your
availability. I pointed out to them the colonel’s friendship for
you and his _absolute faithfulness_ to the friendship, and I urged
upon them the desirability of nominating you directly. They replied
that they would be glad to do this and that in ordinary
circumstances it would be done, but, because of their relation to
the favorite-sons group, such a step would be considered disloyal
and would endanger the whole situation.
They further said that your great value as a candidate was the
colonel’s loyalty to your lifelong friendship and that your
nomination would secure the colonel’s support of the old
organization. After considerable debate I proposed sending a
telegram to the colonel. This telegram was duly approved and
Speaker Cannon remarked, “If the colonel answers that in the right
spirit, we will know that he is sincere. And if he doesn’t----” Mr.
Cannon shrugged his shoulders. Here is the telegram:
“Colonel Roosevelt, Oyster Bay, New York, Thursday, June 8, 1916, 2
A.M.
“Please send me a line confirming your approval of Wood. Powerful
members of Old Guard approve and ask your approval. They say he can
be nominated. Address me, Union League Club.”
I sent this telegram and, as you see, it contained my address and asked
for a reply. I waited twelve hours, until about 2 o’clock in the
afternoon. Having promised a reply to these Old Guard gentlemen, I was
extremely anxious. I called the colonel on the phone and succeeded in
getting him. The day was wet.
The wire was noisy and the connection bad. I told the colonel that I had
wired him and was waiting for an answer. He replied, “Didn’t you get my
telegram?” I told him I had not. He then said he had answered my
questions by telegram and told me that if there was anything else I
wanted to know, to see his son Theodore. The connection was bad, the
answer unsatisfactory.
I immediately tried to find Theodore, Jr., but could not locate him. I
searched political headquarters in Chicago for the telegram the colonel
said he had sent me. I went to the head office and had them search the
wires, but could find no telegram. None had reached Chicago. I requested
both companies to go back over the lines to Oyster Bay and locate the
message. They did and reported in two hours that no message had been
received at Oyster Bay or in New York for me from Colonel Roosevelt.
Following the failure to receive a telegram from the colonel that would
support you, or any definite answer whatever on the subject, I sent
another telegram warning him of the situation and the loss of time. And
again I received no response. That there might be nothing lost by
oversight on my part, I sent a copy of this telegram to you; also one to
Mr. Perkins, together with a letter. Perkins, too, remained silent and
continued to believe that Roosevelt would be nominated. At least he said
so, and that no one else would be nominated or could be. Reports were
being circulated bearing his name saying that you would not be nominated
and that you could not be nominated. Perhaps I ought to add here that
the only objection I have heard to your nomination came out of Mr.
Perkins’ headquarters.
Friday arrived. The convention was ready to ballot. We all waited on the
result of the conference for which we had long worked and from which we
believed some harmonious solution might come. It reported--failure. But
we all still hoped. By that time we knew that the conference was not a
party conference; that the Progressive party no longer had any
authority, having lost what standing it possessed. The only conference
now was between Oyster Bay and Republican leaders.
On the other hand, this Republican convention was the soundest, solidest
body of men of that sort ever assembled in America. They were patient;
they were independent; they knew the world of politics; they wanted the
Progressives; they wanted the colonel to join with them in naming a
President. They were even willing that he should try his strength with
them openly. But 900 delegates absolutely declined to let him either
force the convention or to destroy the party’s chances of defeating
Wilson.
About 2 A.M. Saturday all hope was really abandoned, and the most
influential member of the Central States group said, “Well, no man can
say I have not done everything, tried everything, and waited till the
last minute to harmonize this situation. And here we are forced to move
in the nomination none of us wants.”
After two in the morning, quick and definite plans were made for the
Saturday-morning session and wholly without consideration of Oyster Bay.
What happened at Perkins’ headquarters I do not know. But results came
quickly and everybody soon knew that a great harmonious plan, each group
compromising for the common interest, had failed, and the cause of its
failure was at Oyster Bay.
The Central States had the key, and they had the moral courage to
sacrifice personal advantage for the larger good. At 2 o’clock they took
the bull by the horns and turned sharply to Hughes. Illinois and Indiana
were from the beginning the brain and the power of that convention, and
it was this powerful group that wished to work with the colonel and who
favored you. When forced to follow another leader they showed their
wisdom by selecting McCormick, a late Progressive, to announce the move
of Illinois toward Hughes--which swung the whole convention into line
behind them.
The reading of the colonel’s message was unfortunate. It came too late.
It was too long. In naming Lodge, it was as disappointing a thing as
could be contributed by the colonel’s worst enemy. It was met without
applause of any sort. All Roosevelt interest died then and there.
Regarding your name at the Convention, it rose head and shoulders above
the names of other candidates, and I heard nothing but praise of you,
such as would most gratify a sincere man. Some fear of a military man
was expressed, but I heard no one among the influential inner group of
Republicans who did not always say, “Wood has a record. We can elect him
if the colonel will work with us.”
Several years later Gutzon learned, from inside sources not to be
doubted, several items of information which threw light on the
bewildering events of the last night of the convention. In relation to
that urgent telegram to the colonel that was never answered, he learned
that someone at Progressive headquarters had tapped the line to Oyster
Bay; that Gutzon’s message, which had been endorsed by Republican
leaders who anxiously awaited the answer, was instantly followed by a
message from Progressive headquarters saying that Borglum was all wrong,
the author or victim of a “frame-up,” and that the colonel would surely
be nominated by acclamation on Saturday morning. It was presented that
he, Roosevelt, should withdraw and nominate Senator Lodge, who would
refuse by agreement, and the convention would then turn immediately to
the colonel.
Another item was that Nicholas Murray Butler had likewise talked to
Colonel Roosevelt on that fateful Saturday at early dawn and in answer
to a query about Leonard Wood’s chances had shaken his head.
“Impossible,” he said. “At this juncture in the international situation
it would be suicide for us to nominate a military man.” This was told to
Gutzon by Herman Hagedorn.
All parties returned from the convention in a state of complete
exhaustion. E. B. Johns wrote, “It was three or four days before I got
back to normal, and I am still doing some mental swearing at the
stupidity of Colonel Roosevelt and some of his advisors.” For Gutzon it
was one of the bitterest experiences of his life.
Wilson, it will be remembered, was elected by the vote of California
after most of his newspaper support had conceded the victory to Hughes.
It took three days to find out who had won.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
_AND DR. TRUDEAU_
Three works that Gutzon Borglum completed around 1915 had nothing at all
to do with war or politics. One was a tablet with a bas-relief sketch in
honor of Robert Louis Stevenson, the second a touching memorial to
Governor Altgeld of Illinois, and the third a simple and beautiful
memorial to “The Beloved Physician,” Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau. The
three are linked intangibly through the same fine quality of emotions
that brought them into existence. The subjects of all three accomplished
much in the world and were well loved.
Once in Stevenson’s wanderings as a consumptive vainly questing health
he stayed for a year at Lake Saranac in the Adirondacks in the care of
the not-so-well-known Dr. Trudeau. Trudeau, also tubercular, had cured
others but had started too late to cure himself. He was the central
character of Stephen Chalmers’ engaging book _The Beloved Physician_.
The idea of a memorial to Stevenson originated with Mr. Chalmers and was
brought to the sculptor’s attention by his friend Bob Davis. Gutzon was
busy at the time working on two monuments in the South, and Davis caught
up with him in Grand Central Station as he was boarding a train for
Chicago. His interest was aroused, and from the train he wrote to Davis
to say he would be delighted to do anything “to promote attention to
this kind of men of genius.” He further offered to make the bronze
tablet, bas-relief of Stevenson and an inscription to be decided on by
the committee for just what it would cost--somewhere around $200. The
tablet would be placed on the cottage in Saranac where Stevenson had
lived.
It was September 1915 before the sculptor could find time for a day at
Saranac, where he looked over the ground, listened to all that was told
him about Stevenson, was taken to see Dr. Trudeau and returned to New
York on the night train. The work was finished and ready for unveiling
in October of the same year, as the committee had hoped, “because it was
the gorgeous month of the year.” The only sad note was that Dr. Trudeau
was not well enough to take a prominent part in the proceedings. He died
the following month.
On receiving the preliminary photographs of the tablet, Mr. Chalmers
wrote to Borglum:
I congratulate you on the tablet. You have done something in that
bas-relief that Saint-Gaudens didn’t do. You have brought out the
spirit of the sick man who didn’t believe in lying in bed, and the
little uplift of his head is a perfect expression of “Come!” said I
to my engine, “let’s work anyway!” This thing requires no study. It
hits you between the eyes first glance. I showed it to Mrs. Baker,
who owned the cottage where the Stevensons lived, and the best
compliment from that old lady is this: “Yes, it’s just the way he
looked when he was here.”
A few months later Lord Guthrie, acknowledged leader of the Stevenson
cult in Scotland, wrote:
Gutzon Borglum the sculptor, in his Saranac memorial bas-relief,
has got beneath the surface and behind the mask as Saint-Gaudens,
fine as his bas-relief is as a work of art, never did. I liked the
first sight of Borglum’s work, and it grows on me. It has charm, it
has strength, and it has pathos. It is the invalid, but the invalid
who can say, “O Pain, where is thy victory?” It is the fascinating
personality of a man of genius who, with all his gaiety of manner,
was yet, in the matter of essential principle, like flint.
Hundreds of people whom Dr. Trudeau had cured were anxious to erect a
memorial to him, but were too poor to contribute substantial sums. They
appealed to Gutzon, who again responded generously. He was deeply
impressed by Dr. Trudeau’s self-sacrificing work and by the devotion of
the afflicted ones he sought to heal. He agreed to put up a
bronze-and-marble memorial for the cost of materials--about $7,500.
After studying the matter for some weeks he made a life-size clay model
of the beloved physician seated out of doors, a rug over his knees, and
invited the committee to come to his studio and pass on it. Mr. Chalmers
wrote in the Saranac _News_:
By the end of the day something little short of miraculous had
taken place, the sort of thing that may be called a miracle of
genius. Before the figure was again shrouded in the wet clothes
that keep the clay from cracking, it had become to us not a
conventional photograph image but “The Beloved Physician” himself.
“Well,” said the sculptor, stepping back with a smile, “are you
satisfied?”
“Yes,” said his visitor, but with hesitation.
“I know what you miss,” said Mr. Borglum. “It’s the artificial
something you used to consider Dr. Trudeau’s expression.” As he
spoke he was modeling a small piece of clay in his hands. Presently
he placed over the strained eyes of the face the frame of a
pince-nez. And at that instant the illusion was miraculously
complete. It was as if the doctor would presently lean forward and
say: “Have you read Osler’s _Redemption of Man_? No? Oh, you must,
you must!”
The figure was complete and ready for casting by the end of May 1917,
but there were delays caused by the sculptor’s enforced absence on other
work and the beginning of the aircraft
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Lillian Taylor_
STONE MOUNTAIN, SHOWING SUPERIMPOSED CARVING OF CENTRAL GROUP]
[Illustration: NORTH CAROLINA MEMORIAL AT GETTYSBURG]
investigation. Also there were vexatious problems of cutting, setting
and preparing the site for the statue. All these were generously solved
by Doctors Walter James and Lawrenson Brown and others of Trudeau’s
physician friends. Eventually the memorial was unveiled in August 1918.
On the marble was carved Dr. Trudeau’s favorite quotation:
_Guerir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours._
(Heal sometimes, soothe often, comfort always.)
Carl Snyder, the writer, at that time connected with _Harper’s_, after
driving to Saranac to examine the statue wrote this friendly word to the
sculptor:
May I tell you that I have never seen a portrait that impressed me
so deeply. This was equally true of my wife. She and I agreed that
we never had seen a piece of sculpture that seemed so alive. It
seems to tell the whole life story of an extraordinary man. And I
am told you only saw him once!
Man! Man! Man! With the genius to do magnificent things like this,
to create and to embody the living likeness of a great man, why,
why, why do you waste your precious time on anything else?
One answer to the query, which he was often heard to give, was that he
was never given half the work that he was capable of and wanted to do.
In quick succession members of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn wanted a
monument to Henry Ward Beecher, the famous pulpit orator; the Wheeler
family in Bridgeport wanted a memorial fountain in honor of the inventor
of the sewing machine. For St. John’s Church, near by, he was asked to
make a reredos back of the altar. From North Carolina came a call from
the Daughters of the Confederacy to build a memorial to Henry Wyatt, the
first Southern soldier killed in the War between the States. From
England came a committee to join with Americans to plan monuments along
the border between the United States and Canada to celebrate the hundred
years of peace between the two nations.
All these were not enough to keep him busy. He wrote an incredible
number of letters to committees that were planning public monuments, but
he got very few commissions that way. Most of his jobs came through
friends or others who had seen his work and liked it. Every commission
brought a different set of characters and circumstances with it and
threw different side lights on the sculptor’s personality. His
commission to build a memorial to Altgeld in Chicago was due to the
crusading spirit which had made him widely known as a champion of
democracy in art as well as in politics.
Governor Altgeld of Illinois had become widely and unfavorably known as
“the governor who pardoned the Haymarket rioters” after they had been
tried and condemned as bomb throwers. Such was his reputation for a long
time, during which he remained silent. Then an unbiased study of his
career brought about a reversal of public opinion. It was presented that
he was wholly unselfish; that his life motive had been to help the
underprivileged; that, in the words of the poet Vachel Lindsay, “He set
himself tasks which took a lion’s courage and a martyr’s heart,” and
that to carry out his purpose “He threw his reputation and his health
into the furnace every hour.”
So it happened in 1913, eleven years after Altgeld’s death, the Illinois
legislature appropriated $25,000 for an Altgeld monument. A committee of
five was appointed, including Louis F. Post of the Department of Labor,
with instructions to select a sculptor after a public competition. Two
competitions were held, bringing over thirty models, none satisfactory.
In a letter to the committee the landscape artist, Walter B. Griffin,
wrote:
This particular task should be committed to a sculptor who has
attained in his art that fundamental character, the American
ideal, which Altgeld served in his own field and exemplified in his
career. There appears to be in our time at least one sculptor,
Gutzon Borglum, who is recognized as bearing to the plastic arts a
relation like Whitman’s to literature. It would be a pity not to
avail ourselves of the opportunity to bring together such a man and
the work he is so eminently fitted for.
Following this suggestion the committee awarded the commission to
Gutzon, who received it with intense satisfaction as a recognition of
what he stood for in public life as well as a testimonial to his ability
as an artist. When the news came out the Chicago _Tribune_ published
this comment:
A powerful illustration of how not to do it is the history of the
competition for the Altgeld monument. The commission has now been
awarded to Gutzon Borglum without his being required to furnish any
preliminary sketch, design or idea. That is, the committee has done
what it should have done in the first place--selected a sculptor
and left him free to do the work.
General competitions are so unjust to the competitors and so
unproductive of good results as to be forbidden by the American
Institute of Architects. The best architects never enter them, and
the better sculptors have learned to follow their example.
When the contract was signed in April 1914 the sculptor began to work on
two different models. Before they were done he wrote to his friend Felix
Frankfurter saying that he had been reading up on Altgeld’s life and
ending his letter with this statement: “That man has become a perfect
giant to me. He was a kind of hero when I was a kid, but he lived out
his governorship and died before I got back from Europe. So he comes
along almost like a new star to me.”
Of the two small models submitted, the one selected by the committee
represented Altgeld standing on a slight eminence, his right hand
extended as if quelling a disturbance, his left stretched over a man,
woman and child beside him. The pedestal was low, so that the governor
seemed to be near his audience, his expression was noble, almost
defiant in his determination to protect his charges. The committee
unanimously accepted the full-size model of this statue except for
slight changes which the sculptor approved. The figure was cast in
bronze and erected in Lincoln Park for unveiling on Labor Day, 1915.
Then a thing occurred which to the sculptor was incomprehensible. The
model had been on exhibition in the Chicago Art Institute for a whole
year with no voice raised against it. Then various municipal art
commissions suddenly declared they didn’t approve of it and would not
permit it to be unveiled. The reason, they said, was that it was not big
enough and that the laborer’s family seemed to occupy a servile
position. To this the chairman of the purchasing committee, Daniel
Cruice, made a quick and indignant reply:
I take exception to the criticisms which have attempted to show an
insult to labor. I do not believe that labor is making a fight on
the statue. Altgeld’s enemies in life are the enemies of his
memory. They do not wish the perpetuation of the principles for
which he stood. Consequently they are doing all in their power to
destroy any reminder that such a man lived.
When the sculptor declared in characteristic fashion that he forgot more
about art overnight than ordinary art commissions learn in a lifetime
the Brooklyn _Eagle_, always quick to record a Borglum controversy,
declared editorially:
The controversy between Gutzon Borglum and the Municipal Art
Commission of Chicago over the statue of the late John P. Altgeld
adds to the gaiety of nations. The Art Commission criticizes the
conception of the work--Altgeld raising a protecting hand over a
man, a woman and a child, typifying the working classes. It
likewise objects to the proportions of the Borglum design. And the
artist answers in his characteristic temper.
It was the fate of John P. Altgeld to be a storm center in his
life. Now he becomes a post-mortem center. Large elements of the
Chicago electorate still doubt the historic proportions of the
Governor who pardoned the Haymarket bomb men. It is not to be
wondered at if the proportions of the Borglum Altgeld annoy them.
Nor is it surprising that the design, representing the Governor as
the laboring people’s defender, gives offense to them. It is a safe
wager that this element in the electorate is represented by the
Municipal Art Commission.
The issue is really not an art issue at all. In essence it is
historic and political, or rather sociological. Altgeld’s keenness
as a thinker and debater no one who ever heard him doubts. That he
showed moral courage in that historic pardon, most of his enemies
will concede. Our guess is that Borglum will succeed in
immortalizing him as the friend of labor, though many obstacles may
first have to be overcome.
The surprising denouement was furnished by William H. (Big Bill)
Thompson. He was then mayor and had made an appointment to discuss the
matter with the Art Commission. They were waiting for him at the Art
Institute where his messenger rather bluntly announced to them that the
Commission was no longer in existence nor had any authority, its term of
office having expired. “The statue looks good to me,” said the mayor,
“and the committee doesn’t.”
So the memorial was unveiled as scheduled on Labor Day, 1915, before an
immense crowd including thousands of labor-union men and women. Governor
Edward F. Dunne presided, and William Jennings Bryan delivered the
speech of the day. The sculptor made a puzzled comment:
I have been not a little surprised that in America, the foster
mother of mankind, there exist no memorials of consequence dealing
with the struggles and pathos of life. It is a matter of amazement
and regret that Chicago, a city whose life has been crowned through
sacrifice and struggle as it has been sweetened by suffering,
should show antagonism to a memorial which develops or suggests a
humane situation where one human being befriends another.
There is something stern and vital behind this. But censorship, be
it ever so official, will not arrest one beat in the natural heart
of mankind, nor stop the natural expression of what is true, of
what is good. And that which is true and good is, at least, a full
sister of that which is beautiful. Millet’s “Angelus” and his “Man
With a Hoe” would be subjects of supreme beauty and pathos in
sculpture, admirably composed for public parks. How much more human
and akin would be this interpretation of life than the cheap
allegories or conventional vagaries which the unthinking call art.
General Daniel Butterfield was a Union hero who distinguished himself at
“Little Round Top” in the battle of Gettysburg. His wife outlived him
and at her death bequeathed a fortune, part of which she specified
should be spent on a monument for her husband. She left instructions for
the unknown sculptor who might be chosen by her executors. He was to
visit the battlefield, familiarize himself with Little Round Top and, so
far as possible, incorporate the contour of that famous site in his
design for the monument. He was also to study certain photographs of the
general, one of which represented him standing with folded arms and
wearing a cocked hat, “as in the bas-relief at Utica.”
In the contract all that was said about the figure was that it was to be
over eight feet high, in the dress uniform of a major general, supported
by a foundation of natural work representing Round Top. It was specified
that the sculptor was to make a model forty inches high and that when
that was approved he would proceed with a full-size model “which shall
be submitted to the executors for their approval and acceptance and
shall be in accordance with the will of Julia L. Butterfield.”
All that appears plain enough, but there was a catch which would
presently cause the sculptor no end of tribulation. To him it seemed
that in financial reward it was the best commission he had ever
received, the only one from which he might expect a reasonable profit.
For a single figure, with side panels at the base, he was to receive
$54,000, a generous allowance. The chairman of the executive committee,
Colonel E. M. Ehlers, a Dane by birth, showed him one photograph of the
general in full-dress uniform, arms folded, wearing an imposing military
hat with a plume. Another photograph showed him hatless, with his hands
at his side. But this, said Colonel Ehlers, should be ignored because
Mrs. Butterfield preferred the other.
Following his instructions in good faith the sculptor made a forty-inch
model, using the selected photograph as a guide for the pose. One of the
executors, Mr. Hagar, criticized the nose and mustache of the model and
the sculptor changed these features to his satisfaction. All four
executors then approved the model and signed the voucher for the payment
due at this stage of the work. When the full-size model was accepted
only three executors were present, but again the voucher for payment was
signed by all four. The model was then cast in plaster and sent to the
Gorham Company to be put into bronze.
Gutzon was delegated to find a place for the memorial, preferably in
Central Park, New York City. He was told that the park was out of the
question but was offered a site near Riverside Drive, opposite Grant’s
Tomb, where the statue was placed in January 1917. The secretary of the
executors, Dr. May, in formal acknowledgment that the work was
completed, added this friendly, personal word:
I am sure that it will ever remain a monument to your art. Could
Mrs. Butterfield see it, it would have her complete approval and
gratify her pride in leaving a memorial so creditable to her
husband and to the city. It is located, as I can tell you, only a
short distance from the home of her birth and girlhood.
And then the unbelievable happened. The three executors with whom most
of the sculptor’s contacts had been made all died within a very short
time of one another. Everything was left in the hands of the fourth,
Albert Hagar, who announced that he had never liked the statue, that the
“bas-relief in Utica” mentioned in the will showed the general without
a hat, with his arms down, and that he didn’t think the figure was big
enough. He wanted the whole thing done over and refused any further
payment unless this was done. The worst feature of this arbitrary
decision was that many beneficiaries of Mrs. Butterfield’s will could
not be paid until the status of the monument was settled. Hagar’s sudden
reversal was no doubt sincere but it made inconvenience and trouble for
many.
The Gorham Company offered to handle the suit which had to be brought
against Hagar. The case dragged into the time when the sculptor had the
aircraft investigation on his hands. Meanwhile the contractors who had
done the granite work sued Gutzon for the payment of their bill. Gorham
had not been paid for the casting, the architects were clamoring for
their money and Stamford taxes were in arrears. The suit was carried on
at Cold Spring, near Poughkeepsie, so far away that the sculptor lost a
whole day every time he appeared as a witness.
Of course the Gorham Company won the suit eventually, but payments were
not made until 1920. By that time the sculptor had assigned what little
would have been left over for him to other debtors, so it is doubtful if
he ever received a penny for all his work on this big contract. It was
said by people who should know that some of the Butterfield heirs went
to the poorhouse while waiting for their inheritance. Gutzon blamed
himself for having accepted the commission in the first place. When
later the location of the statue had to be changed on account of the
Rockefeller church construction he declared he wouldn’t mind if they
dropped it into the Hudson River.
The Vance memorial for North Carolina, of which a copy stands in
Statuary Hall in the nation’s capital, was made during this period. It
remains where it was put in the first place.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
_AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATION_
The American Congress appropriated over one thousand million
dollars that were expended for aviation during the nineteen months
of war. When the armistice was signed, not a single American-made
fighting or combat plane had reached the front. No American-made
fighting or combat plane was ever produced. America depended upon
her allies to furnish a few obsolete fighting planes with which our
armies were equipped. Our contribution to wartime aircraft
consisted of two hundred and thirteen “utterly dangerous”
observation planes that reached the front with others on the way.
That is the record. (Report of aircraft investigation under House
resolution of June 4, 1919.)
Mr. Borglum is the man who started the entire aircraft
investigation at the outset and performed a great public service.
(Congressman James A. Frear, Wisconsin, speech to House of
Representatives, _Congressional Record_, March 1, 1920.)
You may have gathered from the record thus far that Gutzon Borglum was a
bit unused to doing things the way other people did them. There was only
one of him, and there were so many of the rest of the population that
maybe one shouldn’t be disturbed by this technique. He had a genius’
variety of talent; so it probably isn’t remarkable that his art studio
should have been filled with frightening projects for roads,
transportation, parks, breakwaters, engineering, airplane models,
philosophy, abstract science and the saving of the world. He believed he
could do anything--so he did it. All of this is fairly obvious on his
history sheet. But, for all that, his investigation of the aircraft
industry in 1918 remains today one of the most incredible things that
ever happened to America.
We start our study of this attempt of one man to produce some honesty in
a $1,000,000,000 delusion with the knowledge that Borglum was not only a
fairly competent theoretical engineer, but also a practical mechanic who
had been following closely the growth of air power. And that is
fortunate, because few other matters in the aircraft investigation are
that obvious or sensible. In November 1917, after the United States had
been eight months in World War I, he got a look at an airplane factory
in Dayton, Ohio. He was shocked, as he admitted, almost into a state of
speechlessness. He had a brief visit with a man in a high position in
the direction of aircraft production, listened to him, and, instead of
going home, made a quick trip to Washington. Next morning he was at the
White House, demanding to see President Wilson.
And here is the first amazing part of his procedure. He had seen that
the United States wasn’t producing airplanes and he felt that something
ought to be done about it. But he didn’t look for anybody to help him
prepare the case for presentation to somebody who might be able to
correct the situation. It never occurred to him that he needed any. The
man best able to get quick action was, undoubtedly, the President of the
United States.
Gutzon Borglum knew Woodrow Wilson and Woodrow Wilson knew Gutzon
Borglum, but the pair took a dim view of each other, as well they might.
Borglum, in his Progressive-party campaign, had been loudly critical of
the Wilson administration. Wilson, who was a scholar, appreciated
Borglum’s art. But, as the record shows, he didn’t think enough of his
politics to consider him a crusader for the democratic ideal.
And yet Borglum was appointed, with authority direct from the President,
to conduct his investigation from an office in the War Department. He
ran the boys into corners for several months, and he stirred up senators
and congressmen and Department heads and cabinet officers. That in the
end his inquiry failed to put anybody in jail or get back any of the
§1,000,000,000 is not surprising. What is incredible about the whole
affair is that he was allowed to start at all.
There isn’t much doubt about our dismal performance in building
airplanes in 1917-1918. The propagandized public was a long time finding
out that the chief trouble with our planes was their continued
nonexistence. But we did get to hear about the “dangerous” De Haviland
Fours, of which we sent 213 to France. This plane was widely celebrated
across the country as “The Flaming Coffin.” It had a large gas tank
mounted in the most vulnerable position, and a pilot was seldom able to
get away from one after it was hit.
Soldier after soldier from the front came before the Frear committee to
tell of seeing his comrades shot down in these planes. Yet reports of
such catastrophes, as the Frear report scathingly pointed out, did not
prevent Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and Aircraft Director John D.
Ryan from continuing the manufacture of DH 4s.
After the war the taxpayers began to find out what they had purchased
for §1,000,000,000. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, ace flyer and national
hero, told them when he came home to testify before an investigating
committee. “Why did the army continue to use French planes?” he was
asked. This was his reply:
The answer is simple. We hadn’t any others except the two hundred
and thirteen “flaming coffins.” The American air forces were in
dire need of machines of all kinds. We were thankful to get any
kind that would fly. The French had already discarded the Nieuport
for the steadier, stronger Spad, and our government was thus able
to buy from the French a certain number of these out-of-date
Nieuports for American pilots--or got on without. Consequently our
American pilots in France were compelled to venture out in
Nieuports against more experienced pilots in more modern machinery.
None of us in France could understand what prevented our great
country from furnishing machines equal to the best in the world.
Many a gallant life was lost to American aviation in those early
months of 1918, the responsibility for which must lie heavily on
some guilty consciences.
There had been a lot of inquiry before the House began its
investigation. And when Congress had finished there was a widespread
display of indignation with the aid of aeronautic associations, farmers’
associations and two New York daily newspapers. For a while the scandals
they dug up overshadowed what had caused the wrath of Borglum. He had
worked in wartime and in a closed circle, and what he found out was
reported to the President and the few others who had a right to hear. He
was satisfied with that arrangement, for he had no faith in the
efficiency of official inquiries. On this subject he said:
There is a radical defect in a system that occasions such
investigations. A political inquiry of this nature must inevitably
arouse enmity and opposition in the most powerful quarters. The
credit, nay, the very existence, of the government in power is at
stake. An inquiry may seem to start something, but what it starts
is an avalanche that will surely crush its initiators and the truth
they seek to discover. Thus they will remain buried under the
debris and obscured by the dust.
When Gutzon Borglum first took his demand for an aircraft investigation
to the White House he was politely, if somewhat shortly, received by
Joseph Tumulty, the President’s secretary. Mr. Wilson was frightfully
busy on account of the war, Mr. Tumulty mentioned, but he would
undoubtedly be able to read a note explaining the purposes of Mr.
Borglum’s visit. Mr. Borglum left the note and went home to Stamford.
There in due time he received a short letter from Mr. Tumulty saying
that the President wished Mr. Borglum to get in touch with Mr. Howard
Coffin of the Aeronautics Board. Mr. Borglum thought this humorous
inasmuch as Mr. Coffin was principally interested in automobile
production, which was what Borglum found wrong with the Aeronautics
Board. So he wrote something of the sort to the President’s secretary on
November 22, 1917. He finished it somewhat tartly:
The program of the Aeronautics Board was invented by Automobile
Production men before they had picked up their representation on
that board, or even before the appropriations had been passed. They
are now engaged in a grandiose project, incapable of fulfillment,
which cannot but bring scandal and disaster, and which, in turn,
can harm your administration.
President Wilson was disturbed and sent a reply on December 5, asking
Borglum to point out specifically the weaknesses in the aircraft
organization as it then stood. Borglum replied at once and suggested
that the Aeronautics Board should be really two boards, one of design
and one of production, and that the military board should have nothing
to do but order what sort of planes it needed. When he had posted this
suggestion he went back to Dayton to take another look at the plant he
had first seen, and he loitered on his way home at the Curtiss factory
in Buffalo. That was a better-looking establishment, but it seemed
disorganized and full of idle men, and it wasn’t producing any
airplanes.
Then, on Christmas Day, 1917, he wrote to Wilson the letter that, no
matter what you may think of it, put his aircraft investigation in
business. He said:
Since writing you, I have visited two other factories and attended
several aeronautics conferences. This so disturbs me that I must
write further with the hope that Congressional investigation of the
aeronautics bodies may be avoided while there is yet time to
correct conditions from within and so avoid the ship-and-ordnance
scandals.
If the opportunity arrives, I will tell you of conditions which
strike at the root of honest, disinterested public service; of
irregularities, graft, self-interest and collateral profiting in
the very heart of our production department. But public knowledge
of actual aeronautic conditions would be a military disaster to
American arms, as well as an unwarranted blow at our Government.
Therefore I suggest:
Immediate selection of three competent, fearless and incorruptible
men, whose loyalty to you is above question. Give them authority,
without publicity, to go quickly over the present plan and
accomplishment in our aircraft and report on:
Engines, planes and propellers.
Contracts placed where, system employed selecting contractors.
Supply sources, by whom held.
Relation of members of production board to supply controls, also to
contractors.
Test experiments. Why are our planes inferior to all foreign planes
and vastly poorer than German planes?
What use is being made of data constantly being sent here covering
Germany’s planes.
Such inquiry should not audit accounts. A larger principle is at
stake.
For this report you need a highly trained engineer, an expert
production man and a man who knows the art of machine flying and
the history and possibilities of machines.
1. Your engineer should be an internal-combustion engine man who
knows that an airplane engine is not merely a refined truck engine.
He should know propellers. This latter item has almost been
forgotten. No reliable propeller exists that can safely be
standardized.
2. Your production manager should be trained as a specialist on
organization.
3. The third position I should like to fill personally. There are
no principles related to flying heavier-than-air machines that I am
not thoroughly familiar with. I feel as Da Vinci did when seeking a
commission. He wrote: “As for that art, I know all that is known.”
The open-mindedness of this carries its own forgiveness. I observe
accurately, avoid prejudices, have no fears that I know of. I know
I’m a good organizer, one who can handle and keep the confidence of
men. I am not only anxious but prepared to serve you and the great
service which you, for America, have undertaken. I could put into
your hands in the briefest possible time a report on existing
conditions and war needs, and avoid scandal. Investigations during
wartime should be periodic and automatic. This would rob them of
abnormal interest and make them policy affecting functions.
Somebody slipped the letter out and published it. The automobile
industry was noisily indignant and Borglum was much annoyed. But those
results somehow seem natural in the circumstances. What must continue to
confuse students of political procedure for some time is the fact that
it brought a quick appointment. On the second of January President
Wilson had written a letter. The Secretary of War would be pleased to
give Mr. Borglum full authority. Stanley King of the Secretary’s
personal staff would be at Mr. Borglum’s disposal for advice or
assistance. Mr. Borglum would be put in touch with General George
Squier, whom he already knew, and he was to have the assistance of any
experts he might think required. He was to report directly to President
Wilson.
Why this appointment should have come through is one of the things that
surpasses all understanding. It is quite likely that Wilson suspected
what was wrong with aircraft production and thought an investigation by
a recognized Republican not connected with politics might stir up some
action without hurting the administration. That is one thought. It also
comes to anyone who has watched political maneuvering that a good way to
get rid of an investigator who was getting troublesome would be to put
him where he couldn’t talk for publication.
Anyway, the sculptor went to Washington, notified the White House and
the War Department of his arrival, called on the Secretary of State and
was assigned to a room on the second floor of the War Department
offices. Borglum felt that he would have every possible aid. The
Secretary’s office door was just across the hall.
Gutzon went to work at once. He asked Mr. King to get him a report on
how many war planes had been ordered and how many delivered up to
January 1, 1918. The War Department’s answer was quickly brought and
easily digested: “Training planes contracted for, 7,500; delivered,
1,444. Service planes contracted for, 12,500; 4,000 to be built by
Dayton Wright. Service planes delivered to January 1, 1918, none.”
Borglum called that same day on Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy,
who telephoned instructions to the Intelligence Bureau of the Navy.
Naval records were laid open to the sculptor and he went through them
personally, making what notes seemed relevant. Three days later when he
went to the War Department he was informed that they had none of the
records he requested--nor any memory of any. He was virtually compelled
to pick up a copy of the Aeronautics Committee report from the office of
the chairman, who apparently did not even know of its existence. He was
blocked in an effort to get Intelligence reports on spy activities in
Buffalo. Secret Service men were assigned to follow him wherever he
went. One of his aides in the War Department warned two of his witnesses
not to talk to him. He was informed of the looting of a bank in Dayton,
Ohio, by an agile group which substituted Aeronautics Board agreements
and checks for tangible assets. He was invited to join the Aeronautics
Board, but he didn’t accept. He discovered that his office telephone was
tapped and that his mail was being systematically examined. He opened an
outside office as headquarters for his own aides, investigators and
stenographers.
By the end of February he knew that we hadn’t planes of any kind and
that we hadn’t engines of any kind and that, nearing the second year of
war, we had less than 130,000 soldiers at the front and that they were
using shoes, socks and other equipment provided by France and England.
Borglum went to talk about this to Secretary Baker. Baker, slumped in
his chair with his feet on his desk, puffed his pipe and listened with
indifference. Not until the condition of aircraft manufacture was
reached did he show any animation. Then he shifted his feet and said
casually, “Why, Borglum, you don’t think we are actually getting into
this war, do you?”
“My God!” said Borglum. “Do you mean to tell me that all this is just a
gesture?”
Baker nodded and puffed contentedly.
Borglum couldn’t contain himself. “Do you mean to tell me,” he said,
“that all America has to do is hint that she is going into war, loan
Europe a lot of money, send over a regiment or two and that this is
going to bluff Germany into retirement?”
“I mean,” Baker said, “that there won’t be any real war as far as we are
concerned.” And so closed an astonishing interview.
Hurriedly and in anger Borglum made his second report to the President.
He hadn’t been too successful with his first report; there had been
leaks concerning its contents. His second report, which he delivered
himself on February 9, was in the hands of Secretary Baker on February
11. Baker made light of it after it had become public property.
Who released the report was never learned, but shortly the newspapers
had it and were charging that America, after spending hundreds of
millions of dollars for aircraft, had produced nothing but brag and
bluster; that we were in a war with no planes and no engines of our own.
White House and War Office press departments began to make counter
charges, ridiculing the report and charging Borglum with falsehood.
Washington seethed for a couple of weeks. Some unknown person called the
Dayton factory to fill two freight trains with airplane parts and to
paint on the boxcars in big letters, “Planes for Europe,” “Right of
Way,” “Our Boys Need These Planes,” and similar legends. Newspaper
reporters and government agents were posted between Dayton and Hoboken
to see these trains pass with their painted signs. From them the news
flashed to all parts of the country, and Borglum was a liar by official
count.
Borglum had his own agents scattered over the route and he knew that not
a single plane had left Dayton for anywhere. He was just getting part of
the pay for his appointment. Verification of the reports of his own
investigators was made two or three days later by General Goethals, whom
he met at breakfast at the Metropolitan Club. General Goethals was then
Quartermaster General and well acquainted with what was shipped out of
Dayton. Borglum wrote in his journal:
About this time Senator Thomas of Colorado turned bitterly upon me
and introduced a resolution “inquiring into the charges that Gutzon
Borglum had so recklessly made.” A small committee, composed of
himself as chairman, Senator Reed of Missouri, Senator
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Senator Wadsworth of New York was
appointed. Its duty was to visit the factories against which
Borglum had cast aspersions.
This committee proceeded via New Jersey up the Hudson to the great
Curtiss plant, on to Detroit and down to Dayton. At Elizabeth, New
Jersey, they reported that the speed and anxiety of the workmen to
get parts of planes into cars and on their way to Hoboken was
“little short of phenomenal.” The officer in charge was courteous
to the senators but begged them to keep out of the way, saying that
the boys in Europe needed planes and there must be no delay--all of
which impressed the senators so much that they thanked him and
left. Then they proceeded north to the Curtiss plant at Buffalo--a
plant having 14,000 men on the payroll and producing only ten to
twelve planes a day. (In Toronto a factory employing 2,800 people
was producing twelve fighting planes and twenty-four training
planes a day.) There was present the same kind of apparently
furious activity which the senators had witnessed at Elizabeth.
The committee then went on to Dayton Field, where, after watching a
schooling of the officers and a workout of the young men, they
turned to leave. As they were walking away, the officer of the day
approached Senator Reed and said, “Aren’t we going to be heard?”
Without waiting for a reply he said, “I’m through. You can strip my
buttons off, but I’ll have no more damned humbug. I am killing two
boys a day. We dig two graves every morning before breakfast, just
to be ready for their deaths. You may do what you like with me. I
am through.”
As a result, so the senator himself told me, the committee
determined to return secretly to the factories they had just
visited. There the men who had brusquely pushed the committee aside
in their anxiety to ship planes to Europe were disgorging the
airplane parts they had so carefully boxed. Thomas, who had been
very rude to me, wrote the report and presented it to a Senate that
had less than a dozen members in their seats. He complained
feelingly of the lack of interest, the lack of patriotism in a
matter which had impugned the honor and the integrity of our War
Department. To one of his committee he said afterward, “I wish
there were some way I could apologize to Mr. Borglum and tell him
how mistaken I have been.”
There was a little more to come before Gutzon could be through with his
aircraft investigation. His inquiry had brought reliable evidence of the
theft of securities worth more than a million dollars from a Western
bank through the connivance of some members of the Aeronautics Board.
This matter he took to Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, chairman of the
Senate Military Affairs Committee, whom he had known for many years.
With his own authority from the President he took it for granted that he
would not have to tell the names of the people involved until after
subpoenas for them had been issued. Hitchcock agreed. The next day he
declared he couldn’t do it, and the day after that he made a speech in
the Senate declaring that he had had a long conference with Mr. Borglum,
had seen all the aircraft evidence and that there was nothing to it.
Monday morning Borglum saw Hitchcock and was in the middle of his attack
when Senators Joseph Frelinghuysen, James Reed, John Thomas and James W.
Wadsworth, the military committee, came into the room. Somewhat
informally, as everything in Washington seems to have been done in those
days, they sat down and listened to Borglum’s demand for blank
subpoenas. Senator Reed nodded, stood up, and said, “Mr. Chairman,
owing to the high character of this witness, I move that the subpoenas
he asks be given. If he gets the evidence he says exists, I will move
from the floor of the Senate the hanging of those men.”
Borglum thanked him. “Senator Reed,” he said, “I have not told you the
half of it, and I can’t. I beg of you to give me the subpoenas and
assist me in getting the evidence.” Frelinghuysen and Wadsworth seconded
the motion.
The subpoenas voted by the committee were never issued, however. The
chairman, in whose hands the matter was left, never seemed to find time.
He retired to private life after the next election.
Borglum’s last interview with Hitchcock relative to the subpoenas was
just about the last of his aircraft investigation. President Wilson
telegraphed that Gutzon had “misunderstood” his letter of January 2, and
that he wished the inquiry stopped. When the sculptor was slow in
stopping, the President made his order of dismissal public. Borglum
published a letter in which he asked: “What is it, Mr. President, in
this country that you are afraid of? What is it in this America that the
President of the United States dare not face?”
Charles Evans Hughes conducted the next investigation. He worked from
May until October in 1918. The New York _Times_ of November 1, 1918,
printed his report. Gutzon said of it that it reminded him of the story
of an Irishman who was sent to locate a bucket lost in the bottom of a
well. He climbed down and he climbed back with great difficulty. Then he
returned to his office and reported: “Sure, it’s there.”
And that, in truth, was the result of the aircraft investigation. There
were other inquiries and other suggestions, but nobody went to jail.
Nobody seems to have been seriously discommoded. There weren’t any
airplanes that anybody could lay a hand on. And the $1,000,000,000 just
disappeared.
Gutzon Borglum was much disturbed about this. He could get angry
thinking of it to the day of his death. But it always seemed to a casual
friend that he was puzzled by the wrong side of airplane production.
What he should have contemplated as the scintillant miracle of all the
days he was to live was the fact that he was allowed to make the
investigation at all.
* * * * *
It is a little late after all these years to try to figure out how a
billion dollars could disappear without leaving a trace on somebody.
Borglum used to get indignant about the matter ten or twelve years
afterward, but the targets of his wrath were always anonymous. He had
some shrewd suspicions, but left at the bottom of the well was the
evidence which in this situation would have been necessary to convict
anyone of wrongdoing.
To give the fiasco a fair estimate, it seems likely that we were very
young then. Up to the time when war was declared we had left the
building of our planes to rugged individuals who whittled out the parts
for them with jackknives and put them together in moldering barns and
sheds. When we had to get an air force aloft we did the best we could,
which wasn’t very good. We didn’t trust our cow-barn airplane
manufacturers. Largely, they weren’t where we could find them anyway.
They had gone into the air corps themselves.
So the searchers for planes took a chance on some people who apparently
knew something about a gasoline motor and how to make forms out of
tin--that is to say, of course, the automobile makers. These lads
muddled through and nobody got any airplanes. They produced pieces in
large numbers and blithely shipped them away to places where they were
supposed to be assembled into airplanes. But, apparently, nobody had
thought to provide an assembler.
It is one thought about this--a thought that would have meant nothing to
Gutzon Borglum--that nobody about the airplane production, if it can be
called that, got rich ... not so far as can be determined. Nobody seems
to have had the remotest idea of what he was doing, and it takes at
least a billion dollars to keep thousands of men in jobs where they have
nothing to do but nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
_FLIGHT, PATIENCE AND SHERIDAN’S HORSE_
None of his sundry war activities seems to have had much of an effect on
Gutzon Borglum’s handiwork. His figure of James McConnell, in the
monument to him on the University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville,
is one of the first memorials to the First World War to be erected, and
it is surely one of the finest. It was because of his intense interest
in aeronautics that he knew about McConnell and got this commission. And
his creative skill had certainly been enriched by new experiences.
The McConnell figure was a labor of love and, considering the nature of
the subject, could hardly have been otherwise. Its start is told in a
prospectus of the project signed by Edwin A. Alderman, president of the
university:
On March 19, 1917, James Rogers McConnell met his death fighting
for France. He had been flying for France for over a year, and it
was meet and fitting that he should encounter death in the upper
air, battling with her enemies. The story of his life, since the
beginning of the Great War, is a beautiful and heroic story. Out of
pure idealism and devotion to the idea of freedom as established in
France, he gave his service to the French Republic, first as an
ambulance driver and then as one of the pioneer aviators of the
famous Lafayette Escadrille.
McConnell was a loyal son of the University of Virginia. He has
enriched her traditions and bound about her brow some of his glory.
His fellow students and his teachers take a solemn pride in his
great devotion to freedom and right, and think of him as a new and
secret tie binding us to the land of Lafayette and the home of
Thomas Jefferson. They desire to place here some simple memorial of
beauty and distinction that will recall to future generations of
youth the beauty of heroic death, the virtues of duty, valor and
self-sacrifice, and will keep green the memory of one who counted
it a gladness to give his life for a lofty end.
Gutzon’s sympathy for a boy of McConnell’s character, and his
acquaintance with others in the Lafayette Escadrille, gave him a
particular incentive to do this memorial. The commission came to him
through a very dear friend, W. W. Fuller of North Carolina and New York.
Borglum had also a deep admiration for Dr. Alderman. The sculptor’s
conception of the statue was new and extraordinary.
The form he chose was a male figure, standing tiptoe on a globe
representing the earth, in the act of taking flight. Vast wings were
strapped to his arms, almost concealing them, and to the calves of his
legs were bound something like greaves, showing that the youth was a
mortal in armor and not the mythological figure that a first glimpse
would suggest. President Alderman’s letters were numerous and helpful.
He was much concerned about the wings. In a letter to Mr. Fuller he
wrote:
Will one tire of their mass? Are they needed in such mass to subtly
suggest battle flight? Is there not some symbolism less realistic
and obstructive that would turn the trick? This thing cannot be
_near_ great. It must either be _great_ or miss greatness
altogether. Hence my anxiety.... I have faith in Borglum and admire
the calm, fine way he receives the layman’s counsel. But this work
is not a mere statue. It is a daring spiritual expression. It must
not offend any canon of form or grace.
Sometimes in writing I weary of seeking the hidden, difficult,
aptest phrase and content myself from sheer ennui with a lesser
form. He cannot do that, for my expression is ephemeral--his is
eternal and unlimited....
It is significant, in view of later comments on his irascibility, that
the sculptor welcomed such criticism as this. Because of the positioning
of the memorial--in clear space, free from buildings and silhouetted
against the sky--he made some changes in the figure. The wings were made
lighter, the feathers outlined more distinctly, and some of the feathers
were separated to admit light between them.
Characteristically, there seems to have been no discussion of price or
of compensation to the sculptor until the first model was completed. At
that time he wrote that the cost would be $12,000, owing to the
increased cost of bronze. Then he moved on to some work in Cuba. There
was delay in getting the marble from Tennessee in time for the
unveiling. Because of this the braces and rivets attaching the figure to
its round base were not in place when the draperies were lifted. Dr.
Alderman went through his speech in grave apprehension that the whole
exhibit would fall on his head. But it all came right in the
end--through sheer luck, perhaps.
Mr. Fuller wrote that a friend of his, “a learned physician and a just
and judicious man,” had looked at the memorial from an unusual point of
view.
This friend reported:
I am sure it is a great work of art, but I studied it mostly from
the position of the anatomist. The lines are perfect. What a grand
specimen of the human architecture, as if just from the hands of
his Maker! A model of human architecture! I noticed particularly
the different prominent muscles, tense and drawn in preparation for
flight--how anatomically correct they were in location and
function.... I shall never forget....
The aviator’s father was deeply touched by the figure. He wrote to
Gutzon:
I attended the unveiling of the memorial to my son at the
University of Virginia. I want to congratulate you on this
wonderful reproduction. It is magnificently beautiful ...
expressive and highly inspiring. I know of nothing in America that
equals this splendid work. I believe that not only the University
of Virginia but all America will regard this aviator as a triumph
of art and will cherish it as a priceless possession.
Then there came a committee which had thought about building a memorial
to a former governor, Charles Brantley Aycock, in Raleigh, North
Carolina. From Josephus Daniels came a letter enthusiastically outlining
this project. Gutzon read it without much interest. The committee had
decided to hold a competition but wished Borglum to submit a model
before they made a decision.
Gutzon replied that because Daniels asked it, he would be glad to lay
aside his ideas about competitions, but that he simply did not have the
time to put in the work of several days on a model that might or might
not be satisfactory. “Committees do not realize,” he said, “that the
making of a model is about one third of the entire work. Neither do they
realize that in at least nine cases out of ten, no model is carried out
as first presented. Not only the committee but the artist himself
develops it.”
So the committee abandoned the competition, invited the sculptor to come
to Raleigh for a conference and gave him the commission the day after
his arrival. He telegraphed home, “Returning this afternoon. Have
contract eighteen thousand.” The family received the news with decent
restraint. They knew Gutzon. He was always sanguine. A contract was
always the same to him as money in the bank.
The Aycock memorial was conceived by its promoters as the monument to an
ideal rather than to a man. Aycock, governor of North Carolina from 1901
to 1905, had established two reforms of importance. The first was to
make suffrage dependent on education. The second placed education
within the reach of all, rich or poor, black or white. And the sculptor
soon realized that he was going to have some trouble telling about this
in a statue.
Most of his correspondence was with Dr. Clarence Poe, son-in-law of
Governor Aycock and editor of a widely circulated paper, _The
Progressive Farmer_. He was a man of exceptional gifts, but sculpture
worried him. His first worry was because Gutzon was working on a
life-size model without having made a plaster cast of the small-sketch
model. Gutzon wrote him a long treatise on models in which he said:
I don’t mind making three or four. The man must be on his feet.
Except for that every action of the body is changeable.... In the
work I do in my studio I keep my small model in clay and do not
cast it in plaster in order not to be bound by it. If it is in
plaster it cannot be changed.... I am anxious to keep it as
flexible as possible, and to keep in mind that the big figure is
the sole thing and the permanent thing....
There was more correspondence and eventually Gutzon invited the
committee to come and look at the life-size model. In the fall of the
year the party arrived--Colonel P. M. Pearsall, Mrs. Charles Aycock, the
widow, and Judge Frank Daniels, Josephus’ brother. After suggesting some
slight changes they expressed complete satisfaction and went home. The
sculptor was on the point of casting the statue in plaster when he got a
telegram from Dr. Poe, who had been unavoidably detained. Poe, who had
learned his lesson about models, begged Gutzon to delay the casting till
he could get to Stamford. Nobody had told him what work it is to keep a
heroic-size clay figure moist for an indefinite time. For the next three
weeks Gutzon had little else to occupy his time.
Dr. Poe and a new committee were more critical than the first group had
been. Dr. Poe shook his head and announced that for one thing the model
was underweight. Aycock, he said, had weighed at least fifty pounds more
than the sculptor allowed. The rest of the committee agreed.
Gutzon had acquired patience. It was not serious, he said. He would
adjust the governor’s proportions. Sleeping quarters were engaged at a
hotel for the committee. And for three days Dr. Poe and his friends sat
around the studio while Borglum added to the governor’s girth. For this
work Judge Daniels was a voluntary model. In the end everybody was
pleased. Dr. Poe declared that “The result is a _distinguished
success_.”
The memorial was unveiled on March 15, 1924, a year later. Dr. Alderman
and Josephus Daniels made the chief speeches. Thousands of the
governor’s old friends attended, together with a crowd of school
children. It was a grand affair.
* * * * *
The Sheridan equestrian statue, which stands at the beginning of
Sheridan Road in Chicago, came out of this same period and was one of
the sculptor’s favorites. The technical perfection of it gratified him.
He used to say of the horse, rearing with his front feet off the ground,
that he could see the play of the muscles under the skin--and that is
very likely true.
The work was accomplished under external difficulties. In the first
place the construction of an armature for so huge a group was no small
undertaking. It was built of heavy timbers, boards and lath and looked
something like the pictures of the Trojan Horse. It wasn’t as
commodious, perhaps, but several able-bodied men could work inside
it--and did. A new studio was under construction with the sculptor
supervising all details. And outweighing all physical handicaps was the
mental strain of his work on Stone Mountain, where things were rapidly
approaching a crisis.
However, for his creative work there was always one tranquil spot in his
brain that no outside disturbance could enter. He believed in changing
his models frequently, stopping only when he could see what he thought
to be right. Jesse Tucker, the Stone Mountain engineer, recalls that
this was one feature of his sculpture in which he would permit no
compromise.
At one stage of the Sheridan memorial, Tucker pointed out, the sculptor
was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. Everybody in the studio knew
that he would receive a substantial sum as soon as the group was
finished and ready for casting. And one evening it looked as though this
happy moment had arrived.
Gutzon walked around the model, seriously studying it. He stopped and
picked up an ax. “Tucker,” he said, “I believe I can improve that
horse.” And without further discussion he began to hack down part of the
armature and added two weeks to the work.
This habit was well known to his assistants. Once his colored attendant,
Banks, reported on the progress of a statue: “Guess the boss is about
through. He’s started pulling it to pieces.”
The personal contacts he made during the production of the Sheridan
monument were particularly pleasing to Gutzon. “Big Bill” Thompson,
storm center of political controversy, was mayor of Chicago at the time.
They became warm friends. Stamford political leaders declined an
invitation to meet the mayor when he was due to look at the models, but
Thompson knew nothing about that. He arrived at the studio accompanied
by nine carloads of New York politicians.
Michael J. Faherty, Chicago’s commissioner of public works, was the
mayor’s first deputy in the memorial project. He had a summer home near
Hartford and would drop in at the studio at unexpected moments on his
frequent trips back and forth from Chicago. His chief interest was in
the development of the oversize model of horse and rider that nearly
filled the studio.
To save the expense of casting bronze in the United States the contract
was given to Vignali Brothers of Florence. There was an endless
interchange of letters and cables. Telephone wires had to be removed and
replaced to permit the trucking of the bronze casts to Genoa because
some of them were too high. This was the fault of the foundry and added
expense for Gutzon. On its trip from New York to Chicago the group
encountered patches of the same difficulty and had to be rerouted on a
wild course to avoid low underpasses. Faherty, who was anxiously
watching all this, finally reported, “Winchester and Sheridan still
twenty miles away.”
Sheridan eventually arrived for the unveiling. A special “Sheridan Day”
had been declared. And there was a big military display with speeches by
the governor, the mayor and other dignitaries. All went as scheduled,
after which Faherty found time to write of his own troubles. To Borglum
he wrote:
Surprises turn up as usual in reference to expense. The governor
has ordered the soldiers to turn out, but the officers have no
money; and the Sheridan Monument Association is called upon to pay
$2,500 to defray their expenses. The total receipts from the State
and others will amount to about $43,000, and the expenses will be
about $53,000. However, the job is done and meets with
satisfaction, for which I have to thank you and your wife.
Gutzon felt that he had never had a more pleasant association.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
_WARS OF AMERICA MEMORIAL_
The Wars of America group in Newark, New Jersey, is the story of a
nation told in figures from life and not by allegorical or classic
symbols. It is one of the largest bronze memorials in the world,
composed of forty-two human and two equestrian figures, all of heroic
size. It is the first monument in America to depict mass action. It took
three years in the molding, another three years to put it into bronze
and ten years of preliminary thought and study.
The same patriotic Amos Van Horn who had left money for the Lincoln
memorial had also provided for a monument to George Washington, which
was created by the sculptor J. Massey Rhind, and for a third memorial to
the soldiers and sailors of all our wars, to the men who had given their
lives in making and maintaining the republic. Since Mr. Van Horn’s
death, World War I had been added to the list. Almost before the Lincoln
was finished, Ralph Lum asked Gutzon to begin thinking about the
military monument, but the sum of a hundred thousand dollars bequeathed
for the purpose was not immediately available and he had to wait. Of his
idea to portray mass action the sculptor wrote:
We do things in the mass, not as individuals. Mass action is the
keynote of our civilization. Why should it not inspire our
monuments? What opportunities there have been in our history for
the inspiration of great sculpture animated by that mass spirit.
What I should like to see, for instance, is a monument to Lincoln
that would include his cabinet. The more one grows, the more his
close associates grow with him. And there are the colonial
settlements, the founders of the republic and the Western pioneers
still waiting to be memorialized in mass action.
The sculptor began his first designs in more or less the conventional
way. He adopted the shaft or the upright column, which is often used as
a symbol of civilization, and surrounded that shaft with figures,
struggling, rising above material difficulties. In making this model he
discovered that it failed completely to express the natural impulses of
the human being under stress, either attacking or defending himself
against an enemy. All war monuments, he decided, should be planned to
depict emotions when threatened by loss of a way of life which was at
once familiar and sacred to every family, tribe or nation.
When that idea became clear the problem of a memorial to men who had
sacrificed their lives for home and country became one of human anxiety
and confusion out of which order, organization and direction gradually
developed. This went hand in hand with the thought that the wars of
America were defensive wars, that America was not a crusader in a
militant sense. The war with England, for example, was a declaration of
independence, in no way a struggle for dominion beyond America’s own
boundaries. And the First World War was, in the sculptor’s own words,
“probably the most remarkable example of utter disinterestedness in
conquest.” Monuments that are built for war, he concluded, generally
treat battle and fighting as part of the process of civilization, while
in fact civilization develops its lines of peace on confidence and in
ways that are antagonistic to war. Of how the plan slowly developed in
his mind he said:
My first sketch, following abandonment of the shaft idea,
represented a confused group of men who were attempting to organize
[Illustration:
_Photo by Lincoln Borglum_
“THE TRAIL DRIVERS”
This group is in Breckenridge Park, San Antonio, Texas.]
[Illustration: THE BORGLUMS’ DAUGHTER
Mary Ellis Borglum is now Mrs. David Vhay.]
themselves and move toward leadership, with Washington and Lincoln
symbolically present. But symbolism, though necessary in a group of
this kind, had great disadvantages in that it introduced an
unnecessary idea of unreality in the passing of great individuals,
which appeared to me to be hurtful in a work of art. It seemed that
Lincoln and Washington standing together as historic characters
introduced a thought that was hurtful to the life and reality of
the group. It might give a mystical character that would detract
from its vitality.
Finally in the last sketch I introduced two horses because the
horse is not only a companion to man but is his closest companion
in times of danger, as a carrier, a weapon, or a friend.
Artistically and sculpturally his excitement and nervous tension
can be used either realistically or symbolically in a group to add
life and strength and to suggest a fear that we would not want to
show in a human figure. I felt also that in a group of so many
figures an upward movement was preferable to keeping them flat on
the ground. When I elevated the center of the base of the monument
the change instantly increased the sense of struggle and effect.
The defensive character of American wars is suggested in the first
part of the work, consisting of a group of four figures. I have
drawn the figures of men who will resist anything they think
unjust. I have clothed these men in the uniforms of three wars,
over a century apart, and strangely enough there is no incongruity
of effect.
Although these figures represent mass resistance in the Colonial
and Civil War and World War periods, only one man in the group has
drawn a weapon. I have shown here four men who form the front and
bulwark of a group of forty-odd characters, representing an entire
nation mobilizing under pressure of war, and only one man among
them displays an implement that could injure another. I have chosen
the sword because it is symbolic of authority.
Immediately back of this group I have represented the only
organized mass action indicating battle. There are five or six
figures, infantry and marines, charging forward with their rifles,
six guns in the hands of as many men, and they represent the entire
armament of this national monument.
Just at this point, as an allegro of the symphony, I have
introduced the two horses to accent the power and movement of an
irresistible forward plunge, with plain indication of the loss of
control that always appears under great stress. In these horses I
have shown a different character to indicate their separate
response to the movement.
From this point backward the composition indicates organization,
preparedness, equipment and such confusion as extends behind the
battle line to the recruiting source and into the home, indicating,
I feel, that America’s battles are all for the _defense_ of her
homes.
Nine different models were made, and the development of the
composition covered considerably over two years of time. The entire
composition was modeled full size, as it appears in bronze, without
having been “pointed out” as is usually the custom. About forty
tons of clay were used. Every bit of it was handled four or five
times. The large group itself required about three years of
incessant labor.
The characters of the group are known people of our time. They are
portraits which it is not necessary to indicate. For example, the
aviator was a personal friend of mine, John Purroy Mitchell, former
mayor of New York, whom I included because of his patriotism and
because he, like so many other gallant airmen, was a sacrifice, I
have been told, not to battle but to criminal mismanagement behind
the battle line.
This group in bronze is the first accomplished part of a plan I
have had in mind for over thirty years--to develop monumental art
into a living, active, historical record of moods, lives and
characters of the men and women who are responsible for our
national development.
In the enlargement of the idea and the making of various models Ralph
Lum, whom the sculptor had come to know in the making of the Lincoln
memorial, played an important part. The mutual trust and regard
established between the lawyer and the sculptor was a dominating factor
in producing the memorial. Such a relationship between sponsor and
creator is unique in the annals of public memorials in America. A like
relationship is not a matter of record anywhere else unless, perhaps,
between Pericles and Phidias.
On February 11, 1921, ten years after the completion of the Newark
Lincoln memorial, Mr. Lum, acting for the three executors, awarded the
commission to Gutzon Borglum and authorized him to go to work. When
photographs of the model were published wagers were laid among artists
that it would be impossible for any sculptor to keep his creative
impulse fixed on one subject long enough to produce an art work of such
proportions. They did not know that monotony or dulled interest was an
impossibility to an artist who regarded variety not as the spice of life
but as its bread and butter. Always he had two or three productions on
hand as well as an enormous correspondence, a lecture to art students, a
promised magazine article and a political campaign in which a
“progressive” candidate must be elected lest the heavens fall.
He was doing the Sheridan memorial for Chicago, which nearly filled his
Stamford studio, when he received the Wars of America commission.
Characteristically, he immediately began to clear a place in the woods
near his home and to dig out the ground for a foundation. The foundation
he built of stones covered with cement, a support stout enough to be
unshaken by any number of tons of clay or marble. On this he built a
bigger studio with walls of stone, while at the same time he laid out
the armature for the big group in the middle. Under his personal
supervision large rocks for the base of the walls were dragged by horses
and tackle from the bed of the near-by river.
The location of so huge a monument demanded much thought and
preparation. Eventually the City of Newark cheerfully spent another
hundred thousand dollars for the setting of the group. Regarding this
matter the sculptor wrote to Carl Bannwort, of the Newark Parks
Department:
Now that the monument matter is settled, won’t you get hold of
Caparn, your landscape architect, and let us have a conference
about where it will be placed? If you and he will come over and
lunch with me, we can talk this park proposition over in detail.
You have a chance to have the best memorial in the United States
and I don’t want any slip through my failing to be beforehand. You
are always in such a hurry yourself, anyway, you will be rebuking
me if I don’t keep one or two steps ahead of you.
A little later Mr. Bannwort replied:
This is a subject I hardly dare mention. The mere whisper of it may
cause as great a stir in the large area of your cerebellum as when
a brick is tossed into the pond and visibly agitates every molecule
of water.
When we move the bandstand and other excrescences from Military
Park, the memorial site, to make room for the monument, we must
have a tool shed. Is there no way of putting a door at the northern
end of your plinth and using some of the space under the bronze
group for this utilitarian purpose? For fear that a whole load of
bricks will be heaved by you with deadly aim, I say no more at
present.
The modeling was “going splendidly,” as the sculptor wrote, when Mr. Lum
brought up a subject of prime importance, which of itself involved a
whole volume of correspondence. This was the casting in bronze of the
huge memorial. Mr. Lum wrote:
I am wondering if you could within the next week secure some
estimate for the casting from some reliable concern. I have no
thought of your giving the contract to anyone at present, for I
think the prices are apt to decline further; but I would like to
get some definite estimate. The way many sculptors and other people
are constantly putting it up to me--that the casting can never be
completed and the work delivered for anything like your contract
price--would unsettle my nerves were I not so sure of you and your
ability to put through anything you undertake. But I would feel
relieved to see some cost estimates just the same.
In answer to Mr. Lum, whose chief concern now was that the sculptor was
putting so much into the memorial that he could expect no profit for
himself, Gutzon sent a list of bronzes he had produced, with a careful
comparison of size, weight and cost. His conclusion was that the
forty-two figures of the Wars of America were equal to about sixteen
single figures and that the contract price of $100,000 would “see him
through.” As a matter of safety, he added, he was corresponding with
European bronze casters who might do the work for much less than would
be charged in this country.
He was dismayed when the American estimates came in--from the Gorham
Company, $123,000; from Roman Bronze, $87,000; from Henry Bonnard,
$78,857. This meant that every bit of the available money would be spent
for the bronze casting alone, which is usually less than half the cost
of a monument. It was an immense relief when from the Vignali Brothers
of Florence, Italy, came an estimate of 475,000 lire, which at that
time, October 1921, was worth about $20,000. A contract was signed to
the effect that the monument would be shipped from New York in eight
sections (plaster casts) and that the first bronze section was to be
returned not later than February 1, 1922, and the other seven sections
before the end of the same year.
And then the misfortune that had dogged the sculptor if ever he went
into a business deal was again at his heels. He had an Italian friend in
the United States who said he was going abroad and for the honor of
being a part of so noble a work would gladly make all the business
arrangements with the Vignali firm. Into the contract the friend
inserted two wholly unexpected clauses--that the sculptor was to be
penalized for every day’s delay in getting the plaster casts to
Florence, and that the friend was to receive a ten-per-cent commission
on such a penalty as well as on the contract with the sculptor himself.
It was later learned that the friend sued Vignali for refusing to
inflict the penalty on the sculptor. Vignali, being familiar with the
optimism of art, had never expected Gutzon to deliver the models on
time.
There was a weary imbroglio. The sculptor sent his assistant, Hugo
Villa, to superintend the whole bronze-casting business. Hugo reported
in 1925 that the first group of figures which had been shipped in 1922
were only partly cast; that later groups to arrive had been cast and
were scattered all over the foundry; that the contract made by the
sculptor’s friend was a pretty bad one.
In Newark, meanwhile, all the burden of explanation fell upon Ralph Lum,
a man of exemplary patience, who was being constantly asked by artists,
reporters and expectant citizens what had become of the memorial. In
answer to one of his many letters Gutzon wrote in 1922:
The new studio I had to improvise for this memorial has been a
great physical burden, while the sheer labor of creating such a
group has been terrible. However, that is all overcome now, and I
have simply to take up figure by figure and group by group, with
some concentrated work of course, but it will be like revamping a
manuscript you have written.
Now about finishing the group of horses by the first of this month,
as you hope. This is quite possible in point of time and labor, but
it would be bad and harmful. You will be surprised to hear me say
I’m a little sorry the main figures are gone to be cast so I cannot
work more on them. I do not need to tell you I shall do nothing
that will hurt the final result, but I ought to say that I work so
rapidly no allowance is made for my slowing up. This work is a
colossal undertaking. A true, clear perspective of it as a whole
must be maintained throughout its making. Handling a mountain of
material is of itself a man’s job continuously. For that I
calculated, but the housing and the danger of freezing and the
responsibility of caring for so much I did not consider as I now
would.
If a sculptor should undertake to do one figure a month,
complete--twelve figures a year--it would be undertaking the
unheard of in art. Yet as the work stands today, I’ve done much
more than that. In the next sixty days I shall have done nineteen
human figures and two horses. I have spent at least half my working
time, by necessity, to properly house and protect the work. These
nineteen or twenty figures are all separate and amount to about two
thirds of the whole. I don’t believe anything like it was ever done
before. I certainly could not repeat it and should not want to. As
to its value, you know better than anyone else that the group is
worth half a million if it is worth a cent.
In a previous letter the sculptor had written in a different mood: “The
work is going splendidly, but I am terribly tired--more constantly tired
than at any time in my life--and it’s not because I have reached the age
of one hundred.” Answering both letters, Mr. Lum wrote:
I can realize, as you know, better than anyone else all that you
say, except the single fact of your having grown so terrifically
fatigued by the labor of our great work. I can’t think of you as
tired. Somehow I don’t associate it with you. Can’t you just go
away from it all for a week or two and then get the labor of the
rear group out of the way and get it shipped and boxed? I am
leaving for abroad next week, and of course I realize now that we
can’t possibly unveil this fall. But I know I will have to move out
of town if everything isn’t in readiness by early spring. That you
should have a million dollars and ten years’ time for this work I
know full well.
Gutzon was still at his wit’s end. The first group of four figures had
not been shipped until September 1922, and by contract all the forty-two
figures in eight groups were to be returned before the end of December.
There had been delays in getting clay into wax, delays which eventually
made the unveiling four years late. For these delays the dimensions of
the group and the sculptor’s determination that only his best work
should be fixed in bronze were responsible.
The Stone Mountain project, started in 1915 before the Wars of America
project had been authorized, had now been suddenly revived and the
sponsors were demanding Gutzon’s return to Atlanta. Still the sculptor’s
work was virtually done when again, as the Italians say, “The devil put
his tail in the business.” The total expense of shipping the crates of
plaster casts to Florence had been about $2,000, as done by an American
shipper, Caldwell and Company. Now came a bill for twice that amount
for returning bronzes which occupied less space. The shipment was
handled by an Italian who added extra fees for trucking from Florence to
Leghorn and “deck charges.” Finally there was a peremptory demand from
Gutzon’s friend for $2,000 as his commission.
In paying other bills that he thought to be legitimate the sculptor had
already used all available funds while he himself worked for nothing
because, as he wrote to Mr. Lum in 1926, “This monument must be put up
if I have to keep on paying for it to the end of my life and mortgage
all I possess.” Confronted now by demands that he thought unjust but
could not carry to court, he borrowed money to pay them and gave several
of his small marbles as security.
Troubles never come singly, says an old proverb. Gutzon was at Stone
Mountain, absorbed in another work, when word came that all the bronze
casts had at last arrived in Newark, where no one had the slightest idea
of what to do with them. By keeping the wires hot the sculptor located
his old friend Bob Baillie, who dropped his own work and hurried to
Newark. There presently he was joined by Villa. At the hands of these
two, and by what the sculptor gratefully accepted as an act of
Providence, the great work moved swiftly to its climax. Several years
later Mr. Vignali asked the sculptor if he had found a case of champagne
in the neck of one of the horses. Gutzon said he hoped that the welders
made a party with it.
The unveiling at Military Park on Memorial Day, 1927, was thrilling
enough to efface all memory of the years of waiting. The mayor of
Newark, Thomas L. Raymond, had formally proclaimed a public festival; he
eulogized, among other things, “the excessive generosity and spirit of
self-sacrifice of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who has given without
limit of his genius, his time and effort.” Because the memorial was
national, not local, invitations had been sent to the President of the
United States and his Cabinet, to all governors, to senators,
congressmen and persons of distinction in national life, scores of whom
responded and were present in festival spirit with tens of thousands of
New Jersey citizens.
The orator of the day was Secretary of the Navy Wilbur. Over the
inspiring scene floated silvery captive balloons. At a bugle signal they
rose, lifting the flags which had been concealed in the monument, and
out flew forty-eight pairs of carrier pigeons to speed the message of
good will to every state in the union. The sculptor’s contribution had
been to scatter poppies over the green around the memorial as an
expression of his own feeling for the soldiers and sailors who had given
their lives for the United States. When it was his turn to speak he
said:
It would be impossible for me to express the pleasure I feel and
the gratitude to God that I am able today to deliver to you and
through you to Newark and to America this memorial monument to the
people who have founded and protected a new freedom of the world.
The design in its dramatic sense is conceived as a moment of crisis
when the life of the state is threatened and depicts America’s
manner of meeting such a crisis. It is a memorial to soldiers and
sailors. It is a monument to the fortitude of the American people.
It is located here because here Washington stood. Here he many
times assembled his troops. Here Lafayette was received by your
forefathers, and the building of this monument was prophesied. Here
Jackson met your citizens, as did Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and
the other great leaders. All these staunch souls foregathered here
on the very ground whereon this design is set, to discuss their
course or part or, if necessary, pay sacrifice to national service.
The design itself represents a great spearhead, consistent with the
character of Military Park. Upon the field of this spearhead we
have placed a great Tudor sword, its blade the pool, its hilt the
monument representing the American nation at a crisis, answering
the call to arms.
As news of the unveiling spread through the country, with descriptions
of the impressive ceremony in the newspapers, a flood of congratulatory
letters came in, some from old friends, some from strangers, many from
distinguished sources. All criticism of the sculptor who had undertaken
two big jobs at once was now forgotten. He was assured that such a work
of art was well worth waiting for. One of the letters was from Robert
Baillie, most valued by the sculptor because of its human quality and
because the writer had worked in the studio and understood him and what
he had been trying to do. Baillie wrote:
Mrs. Baillie and myself want to say how much we thought of the
group and the unveiling ceremony. It was simply glorious in spite
of the rain. I liked what you said, and Mr. Lum’s acceptance was
well worded; but what appealed to me most was the message from the
governor of Georgia. I think that was the most sincere tribute to
your efforts that I have heard at any time, and well it may be so
since they now know what they have lost. You certainly have made a
warm spot in the hearts of Newark’s citizens and one that will not
be forgotten by them. I am sure that you have had many letters of
congratulations but none, I can assure you, more sincere than ours.
And Ralph Lum added: “You know how much the association with you has
meant to me, and my joy that it has all worked out so beautifully is an
abiding and comfortable one.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
_STONE MOUNTAIN_
You probably have heard the story of Stone Mountain, Georgia, as who,
alive, hasn’t. Stone Mountain is an isolated mass of granite that rises
abruptly from a plain near Atlanta, and on its precipitous face Gutzon
Borglum once started to carve the pageant of the Confederate Army. The
idea had its inception somewhere around 1910 or 1911. Borglum was asked
to look at the project in 1915; began his preliminary work on it shortly
before the First World War; carving was started in June 1923; the head
of Robert E. Lee, a gigantic sculpture, was unveiled in January 1924;
the figures of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis were roughed out
during the summer of 1924; on February 18, 1925, there were words
between the sculptor and a representative of the Stone Mountain
Confederate Memorial Association; by midsummer the models were broken,
Borglum had left Georgia, and what was probably the world’s first
attempt at mountain carving was abandoned.
The years have produced a variety of stories about what happened at
Stone Mountain, most of them untrue, and there is little use now in
summing them up. But the wreckage on the mountain was an evident fact,
as was the finish of one of sculpture’s most astounding efforts. From
what remained of the carving it was easy to envision the Confederacy’s
last glorious march--the ride of the great leaders with horse, foot and
artillery across the vast granite wall toward what had looked like
immortality. But there wasn’t going to be any immortality.
Borglum’s plan for the depiction of the army had kept pace with his
far-reaching mind. He hadn’t overlooked a detail: In the front would be
the leaders. Behind them the men, a horde of gray-uniformed men, riding
their horses or dragging their guns or staggering afoot from the brink
of the great cliff top, entering this last great parade from out of the
sky. He had made no count of the figures. Apparently there was to be no
end to them ... and no matter. There was a tall precipice in front of
him--thousands and thousands of square yards.
All that was gone now, not only the first of the striking carvings, but
the hope for the memorial’s completion. Gutzon Borglum waited for a long
time for the aid he felt must come--for the miraculous intervention that
would bring the stone soldiers back to the mountain. But nothing came of
half a dozen efforts to put the hard-rock men back at work. Gutzon
Borglum died, and nobody in Atlanta talks about Stone Mountain any more.
Borglum, they figure, is the only man who ever knew how to carve a
mountain, and they are at least partly right. He is certainly the only
man who ever did it.
On February 27, 1927, Lynn Haines, who obviously knew something about
this dramatic episode, introduced Gutzon Borglum to the Penguin Club in
Washington. What he said may not have been too reserved, but anyone who
knew anything about the Georgia project would have admitted its truth.
Haines declared:
Borglum had an impossible dream for Stone Mountain. Its inception
was beyond belief. Its execution was unimaginable. Every phase of
it presented problems which his smart friends considered
insurmountable. He ignored human limitations and took up the job.
He created a national state of mind that accepted and approved his
impossible project. Then he financed the memorial. He calmly
accomplished what it was said could not be done in engineering. He
had to have and therefore produced entirely new and hitherto
unknown devices in photography, and in mechanics and in his own
art. He proceeded to carry out his idea on a scale so colossal as
to make it the most miraculous thing ever shaped by human hands....
I have been at Stone Mountain several times with Mr. Borglum. It is
rightly described as “the largest upthrust of unbroken granite in
the world.” It stands alone.
We have all wondered about Mr. Borglum in that work. He was so high
that he was merely a small black spot moving across the mountain in
the wind. He was giving shape to statues some two hundred feet tall
and giving them the grace and detail that you would find in figures
in his studio.
They said it could not be done.... So Gutzon Borglum did it.
And then Lynn Haines told the story of Stone Mountain. Or rather he told
an important part of it. He neglected to call attention to the fact that
what one man can _do_ another man can _undo_.
* * * * *
In 1910 the Civil War was still one of the South’s active and bitter
memories. There were still plenty of people alive who could tell from
personal experience of the pillaging of homes, the burning of Atlanta,
the devastation of the Southern countryside by Federal troops.
The women of the South had banded together as The United Daughters of
the Confederacy to alleviate as well as they could the misery caused by
the war and to cherish the memory of their heroes. Gutzon had been
commissioned by a branch of the U.D.C. to carve a memorial to the first
Southern soldier killed in battle; so he came to meet many of the
remarkable membership, including the national president, Mrs. C. Helen
Plane of Atlanta.
Mrs. Plane was a singularly able woman. Although nearly eighty years old
when Gutzon first saw her, she was still vigorous and highly
opinionated. She was a person for whom the War between the States had
never ended.
She was living in Mississippi in the first part of 1861 when her
husband, a surgeon, had been killed. With her old colored nurse for
company she had toured the battlefield in a one-horse wagon looking for
his body. She had found it and taken it home for burial.
Years afterward, when she and the sculptor had become friends, she asked
him if he had noticed that she didn’t shake hands with him when they
first met ... and she explained. “I was afraid,” she said, “that you
might in some way have been responsible for my husband’s death.”
For many years there had been talk in Atlanta about using the flat
granite front of Stone Mountain to present some sort of Confederate
Memorial. The U.D.C. approved the idea and Mrs. Plane gave impetus to
it. Her plan had little more form than anybody else’s, except that she
had seen the head of Lincoln, by Borglum, in the national capital. She
said that she would like to have the same man carve a head of Lee on
Stone Mountain’s great bare wall.
She interviewed the owner of the mountain, Sam Venable, who promised her
a spot twenty feet square near the base of the cliff on which to carve
the memorial to Lee. And armed with this promise, she wrote to Borglum.
Gutzon did not know anything about Stone Mountain, but he was interested
in Lee. So, in the summer of 1915, he came to Atlanta to meet Mrs. Plane
and her committee. The women met him at the railroad station, drove him
to Stone Mountain, and pointed out the spot donated by Venable. He
looked at it in puzzled silence.
“Well,” snapped Helen Plane, “what do you think of it?”
“Ladies,” gasped the sculptor, “I don’t know what to think. But it seems
to me that a twenty-foot head of Lee on the side of that mountain would
look like a stamp on a barn door.”
The stunned women wanted to take him back to Atlanta where they had
arranged a luncheon and a reception, but he begged off. He wanted to
study the mountain, he said, to see if something could be done with it.
So the U.D.C. committee left him in the rambling old summer home of the
Venables at the lower end of the mountain and trooped off without him.
On that day a friendship and mutual understanding sprang up between
Samuel Venable and Gutzon Borglum that was to last as long as they
lived. The Venable family at the time included Mother Venable, who had
been Cornelia Hoyt and had lived in Atlanta during the Civil War; her
son Sam, already in his fifties, a whimsical bachelor and head of the
family; his two sisters, Leila and Elizabeth; their husbands, Dr. James
N. Ellis and Frank Mason; and the two Mason children, Sam and Leila.
They all lived together in a huge house built of Stone Mountain granite
in Atlanta, spending their summers at the home near the cliff which they
called “Mount Rest.” Sam Venable had been in the granite business with
his brother Will who had died leaving two daughters, both married and
living in their own homes--Mrs. Robert Thornton Roper and Mrs. Coribel
Kellogg Orme.
With the Venables at “Mount Rest” Gutzon passed three pleasant days. He
got up in the early morning to see whether or not the sun’s first rays
touched the cliff. He watched the light traveling all day and studied
the angles and shadows of its fall. On the night of the third day he
watched the mountain with a wisp of pale moon hovering over it. He
seemed to see a gray-uniformed host stealing quietly over the upper edge
of the great wall, moving northward across its face.
That evening he pointed out to Sam Venable what he had seen. Near the
top and sweeping downward, the Confederate armies. Above, the artillery,
appearing at the summit as if coming from beyond. Dropping down and over
to the left across the cliff, a procession of men, guns, horses. Left of
these, the cavalry in full forward motion. And in the center, where the
wall bulged outward, was a colossal group of the principal chieftains of
the Confederacy--Lee, Stonewall Jackson and President Jefferson Davis.
Swinging away to the left were column upon column of Confederate
infantry.
Sam listened and smoked vigorously. Then, after a long study he made his
comment. “I suppose,” he said, “it will take an awful lot of rock.”
Gutzon didn’t smile. “A strip at least two hundred feet wide,” he said.
“The whole of the steep side, clear to the top for the central group
alone.”
“That all?” asked Venable sarcastically.
“No, I’ll need the sky, too. Can’t have any buildings or chimneys
sticking up from behind.”
Sam laughed. “All right,” he said, “you can have it.”
The next day Gutzon went back to Atlanta and told Mrs. Plane and her
committee of his additions to their dream. “We haven’t got enough
money!” declared the practical Mrs. Plane. But Borglum talked to them.
Enough people North and South would be willing to help, he said. He
would go through the country and solicit funds. People would come from
all over the world to pay tribute to these heroes, he said, to pay
tribute to the ones who had died for the right as they had been given to
see the right. It would be a shrine for Americans who had fought,
without hope, without money, without arms, for the things they believed
in. It would be the greatest memorial ever conceived. That’s what Gutzon
Borglum believed, and what he said, and the women agreed with him.
There was to be a national convention of the U.D.C. in San Francisco in
October 1915 and Mrs. Plane and Mrs. Walter Lamar, president of the
Georgia Division, called on Gutzon to attend and tell the delegates
about what he intended to do and why. Gutzon went, marched the warriors
down the mountainside as he had for Sam Venable, and produced the same
results. It was the speech of his life.
The imagination of Gutzon Borglum was just as valuable in his
speechmaking as in his sculpture. That the national organization of the
United Daughters of the Confederacy should rally in support of his
prodigious memorial is not surprising. The interest and support that
the press stirred up in the North and East and West as well as in the
South was something of a sensation.
In the spring of 1916 the sculptor took his family, Mrs. Borglum and
little Lincoln, to Atlanta to live. There Mary Ellis, partly named for
Dr. Ellis of the Venable family who saved her life, was born.
Sam Venable and his two nieces consented to deed the necessary portions
of the cliff face to the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The deeds were
formally presented on May 20, 1916. At that time a stone marker was
unveiled and a ceremony of dedicating the mountain for a memorial to the
Confederacy was performed with Mrs. Plane and a number of Atlanta
citizens assisting.
In December of that year the businessmen of the community were invited
to a meeting at Decatur, county seat of the county in which Stone
Mountain is located. Some routine business was being transacted when the
sculptor came in and sat in a chair with the audience. He quickly heard
the conversation of two men directly in front of him.
“What’s this meeting being held for?” whispered one of them.
The other sniffed. “Oh,” he said, “some damn fool artist from New York
has a notion he can carve up Stone Mountain, and they want him to tell
us about it.”
When Gutzon rose to speak he addressed all his argument to this second
man who turned out to be Forrest Adair, one of the prominent citizens of
Atlanta.
At the end of the speech Mr. Adair came forward and apologized. “I’ll
admit I was skeptical,” he said, “but now I really think it can be done
and that you’re the one who can do it.” He was a firm supporter of the
memorial plan ever after.
Gutzon’s success with the businessmen that day was general. But although
he could make mountain carving seem easy to a skeptical opponent, he had
more trouble convincing himself. The difficulties began to haunt him day
and night. A mural painter facing a vast canvas has a uniform surface on
which to lay out his design and balance its parts. Stone Mountain,
however, had an irregular, uneven surface, with a huge overhanging bulge
which must be harmoniously utilized unless the sculptor wished to
convert the side of the mountain into a flat wall before starting his
design.
How was he ever going to locate his sketch on the mountain? How could he
be at once near enough to outline his figures and at the same time be
far enough away to get a proper perspective of the whole and establish
right proportions?
How was he to get his workers to their working stations without utter
exhaustion? How were they to work at ease, unhampered by constant dread
of a sudden fall? How were they ever going to be able to remove enormous
amounts of stone without growing old and gray in the process?
His friends begged him not to become involved in so hazardous and
fantastic an undertaking. His younger brother Solon, whom he had
summoned to the spot in 1915 when the monument was first contemplated,
gave the only encouraging suggestion. He said: “You have an advantage
here over most sculptors. All you have to do is remove what stone you
don’t want.”
Helen Plane and her group had collected about two thousand dollars for
their monument to Lee. For the time being Gutzon decided to use that sum
for a scaffold and for steps leading down over the side of the cliff to
permit an examination of the rock and to make preliminary drawings.
A man by the name of Jesse Tucker happened to be working on the
Venable home, and the sculptor became acquainted with him.
Gutzon discovered that he had unusual intelligence, ingenuity and
resourcefulness--qualities indispensable in this entirely new and
different kind of work. He engaged him to construct a flight of steps
going down over the face of the mountain from the top.
This was a hazardous undertaking. At its northern end Stone Mountain
slopes gradually to the ground level. Horse-drawn vehicles as well as
automobiles can reach a point three fifths of the way up with
difficulty. The steep side, the side chosen for the carving, is
precipitous. The slope starts treacherously easy for some feet from the
top and then swiftly changes to a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the
plains of Georgia. A red line shows where the danger begins. Many
stories are told of those who have disregarded the line and plunged to
their deaths. At one or two points there is a narrow ledge, which
occasionally catches a goat or a child who is more lucky.
Mr. Tucker depended largely on Negro labor and was singularly successful
in working with it. He is a man who naturally inspires confidence and,
by going ahead and showing the men just where and how to step, he soon
had them crossing the red line and drilling holes in the rock. Into
these holes steel bars were cemented. The woodwork of the stairway was
attached to the bars. The first stairway was 480 feet long and ended on
a platform ten feet wide with a barrier twenty feet high on the outside.
Conspicuous among Tucker’s Negroes was one called Homer, by whom the
Borglums were adopted. He could take a piece of timber four by eight
inches and eighteen feet long, lift it from the wagon, put it on his
shoulders, carry it to the top of the cliff and down the stairs without
dropping it or pausing for breath.
Jesse Tucker proved to be a helpful organizer and superintendent and a
faithful friend. He played an important part in all that followed. Over
thirty years after this first meeting, the Borglum family was driving
through the Florida town in which he lives. Answering a phone call, he
came over with his whole family. He refreshed Mrs. Borglum’s memory with
many details of work that she had forgotten. He made one memorable
remark: “Men didn’t work _for_ Mr. Borglum. They worked _with_ him.”
That, possibly, is an explanation of how he was able to carve mountains.
The immediate problem which faced the sculptor was how to get men to
their work in the middle of a steep cliff 800 feet high. The quarry men
who had been taking granite from Stone Mountain for years had never
thought of taking any from the steep side. How then were men who had to
be able to handle drills freely and easily without fear on intricate
work to get to their places. Engineers were consulted. All advised
against tackling such an insurmountable problem.
Finally, at the suggestion of the inventor Lester Barlow, The Brown
Hoist Machinery Company of Cleveland, Barlow’s firm, sent two of its
best engineers to Stone Mountain. They went into the matter in great
detail. They evolved a grandiose plan for a steel mechanism 550 feet
high, with sliding platforms and elevators to carry the workers to their
stations. The cost of this structure was set at $200,000, not too much,
probably, but far beyond the reach of the sponsors of the project.
The sculptor, however, was undaunted. He devised a strong leather
harness with a seat attached, to be buckled around the waist, in which a
man could sit and push himself around by his feet, leaving his hands
free to use drills or paintbrush. The harness was attached to a steel
cable fastened at the other end to a winch or wheel hoist, which could
be operated by one man turning the wheel so the worker could be pulled
up or let down as was necessary. The winches were firmly anchored to the
stone.
By this device the sculptor could and did go all over the face of the
cliff, exploring the surface imperfections. Tucker got a bad jolt doing
it in the dark. Even Governor Trinkle of Virginia proved--to the terror
of his wife watching from below--that he too could go adventuring over
the rock. By adding more platforms on which carvers could stand securely
and on which stepladders could be placed to increase their reach, it was
found that men could soon learn to carve as comfortably as in a studio
on the ground.
The sculptor had gone back to Stamford to work on sketches and models
for the carving when the First World War intervened. The government
needed all the engineers in the country. Jesse Tucker joined the army
and went overseas. Gutzon took up the aircraft investigation. The
project of Stone Mountain came to a stop. Work on it was to be delayed
for some eight years.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
_THE IMPERISHABLE MONUMENT_
The sculptor came out of the war and the aircraft investigations heavily
in debt. Fortunately he received some large commissions for carving
public memorials, but the sponsors of these projects wanted to have his
exclusive attention. There was the customary trouble of the setting for
one finished piece, and the creation of another, the Wars of America
group, was a matter that seemed impossible to finish. As a result Stone
Mountain, which seems to have become his most important interest, was a
long time hearing from him.
Jesse Tucker, back from the wars, paid a visit to the old workings and
made an earnest report. “The stairs and scaffolding need immediate
repairs if they are to stay where we put them,” Captain Tucker said. “In
fact, I should earnestly ask you to come down here if you don’t want to
lose everything you accomplished before the war.”
There wasn’t much more money available. People digging down in their
pockets to support a world war didn’t have much change for a memorial to
the Confederacy. That had waited until now; it could wait further. But
lack of cash did not delay Gutzon after he had heard from Tucker. There
never had been any cash anyway.
When Borglum arrived at Stone Mountain in the summer of 1921 he was
filled with new enthusiasms, new ideas that had come to him during the
war years and during his struggles with headstrong committeemen who
couldn’t decide what they wanted. The sculptor looked at the granite
mountain and took a deep breath. After all, this was home. This was one
place in America where he could never have harsh words with anybody.
Here were people who thought as he did--people willing to sacrifice
anything they had, to glorify the spirit of those who had gone.
Something more than a tremendous picture of the Confederate Army was to
be left here, Gutzon decided. He needed a studio in this area; so he
would build one at the foot of the mountain--a huge one made of
permanent materials. And when the project was finished this building
could be converted into a vast art school of a sort much needed in the
South. The students, he declared, would be able to learn about sculpture
by looking at it, by being a part of a great work as they did in
medieval Italy.
He designed a great hall to be cut into the rock below the marching
statues. This was to be a memorial to the women of the South and a
depository for their records. In addition to that he was planning an
open-air amphitheater at the base of the mountain. He gave this some
tests. Marie Tiffany of the Metropolitan Opera Company came down to sing
for a select few and demonstrated the perfect acoustics of the place.
This will be a shrine to gladden the soul, said Gutzon. And it looked as
if it might be.
For a year the sculptor was forced to commute between Stamford and
Atlanta. But with Tucker looking after the work on the cliff it began to
progress. Sam Venable and Forrest Adair took up the assignment of
raising more money.
Borglum decided to scaffold the entire area necessary for blocking and
carving the central group, nearly an acre of perpendicular granite wall.
This arrangement would have a higher initial cost but would make it
easier and quicker to work the rock. An entirely new approach to the
project was built from below, 700 feet of steps up to a solid platform.
The platform was hung on the mountainside 550 feet above the base, and
on it were the blacksmith shops, drill-sharpening apparatus, hoists,
power plants, supply rooms and machine shops. Air compressors were
installed with air lines and feeders 1,700 feet from the base. A cable
hoist was erected and the mountain electrified.
The cost of bringing electricity to the mountain was estimated by the
Georgia Power Company at $15,000, but it never came to that. Preston
Arkright, president of the company, was interested in Gutzon’s plan to
carve a mountain. He reduced the bill eighty per cent and presently
canceled it altogether.
Once the way was provided for the men to get to their working stations,
Gutzon faced the problem of getting something arranged for them to work
on. He had next to place his design on the great wall of rock in exactly
the right place and proper proportion to the scale of the mountain. The
size of the figures was so great and the surface of the wall such that
the ordinary scale model which sculptors use was not satisfactory. It
was absolutely impossible to get any sense of correct proportion from a
steel cage let down over the face of the mountain on cables.
Large drawings were hung over the cliff without success. Then Gutzon
began experimenting with a lamp projector which could throw photographs
of his models on the mountain face. Up to that time the largest
projection machine had a range of only 300 feet. The manufacturers of
such machines, whom Gutzon consulted, declared that a lamp powerful
enough to project a picture 800 feet would produce such intense heat
that the lens would be broken and the slide melted.
Finally Gutzon went to E. S. Porter of the Precision Machine Company of
New York who promised to build a projector according to his
requirements. After months of experiment the lamp was ready for trying
out on the photographic slides of Lee and his generals taken from
Gutzon’s sketches. The test was made in Stamford; the lamp placed on a
terrace near the house and the biggest sheets he could find stretched
across the meadow several hundred feet away. The Connecticut Power
Company ran the electricity through a special wire.
While the sculptor was fussing with the slide to get the proper focus,
his little girl began jumping up and down and pointing her little
finger. She exclaimed: “Oh, Daddy, look! Horses riding through the
field.” And sure enough! There were horses carrying Generals Lee and
Jackson riding like ghosts upon the slightly misty atmosphere, far ahead
of the sheets hung there to catch them.
The lamp was taken down to Stone Mountain where another difficulty was
encountered. The carving was at an elevation of 350 feet. That meant
that the light beam carrying the design traveled upward at an angle of a
little more than fifty degrees, which meant great distortion. The
sculptor discovered that by tipping the slide at a corresponding angle,
this distortion could be overcome.
Consequently he first photographed the model on the level. Then he
photographed the photograph tipped forward at an angle equal to
overcoming the distortion in reverse. Thus a distorted slide was made to
meet precisely the conditions on the mountain where the design was to be
placed. As a result the picture appeared at that high elevation as it
would directly in front of the lens. The picture was then traced on the
mountainside in white to guide the blocking-out process of the carvers.
The lamp, weighing about a ton, was bolted to a concrete foundation to
avoid the slightest movement. It would be swung to any angle, up and
down, right and left. A slide three inches high produced a picture 200
feet high. The enlargement was so great that a pin scratch on the slide
measured nine inches in width on the mountain. The head of Lee’s horse
was thirty feet from tip of ear to end of lip; the stirrup was nine feet
long. A man standing on Lee’s shoulder needed a nine-foot stepladder to
carve the ear.
In these dimensions absolute precision was of the utmost importance. A
telephone for communication between the operator and workers on the
mountain was installed so that with micrometer adjustments, the same
picture could be superimposed night after night on the incomplete
tracings. In addition to locating the design on the mountain the lamp
made possible infinite changes in the original plan. Even a complete
change in the composition of a dozen horses or a hundred soldiers could
be projected on the mountain and the effect of the change shown at once.
The picture as it appeared on the mountain shown at night was as clear
as the scene in a movie. In fact, one night when the photograph was
being shown a passer-by stopped in great excitement, thinking that the
figures had already been carved, so lifelike was the illusion. The
projection machine, Gutzon estimated, saved him at least two or three
years’ labor in placing his sketch upon the mountain.
A third problem, equally important and seemingly insolvable, was what
could be done to remove the stone with the rapidity and facility that a
sculptor enjoys when he works on a marble bust in his studio? This
thought occurred to Gutzon before he even measured the acreage he
intended to use for his carving. How could he whip these enormous
dimensions and reduce a mountain to a handful? He related this
experience in an article later produced in the Dupont trade magazine. He
said:
When I first put drill to that eight-hundred-foot-high block,
directing the hands of men I could hardly see at a distance of
fifteen hundred feet, I was still impressed by the thought that
without some effective substitute for the thousands of enslaved
craftsmen of the Egyptian days, our undertaking would never come to
an end. I spent weeks experimenting with the ways and means of
blocking out masses of unnecessary stone and trying by plug and
feather and wedge drills to split them off. All these efforts
proved childish and inadequate. After months of failures and
careful calculation of costs I began to see that the work would be
next to interminable with the labor we could afford and by the
known means at our disposal.
I had thought of explosives but, knowing little about them, had
vetoed their use. The general idea is that high explosives can be
used only to destroy. As I thought this subject over, much as I am
writing it, another thought came to me: Why not _control_ explosive
force? Firearms control it. Why not develop some means by which we
could blow off just what material we wanted to be rid of, in
precisely the quantities we wished to remove, and at the same time
preserve the stone left in place, intact and without injury? That
problem I pondered over for months without discussing it with
anybody.
Just at that time a Belgian engineer, who was passing through
Georgia, visited me at Stone Mountain. I told him what our
difficulties were, quite apart from the safety problem of carrying
men to such a height apparently unprotected, to work on the side of
the mountain. The removal of stone was costing too much and was too
slow. The old methods were detaining the development of the design.
“Why don’t you use dynamite?” he calmly asked.
“I’ve been thinking of it,” I said, “and I am on the point of
making experiments. But it’s close work.”
He then told me that he had recently enlarged a tunnel through a
ledge of granite only a few inches, and that by arranging his
drilling and adjusting the charges of dynamite, he was literally
able to cut off six or eight inches of the main ledge as cleanly as
if it had been channeled.
Of course anybody who knows anything about granite knows that it
splits easily in some directions and in others is stubborn and
cranky. I spoke of this and he said he had found means of
overcoming that trouble.
“Where I cross the grain of the granite,” he said, “I put my drill
holes closer together. While I drilled my holes to the same depth I
did not place my dynamite at the bottom of each one, but scattered
the charge, zigzagged it up and down the wall. Then I measured my
charge carefully, kept it so light that the six-inch shell often
only cracked the stone loose and sometimes a hand bar would be
required to release it.”
If ever I had that gentleman’s name and address I have lost it,
but that night in the lamp room I projected the photographs of my
models of Lee, Jackson and Davis on Stone Mountain, which was a
little over eleven hundred feet from our location. The slide was
small enough so that I could hold it in the hollow of my hand, but
the picture projected without distortion over nearly an acre. We
studied it together. It was this traveling engineer who gave me the
assurance and impetus that resulted in the practical use of
dynamite in the carving of gigantic figures, in dimensions to
harmonize with the colossal thought and life of our day.
I spoke of this experience to a great friend of the mountain
memorial idea--the late Coleman Dupont--and, following his
suggestion, I communicated with the Dupont powder people at
Wilmington, requesting that one of their experts be sent to Stone
Mountain to instruct me and my assistants in the use of explosives.
They responded very graciously and sent a man who, I believe, was
on special duty in Florida. So it was that the amazing, almost
fantastic idea of carving with dynamite came into being.
A charming letter from the Belgian engineer has recently come to light,
written after the visit referred to above. His name was Jean Vanophem,
and he appears to have been summoned back to Belgium. He did not have
time to visit Stone Mountain again.
Mr. Tucker remembers that the Dupont man was recalled after a few days
at Tucker’s own request, because he insisted on using too large a
charge--one or two sticks of half-pound strength--whereas Mr. Tucker had
found out that a half ounce was a successful charge. Mr. Tucker, after
much experimenting, trained one of his crew in the use of dynamite so
that the man, Cliff Davis, became such an expert in this artistic form
of blasting that he was known as “Dynamite Davis.” Cliff could place a
row of charges, draw a line on the rock under them and make bets that
the result of the explosion would not be more than three inches from the
line.
* * * * *
It soon became apparent that the women of the Atlanta chapter of the
United Daughters of the Confederacy alone could never raise funds for
the tremendous undertaking, estimates for which ranged from two to three
and a half million dollars.
The first voluntary contribution had been $5,000 from J. S. Cobb, a
North Carolinian as was his friend W. W. Fuller, both of whom were
connected with the American Tobacco Company. Forrest Adair, one of the
first and most loyal supporters of the memorial, succeeded in raising a
few thousand dollars for the most pressing necessities--lumber,
compressor, electric motor, etc. Venable and Gutzon both advanced large
sums for materials, the sculptor going even more deeply into debt. His
Stamford property was heavily mortgaged. It was characteristic of him
not to ask pay for services until creditors were making such insistent
demands that he was obliged to take action of some kind. This led to
misunderstandings. Unfriendly persons called him mercenary. He resented
the charge and was called irascible. And, bitterly denying it, he proved
that he was.
It was decided to invite some of the bankers and businessmen of Atlanta,
as well as other prominent Southerners interested in the Confederate
cause, to serve on the executive board of the Stone Mountain Confederate
Memorial Association. Neither the name nor the constitution of the
original organization was changed in any way, and the United Daughters
of the Confederacy continued to comprise the main body of the
membership, annual dues for which were fixed at five dollars. It was
distinctly understood that the men were to help only in financing the
design and plan created by Gutzon Borglum and adopted by the Atlanta
chapter. It was not a question of a civic committee engaging a sculptor
to carry out a design made by someone else.
Mrs. C. Helen Plane was made president-emeritus. W. W. Fuller was made
nonresident honorary president and vice-chairman of the executive
committee. Four members of the U.D.C. were made vice-presidents, and
four others served on the board in different capacities.
Hollins N. Randolph of Atlanta was made president of the association. R.
Rivers, familiarly known as “Petie” (not to be confused with a later
governor of Georgia named Rivers), was head of the executive committee.
Rogers Winter was made publicity director. These three with their
lawyer, Reuben Arnold, were the most active in controlling the policy of
the memorial association. David Webb became executive secretary and
furnished many constructive ideas for raising the necessary cash. So did
the sculptor. The remaining members of the executive committee were Sam
H. Venable, Robert Harvey, Eugene Black, W. A. Sutton, Thomas W.
Connally and Mrs. Sam Inman, a woman of wealth and social prominence.
In March of 1923 the real financing of the memorial began. A working
organization was perfected, and Atlanta was asked to set a precedent for
the United States as a whole. The city responded and tentatively pledged
$100,000, payable in five years. Fulton County pledged a like amount.
Individual subscriptions totaled approximately $40,000.
Dave Webb suggested the idea of memorial tablets to be placed in the
U.D.C. Hall, at the base of the mountain, to carry the names of
relatives who had served in the Confederate Army. Each contributor of
$1,000 or more to this fund for carving the memorial was to have the
privilege of designating a name for one of the tablets. A family or
group contributing a thousand dollars could designate the name of one
man for a tablet. Each bronze tablet was to show the name, rank, company
and regiment of the soldier or officer so immortalized. This was known
as the Founders’ Roll and became very popular and lucrative. In setting
forth the purpose of the tablets an announcement was published with the
following eloquent preamble by Rogers Winter:
As old as human nature is the yearning to memorialize the buried
dead, to perpetuate the tradition of illustrious heroes, but never
has mankind in all the centuries succeeded in erecting an
imperishable monument. Stonehenge is a jumble of granite slabs. The
Colossus of Rhodes collapsed two hundred years before Christ and
lay in ruins for a thousand years. The Parthenon of Greece, whose
marble figures were the most perfect sculpture ever produced, has
been virtually dismantled by vandals and art collectors. The
pyramids of Egypt are slowly crumbling. Those marvelous temples
which adorned the Nile when Egyptian civilization was in its glory
are but mounds of debris. The Roman Colosseum is a skeleton of
pagan grandeur.
But now, in the Providence of God, it becomes our privilege to
create here in the heart of the South, in memory of Southern
heroes, the one supreme imperishable monument of human history.
The sculptor made all the designs for this hall, working on them for
weeks and delivering the blueprints of them to the committee in July
1923. It was to be cut in solid rock to a depth of sixty-seven feet; in
width it was to be 265 feet. It was divided into three rooms: Georgia
Hall in the center, with Venable Hall on the right and U.D.C. Hall on
the left. There was to be room for 2,890 memorial tablets.
The first work of carving anything at all on Stone Mountain was started
on June 18, 1923. The first figure to be carved was, of course, that of
Robert E. Lee. The sculptor had made a heroic-size model of the head,
seven feet high, in his Stamford studio, and a plaster model of this was
brought to the mountain. Much blocking out and roughing off of the
surface had to be done before the actual surface of the final figure was
reached. The whole area had been gone over carefully and marked out with
the aid of the projection lamp.
The sculptor appointed Mr. Tucker superintendent, giving him complete
charge of the work. He was assisted by Hugo Villa, an Italian sculptor
from Milan, who had crossed the Atlantic years before with a commission
to erect a monument in Mexico. A revolution had put an end to the
project. Villa had worked his way up to New York and went to Gutzon’s
studio, where he soon became a permanent fixture as sculptor’s
assistant. The best in the world, Gutzon called him.
With these two men in charge and on the spot, the “Master,” as Villa
called his chief, felt that he could safely go back and forth to
Stamford or wherever else the business of the Southern memorial called
him. He was greatly in demand to speak at U.D.C. gatherings and women’s
clubs all over the United States, and the Memorial Association expected
him to attend such meetings. It also expected him to be on hand to show
off the work on the mountain whenever there was a convention of Elks or
Rotarians or Sunday-school workers, and there was a continual procession
of such events in Atlanta.
In July 1923 the sculptor wrote to Mr. Rivers, reporting a meeting he
had attended with Hollins Randolph in Cleveland and their visit to the
factory where some of the new machinery for the mountain work was being
completed. In the same letter he mentioned that Mr. Tucker had reported
to him several times that Mr. Rivers had cautioned him to go slowly with
the work on account of lack of funds. Gutzon warned Mr. Rivers that no
real carving could be done without the preliminary work Tucker was
doing, repeating that the carving was the most important thing and the
only thing that would get subscriptions. He deplored the fact that he
himself had to be concerned with the money-raising, and cautioned Mr.
Rivers against spending more money in the office than was being spent on
the mountain, which he had learned was also a fact.
The goal set for the finishing of Lee’s head was January 19, the
general’s birthday. The sculptor left Stamford for Atlanta more and more
frequently as the work neared the final surface. It was his practice to
do the finishing himself. He never finished a model perfectly and handed
it over to someone else to copy or enlarge, as is common practice among
sculptors. Especially in enlargements, he believed that better, more
individual results could be obtained if he himself modeled the figures
in their full size. If he had
[Illustration: WOODROW WILSON MEMORIAL AT POZNAN
Mrs. Wilson is at the center.]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Lincoln Borglum_
TORSO AND LEG OF DANCER]
already expended much of his creative interest on finishing a small
model, the final figure, he felt, would lack spontaneity and vigor.
In mountain carving this practice was absolutely necessary, owing to the
unpredictable character of the stone surface. Blemishes are often found
in a block of quarried marble when the sculptor starts to carve into it.
It requires little imagination to realize the imperfections that are
bound to appear on a cliff exposed to all the elements for thousands of
years. As an example, when the Jackson head was being carved a crack
suddenly appeared on the bridge of the nose. In previous cases such
cracks were not deep, but in this instance the blemish persisted even
after the position of the head had been pushed back four times. One more
move and the whole design would have had to be changed.
The crack was slight and might have been left, except for the danger of
water getting into it and freezing. After fifty years or so it might
have become a serious defect. Jackson’s face in the original model was
looking at Lee. The sculptor decided to turn it to look in the direction
toward which Jackson’s arm seemed to be pointing. Thus that crack was
lost in the six-foot hole of the eye socket, and the nose occupied an
area of solid stone.
Only the sculptor made the change possible. He stood over the carvers
directing the work. A man trained only to copy a model would have been
helpless and hopeless in a situation like this.
During the final six weeks of working on Lee’s head, when it appeared
that the carving could not be finished otherwise, the men worked all day
and all night, in shifts of eight hours each. Gutzon worked with them
and was there virtually all the time. Frequently he worked the whole
night through.
It was cold on the mountain in the winter, and a canvas was stretched
over the work to break the wind. Huge pots of burning coals were placed
on the platform and slung along the surface of the rock. The
stoneworkers, for the first time in the lives of many of them, were
dressed in heavy clothes. They wore what they could keep tied to them
and swathed their feet in bulky wrappings of burlap and blankets. But
the work was still cold and miserable, and only the calm presence of
Borglum gave them any indication that it was ever going to be finished.
Borglum, however, was tired but satisfied. He had never carved a
mountain before and in all truth he must have had his moments of
misgiving. But Lee’s face, as it began to emerge human and
understandable from the stone in those last weeks, must have answered
all his queries. Nobody would ever tell him again that he didn’t know
how to carve mountains. Here was the proof. He knew.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
_THE EMERGENCE OF LEE_
There have been few days in the history of Atlanta so festive as the one
set for the dedication of the Confederate memorial. And, possibly, there
will never be another. The progress of the carving against unspeakable
odds had been such that visitors were pouring in from all over the
United States. There were artists, engineers, dynamite salesmen,
machinery designers, Civil War veterans, politicians and unaffiliated
patriots.
When three governors--Brandon of Alabama, Neff of Texas and Trinkle of
Virginia--had appeared two days before the unveiling, Gutzon decided
that it would be proper to give them a luncheon on Lee’s shoulder. It
would give them some idea of the size, he thought.
So, with the aid of Hetty McCurdy, who ran “The Golden Glow,” a Stone
Mountain tearoom, Mrs. Borglum arranged the luncheon. The stoneworkers
hung out a pulley, and hot fried chicken, hot biscuits, hot coffee and
other things were served with very little trouble. Twenty leading
citizens of Atlanta sat down with the governors on Lee’s shoulder. One
of the governors turned pale when he descended the 400-foot stairway,
and sat down to rest several times. At every move he seemed to be
stepping off into the infinite.
Three more governors--Morrison of North Carolina, McLeod of South
Carolina and Walker of Georgia--were present when Lee’s head was
presented to the world, besides former governors, representatives of
governors, two representatives of the President of the United States,
and a long list of distinguished individuals appearing for the Daughters
and Sons of the Confederacy and for Georgia and other states. The event
was accompanied by all the pageantry and oratory that the South knows so
well how to produce. There were pieces about it, too, in the _Stone
Mountain Magazine_, published by the Confederate Memorial Association.
Said one of these bits:
The dream of the world’s greatest memorial began to come true
Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock. With a stately dignity that held
something of a caress, a bright, broad national emblem was lifted
and gathered as a flowing coronet on the majestic brow of Robert E.
Lee, looking now and forever from the sheer wall of Stone
Mountain....
And nobody knew--or had even a remote inkling--how wrong that was.
Mrs. Helen Plane, the Old South’s daughter, who had hoped for this great
memorial, stood by the sculptor’s side and leaned on his arm as she gave
the signal for the unveiling. Under the gray sky of a typical January
afternoon the flag swept aside and the calm, sad eyes of Lee looked down
upon ten thousand of his people. The crowd stood hushed in awe and
admiration.
Since before noon a pilgrimage had been under way from Atlanta and
surrounding communities toward Stone Mountain. There were no good roads
hereabouts--not in that day--so presently there was a crush of vehicles
parked on the approaches for nearly a mile from the mountain. They never
reached the unveiling. Hundreds upon hundreds of automobiles were in
fields along the highway, and in ditches and on crossroads. The
occupants of some of them walked on miles and miles to the ceremony.
Others were stopped in their tracks when the first trickle of cars back
to Atlanta began at 3:30.
Ten thousand people stood bareheaded and silent as the statue of Lee was
unveiled. Another ten thousand were in the group that could not see,
blocked in the crush of traffic miles from the mountain.
Hollins Randolph, president of the Memorial Association, stood on the
platform briefly to introduce Dr. David Marx, who delivered the
invocation. Mrs. Plane, in a costume of the sixties, was carried onto
the rostrum by the sculptor. With bared head he stood motionless as she
waved her hand.
Up on the mountain platform, a thousand yards away in an air-drawn line,
tiny figures moved beneath the two vast American flags that hung like a
curtain. Mrs. Plane’s hand was scarcely raised before boulders of
granite began to slip from resting places under the flags and flash down
the sheer drop of the precipice--five seconds in their fall from the
flags to the base of the mountain, then two more seconds before the dull
thunder of their impact rolled across the valley.
The flags parted and rose, and between them, to the thunder of cascading
granite, the head of Lee appeared--a majestic head that even in its
colossal size and distance seemed vibrant and lifelike. The silence of
the spectators was long. Then suddenly out of the stillness spoke a
voice clear though quavering--an old man’s voice: “It’s General Lee!
It’s the general!”
Borglum turned wonderingly toward the source of this unscheduled salute.
It was a bent old man who spoke--an old man in a gray uniform. His day
seemed to be done. Not many had heard his outcry--not more than a
hundred or so who happened to be standing near him--but his voice had
brought the awakening of the throng. Applause--cheers, screams and the
shrill rebel yell--crashed across the valley and came echoing back
again, an amorphous sound like the din of a hurricane. Lee had been well
acclaimed.
Gutzon, holding the trembling arm of Mrs. Plane who seemed to have
undergone a tremendous emotional shock, suddenly realized what the
people were cheering for: the head of Lee. And he gazed up at it
openmouthed, conscious that he was looking at it for the first time.
Gutzon Borglum had worked on this massive carving for weeks on end, day
and night. He knew every dimension of it, every curve. Its magnitude was
no surprise to him, because standing on the upper lip of the statue he
had been unable to reach the upper eyelid. He had swung across the face
in a bosun’s chair, drilled holes along the nose, placed his dynamite
sticks and exploded them. But he had had no time to travel down the face
of the mountain and into the distance to look at it.
It was a pleasing sight that day. The monument looked logical, perfect
in scale on the great wall of granite. The day was mild and gray, and
the light was fading; but for all that, there were lifting shadows in
the face. Each part of it stood out in its proper place. And for the
first time in months Gutzon was really happy.
After a time the cheering thousands were quiet again. They moved in
silence to the road, slowly, sedately, like people emerging from a
solemn religious service. They got into their cars and just as silently
and just as unhurriedly moved out toward Atlanta. Then in an hour or two
it was dark--a thick, impenetrable dark.
Gutzon escorted Mrs. Plane to her car and she shook his hand. “I am
ninety-four years old,” she said. “I have waited a long time for this
day and I have never, never in my life seen anything like it.”
* * * * *
The unveiling of Lee was merely a beginning for the Confederate
memorial. Work on the mountain was resumed immediately.
The bust of Stonewall Jackson was the next subject, and that promised
little trouble. Gutzon had made a model of the head in his Stamford
studio and had brought a seven-foot enlargement of it to Georgia. While
the rough work was proceeding on the mountain, a local studio was
completed. Modeling stuff was moved in and Borglum’s horse “Smoke” was
brought down from Connecticut to pose for the mount of Lee.
Then the arguments began.
There had been no doubt about whose face would be the first to be carved
out of Stone Mountain. Jackson was an easy second choice. But after that
nearly everybody in Georgia had a departed Confederate relative who
should rightfully be memorialized in the first group. In the original
plan Borglum had made room for five figures in this group. Lee, Jackson
and Davis were certain of their places. Forrest and Longstreet had many
supporters for the last two places. Then somebody suggested that seven
men be given this immortal recognition, and trouble renewed itself. The
committee squabbled. The state legislature rattled with sonorous debate.
Church societies and high-school debaters aired their views, and Gutzon
Borglum made a fine assortment of models.
The models were a disconcerting problem because modeling clay in the
vicinity of Atlanta was difficult to get and expensive to import. For
his preliminary work the sculptor modeled in plaster which turned out to
be a pure makeshift, because it is not pliable and cannot be used for
fine work. Wax was better for small figures but out of the question for
the stupendous casts used on the mountain.
In addition to these causes of delay, funds began to get short. Borglum
found the money situation an imposing study. The executive committee
seemed to be getting plenty of financial aid, but this money didn’t seem
to be coming in quickly enough. There were always enough funds to
support the office and hire the stenographers and get the printing done.
But there was never enough of a residue to push the work on the mountain
as fast as the sculptor wanted it pushed.
Gutzon was hard-eyed about this situation. Some of the committee
members declared that he was an irascible old obstructionist--that he
didn’t understand their difficulties nor give them credit for the work
they were doing.
To this Gutzon’s reply, generally delivered to them in a harsh tone, was
that the only thing of real importance about a carving on a mountain was
the carving. If the fund raisers couldn’t raise enough funds to pay the
hard-rock men, he declared, then there wasn’t much use in their raising
any funds. During the first eight years of getting ready for the work on
Stone Mountain--which started in 1915--Gutzon said that he had advanced
$20,000 for labor, materials and machinery. He had kept no account of
the expense of traveling around the country in support of the
enterprise, he said. Nor had he kept any record of what he had put out
for experimentation with new tools, his sketches, studies, drawings and
models.
He observed more violently that for the first few months of the newly
organized association he had worked without a definite agreement. A
contract was finally drawn by which the sculptor agreed to carve the
central group for $250,000, he to furnish labor, power, machinery,
explosives and other materials and his own salary. A portion of an old
labor-and-lumber bill was paid to him on account of his advances during
the preceding years. Other payments were postponed for future
settlement. For the time being the association was supposed to pay all
expenses at the mountain, together with a certain monthly stipend for
the sculptor. These payments were always in arrears.
“And why is this?” the sculptor demanded witheringly.
“But, Mr. Borglum,” answered the treasurer, “we just haven’t the money.
We’re sure to have it next week.”
Out of nowhere came the plan to persuade the United States to issue
fifty-cent pieces carrying the picture of Stone Mountain Memorial to be
turned over to the committee for resale at a dollar. This looked like a
wonderful solution to all money problems and, to tell the truth, that’s
what it was. There was some argument about who had first disclosed the
idea. Dave Webb was warmly mentioned by some of those close to the
subject. But in the end, Henry Stilwell Edwards got official credit for
it and is said to have received $30,000 as a reward from the Stone
Mountain Memorial Association. Mr. Edwards was certainly a well-known
writer, and even without his fifty-cent-piece idea his support seemed to
be worth paying for.
Once the plan had been accepted and Edwards properly acclaimed, there
seemed to be some difficulties. It was a difficult matter, some
Atlantans pointed out, to ask the government to memorialize the valor of
soldiers who had so recently been at war with that government. Nobody on
the committee had friends in high places or, for that matter, knew much
about where to go for help. Gutzon Borglum had come into the Stone
Mountain situation as a sculptor whose almost impossible task was the
carving of a granite precipice, but he had friends in Washington from
the President down. So the executive committee approached him, and all
the labor of fostering the memorial coin fell on his shoulders.
It is common knowledge that many things annoyed Gutzon during his
vigorous lifetime and that he spoke of them sometimes loudly and
witheringly. A careless hard-rock man on Stone Mountain had once
observed of him with reasonable fairness, “He’s a pretty good
stonecarver--but he ain’t no sweet talker.” And there had been little
cause for him to improve his ways since the committee began to think
about finance.
The idea of the resalable half dollar appealed to him. It would get
funds--plenty of funds. But, he pointed out, the promotion of it wasn’t
his job. And he was cold and hard about it. He would undertake the work,
he said, because he was ready to do almost anything to see the monument
finished, but he didn’t want to be tripped up every five minutes by
petty politics or local interference or advice. He would do the job in
his own way, he said, or he would be just as glad not to do it at all.
They agreed and he went to Washington.
Borglum wasted no time with professional lobbyists. His first call was
on Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Boston, cradle of the “damyankees.”
Lodge thought the idea was grand and directed Gutzon to take it to
Senator Smoot. Senator Smoot was chairman of the finance committee. He
was also leader of the Republican party, and the sculptor was a little
worried about him. He knew that he wasn’t going to get votes for himself
or his party in the South, no matter what he might do, and he must have
been aware of possible censure in the North. But Smoot was a showman no
less than Borglum.
“It is a noble idea,” he said. “It will be recognized as a gesture of
friendship on the part of a victorious government toward its late enemy.
I shall be glad to handle it for you.”
Borglum then went to President Calvin Coolidge, and what had looked like
an almost impossible job was finished. Coolidge, the skeptical, taciturn
and unemotional, broke out with one of his rare enthusiasms. He would
give the matter his personal support, he said. And he did.
Congressman McFadden, who had helped Gutzon in the aircraft
investigation, introduced in the House the bill authorizing the coin,
and presently it was through both houses. But the making of a model for
a coin and having it approved by the Treasury Department and the Art
Commission and the Director of the Mint entails countless visits to
offices in Washington, Philadelphia and New York, and it is a tedious
process.
Gutzon made nine different models before he got the approval of every
detail. There were arguments about the style of the lettering and the
arrangement of the figures. One member of the Art Commission thought
that the eagle’s legs were too gaunt and lifelike and should be enclosed
in feather pantalettes.
Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon wanted to know why the motto
“In God We Trust” had been placed over the heads of Lee and Jackson.
“Because they did trust Him,” said Gutzon, “and were sincere in their
belief that they were right.”
The secretary smiled. “And the thirteen stars,” he went on. “What are
they there for?”
Gutzon knew then that his trouble was over. “It all depends on which
side of Mason and Dixon’s line you happen to live,” he said. “They
could, of course, stand for the thirteen rebellious states.” And Mellon
laughed and gave in.
The first coin was struck at the mint in Philadelphia on January 21,
1925. The first model had been approved six months before, and the
memorial fifty-cent piece differed from it in only one important
particular. The figure of President Jefferson Davis, a part of the first
group projected on Stone Mountain, did not appear on the coin. That was
one concession the victorious government declined to make.
CHAPTER TWENTY
_MONEY_
It became evident during the summer of 1924 that the Confederate
memorial of Stone Mountain was on its way to a considerable solvency.
The memorial half dollar would presently be minted, whatever the Yankee
quarrels about the status of Jefferson Davis and the need for pants on
eagles. In the meantime a new project of the inventive David Webb showed
signs of lucrative popularity.
“The Children’s Founders’ Roll,” Webb called this new appeal for cash.
And all he needed to recruit the eager children to the Founders’ Roll
was a children’s medal that he could exchange for their donations. This,
he thought, didn’t involve anything very difficult inasmuch as he had
one side of the medal already depicted in the first model for the coin.
The other side was to carry an inscription of the committee’s choosing.
But he didn’t want the medal to cost too much, and there came
difficulty.
The United States mint maintains a rigid high standard in its coinage,
and Gutzon wanted the children’s medals to be equally fine. He turned
his model over to the Medallic Art Company of New York, whose
workmanship satisfied him. The company agreed to make the medals for six
or seven cents apiece. They were to be sold to the public for fifty
cents or a dollar.
However, there turned out to be competition. Another company had made
overtures to the Stone Mountain Memorial Association offering to do the
job for a cent or two less and intimating that somebody--they wouldn’t
of course say Gutzon Borglum--was to profit in some way on the
difference in price. Gutzon, who had put away his anger during his coin
negotiations in Washington, suddenly went berserk again. He turned over
to the committee all his correspondence with the Medallic Art Company,
showing that he was not getting a cent. He reminded them that he had
made all the models for the coin and children’s medal without
recompense, and pointed out one after another the things he was doing on
the mountain for love alone.
“You seem to forget the promotion of your coin idea,” he snapped at
them. “Who paid me for that? Who paid me for the time I spent getting
pushed from one office to another? Who around here ever pays for
anything? Who is honest enough to think that he has to?”
Most of the directors tried to placate him, but some weren’t convinced.
Borglum’s blood pressure was still rising when he went out.
In another week there was another bitter quarrel. Gutzon, whose view of
his associates was still pretty dim, came across some publicity material
designed to promote the sale of the memorial coin. He might not have
liked it had he been untroubled by other things. He certainly did not
like it in his present state of mind, and his criticism of the publicity
director was sudden and bitter. The publicity director answered him in
kind, bowed and retired, and, thereafter, the two men never got along
together.
Amity was singularly lacking around the memorial headquarters for the
rest of the summer. Unfortunate things just continued to happen. The
Borglums, toward the end of August, went to Nantucket where, at the
request of Ed Howe, the sculptor was to give some talks at the summer
school for social science. They had barely arrived when Gutzon got an
emergency call to get back to New York. In a heat wave of unexpected
virulence the wax model of the children’s medal had melted and the
completion of the work had been stopped.
The records show that the Stone Mountain Memorial Association was loudly
indignant and remarkably bitter. Letters subsequent to the telegrams
complained about the sculptor idly vacationing while there was important
work to be done.
Gutzon replied that he hadn’t melted the wax and that he had previously
expressed himself on the subject of the company employing the
thumb-fingered medal maker who did do it. Conditions of mutual trust and
good will when he repaired the damage and returned to Atlanta were no
better than they had been.
Work on the memorial, however, was proceeding smoothly. Gutzon had moved
his family into a house near Stone Mountain. The hard-rock men and
dynamiters in the crew had learned their jobs. The figure of Jackson
would be ready for unveiling in April and that of Davis in June 1925. L.
M. Roberts, the Association’s engineer, had examined the work and
reported that everything was going along according to contract. Gutzon
was ahead of his schedule.
In March 1924 the fund-raising activities of the Association began to
pay their way. At the end of the month receipts equaled expenditures. In
April, before the start of any extraordinary fund-raising campaign,
receipts amounted to more than $28,000 and there was plentiful evidence
that the flow of cash would continue during May.
The annual meeting of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial
Association was held in April 1924 and was marked by some political
maneuvers that greatly irritated the U.D.C. Officers had to be elected.
A new board of directors and a new executive committee was to be chosen
to act for the next twelve months. It was an understanding in the
Association that the presidency would be passed around from year to
year, but this year the old president made a plea for re-election. The
national presidential campaign was in full progress. The Association
president had been active in support of William Gibbs McAdoo and was
having some friction with the editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_. If
he were re-elected president of the Association, he said, he would have
greater status in politics, and he would resign immediately after the
primary election. His request, unfortunately, was granted. It was no
help to McAdoo.
The date of the Association’s election day was the same as that of the
selection of a presidential primary candidate. The political meeting was
held first. After it had adjourned the Association president went to the
Association’s annual meeting accompanied by a large number of
politicians.
Up to that point the Association hadn’t had many active members. The
dues had been five dollars. Nobody seems to have known what the total
membership was. Nobody ever counted the attendance. And most of those
present were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Eighty-six politicians came into the hall with the re-elected
Association president. Somebody moved to reduce dues to one dollar, and
someone else slapped eighty-six dollars on the desk of the treasurer.
Eighty-six new names were added to the roster of the Association. And
these eighty-six, along with the president, dominated the meeting.
There had hitherto been five or six people on the board of directors.
The number was immediately changed to fifty. The membership of the
executive committee was increased from nine to fifteen and was to be
chosen by the board of directors. A resolution was passed to bar any
increase in the membership of the Association except with the approval
of the president and a subcommittee of three appointed by him. The
president and the executive business manager, as the result of these
arrangements, were then in absolute control of the organization. The
president forgot his promise to resign.
An executive committee of fourteen men and one woman was named. The men
were persons of big affairs--several of them bankers whose daily
routine gave them little time for benevolent causes. There was not a
member to represent the U.D.C.
* * * * *
There has been a lot of controversy over the Stone Mountain memorial.
There will, no doubt, continue to be. Nobody who ever knew Gutzon
Borglum would attempt to say he was a complacent character. Decidedly he
was not. He knew what he thought was right, and that is what he wanted.
He wanted nothing else. Calm argument could change his point of view, of
course, for he was intelligent. But he could not be browbeaten. He was
honest--so he could not be bribed. His anger could be Jovian, and in his
indignation he could be intolerant and insulting. No one will deny these
things.
There isn’t much doubt that the executive committee of the Stone
Mountain Association encountered him in many moods, for he was in and
about the premises from 1915 to 1925. When things went wrong with
Gutzon’s plans, when anybody thwarted him, the world knew about it, and
few will say that the early days of the work on the mountain were
without confusion.
The story is still circulated in the South that Gutzon Borglum was a
genius of evil temper with whom no one could possibly get along; that he
had quarreled bitterly with the ladies of the U.D.C. and, in a huff, had
destroyed his models and all that it was possible to destroy of the
carving on Stone Mountain, and had gone away. But none of that is true
except that he did destroy a pair of models.
If anybody thinks that the carving of the Confederate memorial was a
simple thing, he may consider the odd politics that took over the
project at the annual meeting of the Association in 1924. There would
have been nothing simple about that even if Borglum had never lived.
Little had changed in the atmosphere except that money had begun to roll
into the treasury and there was prospect of more. The Children’s
Founders’ Roll was getting a large number of members, the children’s
medals were being distributed in quantities, and presently the memorial
coin would come out of the mint.
Gutzon Borglum, back at work on the mountain, paid little attention to
the political maneuvering in the Association. If he was displeased with
anything, he went down to Atlanta and told somebody about it. Otherwise
he was getting President Davis and General Jackson out of the rock in
shape for presentation on Davis’ birthday, June 3. He was looking
forward to the completion of the entire central group by the end of
1926.
He was called from this work to discuss the problem of selling the
memorial half dollars. Commercial institutions experienced in such jobs
wanted too large a percentage of the profit. Pseudo-patriotic
associations wanted more. At a bankers’ meeting in the Biltmore Hotel
early in 1925 it was suggested that a number of wealthy men might
underwrite the coin so that the money or some part of it might be
available at once. The board of the Association authorized the proponent
of this scheme to find such a group. And the man who had made the
suggestion was Gutzon Borglum.
Borglum wrote to John Kirby of Houston, Texas, and got promise of
$100,000 toward a fund of $500,000. With Dave Webb he went into
Mississippi and got promise of more money. W. W. Fuller urged him to
come to New York and there, with friends in the American Tobacco
Company, he lined up a sheaf of pledges. Judge Elbert Gary promised to
find more. Gutzon invited these people to meet Hollins Randolph at a
dinner in Washington where the sums to be subscribed would be agreed on.
President Randolph of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial
Association failed to show up or to answer telegrams. He was out duck
shooting. Nobody, it appears, had time to go and look for him.
Gutzon considered the situation somewhat sadly. The only problem in
mountain carving that he could not solve was that caused by human
ignorance or cupidity. The Stone Mountain Association somehow had been
happy as long as its treasury had been empty. There was now an
expectation of an even two million dollars in the till.
The men of the Association formed a quick plan to abandon most of the
carving program. It would be simpler, they thought, to spend $250,000 on
the central group and reserve the rest of the money “for future causes
and purposes.”
On February 18, 1925, Gutzon was going through Atlanta from Stone
Mountain to Washington with Lester Barlow, inventor of a depth bomb.
Barlow had promised that if the government were to pay him his back
royalties, he would donate $100,000 of the sum to the Confederate
monument.[A] Barlow says that the sculptor was so outraged at the idea
of holding up the spending of money for work on the mountain that he
went straight to Washington and got an immediate interview with
President Coolidge. His single purpose was to stop the minting of any
more Stone Mountain coins.
[A] His claim was settled in 1940 when he was given nearly $700,000.
Coolidge, who sat knee to knee with him in serious and intimate
conversation, became incensed. He slapped Gutzon on the shoulder and
declared--as Barlow remembers it--“We won’t let those rebels put
anything like that over on us.” Barlow does remember vividly that the
President promised to put an end to the issuance of the coins. Gutzon
slapped him on the knee and thanked him. Of course, nothing more came of
this than conversation. Gutzon had hardly reached the Metropolitan Club
after his conference when Bascom Slemp, Presidential secretary, called
him on the phone. The President, it seems, had not understood. The
promise to stop the coin must be considered unofficial.
Things were moving fast in Atlanta. Tucker was called in from Stone
Mountain to meet with some of the men who were active in the
Association. Tucker refused to talk with them as a group, and Randolph
met him alone.
The conversation was what the engineer had expected. The directors were
going to get rid of Borglum and were offering him $15,000 a year to
carry on the building of the memorial. Tucker laughed. It was Borglum’s
idea, he said. He wouldn’t consider taking the job even if he thought
himself qualified.
Randolph seemed disappointed. “You could put _something_ up there that
would be satisfactory,” he said.
Tucker telephoned to Gutzon in Washington and begged him to come back.
The sculptor said he would. The next day Hollins Randolph gave out a
statement which at least one Atlanta newspaper printed under the
heading: “Borglum’s Dismissal as Sculptor Is Imminent.”
Gutzon was back in Atlanta twenty-four hours after receiving Tucker’s
message. A meeting of the executive committee of the Association had
been called for the next day. But the sculptor fully believed that his
contract would protect him, and he was not so worried as his friends.
Virtually everybody else in Atlanta knew what the executive committee
was going to do. A full copy of the proceedings of the scheduled
meeting, to its climax in a resolution dismissing Gutzon Borglum, had
been given in advance to the Atlanta _Journal_ and was in type hours
before the committeemen were called to order.
The sculptor was met at the station in Atlanta by Tucker, who drove him
out to Stone Mountain. Sam Venable was waiting for him there with his
sister Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Grace, of Macon, Georgia; and Mrs. Purdue,
president of the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The women went up on the
scaffolding to view the progress of the work.
Word of what was happening in Atlanta took the sculptor completely by
surprise. He listened, stunned, to the telephone message that the
committee had voted to dismiss him. Quietly he broke the news to the
little group about him, then considered the situation.
“I shall have to break up the models to protect my design,” he said.
The plaster model of Lee’s head had already served its purpose. There
was a copy of the Jackson head in Stamford. He ordered these models to
be dropped off the platform onto the rocks below. And, finally, he told
his man Homer to break up the model in the studio, the one showing Davis
on his horse. Mr. Venable said there were tears in his eyes as he took
one last look at his work and turned his back.
He talked to the U.D.C. women in Mrs. Coribel Venable Orme’s house,
urging them to carry on without him. Then suddenly Tucker came bounding
in from the road and took him by the arm.
“Quick!” Tucker said. “Kiss your wife good-by.”
“But where to?” asked Gutzon.
“I’ll tell you that afterward,” said Tucker, pulling him toward the
door.
Shortly they were gone and the people in the house heard a car roaring
out the back way on a road from the city that was virtually impassable.
The sound had died out and they were well on their way when the local
constable arrived and sheepishly produced an order for Gutzon’s arrest
on a charge of “malicious mischief.” The complaint declared that the
sculptor had destroyed a model valued at $25.
Nobody has ever pointed out how the Association directors found out
about the smashing of the models within two hours after it happened. The
constable didn’t know. He had just been called on to serve it, and,
well, if Mr. Borglum had gone away, he couldn’t do that. So he accepted
a drink and sat down to enjoy it.
Not until long afterward did Mrs. Borglum discover that the head Gutzon
was accused of having destroyed was the useless plaster image of Lee.
The morning after the Association meeting of February 25, 1925, the
Atlanta newspapers gave roaring accounts of the affair, one of them
announcing in letters three inches high: “Borglum Fugitive From
Justice.” There were long lists of his crimes, misdemeanors and
delinquencies for which he had been driven away from Stone Mountain.
Chief of these were “loafing on the job,” “inordinate love of money,”
“wasteful expenditures,” “ungovernable temper.” And there was the old
story of the angels of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Clarke
Howell, editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_ and Francis Clark, the city
editor, were Gutzon’s friends, and they sniffed at the angel story. They
were the ones who telegraphed the cathedral to get the straight of it.
But no matter. There was no end to such charges nor to the people who
believed them. Mrs. Borglum, warned by her attorney, Albert Howell, to
refrain from comment, nevertheless issued one statement: “The Greeks of
old drove Phidias into exile, but his name has lived on while those who
persecuted him are forgotten.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
_AFTERMATH_
Borglum and Tucker sat down to rest on the plantation of Colonel Beniham
Cameron, head of the Bankhead Highway Commission, near Durham, North
Carolina, and entertained a great outpouring of their friends. Georgia
made one weak effort at extradition, but the warrant was promptly thrown
out by a sympathetic judge. Governor Angus McLean announced that he
would call out the militia if necessary to prevent extradition, and
there the matter rested. Gutzon never condescended to answer the
Association’s charges. On July 7, 1925, he wrote to Gerald Johnson:
It should be remembered that we undertook the building of a
memorial to honor, not to war. We built it to the soul of Robert E.
Lee, to his conscious martyrdom, to the valor and development of
those the world said had failed.... Can we who have worked so
disinterestedly and succeeded somewhat in reaching the ear of God
for Lee and his hosts forget? Can we fail in those qualities? I am
determined that history shall carry no such item in her record of
our acts.
The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association eventually gave the
job of finishing the mountain carving to a practitioner who was at Stone
Mountain only briefly and with little success in furthering the art.
Gutzon stayed at Raleigh, North Carolina, seven or eight months
preparing new models for the memorial, with the aid of Captain Tucker
and Hugo Villa. One day came Homer. He had walked all the way from Stone
Mountain, more than 600 miles. Tucker said that he had only to shout and
they would all come “a-runnin’.” But there was little work, hardly any
money, and no place for them to stay. Villa made and sold some violins.
The others mostly had a hard time.
Gutzon’s family joined him in Raleigh in a home next to that of Josephus
Daniels, and they were pleasantly received.
In Georgia, the Association removed from the project everyone originally
connected with the memorial except Mrs. Helen Plane. But Mrs. Plane was
old and ill when the notification reached her. She commented on what had
happened to the great memorial and the men who had labored for it. Then
she went to bed and died.
The Association prepared statements repeating and enlarging the original
charges against Borglum. Gutzon saw enough of it to convince him that
masses of this material were sent to every point where any sculpture was
contemplated, across the country from Texas to the Dakotas. Why all this
tireless effort to discredit him? His theory was that the Association
was in debt to the Atlanta banks and had to stay alive long enough to
sell its half dollars and pay its debts. It must maintain the theory of
its integrity by picturing Borglum as a road-company villain.
In Atlanta an active member of the U.D.C. who had friends in both camps
was disturbed because neither the sculptor nor Sam Venable would take
legal steps against the Association. She declared the directors were
destroying Gutzon’s business and would destroy him. “I cannot and will
not add to this quarreling over a memorial to Lee,” he wrote her. “After
I got Coolidge and Smoot and Lodge, and the Senate and Congress to
authorize a coin, I was further bound by my own claims that the
brotherhood of America must be strengthened and preserved.”
But the battle of words went on. And nobody called on Gutzon to produce
his new models. The new sculptor had trouble. The granite firm of
Weiblen Brothers, which had a lease from Sam Venable, refused to permit
the importation of outside stoneworkers. Eventually they reached an
agreement to do the stonecutting themselves on a basis of cost plus
ten-per-cent profit.
The Association seized all of Gutzon’s papers and records as well as his
personal possessions, including art works in his studio and the
machinery on the mountain. When they refused to listen to the U.D.C.’s
suggestion of arbitration, which was definitely provided for in
Borglum’s contract, the sculptor took one step in his own defense. He
sent to Georgia a certified public accountant who disproved the charge
that $185,000 had been spent on his part of the project. The books
showed that only $113,922.61 had gone to the mountain--and this included
the sculptor’s salary and every other expense of the work. The office in
Atlanta at the same time had spent more than $116,000.
There was a persistent rumor through the United States that Borglum’s
real trouble had been a quarrel with the United Daughters of the
Confederacy. That was not true if only for the fact that the political
brothers in the Memorial Association’s directorate had taken away the
voice of these women in 1924. It was thoroughly refuted in a pamphlet
issued by the Atlanta chapter telling where the blame should be placed
for the monument’s loss.
The pamphlet was in the precise form of the statement sent out by the
Association and was distributed among U.D.C. organizations throughout
the country. It never had so large a circulation as the Association’s
statement for the reason that the women did not have so large a fund to
draw on.
How so great a memorial could have been destroyed, how the matter of the
sale of the coin could have been so confused that few could understand
anything beyond the fact that the money was dissipated and lost, is a
complicated story. It cannot be dismissed in a few words and in fairness
to all, the story of the U.D.C. should be told. Here are some extracts
from the Atlanta chapter’s pamphlet:
The Stone Mountain debacle was the result of vandalism pure and
simple. It is no longer necessary to defend Gutzon Borglum. Time
and the course of events have vindicated him.
Borglum contracted to produce the central group in three years for
$250,000, which was to cover his ideas, his designs, models, labor,
a portion of his working equipment and his personal compensation.
At the end of seventeen months he had produced the first model,
master model and all working parts necessary to that date, removed
25,000 tons of granite, completed head of Lee, half head of Davis,
designed children’s medal, made model for Stone Mountain coin.
Price for above, official audit of March 31, 1925, $113,922.61.
During the thirty months since the employment of his successor, the
combined efforts of the sculptor, Weiblen Brothers, and the
Association have produced: first models, master models, some
working models, blasting of mountain side, roughing out of Lee’s
horse. Cost, as stated by Randolph, $171,000.
Mr. Borglum formed a syndicate to buy the entire coin issue. This
would immediately have placed $2,500,000 or securities to that
amount in the hands of the Association. A condition of the sale was
that the money should be used exclusively in carving the mountain.
Randolph declined the offer; his reaction was as follows:
“Under the Borglum proposition, his friends could have sold the
coins when they pleased, at whatever price they pleased, to
whatever purchasers they pleased, and could have spent the proceeds
in whatever way they pleased to carve on the mountain whatever they
pleased.”
Mr. Randolph has sold the coins wherever he pleased, when he
pleased, to whomever he pleased, and is now engaged in carving on
the mountain what he pleases against the protest of the Atlanta
Chapter and hundreds of Southern people, having discarded the plans
and ignored the purpose entrusted to him. The monument he is
building is smaller and entirely different from the one endorsed
and subscribed to by the people of the United States, whose funds
he has squandered and misspent.
The document goes on at considerable length to discuss the policy of
Atlanta banks in keeping the Association alive, and the piecemeal sale
of coins to pay back loans that the banks advanced. The banks at the
time of Borglum’s departure from Stone Mountain held the Association’s
notes for $78,862.72. The marketable property owned by the Association
including its bank balances was listed at $6,406.39. The banks in time
were paid off by receipts from the coin sale. The statement closes:
Members of the Atlanta Chapter organized the original Stone
Mountain Memorial Association and secured its charter.
Members of the Atlanta Chapter personally invited Mr. Randolph to
become president of the Association.
Mr. Randolph has discarded the original models entrusted to him,
altered the style, and reduced the size of the memorial.
He has plunged the work into a national scandal on false charges.
He has destroyed the confidence of the public in the work by false
statements and lowered the standard of Georgia and Georgians
throughout the United States.
And that isn’t all of the story of Stone Mountain. While Sam Venable and
Gutzon were quietly waiting for the group then in control to take a
false step and fall, the Association’s directors suddenly decided that
something had to be done about Stone Mountain. Gutzon’s first intimation
that something was wrong came with the publication of a news story in
which the new sculptor said that Borglum had deliberately left large
holes in the rock to interfere with further carving. Inasmuch as Gutzon
had not known that he was to have a successor and had not been in
Georgia since, the accusation seemed silly.
Next came Randolph’s announcement that Lee would never have worn his hat
in the presence of ladies and that the Association was planning to
remove the hat. Leading sculptors of the United States said that this
could not be done without destroying the head. But the public had
nothing to do with it anyway. There was little talk about it, and the
work was done behind a canvas.
The book _Famous Statues and Their Stories_, published by Edwin Rayner
in 1936, pictures Stone Mountain with a photograph of the second
sculptor’s designs superimposed upon it. The horses’ legs are very
prominent. The design is attributed to Gutzon Borglum, and there is no
suggestion in the text that he had left the work.
Had Gutzon suspected what was about to be done to his head of Lee, it is
probable he would have fought to retain it. It remained in his mind as
one of the greatest things he had ever produced. And one close to him
recalls that its destruction was caused by men who had boasted that
until the end of time nothing could injure it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
_BACKSIGHT_
One of the most remarkable features of Gutzon Borglum’s quarrel with
Georgia seems to be Georgia’s unawareness of it. The sculptor left Stone
Mountain ahead of the constables on February 25, 1925. And he sat for a
long time in Raleigh aware that a large group of worthy patriots was
demanding that he be extradited to stand trial in the municipal court
for breaking up a worthless lot of plaster. Then in March 1926 he
received a remarkable call. The state of Georgia, which had him roughly
classified as a fugitive from justice, conferred on him the signal honor
of asking him to make a statue of one of her most distinguished sons,
Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. The statue was
to find permanent place in Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building at
Washington, D. C.
Gutzon carried on conversations about this piece of work by mail and
carved the figure in San Antonio, Texas. It was a striking portrait,
fine, strongly intellectual features, lighted by an inner serenity and
gentleness. It was a seated figure, for Stephens could not stand. And
the hands, resting on the arms of his chair, were modeled to show great
firmness of character. Hugo Villa, who had followed the sculptor to
Texas, helped carve the statue, slightly oversize, in Georgian marble.
The unveiling in Washington in 1927 was a gala affair. A special
trainload of Georgians had come to the capital with the governor of the
state in the lead. The National Guard of Georgia, brilliantly uniformed,
was on hand to lend color.
Most of these people were from Atlanta. Some were even members of the
Stone Mountain executive committee. All seemed to ignore the tragic
happenings of only two years before. It must be noted, however, that
Gutzon was as good at that as they were. He was calm, pleasantly aloof
and unconcerned.
* * * * *
In 1928 the time set for the finishing of the central group on Stone
Mountain expired with only Lee’s head and part of his horse completed.
An attempt was made by the donors to reclaim the property. They said
that the work on Stone Mountain was at a standstill and that the
operating Association was insolvent.
Sam Venable circulated an open letter in which he charged that he had
added together all the sums spent by the Association on bank loans,
etc., and had reached the stupendous figure of $1,421,665 which, he
said, it had cost Gutzon’s successor to complete his model and change
the bust of Lee. He added this comment:
Furthermore, Mr. Borglum’s head of Lee everybody recognized. His
successor’s head of Lee, nobody recognizes. The nose is crooked.
The left arm is withered and paralyzed. The hilt of the sword is
gone and the stirrup of the saddle is broken off. The money is all
gone and the carving of Lee, in my opinion and the opinion of
hundreds of others, is a mutilated imperfection that cannot be
rectified.
The Association was in debt to the Founders’ Roll for the use of
$260,800 paid for tablets, and to the Children’s Founders’ Roll for
$35,019.91. Suits were being brought by contributors to the first of
these funds. G. F. Willis succeeded Hollins Randolph as president. The
Association begged for an extension of time, and the Venable family
agreed to allow work to proceed until May 1931. However, nothing was
done on the mountain during that period.
In 1930 the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of Park
Committee Chairman L. Lawrence McCord, got interested in finishing the
monument. Mayor-elect James L. Key, largely celebrated for his huge
Sunday School Bible Class, sent a telegram to Gutzon who was then in the
Black Hills. He wanted to have Mr. Borglum come to Atlanta as his guest,
he said, for the purpose of conference on Stone Mountain Memorial. The
telegram was sent in August 1930. It might be mentioned that on July 4
of that year the head of Washington had been unveiled on Mount Rushmore
with a great deal of publicity.
The sculptor arrived in Atlanta on the first of September and was given
a rousing welcome and reception by a capacity house at the Fox theater.
It was the first chance public opinion had had to express itself, and
the result was gratifying to a man who had had to suffer in silence for
five years. He mentioned that if he had to do it over again, he would
make the Stone Mountain figures twice the size. He had learned something
of mountain carving. The crowd cheered him enthusiastically, and he came
home. But little came of it.
In 1931 McCord got a bill through the Georgia state legislature, giving
the state right of eminent domain to take over Stone Mountain and
adjacent property for a park. On this basis talks went on for years and
years.
In 1933 Sam Venable with Mrs. Frank Mason, to whom he gave his share of
Stone Mountain, presented a deed to Mayor Key for the portion of the
cliff required for carving, and an attempt was made to get W.P.A. funds
to finance the undertaking. There was a vast amount of correspondence
without result. In 1936 the governor made an investigation of
possibilities. In 1937 W. R. Ulrich of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce
met Borglum in Washington and they had a friendly conference.
In the winter of 1939-1940 there was another revival of interest, and
once more Gutzon was called to Atlanta. The hotel men of Atlanta had
suddenly become aware that tourists coming to see Mount Rushmore were
dumping large amounts of cash into South Dakota. They were wondering why
they had never foreseen this golden reward, and they could see that they
needed Gutzon’s help. They were willing to put up enough money to pay
for the labor week by week if he would donate his time and use his
influence to get credit with the machinery and powder companies.
Gutzon was jubilant. Dr. Ashby Jones, popular clergyman, and Preston
Arkright, president of the Georgia Power Company, gave him their
blessing. Success seemed so near that the sculptor wrote a letter to
John Kaufman, who had succeeded Cliff Davis as stand-by on Stone
Mountain, to be ready for starting work next Monday, to lay out a
program for a full week. And then that too joined the futile history of
the mountain. The other half-owners of the mountain wanted a million
dollars which they insisted must be paid to them before work could be
resumed. So this chance failed. The matter of the carving on Stone
Mountain remained unchanged a year later when the sculptor suddenly
died.
Despite the course of ill luck, bickering and unexplained hatred that
has accompanied it, the dream of Atlanta for a Confederate memorial--or
the dream of Atlanta hotel men for a popular tourist attraction--is
still showing signs of life. The state of Georgia has appropriated funds
for the purchase of Stone Mountain and the establishment of a park at
its base. An Atlanta sculptor has been appointed to take charge of any
carving that may be done on the tremendous uplift of granite. The
wording of the commission is a bit indefinite as, after all popular
experience with the memorial, it should be. But, somehow, the emergence
of the Confederate armies from the rock seems a bit nearer than it did
yesterday.
There is no recognizable trace today of Gutzon Borglum’s magnificent
head of Lee, or of anything else identifiable with the vision of Helen
Plane. There is a disfiguring scar, the remnant of a head, part of a
horse. But no matter. Some starry-eyed sculptor, somewhere, is figuring
on a new supply of dynamite and drills, and some epochal work--it will
start any day now, you may hear--to recover Borglum’s unfortunate plan.
The mark of his hand is dim, perhaps, but it is still to be found there
on the rock--the reminder of what was certainly a noble and, as it turns
out, continuous experiment.
* * * * *
The Borglum family moved to Texas from North Carolina in 1925 because
the Trail Drivers’ Association wanted a monument and because the Stone
Mountain Confederate Memorial Association had definitely set its trail
toward nothing. Texas would have been a remarkable spot for them in any
case, and it was one place in the universe that they knew little about.
The romantic history of the state--its gracious women, tall men, Spanish
warriors and grandees, American pioneers and land seekers, its Alamo,
its victorious revolution, its statehood, Indians, rangers, ranchmen,
cowboys, trail drivers--all appealed to Gutzon like a journey back to
boyhood when he received the invitation of the Trail Drivers’
Association to their conference in 1925. These men, now grown old,
wanted a memorial. They wanted to perpetuate the heroes of an epoch when
cowboys braved heat and cold, drought and flood, hostile Indians and
rustlers, as they drove herds of longhorns northward across hundreds of
miles of continent to Kansas or Montana.
It was disappointing to some of the newcomers to discover that San
Antonio was a highly civilized city with a cultural history antedating
the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. As for their equipment, Mrs.
Borglum’s sidesaddle stood for years in a saddle-shop window as an
eye-opening evidence of an effete custom.
A studio was improvised in a shed previously used to house floats before
the annual “Battle of Flowers” parade. There, while making the first
model for the Trail Drivers’ monument, Gutzon was initiated into the
lore of the trail. Old cowmen came in
[Illustration: GUTZON BORGLUM AND SON LINCOLN]
[Illustration: LINCOLN BORGLUM]
numbers and sat at ease as they yarned about how cattle behaved; how
cowboys talked, rode, ate and slept; how they dressed by putting their
big hats on; how they soothed the bedded herd by singing a ballad of
uncounted verses. When the time came for the sculptor to make scenes in
bas-relief around the base of the monument talk rose to feverish heat
over such moot questions as whether thirsty cattle lift their tails when
they scent water, or whether cowboys squat on their heels around a
campfire at night.
Gutzon tracked down the few remaining longhorn cattle in the state and
took time to witness driving, riding, roping--all the details of the
cattle business as exposed in numerous rodeos. A cowboy known as “Red”
posed for one of the chief figures in the group. And when a question
arose as to who should be pictured in the other, there was rivalry over
the claims of George Saunders, president of the association, and another
old cowman, Tom Russell, recently deceased. Russell’s widow was a prime
mover in the memorial project, but she wasn’t looking for a personal
monument. She and her committee worked tirelessly to raise money for
this tribute to the unsung heroism of their menfolk.
As the model was finally developed to their satisfaction it showed two
riders, one pointing with outstretched arm to indicate where water would
be found, while behind them were three longhorn steers, their heads and
tails raised as they scented the distant river. To cast that group in
bronze, full size, called for more money than the women could raise at a
time when drought and low prices for beef put the cattle business in a
decline. Even before the clay model was completed, messages came from
Atlanta warning the Trail Drivers to have nothing to do with Borglum.
The women seemed unconcerned. When the model was exhibited in other
cities there came lively bidding for its location. Mr. Goodnight, a
famous old ranchman, offered to pay for the casting on condition that
the monument be placed in Abilene, but the San Antonio Chamber of
Commerce was determined to keep the work where the idea originated. Only
enough money for a bronze about one-fourth life size could be raised,
and the memorial was permanently placed outside Trail Drivers Hall,
especially built for the purpose in Breckenridge Park. This was a great
disappointment to the sculptor who had planned for an enlarged group
more than forty feet long to stand under the open sky in front of San
Antonio’s auditorium.
As long as there was any hope of completing his work at Stone Mountain,
a hope that died hard, the sculptor wanted to remain in the South, where
his chief need was a roomy studio. He secured lease of space in a
machine shop near the railroad tracks to complete the model of the Trail
Drivers’ memorial, and then began to scout around San Antonio for a more
permanent location. He found it eventually in an old stone building on
the edge of Breckenridge Park which had been abandoned by the local
water company.
The genial park commissioner allowed him to remodel it. A new roof was
built with its big skylight, an ell added, windows and doorways
completely rebuilt and the interior decorated. When finished it was a
delightful place for work or play, half hidden by pecan trees that
shaded it from the Southern sun, with the sound of running water
beneath. Here several new sculptural works were modeled, but only one
was destined to stand in Texas. When it came about that Mount Rushmore
demanded all his time the sculptor gave this San Antonio studio to the
Witte Museum in the same park. Now known as the Borglum Memorial Studio,
it is used for art classes and as a meeting place for art students.
In this city the sculptor became deeply involved in several projects
promoted mostly by women, who often took the lead in civic improvements.
There were women’s clubs all over the state which invited the sculptor
to tell his ideas on the art and beautification of one’s surroundings.
The Conservation Society of San Antonio interested him in their pet
project of beautifying the banks of the San Antonio River, a lazy little
stream that threaded its way through the city. Real-estate interests
wanted to fill up the stream and use the space for more buildings, but
the women wouldn’t hear of it. In this the sculptor joined heartily, but
his ideas conflicted with theirs when it came to restoration of old
Spanish ruins.
From his experience in preserving the California missions the sculptor
was keenly interested in these San Antonio ruins, one of which, the San
Jose Mission, is especially beautiful. A copy of its rose window was
sent to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933.
Before he arrived, its belfry tower had collapsed. Mrs. J. P. Drought,
one of the most civic-minded leaders San Antonio ever had, had at her
own expense hired workmen to collect the stones and wood blocks for the
stairs and return them to their original places. The belfry stairs,
triangular blocks of wood that unknown hands had carved out of big
trees, had been carried away as relics by Mexican families, and the same
Mrs. Drought had searched them out, one by one, and brought them back to
the mission as a real work of restoration. Meanwhile the Conservation
Society engaged a local architect to restore parts of the old church and
a granary which had almost disappeared.
Seeing what was going on and knowing that such a restoration would only
destroy the original character of the mission, Gutzon wrote an article
in protest against what seemed to him vandalism, but never published it
because he did not want to hurt the feelings of a friend who was most
active in the undertaking. Instead, he sent her the typed article with
this friendly warning: “I alone am honest enough to tell you that you
cannot restore the lost lines of a great poem, the lost notes of a great
opera, the lost parts of a great building, the lost parts of a great
painting.”
And there were other projects. There were two large musical societies in
the city, both run by women, with considerable rivalry between them. The
leader of one club came to the sculptor begging his help in building an
open-air theater in an old quarry in Breckenridge Park where she could
have performances by her Civic Opera Company. “We have no money to pay
an architect,” she said. “Won’t you design us a theater, just for the
love of art and music?”
The project interested the sculptor and he went out to the quarry to
study its possibilities. Mrs. Borglum vividly remembers one moonlight
night when she and Gutzon were accompanied by Mrs. Drought and her
guest, a professor from Dublin, Ireland, a man well acquainted with the
new Irish Theater in Dublin, who had come to Texas on a lecture tour. He
bubbled over with enthusiasm when Gutzon pointed out a little knoll
overlooking the quarry which he had already selected as a stage. On each
side of this he planned a group of columns with dressing rooms behind.
For the curtain he designed something new--a barrage of water jets which
could be turned on or off at will. When the curtain was down, colored
lights would play on the water, creating an eerie effect and concealing
the stage from the audience. All details were so carefully worked out
that the only expense to the city would be for material and labor, with
no fee for the designer, Gutzon, who would act also as superintendent of
the work. To make sure that his architectural plans were correct, he
summoned at his own expense Mr. Kimball, who had been president of the
National Institute of Architects. This helpful friend not only made
blueprints and drew up specifications but made a pretty water-color
sketch to show how the theater would look when finished.
Naturally the members of the Civic Opera and the San Antonio Woman’s
Club were delighted. In a mass they went to the City Hall when the plan
was submitted to the council. Without a dissenting vote a resolution was
passed accepting the open-air theater as the sculptor had planned it.
And that, one grieves to record, was the end of another Gutzon Borglum
dream. After a long delay a conventional design by a local architect was
“unanimously approved” by the same city fathers. The theater was built
at city expense. And the lady who had begged the sculptor to design the
theater because she had no money to pay an architect told him that the
wife of one of her leading singers was the local architect’s sister. The
lady accepted the tenor’s brother-in-law because it made her tenor
happy. “And, dear Mr. Borglum, what else could I do?” wailed the lady.
* * * * *
Gutzon was much taken with the appearance of Corpus Christi, Texas;
however, he felt the shore line was unsightly. So he hired an aviator to
take pictures of the town showing the residential portion on a plateau
high above the gulf and the crowded business district along the shore
line. He took the mayor and some other citizens on a motor trip to
Galveston and along the Gulf Coast to Florida to see how other cities
had dealt with similar water-front problems.
He built a plaster model of Corpus Christi with a fine new--and
artistic--concrete promenade along the sea front, with steps down to the
water’s edge, and exhibited it in the rooms of the Chamber of Commerce.
He designed approaches for a new bridge to replace the old drawbridge
that frequently tied up traffic for half an hour at a time. And he got a
Mr. Harrington of Kansas City, a reputable bridge builder, to design a
bridge. The cost of this improvement, he felt, would speedily be paid by
toll collected from the passing cars.
Everybody was interested in Borglum’s great enterprise. A loan project
was placed before the R.F.C., which turned it over to the W.P.A., which
started everything all over again. In the end the whole business got
into the hands of the state W.P.A. at Fort Worth, and the
water-front-bridge development was changed to a sewer project. Probably
the sewer was needed and anyhow it had not been proposed by a stranger.
Texas, the sculptor learned, was a place where big things were done
bigly; but, nevertheless, in the accustomed fashion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
_AND SO FORWARD_
Texas owed something to Gutzon for the suggestion of the Four-City
Centennial celebration of 1936. This hundredth year that Texas had been
independent of Mexican rule had to be something unique. The sculptor
wrote a letter about his idea to Jesse Jones, the managing director,
stating that the great fair should begin in San Antonio, the ancient
Mexican capital, then proceed to Dallas and Fort Worth and end in
Houston. He outlined the historical features of these cities, listed
their natural advantages as exhibition towns and finished with an
unusual thought: “These cities will draw enormous income from the
tourist travel that the centennial will surely set in motion. For that
reason all exhibition buildings should be made permanent in character,
thus saving what might otherwise be considered an enormous total loss.”
But though many of his suggestions were carried out, and though an art
committee from each of the four cities consulted him, not one of the
more than forty monuments they built was his design. The explanation is
that each committee was hidebound by the idea of a competition with
prizes, and Gutzon would have none of that.
He worked hard for the beautification of roads in that part of Texas
where the greenery gives way to the desert. He was appointed chairman
of an advisory committee to supervise the spending of the W.P.A. and the
Federal Highway Department funds. But local rivalries kept many a town
out of funds, and the Federal Highway Department’s $5,000,000, allotted
for _road beautification_ in Texas, was demanded by an influential
highway engineer who outweighed Gutzon. All road funds, he declared,
must be under the State Highway Department’s control; and to this simple
proposition the federal government would not agree. So Texas got little,
and the beautification of Texas roads was left to Texas.
Looking back over the record of those years, one can’t but figure them
the most disheartening in all of Borglum’s life. The sculptor himself
hadn’t changed much--except for the better. He was still motivated by
his love for the big things--for the projects that would give more joy,
more comfort or more safety to humankind. But somehow none of the plans
was working out well.
Stone Mountain, as he must have known in his heart, was finished. The
head of Lee would presently be an outrageous blot on a tall cliff. He
had had no part in the Texas Four-City Centennial celebration; he had
been thrust out of any plans to beautify Texas highways. He had been
thwarted in his effort to provide a sea-front development and bridge for
Corpus Christi. He had lost the job of designing the San Antonio
open-air theater, which he would have enjoyed doing. Five times in a row
he had put out his best effort and finished nowhere.
He might have been saved a lot of trouble had he known that few
outsiders ever succeed in getting anything out of the preserves of Texas
politicians--especially those busy keeping happy a Texas tenor. But
those who knew him in San Antonio say that he showed no consciousness of
his reverses. He was gracious to the people he thought deserved his kind
words. He blasted the louts that he thought needed blasting. And on the
whole all went well. He continued to be Gutzon Borglum.
His art work was by no means neglected because of his apparent
absorption in civic improvements and expositions and music festivals.
Nor had ill repute deriving from the Stone Mountain Association’s
adverse publicity given him any lack of employment. He had not quite
finished the Trail Drivers’ memorial when he was given a commission for
the memorial to Alexander Stephens. The armchair in which Stephens is
seated was made in the San Antonio studio and cut out of marble at a
local stoneyard. The marble was the gift of the Georgia Marble Company
at Marietta.
The place of this model in the studio was immediately taken by a
memorial to General John Greenway, of Rough Rider and earlier Yale
football fame. He was a resident of Arizona, engaged in copper mining
when the First World War broke out. Though past the age limit, he bought
a uniform and, with the aid of Washington friends, got into the army.
His widow, Isabella Greenway, one of the most distinguished women in the
country, came to the Stamford studio, bringing with her a request for
the statue by the state of Arizona. Greenway had been honored as a
favorite son and chosen for a place in Statuary Hall, Washington.
Unfortunately Gutzon Borglum was in Texas. Telegrams were exchanged, and
he met Mrs. Greenway in 1928--at the Democratic National Convention in
Houston. Mrs. Greenway brought to the San Antonio studio not only
photographs of her husband but some of his clothes and favorite gear.
She knew, the sculptor said, more about her husband’s appearance and
characteristics than any person he had ever met who tried to tell him
what he wanted to know of a departed hero--and must know if he were to
complete a perfect likeness.
The bronze statue was unveiled in Washington in 1930, and Mrs. Greenway
ordered a replica to be placed in Arizona. The friendship between her
and the sculptor which began at first sight was without a flaw during
their lifetime.
From the state of North Carolina, meanwhile, came a commission for a
bronze group in memory of Carolina soldiers who led the immortal
Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, a dramatic climax that
marked the high tide of the Confederacy and from which Lee’s army reeled
back in defeat, never to attempt another invasion of the North. The
sculptor had submitted a small-scale model of the group, made in his
Breckenridge Park studio at San Antonio in 1928. This was accepted and
he was busy with an improved large-scale model when the same wearisome
correspondence began, caused by some misunderstanding of the artist’s
habit of developing, that is, bettering, the original plan.
Here, for example, is a letter from Mr. Barringer, a member of the
memorial committee, written to another member, Mr. Fuller, after seeing
photographs of the large-scale model and noting with anxiety that
changes had been made from the original. He said:
It is out of the question for me to go to San Antonio to examine
the model. I am perfectly willing, however, to abide by your
judgment. I confess to being somewhat disappointed, particularly in
the expressions of the faces. They do not give promise of being as
good as those on the smaller model. Moreover, I cannot help
agreeing with the governor that the model does not seem to be
completely finished.
If Borglum will put his best into this monument, as we have the
right to believe he will do, it will be a great monument. I feel
sure of that. Such is my confidence in Borglum I know that if he
can make a good small model, he can also make a good large one.
To the sculptor this same Mr. Barringer made the following interesting
comment about facial expressions:
It was Darwin, I think, who pointed out that the sneer originated
in an unconscious effort to uncover the canine or fighting tooth.
Most men, when very angry or about to go into a fight, have a
sneering expression. I have seen somewhere the expression “a
snarling grin,” which conveys the idea very well. Might it not be
well to put on one of your faces this “snarling grin?” For it is
doubtless the characteristic of many men when they are charging the
enemy.
Gutzon was quick to welcome any suggestion for improving his work from
any interested source. In answer he wrote:
Thank you for your letter just received and also for the suggestion
you have made. I not only think it is good, but I have just the man
on whose face I would like to put that sinister expression. The man
in front must be too thoughtful, too conscious of his danger and
too indifferent to it, to have any emotional feelings. He is too
determined. The one just back of him, the boy, will express
amazement, fear--a little--but surprise and youth more. To the
bearded man next to him, the one you thought was crowding him a
little too close, I will give an expression of anger and supply the
snarling grin. Of course, the boy back of him with the flag is too
much occupied with the load he is carrying and too important to be
anxious about anything but getting forward.
Because the memorial was to stand on the Gettysburg battlefield, it was
highly important to locate it properly in relation to other incidents
and heroes of the great battle. A special site committee was appointed,
and as its chairman the sculptor had the chief responsibility. On one
visit to the field he had the happy fortune to meet Mrs. Elsie
Singmaster Lewars, a well-known writer who lived on Seminary Ridge,
another famous part of the battleground. She was familiar with the whole
historic region, knew its charges and countercharges by heart, and so
gave invaluable help in selecting precisely the right site for the
memorial.
The unveiling took place July 3, 1929, just sixty-six years after
Pickett’s Charge failed to win its objective and the Confederacy was
plainly doomed. Governor Gardner of North Carolina presided, and the
sculptor’s old friend, former Governor Angus McLean, delivered the
principal address.
A special train brought hundreds of North Carolina people to join in the
dedication of their memorial. An airplane, engaged by the sculptor,
dropped roses over the battleground and dipped its wings in tribute to
the honored dead. By that time Gettysburg had become, as it has been
ever since, a lure for tourists and sight-seers from every part of our
country. Only a year after the unveiling of the Borglum monument C. W.
McDevett published in the Raleigh _News and Observer_ a long description
of a visit to the battlefield, ending with this tribute:
It may be a quiet day at Gettysburg with only a few hundred
visitors scattered through its tens of thousands of acres, while on
other days the visitors are numbered by thousands. But the biggest
group anywhere, any time, will more than likely be found around
North Carolina’s memorial.
That was the case on a day this summer. It was a quiet day, but
there were dozens before the five bronze giants, silent dozens,
studying the master’s work in reverent admiration. They were from
Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Maryland, as their
automobile licenses indicated. They murmured praise of the picture
in stone and metal. The men doffed their hats unconsciously. All
gazed into those faces of bronze--faces that seemed filled with
life--and paid tribute to the likenesses of men--strong,
purposeful, clean-limbed, clean-minded men--who had been their
fathers’ and their grandfathers’ foes. Borglum had imagined them
worthy foemen, indeed, and his genius had made his hands the
servant of his thoughts. Borglum carves mountains into battle
panoramas. Borglum will never carve anything to equal his Tar Heel
heroes at Gettysburg.
A year before the Gettysburg memorial was dedicated, a foreign-looking
letter, postmarked Morges, Switzerland, came to Gutzon at San Antonio.
As he was away at the time and it was Mrs. Borglum’s job to oversee his
vast correspondence, she opened this letter with some curiosity. She
uncovered a six-page autograph beginning, “My great, good friend,” and
signed, “Affectionately, gratefully and devotedly yours, I. J.
Paderewski.”
The gist of the letter was that Paderewski’s compatriots desired to
erect a monument “to the memory of Poland’s most generous benefactor,
President Wilson”; that a competition had been staged; that the first
prize had been awarded; that the prize winner’s model was “horrible”;
and that, in despair of getting a satisfactory design at home, the
committee had left the decision to the writer. The letter concluded: “My
decision is that the statue of that great American should be done only
by the greatest American artist, by the greatest living sculptor in the
whole world.”
By way of explaining Paderewski’s greeting and highly emotional
signature, one should remember how close the two artists had become in
their efforts to promote an association of mid-European republics.
Gutzon had been present when the representatives of these states had met
in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. Paderewski was the first speaker at
this convention, and in the few minutes of his oratory he was
transformed from a civilian pianist into a soaring apostle of freedom.
Professor Masaryk, who followed him with what was expected to be the key
speech, could barely speak at all. He threw away his prepared address
because, he said, Paderewski had said it all and said it better. “I have
never listened to such an inspired speech,” he said in conclusion. “I
can give no explanation other than that Ignace Jan Paderewski is an
artist.”
Paderewski’s letter to Gutzon in San Antonio begged an immediate answer
by cable, inasmuch as it was hoped to have the memorial unveiled on
Wilson’s birthday the next year. Gutzon was in Georgia on another of his
futile attempts to revive the Confederate memorial; so his wife sent him
a telegram in care of the Venables:
SIX PAGE LETTER FROM PADEREWSKI WANTS MEMORIAL TO PRESIDENT WILSON
BY QUOTE THE GREATEST SCULPTOR IN THE WHOLE WORLD END QUOTE. CAN
YOU GUESS WHO? WANTS CABLE ANSWER.
The avowal of confidence by Paderewski, even more than his offer of the
commission, was something that Gutzon appreciated. His answer was eager
and quick:
MRS. MASON GAVE ME YOUR MESSAGE. SEND PADEREWSKI AT ONCE BY CABLE
QUOTE AM DELIGHTED TO ACCEPT DOUBLE HONOR FOR YOURSELF AND WOODROW
WILSON. TIME AMPLE IF WE ACT SOON. MEANS ALSO AMPLE FOR BEAUTIFUL
MEMORIAL UNQUOTE. LOVE TO YOU ALL.
Paderewski’s response, grateful and sympathetic, settled the matter of
the Wilson statue in a few days. Because of the early date set for the
unveiling, the sculptor should first have gone to Europe to confer with
the committee and to study the proposed location of the memorial. But
the work on Mount Rushmore was getting critical and it was impossible
for him to leave. He decided to send his son Lincoln to Europe to
arrange for the casting of the bronze in Paris, Florence or Naples, and
then to confer with Paderewski at his home in Morges, Switzerland.
Lincoln, accompanied by his mother, went immediately.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
_TRIBUTE TO WILSON_
The travelers never forgot Paderewski as he met them at the Morges
station. He was standing on the runway, a little derby hat perched on
the top of his head, with his wave of hair floating out from it like a
cloud. He seemed serene and happy.
“Where are your trunks?” he asked in honest puzzlement.
And they told him that they carried no trunks, that they were staying
with him only between trains. His surprise was genuine and his
disappointment obvious.
“I expected you to stay a month,” he said. “So now you must stay for at
least a week.” He picked up the bags, though his butler factotum hovered
around anxious to help, and led the way to his old-fashioned touring
car. And they stayed at his chalet, with its wide-spreading trees, its
huge garden and its vineyard sloping down to the lake shore--they stayed
a week.
Gutzon had little trouble making sketches of his new subject. He had
known Wilson fairly well; they had traveled the Atlantic in the same
ship. Wilson had given him a degree at Princeton. They had seen much of
each other when Gutzon was working on the decorations for the dormitory
built by the class of 1879. And they had been close, though hardly
harmonious, during the Borglum investigation of the aircraft scandal.
However, to amplify his own impressions of Wilson’s characteristics, the
sculptor wrote to several men who had known the President: Professor
John Grier Hibben, the new president of Princeton University; William
Allen White; President Coolidge; and several senators. He asked them to
say frankly what characteristics he should portray.
Wilson was then, as he still is, a subject of controversy. Gutzon got
some amazing answers. President Coolidge thought he should be depicted
as a kind of Abraham Lincoln. Senator William E. Borah thought that his
features should express humanitarianism and said, “The Versailles Treaty
was a cruel, destructive, brutal document. The only touches of humanity
it contains were put there by Wilson.” And a senator who shall be
nameless said, “I feel incapable of making a suggestion along this line.
If I undertook to do so, I’m afraid I should bear in mind that a man who
is untruthful, no matter how exalted his position, should not be deified
in sculpture or otherwise.”
Gutzon decided to represent Wilson slipping out of his Academic robes
and standing alongside a martial female figure of Poland on the capitol
steps. Poland, helmeted, was defending herself with a sword. Forced back
she stood at bay under the President’s extended arm. It was a
composition of great charm and historic truth. But it required more
simple sentiment to be popular in Poznan, Poland, where it was to stand.
Paderewski’s message of regret, contrived after he had looked at the
photographs of the model, was a shock. He wired:
DEEPLY IMPRESSED. MAJESTIC GREATNESS OF YOUR COMPOSITION TRULY
WONDERFUL. PRESIDENT’S FIGURE SPLENDID, SUPERB, INSPIRED. POLAND’S
ENCHANTING IN VIGOR AND YOUTH. ENTIRE CONCEPTION EXTREMELY POETIC
AND BEAUTIFUL. HOWEVER AM AFRAID PLACING POLAND’S FIGURE WOULD
CREATE SERIOUS TROUBLE AND ADD TO EXISTING POLITICAL STRIFE. MANY
MEMBERS OF PARTY NOW IN POWER, WHO HAVE BEEN FIGHTING ON WRONG
SIDE, WOULD SURELY INTERPRET YOUR IDEA AS HOMAGE TO AND TRIUMPH OF
THEIR DISASTROUS POLICY AND WOULD AROUSE INDIGNATION OF VAST BUT
TEMPORARILY PARALYZED MAJORITY. CONSEQUENCES MAY BE FATAL. ARTIST
MYSELF, KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO PART WITH CHERISHED IDEAS, TO MODIFY
PLAN CONCEIVED IN LOVE AND MATURED BY LONG MEDITATION. AND YET AM
FORCED, PRO BONO PUBLICO, TO ASK SACRIFICE IN ELIMINATING POLAND’S
FIGURE ALTOGETHER. PRESIDENT’S FIGURE, NO MATTER HOW EARNEST, WILL
PLEASE EVERYBODY AND HURT NOBODY. HIS NOBLE GESTURE WILL SEEM
BENEDICTION GIVEN TO INVISIBLE SYMBOL OF REBORN COUNTRY FOR NEW,
HISTORIC LIFE. THAT GESTURE COULD BUT ENHANCE, INTENSIFY DEEPLY
RELIGIOUS, ALMOST APOSTOLIC CHARACTER OF HIS IDEOLOGY. PLEASE
FORGIVE AND LET ME KNOW THAT I HAVE NOT OFFENDED YOU. SORRY TO SAY,
CANNOT BE IN AMERICA BEFORE OCTOBER. MY BANK CABLING TEN THOUSAND
DOLLARS. AFFECTIONATE REGARDS TO YOUR DEAR WIFE AND BOY.
So here was another crushing blow to Gutzon. To him it was like asking
Beethoven to eliminate one of the movements of the _Fifth Symphony_. But
he accepted the verdict with grace. And so he cabled Paderewski.
From Morges Paderewski had sent to the sculptor a group of photographs
of the ancient square of Poznan where the statue was to be placed.
Gutzon studied them closely to estimate how much light would strike his
figure. Later, after wearisome correspondence with a Mr. Rucinski of the
Official Council of Building Department, it was decided to move the
memorial to the newly created Wilson Park.
Off and on, all winter, the sculptor worked on the model in his San
Antonio studio. When completed it was generally acclaimed as a great
portrait of the President. It had in it the idealism and the spiritual
quality that the sculptor could give it. But he was never reconciled to
the loss of the figure of Poland. He felt that the monument lacked
something beautiful and significant that he could have given it.
Gutzon took his whole family abroad for the unveiling of the monument in
1931. It was his first visit to Europe in thirty years. Because he had
to attend to its erection and the preparation of the pediment, they were
several weeks in Poznan. One of the most interesting, and rather tragic,
denizens was an old countess who had recently returned to her ancestral
home. The place was more than a thousand years old, several miles out
of town, and was on exhibition certain days of the week because of its
historic interest.
The countess had been in exile for many years, and told an exciting tale
of escape when the Germans came to her home. According to the tradition,
the family fortune had started with the levying of tribute on travelers
at a near-by crossroads. But most of it had been taken away by a similar
process of collection. Little was left to her now. One day she invited
the Borglums to “high tea,” and as the family sat around the ancient
table eating raspberries off priceless china, they could hear the voices
and steps of sight-seers in an adjoining room. The exhibition fee
undoubtedly eked out her scanty income.
Gutzon took a great liking for this aged lady in her rusty black gown
and pathetic shoes. He hired a car and invited her to the opera. His
attentions and the unusual experience gave her great delight, and she
was sparkling.
During her exile she had cared for the Polish children in Paris. Now she
was anxious to insure religious instruction for the large number of
Polish orphans there. It hurt her to think, she said, that their bodies
were well nourished and their souls were neglected.
As the day of the unveiling drew near, it became known that Paderewski
would not be present. This seemed evidence enough that there was
something rotten in Poland. The man who had been Premier; who, more than
anyone else, had brought the world’s recognition to Poland after the
World War; who had made possible the return of territory snatched fifty
years before by Germany; the man who had given most of the money for the
nation’s tribute to Wilson--this man alone wasn’t going to be permitted
to see the honoring of an American president whom he loved.
Large numbers of Polish-Americans came to share the tribute to Wilson.
Three hundred priests had come from the United States, every one
carrying a wreath of artificial flowers representing his district at
home. The flowers, piled about the base of the statue with the fresh
wreaths of local patriots, made an impressive display.
On the morning of the unveiling day Mrs. Woodrow Wilson arrived with her
niece and a group of men representing the United States. Among them were
Robert Underwood Johnson, ambassador to Italy, and Bernard Baruch, who
had taken the opportunity to visit the early home of his parents not far
from Poznan. Mrs. Wilson went through the ordeal on the arm of General
Mosciki, President of the Polish Republic, and she bore up well despite
interminable speechmaking.
The crowning event of the program was a banquet at the old Royal
Schloss, which at times had been occupied by Kaiser Wilhelm. After that
there was a reception for a thousand or more, with General Mosciki
presiding.
At dinner Mrs. Borglum was seated next to a delightful Pole whom she had
met before. She asked him why there were so few at the table when she
could hear the throng waiting for the reception in the next room. He
seemed surprised that she shouldn’t know. “But Madam,” he said. “There
are only twenty-four plates in the old Emperor’s dining service.” And he
turned over a plate to show the label “W. Rex” stamped on the bottom.
Paderewski sent this telegram to Gutzon:
TODAY ON THE SOLEMN OCCASION OF THE UNVEILING OF YOUR NEW
MASTERPIECE, MY HEARTFELT THANKS TO YOU, AND MY MOST AFFECTIONATE
GREETINGS. YOUR PEERLESS ART HAS ENABLED MY COMPATRIOTS TO POSSESS
AND PRESENT AN ENDURING PROOF OF THEIR EVERLASTING GRATITUDE FOR
POLAND’S FREEDOM AND INTEGRITY TO AMERICA AND HER NOBLEST SYMBOL,
PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON.
And what happened to this noble Wilson monument? When Hitler’s troops
came plowing through Poland at the beginning of the Second World War it
was pulled down and, presumably, turned into ammunition.
* * * * *
The Borglums had several other chance encounters with Paderewski. On one
occasion he was to give a concert in Abilene, Texas, and invited Gutzon
and his family to see him. He was in a private car and the three met him
for dinner after the concert. The evening was delightful--at any rate it
was delightful to Paderewski and Gutzon. They talked all night until the
car was coupled to an outbound train. And then Paderewski invited them
to ride on to the next stop.
Gutzon had an immense faith in Paderewski. One day in Washington during
the First World War, he stated his theory to Secretary of the Interior
Franklin K. Lane. “One of these days,” he said, “you people will realize
that imagination and disinterestedness are powerful factors in the
building of a state. I believe Paderewski is capable of rebuilding
Poland and of rebuilding Europe if the occasion demanded. He is capable
of any sacrifice, and he has the mind and soul to keep him going.”
“You artists always talk in big terms,” said Lane. “So far I am with
you. But there’s a great practical side to nation building.”
“Don’t you think Paderewski has that, too?”
“Yes,” said Lane, “and that’s why I’m interested. That’s why he’s
succeeding. They tell me he’s abandoned music and set aside his entire
fortune to arm Poland and place her on the side of the allies. Just as
certainly as I’m sitting here, this great artist is going to be the
liberator of modern Poland. This artist!”
“Yes,” commented Gutzon. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. He’s an
artist.”
When the next great crisis came for Poland, there were no great artists
to deal with it--only politicians.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
_FOR THE PARKS_
It is one of the amazing things about a sculptor that the more work he
does and the more recognition he gets, the more his friends demand that
he stick to his proper business. And it is probably just as amazing that
the sculptor doesn’t want to and seldom does. Somebody, commenting on
the varied activities and interests of Gutzon Borglum, quoted a bit of
apt philosophy: “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me,” which was
Borglum’s estimate of the situation, all right. The constant urge to Art
was something, he thought, that made his friends seem normal.
He might have been an aviator had his reflexes been faster at the time
the Wright brothers made their test flights at Kittyhawk. His studio at
Stamford was big enough to be a fine air laboratory, and for years it
was cluttered with an odd assortment of things that were going to make
flying better ... and quicker, and cheaper, and easier and safer.
Gutzon was one of the observers of Orville Wright’s first sustained
flight at Fort Myers when the inventors were trying to prove the value
of their plane to the United States Army. He saw “a little mechanism
that looked like the wreck of a covered wagon” travel around a half-mile
course for sixty-seven minutes. Then, after an enthusiastic greeting to
the pilot, he and Orville, Colonel Bromwell, Captain Squier and
Lieutenant Selfridge rode into town aboard a streetcar. As a
representative of the Aeronautical Society of America, he saw the
collapse of the plane the next day and the tragic death of Lieutenant
Selfridge.
Still he went on. He became acquainted with Alexander Klemin and his
wind tunnel. He was greatly interested in Major Ocker’s development of
blind flying. He invented an airplane brake which, with modifications,
was the type used in the Second World War.
In a speech before the Aeronautical Society at the Astor Hotel in New
York early in 1904 he outlined his plans for a “cylindrical type of
machine with the engine in the pointed nose directly behind the
propeller and winglike fins to steady the flight.” He demonstrated what
he meant with two little models that flew gracefully over the audience.
He said:
Consider the bird struggling with the power of a water freshet. The
model for the aeroplane should not be the bird, but the fish. The
only fish that can move in stormy water is the trout, and the
trout, I am convinced, gives us an unbeatable design for an
airship.
There is something in that speech to remind one of Cellini’s departures
from art, and the activities of Da Vinci when he was looking most
clearly at the patterns of a future life. But his friends weren’t
impressed. Mrs. William Brown Meloney of the _Herald-Tribune_ and _This
Week_ magazine, with whom he carried on a ceaseless correspondence, gave
him a sharp rebuke and told him that art needed him more than the
airplane business. And he sent her this prompt answer:
Dear Missy: You regret as many of my friends do that I am not
eternally astride a ton of clay, constantly modeling. On the other
hand, the insistent application of a man’s mind or his body to one
activity creates lopsidedness.
I was hardly out of my teens before I discovered that it was only
men of varied interest in life, men of varied capacities, whose
minds survived middle age....
I mean the sort of men who can turn from the study of an orchid to
the building of a fortress, to mending a sewer, to designing a
fleet, to colonizing a continent.
Gutzon spoke a lot. He liked public speaking and he was good at it. Any
good cause was his cause, and, inasmuch as he never seemed to be looking
for any personal reward from his public fighting, he made a lot of
friends in unexpected places.
He loved children and he was disturbed by New York’s lack of room for
them. He remembered his own childhood--so much of it in the fresh, open
air--and he campaigned vigorously for playgrounds or parks or unplanned
pieces of the outdoors that would give them a chance to stretch their
legs. He began to write on such subjects for the newspapers and spent
most of his days in wordy controversy. He wrote largely on political
subjects and was rated among the country’s foremost essayists on the
subject of world peace. His peace article, “An Essay on Economic
Boycott,” was one of twelve selected from 20,000 for publication in the
book “Ways to Peace.” It was widely reported in the newspapers, widely
discussed, and carried abroad by President Wilson when he went to make
his futile treaty of Versailles.
The park controversies pleased Gutzon for two reasons. He thought they
might bring about a little better living for the children. And they
might promote a general love for flowers--bring a new generation into
the open air and give it a consciousness of nature. He loved growing
things--green trees, soft grass and the smell of aromatic shrubs. He
never forgot his chase to capture the moon in Fremont.
In his early life he wished to be a horticulturist. Years afterward he
found at the door of his New York studio an opportunity to practice his
green thumb and at the same time to put his play-spot theories into
practical development. In 1907 he was invited to join the board of
directors and serve on the executive committee of the Metropolitan Parks
Association which became the Parks and Playgrounds Association of the
City of New York. His membership was one of his special interests for
twenty years. He was appointed chairman of a subcommittee which later
became an independent body looking after the affairs of Central Park.
Gutzon was highly pleased with his work as permanent chairman. Forty
years had passed since the country’s two pioneer landscape artists had
made one of the most famous parks in the world from some rocks and a
swamp in the middle of Manhattan Island. They had brought in hundreds of
tons of soil and thousands of rare trees and shrubs. They had laid out
driveways for carriages and winding paths for pedestrians. They had
provided lakes and playgrounds for children. In 1907 Samuel Parsons, the
landscape architect under Mayor Green, was begging uselessly for better
park equipment and a new watering system. The sculptor felt that he had
been cast in the right role. An appropriation of $100,000 for improving
the water system was passed that year.
The sculptor gathered the curses of the old school of artists when he
joined the parks association to keep the Academy of Design from putting
up a building in Bryant Park. He won a taxpayer’s suit against the city
in 1911 to prevent the slovenly extension of Riverside Drive in the
Washington Heights region. In 1918, in a similar action, he prevented
the building of an unsightly pumping station in Morningside Park. And
routine park business, outside of the courts, amused him continuously
because it was so full of trouble.
In 1910 Mayor Hylan appointed Charles Stover, who had worked under the
direction of the park association, his Commissioner of Parks. Stover
promptly turned the park into a playground, principally by digging
swimming pools and wading puddles wherever there was room for them. He
came into direct opposition with Parsons the landscape architect. They
quarreled. The commissioner held up the architect’s salary on the ground
that he was absent from his office too much.
Gutzon entered the fight with a letter to the New York _Sun_, pointing
out that the new commissioner had “not rotted enough manure to fertilize
a ten-acre lot, nor mustered enough courage to contract for a single
manure pit.” He reminded his readers that “Last year a $100,000 high
pressure water system remained absolutely idle for the lack of a little
hose, and $100,000 worth of property was allowed to go to ruin.” He
arrayed himself against a movement to impeach Stover and put his own
report on the needs of the park before the Board of Estimate and
Apportionment. With him on the committee was a fine array of
talent--Jacob Schiff, Francis Lynder Stetson, William J. Gibson, George
W. Perkins, Charles L. Burmeister and some others. They got a respectful
hearing.
The sculptor submitted with his report sixty samples of Central Park
soil that had been analyzed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The
budget committee gave him hearty approval and allotted enough funds to
save the park.
During the years Gutzon served on its board of directors, many important
questions were discussed by the Parks Association, such as what to do
with the old Arsenal building, what about additions to the Metropolitan
Museum, what about monuments and statues, what about Riverside Park and
the New York Central Railroad tracts. He deplored the usual attitude of
the Association which in its zeal to “save the park” objected to almost
every new proposal, regardless of merit. He took most of his indignation
to the newspapers.
In 1922 he fought for the request of the National Sculpture Society to
hold an open-air exhibition near the Metropolitan Museum, although he
was not a member of the society. The Association opposed him. He
declared in the New York _Times_:
The charm of Central Park lies in the development of its original,
natural contours. The National Sculpture Society should be allowed
an area of fifty to one hundred acres and there place their exhibit
to suit the natural conditions, precisely as they would place it if
it were permanently located. I feel certain if some such plan is
inaugurated, it will be successful....
And he took an active part in the city’s big stir about the proposed
development of Riverside Park in connection with the New York Central’s
right of way along the Hudson River front. It was part of his plan that
“The park from the Drive, with its river glimpses, should be the most
tempting in Manhattan, and every walk into it should possess a separate
individual interest.” And so in February 1917 he wrote to Mayor
Mitchell.
The First World War put a stop to many of the plans of the park
designers. Mayor Mitchell went into a training camp in Florida and was
killed in an airplane crash. Gutzon resigned from the Association in
1922, but he listened to the plea of George Gordon Battle, the
president, and reconsidered. He remained active for many years.
One of Gutzon’s last appearances in New York was in 1939 at a dinner
party given by “Missy” Meloney. Present were the new Park Commissioner
Robert Moses, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He was surprised to see
them and obviously pleased.
“I’ve been anxious to see you fellows,” he said as he sat down. “I’ve
been wanting to tell you about my new plan for the development of
Central Park.... Now what I’ve had in mind is this----”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
_THE CZECHO-SLOVAK ARMY_
Many people on the Borglum visiting list figured that Gutzon was a
Czecho-Slovak merely because he ran a Czecho-Slovak army on his front
lawn in Stamford. He wasn’t, of course, but nobody got any evidence of
that from the highway.
The sculptor’s interest in the Czecho-Slovak cause came about in a
purely natural manner. For some years he had had working with him, on
and off, a young Austrian sculptor’s assistant named Micka (pronounced
Michka) and Micka had some odd ideas about the European war. There was
need for reapportionment of some parts of Austria, he mentioned. And
presently he began to talk about an independent republic that was to be
formed by a group of Bohemians and Slovaks.
Gutzon was interested in this, as he was in all new republics that were
brought to his attention. He looked into the matter and shortly found
himself in spirited correspondence with its leaders. The republic
makers, he discovered, called themselves Czecho-Slovaks, and with them,
as a sort of motivating influence, was Thomas Masaryk. The cause seemed
to be popular. Large numbers of these foreigners who had found security
and freedom in the United States were now volunteering to go back and
fight for their countrymen in Europe, and, since the draft law had not
yet gone into effect, nobody stopped them.
Masaryk was mostly in Washington trying to get the United States to aid
his cause. There Borglum met him and helped him to get a $12,000,000
appropriation from the U. S. Treasury. The two then collaborated in
writing a constitution for the new Republic of Czecho-Slovakia. In
Gutzon’s files was found a parchment-bound copy of this document with
Masaryk’s signature on it, together with a letter expressing the
leader’s gratitude for Borglum’s help.
That’s how it came about that the sculptor offered a part of his
property in Stamford to serve as a military post. The land was vacant,
there was plenty of space, and there the Czech volunteers could be
trained while they waited for transports to carry them across the
Atlantic. As headquarters Gutzon donated an old farmhouse. The
volunteers built their own barracks and cleared a parade ground across
the woods.
The first recruits to arrive at the camp looked a little confused. As a
military force they were a lonely lot. The United States had nothing to
do with them. They were under command of the French and were to be sent
to a French sector when they reached the front. But there wasn’t any
French control of them in this country. Whatever military control they
had was purely theoretical.
The Czecho-Slovak organizers in New York and Washington were pleased by
the patriotism of the men who volunteered to fight. But, once they had
expressed their satisfaction, they forgot all about the army. It was
easy to send passage money to worthy young men all over the country and
move them on to the camp in Stamford. As a result of this carefree
policy, most of the business of handling the volunteers fell
automatically to the Borglum family.
Frequently a batch of recruits would be sent from New York without
advance notice or arrangements for provisions. The Borglums would then
have to scour the neighborhood to borrow blankets and appeal loudly to
the Red Cross for a quick food supply. Once in 1918 when the painter
George Luks was spending the summer with Gutzon he and the sculptor
painted posters which were sold at auction to raise funds for the camp.
The boys needed some adequate kitchen materials, such as a stove, knives
and a collection of pots and pans.
The Czechs, after a little pushing by Borglum, put on a sort of pageant
which showed an attack on an Austrian village by a band of the new
republic’s troops. It was realistic, and press reports said that it was
very thrilling.
The soldiers had hurriedly put together a few thatched-roof cottages and
hung up a background to give the illusion of the Austrian village.
Everyone who came to Wire Mill Road that night was in Czech costume, and
that included the Borglums and their guests. It was a gala night, and it
brought another tide of volunteers.
On another evening there was an impressive musical program. Masaryk came
with his daughter Anna and one of the Benes brothers presently to become
famous in Europe. Miss Kitty Cheatham, a singer who had made many
concert tours in Europe, was present also. She heard the massed male
chorus of the soldiers sing her composition “America” as it probably
would never be sung again. The boys were born singers, and they meant
what they sang.
Gutzon telephoned one night that he had heard important news and would
deliver it to the camp in person. So the Czecho-Slovak army stayed up
late that night. There was no radio. The late evening papers would
arrive with Gutzon Borglum. So there was nothing to do but wait. About
10 o’clock the sculptor arrived. The boys stood at attention in dead
silence. “I won’t keep you long,” he said. “But I have heard good news
and I wanted to tell it to you myself.... President Wilson this
afternoon announced that the United States has recognized the
independence of the Republic of Czechoslovakia.” The boys were
enthusiastic that night. They built a huge bonfire on the parade ground.
They marched around it and over most of the neighborhood singing and
shouting for a large part of the night.
The camp commander, a Czech, was a professional agnostic. He said it
hurt him to look at any sort of religious observance. This made things
difficult for him because the greater part of the Czecho-Slovak
volunteers were deeply religious. They were always aware that they were
going into danger, and until they came to Stamford they had always been
able to go to church when and if they wanted to. The conflict between
the commander and his troops was rapidly approaching a state of open
mutiny when Borglum intervened. He arranged to have mass celebrated in
his home whenever a contingent of soldiers was due to go abroad. Father
Kubacec would come up from Yonkers on the eve of their going, to hear
confessions. In the morning he would celebrate mass on the open terrace.
And everybody in the camp would attend except the commander.
When the first group left for the front they wanted to carry the new
republic’s flag, which, so far, they had seen only on the camp
stationery. Gutzon requisitioned one from the headquarters in New York,
but there was none there, either. So he toured the New York shops for
suitable flag material and brought it home. It was cut by a Bohemian
tailor from Chicago on the table in the Borglum dining room. Four stars,
representing four provinces, were eventually stitched to the field. The
camp commander said that very likely there was no other flag like it
anywhere in the world. He was probably right.
A hundred men marched with this flag down Wire Mill Road to entrain in
Stamford for the boat from New York. They were dressed in blue-gray
uniforms with berets of the same color. And somehow, they looked like
soldiers. Gutzon frequently wondered how many of them had survived the
war.
Every few weeks a similar pageant rolled out of the Borglum estate.
Altogether several thousand volunteers learned squad drill and the
manual of arms on Gutzon’s front porch. Several hundred were still
there on Armistice Day and went roaring to town to join in the general
celebration.
In the meantime the sculptor and some other Americans had formed an
association of independent mid-European nations. Leaders of the nations
and American aides assembled on October 25, 1918, in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia, where they drew up a declaration of common aims. This
much-bandied declaration of independence was signed by Paderewski for
the Poles, Masaryk for the Czechs and five other lesser lights for
nations in being or about to be.
A preceding Victory Meeting had been held in Carnegie Hall with Masaryk
and Paderewski as principal speakers. It was a conclave volcanic in its
enthusiasm for two nations that now have been allowed to die. It is
remembered chiefly for Paderewski’s remarkable speech.
Much of the labor of getting these ill-assorted people together for the
Philadelphia meeting was the free gift of Lieutenant John Townsend, a
young American. He had learned his Europe while living with his father
who was in the diplomatic service, and he had given his time day and
night to the campaign for the unity of the small nations. He worked too
hard and on the evening of the ceremony at Independence Hall, he
suddenly collapsed. He never recovered. Gutzon was impressed by him. To
a group of Czecho-Slovak officers he had this to say:
We can all take lesson from his shining example. He was one of the
young Americans who gave their lives to save Europe ... eager to
help, uncomplaining, self-sacrificing. He was an example of the
Western spirit that seems always to be at the disposal of the rest
of the world. I, for one, will pray to live my life in the copy of
his generous spirit.
Everybody was touched. Nobody said anything about Gutzon’s part in the
raising of the Czecho-Slovak army.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
_THE NOBLE SPORT_
And then there was the matter of The International Sporting Club. It was
among Gutzon Borglum’s most altruistic endeavors and certainly one that
can be viewed without any reference at all to his art.
It may seem to some readers that there is something of a retrogression
when an artist involves himself in a sporting club--that the whole
effort militates against his ideals of his craft. But that doesn’t seem
to be the way Borglum felt about it. Boxing was just another odd subject
that interested him and one with which he believed he could do
something. He may even have fancied himself as a fighter--and, in view
of later conduct, it seems that he did.
Critical opinion being what it is, three propositions should be noted as
a sort of prelude to what follows:
1. Many physicians agree that boxing, or, as it is sometimes called,
“The Manly Art,” is an excellent physical exercise, particularly for
those who win at it.
2. During the First World War, the United States Army made boxing an
important part of the training of two million young men as soldiers.
3. After the war an extraordinary number of returned veterans (the
estimate of the trade is 20,000) wanted to take up boxing as a
profession because they liked it, or because there was a living in it
with big money for those who reached the championship in any grade from
bantam to heavyweight.
There was no tangible evidence that the sculptor had gone very deeply
into the study of these matters. But as a man who had raised an army on
his own grounds he was one who undoubtedly would listen to any harangue
about what was good for soldiers being just the stuff for virile men who
were not soldiers. And the appeal came to him without his making any
move to ask for it.
One Sunday afternoon in 1917 there came strolling up the driveway to the
Borglum home in Stamford a stranger somewhat noticeably costumed. As he
alighted from his cab and started a leisurely march to the terrace the
Borglums were conscious of a broadly checked suit, a flaming tie, a
monocle and a bright-yellow cane. The man’s face may have shown a hint
of Irish, but otherwise he was unmistakably British and impressively
advertising it.
At the door he introduced himself as William A. Gavin of London. “But I
have come originally from old Ireland,” he mentioned. “I was taught to
love the arts at my mother’s knee. I have never forgotten the precepts
she laid down for me.... ‘A great artist,’ she always said, ‘must live
very close to God.’ And I have come here, sir, as a humble pilgrim. I
have seen some of your magnificent work and I stand in great awe of it.
I should esteem it a great privilege, Mr. Borglum, if I could go home
and tell some of my friends that I have had the chance to shake your
hand....”
Mr. Borglum invited him in.
Whatever else Mr. Gavin may have been, he was a finished worker. He has
been described by some of those who knew him best as a somewhat small,
round, dapper gentleman with an amiable manner who was stiff enough to
be nearly pompous. But he knew how to take his time.
In due course he mentioned what had given him his interest
[Illustration: LINCOLN AND GUTZON BORGLUM IN HOIST]
[Illustration: PLASTER MODEL IN MOUNTAIN STUDIO
G.B. has his hand on T.R.’s nose. Lincoln Borglum is at left]
in sculpture. “I have learned,” he said, “what the human body looks like
in motion. I know there must be strange techniques in the art that
permits the transfer of this motion to blocks of stone or metal. I can
sense it. I can see it although I cannot comprehend it. I have been able
to recognize master productions. I have never failed to see that they
were master productions--and I may say that so far I have never seen any
that move me the way that yours do.”
“And you are not an artist?” inquired Mr. Borglum.
Mr. Gavin sighed. “Ah, no,” he said. “I wished to be. As a child I
haunted the art galleries. But there were financial difficulties in the
family and I was discouraged. I have given much of my life to sports.”
“Interesting,” murmured the sculptor.
“Yes, indeed,” returned Mr. Gavin. “In a way it has been an odd
path--and not one, perhaps, that I should have chosen if I had been
given the selection. But I feel that I have done a worthwhile thing. The
strength of the nation may be said to depend upon its horses, rifle
shots, swimmers, tennis champions, boxers, and, of course, cricket
players. I have tried to make these people constantly better--and, in my
small way, I have succeeded.”
“I like boxing,” admitted the sculptor.
“I had believed you would,” said Gavin. “At the moment boxing is my own
principal interest. That is one of the reasons why I have come to talk
with you. Unfortunately few people in New York have ever seen a boxing
match. They do not know what it means to watch the effortless movement
of a pair of skilled boxers--to note the extreme precision with which
their effort is controlled.” To him, he said, such contests were the
most beautiful thing in the world--expressive of the fundamental male
instincts, inspiring. And after that he got around to the reason for his
visit.
It had occurred to him, he said, that Mr. Borglum might be of help to
him in raising the level of boxing in the United States. He had come
from England because he hoped to do what Lord Lonsdale had done over
there to get outstanding people interested in the art instead of the
heedless ruffians who now controlled it. Gutzon’s name had been given
him, he said, as that of a man whose integrity was well known to the
community and who had expressed some sympathy with the people who were
trying to make ring contests legal. If Gutzon would join his list of
sponsors, he said--and he named several highly respectable men of
Gutzon’s acquaintance--he would form an immense club, restore the manly
art and form a national association to promote it. He, himself, he
mentioned, would advance all preliminary expenses.
The sculptor joined this crusade without further pressure. Nobody
connected with him could have doubted that he would. Boxing had some of
the artistic appeal for him that it theoretically had for Gavin. He had
known about fisticuffs since boyhood, and, as his sculpture progressed,
his continuous swinging of the tools had broadened his shoulders and put
power behind his punch. Boxing had become one of the things that he
thought he might learn to do better than anybody else, and he had tried
to prove it. His friend Bob Davis had brought the world’s heavyweight
champion Bob Fitzsimmons to the sculptor’s studio just as a test.
Borglum had made a somewhat secondary showing against the champion, but
that hadn’t hurt his enthusiasm. Maybe he didn’t know as much about ring
mayhem as a champion, but he still knew as much about the theory of
boxing as anybody else. That’s what he was thinking when he signed
Gavin’s prospectus--which was quite a prospectus.
It turned out that there was a lot of business about the boxing reform
movement that Gutzon had not suspected. In September 1919 there came
into being The International Sporting Club, Inc., of New York, an
organization that was to show the National Sporting Club of London how
sports really should be conducted. According to the plan ably outlined
by Mr. Gavin, there would be 2,250 members. Each member, to get the
great movement started, was to buy a gold-debenture bond for $500 as a
sort of initiation fee. The bond was to pay six per cent annually. After
that the dues would be $100 a year.
Land was bought and plans were drawn for a magnificent clubhouse at
Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. Excavators came with suitable
tools and began to dig a hole for this great temple of sport. Members
rushed in to buy their gold debentures. The hole deepened and presently
was surrounded by a high fence to keep New York’s enthusiasts from
falling into it.
By the end of 1920 Gavin was beginning to be one of the most
talked-about men in New York. He, of course, was managing director of
the club. He was mentioned in press reports as the man in control of
“organization and development,” which seem to have been his chief
concern.
Major A. J. Drexel Biddle was first president of the organization.
Gutzon Borglum, still eager for the return of boxing, suddenly found
himself treasurer. The Army and Navy were well represented in the
membership by people who had been active in the First World
War--admirals and generals, and commanders and colonels. And there were
so many more figures from financial and social eminences that the roster
was a sort of _Who’s Who_. There was quite a sensation when this list of
magnificent members moved into the struggle to get boxing back again.
Whatever may be said about Gavin’s effort to raise the level of the
boxing industry, it is certain that the club presently began to make
some headway. Senator James J. Walker, presently to be known as New
York’s playboy mayor, led the fight at Albany and presently won it when
the Walker Bill (Chapter 714, Laws of 1921, N. Y.) was passed. But he
had a lot of amateur assistance. Biddle made an impassioned plea to
Governor Alfred Smith and later broke through Tammany obstructions to
lay the matter before Boss Murphy and demand his support.
When the bill was passed, as nearly everybody thought it would be, a
testimonial dinner was given to Gavin. Jimmy Walker declared that the
legalization of boxing in New York was due to Gavin’s skill in
organization and to his tireless energy. He read a letter to the
banqueters that Borglum, still full of crusading zeal, had written to
him:
You have recounted some of the obstacles Gavin surmounted in the
passage of the bill. They were great, no doubt, but they were small
compared with those he has encountered in the founding of the
International Sporting Club. And these are small compared with the
obstacles that stood in the way of convincing the governors of
twenty commonwealths of the wisdom and necessity of forming a
national body. It seems that boxing, which has become the black
sheep of the family of sports, and of which Maeterlinck says, “It
is not a coincidence that the nations who love boxing do not know
the knife,” is at last destined to come into its own.
Gavin went on. While the eager members were still peering through the
fence at the empty hole at Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, he
began a series of gorgeous entertainments for celebrities. At one of
them, entitled “Ladies’ Night at the Commodore Hotel,” the women leaders
of New York’s society looked at a prize fight for the first time in
their lives. Gavin was a good promoter. The homeless club staged, in
all, three bouts--Fulton _vs._ Wills, Carpentier _vs._ Levinsky, Herman
_vs._ Lynch.
Georges Carpentier, the French championship contender, was the chief
attraction and got considerably more publicity than he deserved.
Champion Jack Dempsey, who, a few months later, was to knock out M.
Carpentier, was present at the Sporting Club bout and was applauded with
dignified acclaim. With all this enthusiasm roaring through New York,
Gavin got some new ideas for his building. He arranged with Gutzon to
carve marble panels for the main room and to produce a large piece of
sculpture for the entrance. Borglum started to make models of the
specimens required ... but it is hard to find any record of what became
of them.
The third prize fight sponsored by Gavin was between Pete Herman and Joe
Lynch at Ebbets Field, and it was not much of a success. It ended in a
riot that caused the club to lose its license to promote private bouts
and something like $40,377.32 in cash. Major A. J. Drexel Biddle walked
out and trouble began to pile up.
In May 1921 some of the members who were no longer impressed by the
empty hole in the ground on Lexington Avenue formed a committee and
asked Mr. Gavin to give an accounting of the International Sporting
Club’s finances. He did so suavely and willingly. There were 1,700
members on the list, he said. That was because of his care in selection.
Some of these had paid only part of the $500 due on their debentures,
but a total of $742,000 had been paid in and quite a lot had been paid
out. The price of the building lot had been something like $250,000.
There had been a charge of $105,000 for the digging of the hole. He had
made an advance of $120,000 for steel, contractors’ fees and architects.
And then there had been some expense--about $126,000--for “organization
and development.”
There was further inquiry. Borglum became president of the club to
succeed Major A. J. Drexel Biddle, and to the end he looked upon Mr.
Gavin as a much maligned man.
It was discovered, during what remained of 1921, that Gavin had
incorporated two organizations--The International Sporting Club and The
Army, Navy, and Civilian Board of Boxing Control--which everybody knew
about, and also The International Sporting Club Corporation. The
International Sporting Club Corporation was a holding company designed
to control the real estate--and the money--of the other two. When the
membership investigating committee found out about it, it was in “an
unhealthy condition.”
In November 1921, after he had spent another $62,000 for “organization
and development,” Mr. Gavin got tired of all the mistrust and bickering.
One night he and his attractive wife quietly slipped out of New York.
They left no word of explanation or farewell. They left no purse to pay
the current bills of the International Sporting Club. The investigators
found that the membership had paid in a total of $1,013,478. Before the
report was completed they received a nice letter from Gavin saying
good-by to everybody, but they found no way to include it in the
valuable assets which consisted chiefly of the hole in the ground. They
found $149.69 in one bank. In another there was $3.52.
There were those who believed him incompetent to handle money, and those
who thought him extremely competent--in his own interest. There were
some, like Gutzon, who still believed in him. Nobody sued him; nobody
charged him with any crime; no crime was ever proved against him. The
money was spent. The members disagreed whether he had given them their
money’s worth in excitement and novelty.
Gutzon got words of sympathy from Charles Dana Gibson, Postmaster
General Hitchcock, Senator Coleman Dupont, Major General Leonard Wood
and others. But nothing came of his efforts to retrieve the Sporting
Club. Gavin was gone. The Club was gone. After a while the hole in the
ground was filled by another building, the anguished creditors ceased
their crying, and presently nothing remained in New York to mark the
regime of Gavin except the boxing act. Borglum was never quite sure that
it was worth bragging about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
_FRIENDS AND HOME_
One of the chief errors in the life of Gutzon Borglum was his belief
that everybody loved him--or nearly everybody. As a matter of fact, he
wasn’t quite that popular. His record for a public career that lasted
just about half a century is, of course, the continuous story of a
crusader who didn’t mind the noise. He was a positive, stubborn
character who could never see why some people didn’t want his
ministrations. But it must be admitted that what he wanted to do for
human beings was all intended for their own good--and not, particularly,
his. He was interested in beauty, and in other people ... and
emphatically!
Lester Barlow, the inventor, who knew him well, said that Gutzon’s
ambition was to show that he could do anything better than anybody else,
from sculpture to tightrope walking. In a way he was right, for Gutzon
was a perfectionist with unbounded confidence in himself. If he had gone
in for tightrope walking, he would have tried to do it better than it
had ever been done before, and, possibly, would have succeeded--possibly
not. But the point that Barlow overlooked was that Borglum was always a
critic of method and never of results if the work showed progress in
technique. If a thing was better done, he never cared much how.
Many of those who knew him well thought he was a man of great humility.
He accepted criticism with great calm and respect. He was an ideal
father and husband and a pleasant, unexacting friend. That’s what those
closest to him say--which is one of the things that makes Gutzon Borglum
so difficult to understand.
There were hundreds of people in the United States who weren’t so close
to him--the ones who thought he talked only about tons of rock, and man
hours, and A-rigs, and dynamite--and many of them figured him for a hard
businessman with a Class “C” temper. That, unfortunately, is the picture
of Gutzon that he left for himself in so many parts of this calm and
pleasant land. And the worst part of it is that in many particulars it
is authentic.
Gutzon was intense in his work. He believed in himself. And when he ran
into opposition in what he considered a perfectly obvious course, he had
a devastating vocabulary and a voice like the crack of doom. He was
afraid of nothing.
It is odd, of course, that such a man could be a dreamer and a poet.
Those who stood up to him toe to toe in bitter wrangles would never be
convinced that he could see both sides of anything--that he could be
tolerant and kindly. But he was a poet, and those who put flowers on his
grave remember him for softness and gentleness.
Once he said that a man who wasn’t a great poet could never become a
great artist. He had a reverence for a child’s unspoiled outlook on
life, and when asked what was his favorite poem he frequently cited
Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley and the lines that begin: “Know you
what it is to be a child?”
For all that he was still the man whom the hard-rock worker epitomized
with the comment that he was a good stonecutter but he didn’t talk
pretty.
He made a lot of remarkable friends, about half of whom never knew a
thing about art. They liked him personally, and when he talked they
listened. Otherwise, you can’t very well explain the financing of Stone
Mountain, and Mount Rushmore, the work of liaison between two great
political parties, the fantastic air investigation.
He knew countless people--politicians, artists, travelers, writers,
soldiers, actors, cowhands, drillers, bankers--who would turn a hand for
him if he asked them to. Quite likely he didn’t talk sweet to them
either.
“Any man, in any walk of life, has something to tell you if you’ll
listen,” he once explained. And he listened.
“It would be a godsend,” he mentioned when his bank balance was down
nearly to zero after the Stone Mountain fiasco, “if every man had enough
money so that he could do what he wanted to do.” But even then he was
never able to keep what money he got. Somebody else always needed it.
Of his conflicting characteristics his friend “Missy” Meloney, the
editor, once wrote this to him:
Dear Gutzon, Heaven bless you. What a glorious time God had of it
when He made you. A glorious thought that, seeing the Infinite Hand
reach down and gather up the dust of the mighty and the great and
mold it with terrific force into the hardest--and softest--soul I
have ever known. Out of Milton and a speck of Angelo, and a grain
of Napoleon, an atom from Paul and a flame from the Immortal
Redeemer. It is a thought to play with. Such a strange, complex,
unlimited person you are ... counting a line of vital importance,
throwing away a fortune, soothing a crying baby, harboring an army,
fighting for peace, loving a friend. You and Mary are destroyers of
weak faith, and I love you both.
“Missy’s” picture of him is the one that his friends knew best. He never
felt that he or anybody else had been endowed at birth with superior
talents, though he always felt that he had done well with what he had.
His ability to be successful as an artist, he declared, was due to
trained observation and hard work. As a matter of course, he never
talked down to an individual or to an audience. Once a Texas friend of
his, Ralph Bradford, remarked that he was going to a “little hick town”
to give a speech and didn’t need to prepare for it. Gutzon disagreed
with him. “You never know the brains of an audience by the size of the
town,” he said. “How do you know you won’t be talking to some ‘king
maker’ who’s just there waiting for a train?” So Bradford, who presently
moved on to an important post in Washington, did so because he stopped
to prepare what he had to say--and the ambient “king maker” was in the
audience.
“If there hadn’t been any ‘king maker,’” Gutzon commented afterward, “it
would have been just the same; somebody, if it was only Bradford, would
have known that the orator was doing a good job.”
Among the sculptor’s oldest friends was the painter Martin Borgord, a
man of Norwegian extraction whom he had known in California and France.
Borgord received honors in Paris and late in life returned to
California. He stopped to visit Gutzon in South Dakota. Through him
Gutzon met another well-known painter, William Singer, and his wife, and
visited them in Norway. Mrs. Singer bought two of his marbles for her
museum in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Another friend of the early Paris days was the Belgian sculptor Paul
Nocquet, who came to New York to be near Gutzon and lost his life in a
balloon ascension. After his death Gutzon collected his art works, had
some of them cast in bronze and arranged an exhibition. The sale netted
several thousand dollars for Nocquet’s mother and sisters in Belgium.
Among the patrons of the show, whose names appeared in a handsome
catalogue, were President Theodore Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, and the
French and Belgian ambassadors to the United States.
Gutzon took care of Nocquet’s burial in Mt. Kisco and prepared a
calf-bound volume, _In Memoriam_, which contained, among other mementos,
prints of the first air photographs of Long Island. Nocquet had taken a
camera on his final trip, and the films were found in his pocket. Though
wet, they were successfully developed and are probably the first
pictures taken from the air to be reproduced in the public press.
Gutzon, after his return from Europe in 1901, met the Herbert Wadsworths
of Washington and the Genesee Valley. They were horse enthusiasts. So
was Gutzon. Martha Wadsworth was a dominating personality, and she was a
social power in Washington. But once she motored all the way to Hermosa,
South Dakota, and again to Stamford, Connecticut, just to visit with the
Borglums.
Herbert Wadsworth’s attitude toward his wife’s activities was one of
whimsical tolerance and his view of Gutzon’s enthusiasms was much the
same. In 1912 he wrote this to Borglum:
Any indication that you are recovering from the
Too-Many-Things-at-Once disease is most gratifying. Once I wanted
to reform the world and now I’m too exhausted to reform myself. By
and by, when you can take a long time off, come up to Ashantee--The
Dawdlers’ Do-Nothing Roost--and do nothing with me. Say, where is
home, anywhere?...
Another equally old friend and brilliant woman who also motored out once
to Texas to spend the winter near Gutzon was Edith Cornell Smith, wife
of Sydney. She and her husband lived in Thirty-eighth Street, near
Gutzon’s studio. They were old New Yorkers to whom tickets at Carnegie
Hall and the Opera House, and various club memberships, were as much a
part of the annual budget as taxes and rent. Edith was deeply artistic
and after her husband’s death spent most of her summers in Stamford
where she was a welcome part of the Borglum family. There were many such
travelers. In time Gutzon came to look on their arrivals as he did the
rains or the rising of the sun. But he was overcome with wonderment when
Julian Lee Rayford, then an obscure young artist, thumbed his way from
North Carolina to Texas just to talk to him. “I don’t think I ever meant
that much to anybody before,” said Gutzon. And he meant it.
During his bachelor days in New York, Gutzon occupied a quaint brick
apartment on 104th Street where other artists lived, including the
Boardman Robinsons. It had been built by a strange woman who, in her
youth, had gone abroad to study art and life. She had come back with
strong distaste for the respectability of her well-to-do relations.
After erecting this flat building, she had taken up her abode in the
basement amid an assortment of art treasures gathered up in Europe. The
sculptor admired what he called her wild streak, by which he meant her
defiance of the conventions, and they got along quite well.
She would allow him to do what he pleased to the second-floor rear
apartment, she said. So he rented it and transformed it completely and
extravagantly, equipping it with furniture built from his own designs.
The dining room had a round mahogany table six feet in diameter. Around
it were twelve circular chairs all painted green and rubbed to a soft
patina. There was a sideboard to match.
Gutzon passed out twelve keys to twelve friends who could come when they
pleased and find a place at his table. Among them was Adolph E. Borie,
called “Billy” by Gutzon and “Doppie” by everybody else. As president of
the Savage Arms Company he was of considerable help in the aircraft
investigation and in settling the affairs of the Sporting Club. He was
an ardent fisherman, and, therefore, one of Borglum’s own kind.
The sculptor would go almost anywhere fishing with anybody he trusted.
But now and then he would decline to make a second trip. Bob and Madge
Davis once invited him to fish with them in a Canadian lake. He didn’t
like it. Sitting in a boat and trolling was too tame a sport, he said.
“You might as well be pulling a suitcase aboard the boat as one of those
lake trout.” The trout stream near Hermosa was the chief reason for his
buying the Black Hills ranch. It was expensive and brought more debts
and embarrassment. But the fishing was a compensation--or so he said.
In the duplex apartment where he lived in New York before moving to
Stamford, close friends, Charles Rann Kennedy and his wife Edith Wynne
Matthison, occupied the flat upstairs. Gutzon became acquainted with
them through a neighbor, Henry Miller, who first staged Kennedy’s play
_The Servant in the House_. Edith was leading lady, and in the cast were
Walter Hampden and his wife and the elder Tyrone Power. The sculptor
engaged the company for a special performance in honor of the Howard
Lodge at the Masonic Temple. A special edition of the play bound in
vellum with the Howard Lodge emblem stamped in gold on the cover was
presented to each of the players and to distinguished guests.
There wasn’t much privacy about Gutzon’s home life. At Stamford there
were usually more outsiders than he had room for. He lived too far from
town for studio assistants to go back and forth. At least one of them
lived with the family all the time. And because he liked to do his
writing after work hours or on holidays, a secretary was another
permanent member of the group. A few of the outstanding ones came to be
friends.
In the earlier days there were Eugenia Flagg and Helen Johnson Keyes,
daughter of the historian. In Georgia, Lillian Taylor, who fought
through the Stone Mountain war, was always on Gutzon’s side and
frequently stayed with the Borglums in Stamford or out at Rushmore. Jean
Philip was also ready to take up cudgels for the chief and was
frequently called.
When the barracks of the Czecho-Slovak volunteers were vacated the
Borglum part of the community was enlarged to care for casual visitors
and studio staff. In looking after all these tides of people Banks, the
chauffeur, became an invaluable help and seemed so much like one of the
family that Mrs. Borglum’s nieces and nephews referred to him in their
prayers as “Uncle Banks.” Another indispensable person came to Stamford
in those early days--James Reilley, the Irishman who has now been there
for thirty years. His children grew up with Gutzon’s, and one of them
reached a position of importance at Rushmore. Old Reilley is still
there, still keeping count of the empty acres.
The sculptor was likewise a dutiful son and brother. Very often some
member of his family was living with him. With the first large amount of
money he received for a monument commission he sent his father and
others on a six-month trip to Denmark. Again he brought to New York a
younger brother and his family, to keep them for a whole year while the
brother was taking a medical course. There are many letters to show that
moments of crisis were not infrequent in the Borglum family and that
Gutzon was always ready to aid.
When his son Lincoln was born Gutzon’s happiness was touching. This was
his miracle, he virtually announced, and his alone. Within a week he was
quarreling with the trained nurse because she would not let him pick up
the baby when he pleased, day or night. There was also some resentment
about the timing of the boy’s appearance. He had arrived on April 9,
1912, and, in keeping with the name the sculptor had in mind for him,
his birth date should have been Lincoln’s birthday. Some friend fixed up
this worrisome situation by mentioning that April 9 was Appomattox Day.
In due course the baby was taken to Bridgeport to pose for the baby
faces spouting water from the rim of the Wheeler Fountain. In that same
fountain he was christened by his uncle, Rev. Marshall Montgomery, after
which he was registered in near-by St. John’s Church, for which Gutzon
had made the reredos.
The child, apparently, was the most important thing that had yet come
into the sculptor’s life. He took him everywhere he was allowed to,
presented him to friends up and down the Atlantic coast, and presumably
was grateful that the child’s mother was a calm and tolerant woman.
Once, when Lincoln was four years old, Gutzon picked him up suddenly and
said they were going to Boston on a two-day trip. But they weren’t back
in two days--or in thirty days. By that time the anxious mother was
telegraphing to every place where she thought Gutzon might have chanced
to go. And from Atlanta she got an answering wire: “Don’t worry. Both
boys here. And well.”
When his daughter Mary Ellis was born on her father’s birthday, March
25, 1916, he began to make plans to have her with him wherever he went.
But he learned that the arrangements were not so easily taken care of.
However, by the time of the Stone Mountain break, Mrs. Borglum had
learned to drive a car and the four Borglums were constantly on the go,
exiles from home, but, wherever humanly possible, together.
Life at the Stamford home and studio is recalled by those who took part
in it as a continuous carnival. Michow Ito, Japanese dancer, moved onto
the old campsite of Mrs. Lanier and the Greenwich girls with a summer
school. He taught dancing and listed classes in history and provided
some art theory, taught by an old American artist. His men pupils and
his staff, including a Japanese cook, lived in tents. The girl students
were billeted in the old Czech barracks. One of the girls, Angna Enters,
stayed on after the rest had gone. She wrote several books and became
famous as a dancer, but is known best locally for _Silly Girl_, in which
the days of the fantastic summer school are recalled.
Ito, who was an odd character, is now known to history principally
because one of his pupils posed for the leading figure in Gutzon’s “Wars
of America” group. Ito had plans for establishing the peace of the world
through the promotion of fine arts. But he wasn’t consistent at it. One
day, when he heard that a Japanese envoy had arrived in Washington to
take part in the 1922 naval conference, he borrowed a Bible and hurried
down to the capital with a message. There he created something of a
sensation by arguing with the Japanese delegate that it would be better
to throw away the sword altogether than to haggle about its relative
length. The envoy thanked him kindly and paid no attention.
Probably because of friendship with Henry Miller, Gutzon knew many
actors. They were in and out of Stamford for years. When Margaret Anglin
was rehearsing her play _The Bronze Woman_ she sent her leading man, who
was playing the part of a sculptor, to the Borglum studio to pick up
local color. He borrowed some authentic stage properties such as a
mallet and chisel.
Later Gutzon, who knew Edgar Davis, tried to get a part for Miss Anglin
in _The Ladder_. This play was about Davis’ thoughts on reincarnation,
but that is not what one remembers it for now. Its Broadway record was
established chiefly by the fact that nobody had to pay to see it. The
tickets were given away free. And it went on almost to a performance
record with virtually nobody in the house. Miss Anglin, however, never
played in it.
With much interest the sculptor liked Laura Hope Crews. She played in
_The Great Divide_ by William Vaughn Moody, another of Gutzon’s
favorites. Gutzon found a resemblance between Moody’s philosophy and his
own, particularly as shown in the poet’s _The Fire Bringer_. Gutzon
frequently talked of Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_ as he might have
concerned himself with somebody living, breathing and immortal. He was a
glamorous, free spirit, and anyone who had anything to do with his
chronicle was a demigod.
Another seldom chronicled trait about Gutzon is the fact that he was
passionately fond of the violin. He had to give it up in order to find
time for his modeling, but he cherished an old fiddle for years until
vandals broke into his Stamford studio and smashed it and other things
to bits. Toward the end of his life Congressman Kent Keller gave him
another violin which is somewhat remembered by those about him. He
received the gift on the ranch in Hermosa and, thereafter, it was his
custom to rise at five in the morning to practice before the day’s work
began.
Whatever one’s criticism of this almost secret work as a virtuoso, it
must be conceded that he liked good music and probably tried to learn to
play it. He knew and loved the great classics--and also the country’s
folk tunes. He hated grand opera, but he liked brass bands.
He had a remarkable love for motion pictures. This was partly due to the
fact that at Rushmore there was hardly any other diversion. But it was
likewise because actors who first appeared to him only as people who
moved about the screen suddenly became real and interesting to him.
Anyway, he used to go to the theaters in Rapid City several times a week
whether they changed programs or not. He saw Jeanette MacDonald seven
nights in succession in _Naughty Marietta_, and Grace Moore, Irene
Dunne, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and others of the sisterhood with
less concentration.
Almost as much as the glamour girls he loved the pictured cowboys. Not
that he cared whether the cowboy was a good hand or bad, but he liked
the horses.
For more quiet relaxation he enjoyed Wild West stories of the good old
dime-novel kind. He and Mrs. Borglum used to read them aloud to each
other on long cross-country trips. Although there are countless Wild
West story magazines on the newsstands, they discovered that only one is
recognized by connoisseurs. In the sparsely settled regions of the
West--even in San Antonio--this magazine was hard to find, and Gutzon
sometimes used to lay out a trip so that on a special day he would be at
a place where it would be available. Thus he would miss no time getting
to the next installment of some continued story.
Gutzon used to look for stories by Max Brand on the ground that his
literary style was superior. Long afterward he discovered that Max Brand
was actually a well-known writer who had made a fortune writing under
different pseudonyms.
In meeting friends new or old the sculptor’s outstanding trait was his
unworldly attitude, totally unaffected by praise or blame, by newspaper
gossip or radio commentators. This is exemplified in a story that he
used to tell on himself.
During his early days in New York the actress Blanche Bates, who had
known him in California, invited him to a matinee where he found himself
the lone male in a box of women. He noticed that opera glasses were
being turned on the box, presumably because of the exceptional beauty of
the woman beside him, and tactfully he withdrew into the background.
As he was filing out after the performance he overtook Miss Bates and
asked, “Who was that striking woman sitting next to me?”
Her laugh was spontaneous as she called to her friend, “Oh, Lillian,
here’s one man in the world who never heard of you!”
He had been spending the afternoon with the most glamorous woman in the
world, Lillian Russell, and he hadn’t realized it. He was not
embarrassed. He never liked to be told in advance the names and
positions of people he was likely to meet.
“I don’t care to be hampered by other people’s opinions--or guesses,” he
said. “I like to discover people for themselves. And I do.”
“You certainly do,” conceded Miss Bates.
And, of course, he did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
_SHRINE OF DEMOCRACY_
A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to
civilization of the events memorialized.--GUTZON BORGLUM.
Back to the mountains came the boy who had felt kinship for them more
than half a century before, to put into form a dream that was as yet
nebulous and disturbed. Vaguely he felt that he was going to preserve
forever some symbol of a great national ideal. The trouble was that he
did not yet have an inkling of what the symbol looked like or how he was
going to keep it intact for future generations to look at. And he had
the granite--the living rock of the mountains--that would turn the
weather as it had been turning it for thousands of years. It would keep
what he carved on it down through time to the rim of eternity.
It sprang from the Stone Mountain conception, this project. But it
wouldn’t be the same thing. There would be no army of horsemen riding
across the white face of a cliff. For this, as he knew but found it hard
to express, must provide a quick glance at the history of the whole
republic, and not until he had accomplished it did he find the words. He
said:
The Shrine of Democracy, carved on Mount Rushmore in the Black
Hills of South Dakota, is the first of its kind in the Western
Hemisphere and perhaps in the world. It is a memorial to the
conception and organization of this great government. Monuments
have almost never been built deliberately to make note of the
intellectual or political acts of a people. The great memorials of
China, Angkor, India, Egypt and Greece were incidental to the life
and religion of the nations. None, I believe, was deliberately so
conceived, so designed and so located that it would remain an
understandable message to posterity ten thousand, a hundred
thousand, or, if the material survived, a million years hence.
Each succeeding race destroys or buries its predecessor,
appropriates what it can and throws the rest to the winds. Only the
most enlightened of human beings revere the remains of others. So
it was thoughts of this sort regarding the failure of mankind to
make suitable, indestructible records of its attainments that led
me to carve our national record on a cliff, on rocks that are of
communally useless material. Therefore our sons will not pull them
down.
Gutzon Borglum arrived for the first time in Rapid City, accompanied by
his son Lincoln, then 12 years old, on September 25, 1924. He was met by
State Historian Doane Robinson, who had invited him on behalf of the
Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Association, and was taken to the
Harney Peak region by a group of citizens including Dr. Cleophas C.
O’Harra, president of the South Dakota School of Mines. The road led
into a region of rising plateaus, then past rocky spars that were called
the Needles, and to the Sylvan Lake, where they spent the night The next
day they climbed Harney Peak. Gutzon observed several locations suitable
for carving, and he said so. But there was nothing so fine in that area
as the Stone Mountain cliff. He reserved decision pending further
inspection and went back East.
The result of this short visit was that Mr. Robinson proceeded to get
the permission of the government to undertake the carving in the Harney
Forest area, which was federal property, and to try to get an
appropriation from the South Dakota state legislature. There was no
difficulty about his first effort. He got his governmental permission
through the Congressional delegates from South Dakota, led by Senator
Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson, whose support and
interest were valuable assets. Mr. Robinson almost as quickly discovered
something that is undeniably true about mountain-carving projects: They
cost a lot and it is almost impossible to get anybody to donate money
toward them. The state authorized the formation of the Mount Harney
Memorial Association, but could find no money. The state of South
Dakota, as an organization, never did find any.
The Stone Mountain storm burst in the spring of 1925 and was responsible
for a lot of Robinson’s troubles, for the desks of the legislators were
shortly piled high with literature sent out by the Stone Mountain
Association trying to discredit Borglum. The only result of this warning
call was a temporary delay. Senator Norbeck reported that Gutzon was a
friend of the President and was known and respected as an artist and a
patriot by both senators and congressmen. So the legislators of South
Dakota figured that the gentlemen in Atlanta were kindly but mistaken.
Gutzon came back to the Black Hills in the fall of 1925 to look for
available granite. He was piloted on a camping trip by Theodore
Shumaker, an old bear hunter and former man-hunting sheriff. Before
meeting Gutzon he had been well acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt,
“Wild Bill” Hickok and “Calamity Jane” Burke.
They entered the Hills near Harney Peak through pathless, rugged, almost
impassable timber and tree falls. What Borglum wanted was a granite
cliff, four or five hundred feet in height and towering that much above
neighboring cliffs. It must lie in such an angle that the main wall
would face the southeast, and there should be enough of fairly even,
unbroken stone to provide at least an acre of upright surface for
carving.
The wall facing southeast was a necessary condition because on it the
figures would be cut to face the sun. It looked almost like an
impossible requirement.
The party had been two weeks in the open, clambering up and down over
seemingly inaccessible mountains, when they suddenly came face to face
with Mount Rushmore. Gutzon was too tired to try to scale it in the
waning day. But he knew that, barring serious cracks in the rock, this
cliff was the one he’d been seeking. They camped in a quiet ravine in
the mountain’s shadow, preparing for supper and a comfortable night’s
rest.
“This looks like what I want,” said Gutzon. “Where is it?”
One of his guides shook his head. “About due east of Harney Peak,” he
said. “But I never saw it before. There’s probably never been a man
within miles of this place.”
So the next morning they started to climb and presently came to an
entrance to the great dike they hoped to surmount. Wear and tear of
wind, water and ice had cut this opening, piercing the cliff to half its
depth. The climbers were still 150 feet from the top--the top that
became the heads of Lincoln and Roosevelt. The heads of Jefferson and
Washington were placed 200 feet farther south and higher.
They surmounted this last perpendicular wall by pyramiding one man on
the shoulders of two others and using a lariat over a projecting sliver
of rock as a hoist line. With torn hands and broken nails they reached
the upper floor and looked down on the mining town of Keystone, about
three miles away. The sculptor related his impressions thus:
When I first saw the shoulders of Rushmore I knew instinctively
that I was a doomed man. I knew that while the years and I reshaped
the mountain, I must be reshaped myself.
Once before I had something of the same intense, emotional shock.
That was when I stood in front of Stone Mountain and listened to
Helen Plane pleading with me to cut into the wall the story of Lee
and his associates.
Such thoughts passed through my mind as we lay prostrate to rest
in the sun on the top of Mount Rushmore. Here great masses of rock
of new dimensions, of greater hardness, rose above and about me. I
was conscious we were in another world. We could imagine clouds
moving over us and around us in stately dignity, or driven by
hurrying winds out of the north, or falling as rain or snow against
the chill white cliff. And there a new thought seized me--a thought
that frightened me and was to redirect me and dominate all my
carving: the scale of the mountain peak!
We were 6,200 feet above sea level--500 feet above the surrounding
cliffs. We looked out over a horizon, level and beaten like the rim
of a great cartwheel, 2,000 feet below. We had reached up toward
the heavenly bodies; we were looking at the forms removed from the
detail of earth in the valleys, with crude colossi piercing the
sky. I had worked seven years on Stone Mountain without real
consciousness of this changing relationship of lofty mountain forms
isolated in space. And it came over me in an almost terrifying
manner that I never had sensed what I was planning. Plans must
change. The vastness that I saw here demanded it.
The Rushmore elevation is the highest elevation of granite, except
near-by Harney Peak, between the Rocky Mountains and Europe. It is a
hard formation called pegmatite, peculiar to the Black Hills, and on
Rushmore it is of a finer, more even grain than that of surrounding
rocks.
Once there was a sea in this region, then rising tracts of sediments
compressed into complicated folds. At some remote time the earth’s
interior intruded upon the sedimentary folds, pushing steadily upward
beneath the surface, and so formed in time the granite batholith of the
Harney Peak region. The overload above the granite must have been of
great height before it was destroyed by erosion. It was torn down and
now lies scattered across the Bad Lands and in valleys all the way to
the sea.
There is no telling when Mount Rushmore was exposed to the sky. Dr.
O’Harra believed it to be one of the oldest mountain formations in the
world--older than the Alps or the Apennines or the Pyrenees or the
Caucasus--older, even, than the Himalayas. Said Dr. O’Harra:
Mount Rushmore, placed near the center of the Black Hills, in the
heart of the continent, midst a galaxy of the world’s profoundest
splendors, where every stone shows an imprint of sanctity and every
bush is aflame with glory, for thousands of years, yes, for
millions of years, has surveyed its entrancing surroundings and
with uncovered head has looked into the benign face of a kindly
creator.
So now a mountain had been discovered such as the sculptor had never
hoped to see. There remained the twin problems of getting the means to
carve it and a majestic design to put on it. Senator Norbeck, notified
the next day, was cautious. He declared flatly that the location
wouldn’t do. It was inaccessible. There were better cliffs and he could
point them out. He and the sculptor met in Keystone, twenty miles from
Rapid City, and spent another day in the hot sun looking for the cliffs
that Norbeck remembered. After that the senator gave in.
The parks of South Dakota were Senator Norbeck’s hobby. He had
antagonized farmers by including their lands in park areas, and he had
schemed to find money in the state and national treasuries that could be
used for landscaping them. Virtually every road in the Black Hills and
Bad Lands is his creation. If he needed a new one, he could make it. So
he wasn’t much worried about the remoteness of Rushmore.
“We’ll get a highway up to it,” he said. “Now, what are you going to put
on it?”
It was Robinson who gave the clew. Years before, in the shale hills west
of old Fort Pierre on the Missouri River, some children had found a
leaden plate left there in 1743 by the Vérendrye brothers, French
explorers. They had claimed the region for the French king as part of
the Louisiana Territory. And it was brought out that Dakota was linked
with the little colonial republic on the Atlantic seaboard in 1803 when
President Thomas Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Considering these two episodes, Gutzon Borglum in his own stepless way
decided what he would do. He would build a memorial to symbolize the
creation and extension of the great republic, the forming of its
government, the saving of its political union, and the completion of the
dream of Columbus--a water route to India--by the cutting of the Panama
Canal.
The characters he chose for the carving were obviously four: Jefferson,
author of the Declaration of Independence and our political gospel;
Washington, who made the visions of Jefferson practicable; Lincoln, who
preserved the union; and Theodore Roosevelt, who was chiefly
instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal. When the design became
clear in his mind Gutzon said:
Our forefathers wrote in the canon of human government that a man
has the right to be free and happy. They formed a sisterhood of
states on that simple creed, and their challenge became the tocsin
cry of the world’s oppressed souls. Those words have changed the
philosophy of the world’s governments. They are the motive, spirit
and purpose back of the Rushmore memorial.
We have not created a monument to Washington or Jefferson or
Lincoln or Roosevelt, but to the meaning of those eleven words as
maintained in our government by those four great leaders. Those
words--man has a right to be free and to be happy--hold the Western
experiment as the guide that leaped out of medieval Europe, more
important to humanity’s immortality than creeds and governments.
So the names of the Presidents to be carved on Mount Rushmore were
agreed on by Norbeck, Robinson and Borglum as early as the fall of 1925.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Of course not. From press reports it was
difficult to see that any two people agreed on any man as a possible
candidate for the super carving. The women’s clubs got turned into a
movement for Dr. Susan B. Anthony, the noted feminist. And they argued
bitterly and earnestly. Somebody introduced a bill in Congress for her
support.
Gutzon, however, wasn’t to be shaken. He said that the men selected
might not be the greatest the United States had produced, but they
exemplified the four great periods of the country’s progress and so
deserved their places in the memorial. He would carve other figures
later, he said, in some places where they would not be crowded.
He went to work first on the head of Washington and studied long in an
attempt to find out what kind of man he was. Of the familiar Washington
portraits he said:
I have examined all the available portraits of value--the Stuart
and Trumbull portraits, and the Houdon portrait which I consider
best of all. Not the statue by Houdon in Richmond, the figure of
which is poor, but the unretouched mask by Houdon which is now in
the Corcoran Art Gallery. It is unquestionably the most valuable
evidence of the appearance of Washington extant. I choose to
represent him before retirement. In retirement a certain fulness of
cheek becomes apparent as in Stuart’s last picture. His face,
definitely masculine, takes on a more rugged form and reminds one
of Cromwell at forty-five. There is much of the robust Britisher,
the country squire or nobleman. There is none of the prettified
Virginia gentleman that Stuart always produced. I recall a story to
the effect that Martha Washington once told him that Stuart had
said he had an awful temper, and that he must warn Stuart not to
circulate such stories. Washington is said to have pondered a
moment and replied, “My dear, I’m afraid Mr. Stuart is right.”
The sculptor made a small model of the group in San Antonio in 1926.
When he returned to Rushmore that same year he made an enlarged plaster
model of Washington’s head on a scale of an inch to a foot. By this time
he had determined to make the heads sixty feet high; his previous
thought of thirty-foot heads he found to be completely out of scale with
the mountain. To make sure of the size he had gone down over the face of
the cliff, located the nose line perpendicularly and the eyebrows and
chin horizontally. From those lines he was able to calculate the scale.
For the next several days he crawled about the cliff and valley
studying the points he had marked on the mountain in red paint with a
six-inch brush.
The enlargement of the Washington head was made in an old log cabin more
than two miles away from the cliff of Rushmore. Plans were afoot to
raise money for the vast work, he was told. But that summer, at least,
nobody was able to find it. Gutzon and his family lived until September
in Keystone. Their living quarters were typical of the mining boom that
had cluttered the valley with shacks in the late seventies.
“Compared with the setting of the rest of the project,” said Gutzon,
“they were ultramodern.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
_DEDICATION_
One of the favorite jibes of the scoffers who didn’t think the Shrine of
Democracy would ever amount to more than a big scar on a hill was that
the workmen spent all their time dedicating it Gutzon listened to these
charges gravely and without heat. “People like to go to dedications,” he
said. “And if you don’t get people out here, nobody is going to know
what you’ve got.” In addition to being a top sculptor he was also a good
showman.
One remembers that the enterprise had virtually no friends in the summer
of 1927--certainly no friends with ready money. The citizenry knew about
it. That is to say, the citizenry of the Hill towns knew about it. They
had heard it was buried somewhere out in the _bosque_ near Keystone.
Gutzon Borglum and a couple of aides went up there each day on rented
horses and surveyed and measured. In Keystone Gutzon talked with
representatives of the power company and salesmen from machinery
companies. But certainly nobody was cutting any rock off the surface of
Mount Rushmore.
And then, in one of the most fantastic journeys that the history of the
Presidents records, Calvin Coolidge came out to look at the West. The
White House Correspondents’ Corps has never reached a decision about why
Coolidge chose the Black Hills for his vacation that year. He caught
trout with bait. Somebody should have advised him not to put on Sioux
eagle feathers. He played a weird game of golf on a private course that
was nearly vertical. And the best thought of the Washington press on the
subject was that he was just a New Englander who had learned how to be a
tourist. Now it is permitted to wonder.
Coolidge came out to the Game Lodge, thirty miles southwest of Rapid
City, chiefly because Peter Norbeck suggested it and carefully laid the
way for him. Norbeck was one of two South Dakotans who was really
enthusiastic about making the Harney Peak region an object of national
interest. Norbeck and Gutzon were friends who believed in each other’s
magic, and Gutzon was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. You may make out of
these premises anything you like. But there isn’t any doubt that the
carving of Rushmore ceased to be idle conversation when the President
arrived and slogged three miles up the hill through the dust to raise
his hand and give the project its sacred quality.
The President was rolled out over a new road from Rapid City to the Game
Lodge, a hostelry on Squaw Creek, handed a fishing rod and assigned to a
preserve that had been packed with specimens from the state hatchery.
Indian chiefs came and made obeisance. The grumbling correspondents
installed themselves in Rapid City. Then, on the second day, Gutzon
Borglum paid his respects to the distinguished visitor. He hired an
airplane--which nobody else had thought of--and flew over the Game Lodge
to drop a huge bouquet of mountain flowers on Mrs. Coolidge’s lawn.
The next day he arrived more formally at the President’s picnic plot to
arrange, as he afterward reported, “a visit of dedication to Mount
Rushmore.” And it is significant that the interview seems to have been
previously arranged and the subject of the discussion well understood.
Nobody was surprised when the date for the dedication was set--August
10, 1927. By that time everybody near enough to see was convinced that
the President was just doing the things he had his heart set on.
Recalling his interview with President Coolidge, Gutzon wrote:
It was a fine interview. Coolidge was a silent man. But he always
talked with me--fishing, politics, even a little about art. He was
happy he had come to the Black Hills for his summer outing. He said
they reminded him of the Vermont mountains.
When the day arrived for the dedication we drove up as far as we
could and walked the rest of the way. The President was mounted on
a safe horse, led by an orderly on each side on foot, until we
reached the cabin I had taken over as a studio. It was about 1,500
feet from the cliff.
There were lots of specially invited guests who had struggled up
the hill. It was something new to see the consecrating of a
mountain by the President of the United States. Nothing had been
left undone to make this an official act. Everything was done with
the greatest of dignity and decorum. Coolidge was really impressed.
“We have come here,” he said, “to dedicate a cornerstone that was
laid by the hand of the Almighty. On this towering wall of Rushmore
in the heart of the Black Hills is to be inscribed a memorial that
will represent some of the outstanding events in American history,
and portraying the features of four of our Presidents.
“The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people.
It is in no small degree due to that spirit that we have been able
to produce such leaders. If coming generations are to maintain a
like spirit, it will be because they continue to study the lives
and times of the great men who have been leaders of this country,
and continue to support the principles those men represented. It is
for that purpose that we erect memorials. We cannot hold our
admiration for the historic figures which we shall see here without
growing stronger in our determination to perpetuate the
institutions that their lives revealed and accomplished.”
That, for the most part, was the dedication. And, singularly enough, it
was very effective. The hot and weary witnesses who had made the march
out of Keystone had suspected it would be, and they had no reason to
complain. Calvin Coolidge, for once in his life, had been deeply moved.
The little crowd stood quiet and motionless for a minute. Gutzon was
called over to the President’s side.
“Look,” said Coolidge abruptly, “who’s paying for all this?”
“Well,” answered Gutzon, “the Rapid City Commercial Club has been taking
care of preliminary expenses. And since the Mount Harney Memorial
Association has been formed, some money has been raised in the Black
Hills and the state generally. We’ve got donations from the Homestake
Mine and the railroads and from people outside like Charles Rushmore,
Herbert Myrick and Coleman Dupont. We are very grateful.”
The President sniffed. “You’ll not go far on that,” he said. “The people
of South Dakota can’t even pay the interest on their farm mortgages.”
“They’ve had a dry year west of the Missouri River,” explained Gutzon.
“We can hope for more water next year.”
“Nonsense,” declared Coolidge. “They never get water out there. When I
get back to Washington I want you to come to the White House. You know
Secretary Mellon?”
“Yes,” said Borglum.
“All right,” pursued the President. “He and you and I will sit down and
figure out what can be done to promote this work. I know great
governments do things like this.”
The President then handed the sculptor the drills and Gutzon climbed to
the top of the mountain. The engines were turned on for the first time.
The huddled, silent witnesses caught the sudden chatter of the drills.
The carving of Mount Rushmore had begun.
Gutzon came down and presented the first drill in use to President
Coolidge. The next two went to Doane Robinson and Peter Norbeck, and he
kept the fourth. Then everybody plodded back down the hill to Keystone.
“See me in Washington,” repeated Coolidge as they said good-by. And that
the historian might record as the beginning of Rushmore financing.
Norbeck and Borglum disagreed as to the proper approach to the problem.
Borglum said that he would ask the federal government to donate as much
as the memorial promoters were able to collect from other sources.
Norbeck said no, that money was hard to collect privately, that you
couldn’t run drills on promises and that Mellon could be made to pay the
full cost. Gutzon, remembering how he had raised more than a million
dollars for Stone Mountain, refused to listen to this argument. But, it
turned out, Norbeck was right.
Toward the end of 1927 Borglum was in Washington. He laid his plan
before Mellon just as he had said he would, and Mellon was pleased. So
was President Coolidge, for Gutzon’s modesty was something unusual at
the time.
Norbeck was not pleased. “You could have got it all,” he said. “Now I
don’t know what you’ll get.” He put a bill through the Senate, while
Congressman Williamson was doing the same thing in the House, providing
for a twelve-member commission to take over the drawings, contracts and
material now held by Borglum, to be held and owned by the United States
government. The $50,000 fund in the Rushmore treasury was exhausted in
the middle of December 1927; so work was abandoned and nothing was done
in 1928 while everybody in the Black Hills waited for Congress to act.
Norbeck was discouraged in 1928. In a letter to Gutzon he wrote:
Previous to this, public sentiment has held up pretty well under
our repeated assurances that everything would go right along. But
the fact that neither you nor I could scare up a few dollars for
the work during the summer of 1928 has led people to believe that
we were just talking hot air. Very few people in South Dakota take
the matter seriously any more. Doane Robinson tries to, but it
keeps him awake nights and he needs sleep....
This letter came to Gutzon in San Antonio, where he was working on the
memorial to Woodrow Wilson destined for Poland, and he was a bit put
out. To this letter he replied:
[Illustration:
_Photo by Lincoln Borglum_
VIEW OF RUSHMORE SHOWING HEADS OF THE FOUR PRESIDENTS]
[Illustration: F.D.R. AT THE UNVEILING OF JEFFERSON, AUGUST 1936]
My dear Senator, if I didn’t love you and sympathize with the
difficulties you have had to face in the past year, I would get
cross. But no one can respect you more than I do, know you half so
well, agree with you so much and fail to feel that anything you
write would be written in the best spirit. If I say anything a bit
harsh, I am going to ask you to treat my remarks in the same
spirit.
I have a feeling from your letter that you feel I have not raised
the money that should have been raised; that I have not carried
through the matters I should have carried through. Now let us clear
up a few of these points. First, because it was with great
reluctance that I took up the Black Hills work, for it is a
terrific undertaking and I found the country and the people utterly
uninformed in such matters and without funds. I agreed to go to the
Hills and make a survey for a fixed sum. That was accepted; a bill
was introduced in your state government with the result that
nothing was paid for that service by the state. I found, in other
words, that whatever I undertook, I had to carry much of the load
all the time, in financing and developing interest, in engineering
and production.
Finally when the work was in hand it was always in South Dakota
that the inertia was felt most. While I was there, everything was
promised; immediately I left, everything was put off until I
returned. I have made at least three complete rounds of the cities
in the southwest of South Dakota, feeling out gatherings for the
purpose of informing and interesting the people and securing help
for the memorial. I have been informed, time and again, at each of
these gatherings, that the necessary funds were available provided
your committee, or someone you designate, would either be with me
or go and collect the money.
This was told me even at the Homestake Mine, where I talked for a
solid hour to the manager and legal head of the concern, and
secured from them the statement that they were completely sold on
the proposition and would do their part. You yourself secured their
contribution. I am not blaming you for anything. I have never
questioned your wisdom, or your politics, or the reasons for delay
in Washington. But I do think, and you must bear me out in this,
that if the bill had been passed, the past year would have been one
of energy, action and production, with the head of Washington
completed on the mountain.
Less than a month after this exchange of letters the Rushmore bill was
passed; $250,000 was appropriated on a matching basis and more than
$50,000 released to match sums previously subscribed. Considering the
carving program, this fund was still nothing to cause much celebration.
The making of monuments has always been expensive. One such group
alone--the Jefferson Memorial in Washington--had an estimated cost of
$3,000,000. But one takes what one can get, and Gutzon was cheered
again.
In one of his last Presidential acts Calvin Coolidge appointed ten men
and one woman as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission: John
A. Boland, Rapid City, South Dakota; Charles R. Crane, New York City;
Joseph S. Cullinan, Houston, Texas; C. M. Day, Sioux Falls, South
Dakota; D. B. Gurney, Yankton, South Dakota; Hale Holden, Chicago; Frank
O. Lowden, Oregon, Illinois; Julius Rosenwald, Chicago; Fred W. Sargent,
Evanston, Illinois; William Williamson, Rapid City, South Dakota; and
Mrs. Lorine Jones Spoonts, Corpus Christi, Texas. At their first
meeting, called by President Hoover in the White House in June 1929, J.
S. Cullinan was elected president of the commission and John A. Boland
chairman of the executive committee. Work on Mount Rushmore began at
once.
Some people remember 1929 because of renewed hope that the great
memorial would be finished. But most of the rest of the United States
recall it as the year that started the big depression. Contributions
came in slowly; then they stopped. Cullinan, with the blessing of
President Herbert Hoover, organized the Rushmore National Memorial
Society of the Black Hills to handle advertising, fund raising,
memberships, management of concessions, maintenance of the park area,
publicity and other matters not directly connected with the building of
the memorial. Memberships were set at $100 apiece, which brought in
$6,000, and that was the biggest sum that anyone in the undertaking saw
for a long time.
Then there was the matter of a suitable inscription. The idea of such
explanatory matter to accompany the carved figures had been set forth in
the Congressional bill. It had been discussed by the sculptor and
President Coolidge in the summer of 1927 and again when the pair met two
years later in Texas. Borglum asked of the ex-President some eight or
nine terse paragraphs covering the territorial expansion of the republic
and starting with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
The available space on the mountain gave room for about 375 words in
letters three feet high. If reduced to two and a half feet, there would
be room for 475 words. Reporters spread word throughout the country that
Coolidge was writing a history of the United States in 500 words. He
denied it.
Gutzon wrote a letter to Mr. Coolidge after that restating what he
wanted. He was about to dress the mountainside for the entablature, he
said, and would appreciate some copy. Mr. Coolidge sent the two
paragraphs which read:
_The Declaration of Independence_--The eternal right to seek
happiness through self-government and the divine duty to defend
that right at any sacrifice.
_The Constitution_--Charter of perpetual union of free people of
sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers under
an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide
security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality
and justice under the law.
Gutzon changed the wording slightly. He cut out the word _through_
before _self-government_ in the first paragraph. In the second he
eliminated the phrase _under the law_ after the word _justice_. Mr.
Coolidge objected to the editing. The newspapers raised another storm.
Coolidge complained of the publicity. The sculptor assumed all blame and
got this somewhat annoyed reply from Coolidge:
I know that you are a great artist. What I meant to convey is that
I do not wish to be engaged in putting up a monument to myself. I
wished my name kept off the mountain. I do not see any reason for
your committee giving the press any statement of any kind in
relation to me. I wish you every success....
Then there were letters to the _Times_, and essay contests in the
newspapers, and speeches by high-school students, and resolutions by the
Rushmore Commission. But in the end there was not one single
contribution of the required length. Flaws in the granite caused a shift
of figures that left no room for the entablature; and the Commission set
the whole matter aside for future reference.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
_CARVING THE MOUNTAIN_
Some sons of God must stand upon the mountaintops
And there through all the deathless generations guard
The continents, and guide the gracious stars of fate:
So God made mountains for the throne of these.
Upon this mountaintop America enshrines
Her sturdy sires, exalts her noblest knight.
Where children of the earth may lift appraising eye
And feel his virtue while his strength invests their souls.
--DOANE ROBINSON
Gutzon Borglum carved a mountain. And as the years went by he became a
dynamiter, a geologist, a practical miner and, very definitely, an
engineer. He got used to crawling about on the face of a cliff, and in
time he used to say that his sculpture was not greatly different from
the cutting of a large block of stone in a studio. But, of course, the
stone of the mountainside wasn’t dressed or prepared. It couldn’t be
shifted into the light or away from it. The amount of stone to be
removed was prodigious, and injury of the material left for carving was
always a serious possibility. How one of these projects ever got itself
done is something that he wasted thousands of words trying to explain.
When Gutzon first used dynamite for carving on Stone Mountain it had
been taken by the world as a fantastic idea. But there was no coyness
about its use when it came to Rushmore. It was laid out there in all
proportions and all quantities. The sculptor had experts who knew what
could be done with a six-inch stick, or half an ounce of it, or with a
percussion cap alone. And they had to be in touch not only with the
drilling of the moment but with the design of the whole monument to
avoid the chance of an overcharge at one point injuring stone at a
distance.
Such drilling skill was developed that the sculptor could depend on them
to block out a nose to within an inch of the finished surface, to shape
the lips, grade the contours of the neck, cheek, brow and all round
areas. He could even shape the eyeball as a whole, but the defining of
the eyelids and the pupils was done by drills, air tools and by hand.
The sculptor’s first concern was the position of Washington. He put in
days studying the surfaces, shadows, reflections and the course of the
sun; and eventually he chose the place where Washington’s head rises
today. It was the best spot on the mountain.
He began to make models to suit the cliff. He discussed the angle of the
head with Carothers, one of the literary secretaries of the Hoover
administration, and he had long conferences about the character of the
first President with Hoover himself. They decided that _uprightness_
should be emphasized in Washington’s statue. The head should not incline
to right nor left, nor forward nor back, but should be set on the
shoulders so that it would show dignity and poise. Carothers drew a
straight line down the middle of a paper, put a ball on the top of it to
indicate the head and remarked quite gravely, “This is the way it should
be drawn.”
And that is the way it was drawn. The center of Washington’s head was
fixed at the point where the horizontal line going across the brows met
the vertical line through the chin. In roughing off they had to remove
fifteen feet of rock before they found a hard, undamaged surface. This
was done late in the summer of 1927. Blasting was not resumed until
1929.
Work on Washington taught them how to proceed quickly with other
figures. It established methods, determined tools, temper of steel,
arrangement of scaffolding for hoists and a labor gauge on the men who
were to perform most of the rough toil on the monument.
The first preparation for carving was to draw in its proper position on
the mountain an oval of the required length and width. This oval was
divided into three sections--one at the line of the eyebrows, one at the
end of the nose and a third at the end of the chin. These measurements
were in the scale of the model; in other words, a model sixty inches in
height had an enlarged outline sixty feet in height.
The work on Rushmore was done from swing harnesses developed at Stone
Mountain. They were made of a leather-covered steel frame and were quite
strong. The men were buckled into them. Thereafter they might be bumped
or fall, but they could not get out without unbuckling themselves. The
swings were suspended at the end of a 300-foot steel cable from a winch
on the top of the cliff. They were housed in a shack on Washington’s
head.
Ordinarily the practical method would have been to determine precisely
where in the cliff the head was to be located, then fix the model at the
same angle; next, to begin at the top, peel off the rough stone and
finish as you went down. That’s the way any good mechanic or engineer
would carry on such work, relieving the features, finishing as he
descended and using the stone shelf that the work always left under his
feet to stand on.
But this was a work of art, not of mechanics. The revelation of the face
by the sculptor was as if he were releasing a living thing. Each drill
hole must pierce the stone with certainty, so as not in any way to
injure what was below. Gutzon said he could not allow mechanical
methods to reduce his art production to a lifeless form.
Each day they carefully surveyed the rough-blocked face. When they
reached the chin line they were thirty feet in from the original granite
cliff. There they stopped and built a scaffold from chin to forehead,
and the sculptor sent to Texas for his old friend and assistant Hugo
Villa. It was then June and an unveiling was scheduled for July.
No man on the Rushmore project had ever carved a mountain before. But no
matter. He had less difficulty with them than with any other phase of
the undertaking. Most of them were the so-called forgotten men of
Keystone--veteran miners, the one-time workers of the idle Holy Terror
Gold Mine. They were hard-rock men; they were used to explosives; and
they did not need many instructions.
In the end the sculptor had several experts on the mountain as adept as
any in the country, and a loyal group of helpers. Gutzon established a
boardinghouse near the blacksmith shop, engine room and other buildings
at the foot of the cliff, and frequently came with his guests to eat
with them. He knew them all.
Gutzon’s original contract with the Mount Harney Memorial Association
had specified that Captain Jesse Tucker of Stone Mountain be named
superintendent of the work at Rushmore and given a fixed salary of
$10,000. To make this sum possible the sculptor reduced the amount to be
paid to himself. The reason for Tucker’s position, he frankly stated,
was that he must give part of his time to other sculptural work, and
that while he was absent from Rushmore he needed someone to take his
place.
But presently the Rushmore Commission hadn’t any money to pay to
anybody. There were arguments and misunderstandings, and Tucker
resigned. After that the full burden of the work fell on Gutzon. He
moved with his family to the Black Hills and built a studio some
distance from Rushmore at Hermosa.
Gutzon probably missed Tucker more than anybody else with whom he had
ever worked. Correspondence between them during the first few months of
construction on Rushmore shows the great concern of both of them for the
safety of the workers. Tucker, who thought the men careless, was certain
that they would contrive some bad end for themselves. But the years went
on and the carving got done and somehow there were no serious accidents.
The nearest approach to disaster came when a lightning flash exploded a
percussion cap just as the worker was making an artificial electrical
connection. The man in the swing harness was shot out into space but by
instantaneous muscular reaction flexed his knees as he was hurled back
against the side of the mountain. He was badly bruised but not otherwise
hurt. The sun was shining when the accident happened. Thereafter no
blasts were set off without the advice of the weatherman.
The other accident occurred when a steel wire controlling the hoist
broke. The open box in which three or four men were riding came hurtling
down. The quick wit of a young man from Stamford, the assistant
superintendent, prevented a serious crash. He stuck an iron rod between
the hoist wheel and the cable that retarded the descent of the car. Only
one worker jumped out as the car hit. He was treated for a minor chest
injury.
Some unknown friend whom Gutzon always identified privately as Sam
Insull set out a Diesel engine for him at a town in the western part of
the state. For two years it furnished all the power needed not only to
run the air compressors and drills on the mountain but the pumps of the
Holy Terror Mine as well. A Wyoming company was started and Gutzon, on
the promise of electricity for less than his own plant would furnish it,
agreed to shut down. Shortly before the day scheduled for the unveiling
of the Washington head the power company informed him that he must sign
a contract to use the company’s electricity for twenty years or be cut
off. Gutzon snorted and turned to the Diesel engine. But there was no
hope from that source. Somebody had dismantled it and carried away most
of the movable parts.
Commissioner John Boland rushed out from Rapid City and thereafter
Gutzon bought power from the new company. But he refused to sign the
twenty-year contract. The cost of the power was a matter of bitter
discussion forever after.
Lincoln came to the mountain in 1932 and worked two years without pay.
Gutzon trained him to do the “pointing,” which consists of measuring the
models and locating their enlargements on the rock. It is the direct
translation of the work of the artist from studio to the material which
he will cut, and Lincoln was carefully prepared.
Gutzon declared that Lincoln was a master of this work, understanding
its complicated mathematics, and father had confidence in son. Under him
a staff of three assistants served as a “pointing crew” for the
measurement of all models to be enlarged on the mountain. When not
measuring they acted as aids and guides to the drillers. The
instructions given to Lincoln at one period when the sculptor’s arrival
at Rushmore was delayed indicate the dramatic quality of the work. The
sculptor instructed his son thus:
I want you, in beginning the work and allotting the positions to
the men, to avoid the two finished faces completely. Do not touch
the hairlines around the face of Washington or his chin, or under
his chin. Do not approach the face lines of Jefferson, or to the
side of his face or under his chin.
On Photograph No. 1, I have drawn a circle where you can locate
Payne [a driller] to begin down-drilling under what will be
Washington’s ear and the left-hand lapel of his coat. Put one or
two men on the lapel, which I have marked No. 2. Put two men on
Washington’s shoulders and work carefully from the top, which I
have marked No. 3. That will dispose of five or six men.
I have marked Lincoln’s eye. You can put two men in cages in each
of the eyes. I would use Anderson on the one side and Bianco on the
other, putting Bianco where the feldspar streaks run down, and
Anderson on the outside. I would give Payne, with Bianco, a
position on the nose and have them begin to take off stone by
drilling in squares and breaking it off down to within six or seven
inches of the finished surface. But do not try to cut the eyelid or
eyeball. Make a round mass for each of these. Lincoln’s face in
that way will take up probably six more men.
You can put about three men on the Roosevelt stone, marking
carefully the contour of Lincoln’s face so that none of that is
disturbed, and going back into the hole next to Jefferson’s face as
deep as you can. If you can put any men down on the block that I
have marked No. 8, without any danger of tools and stone falling on
them, all right. I would put about three men down on the big crag.
We still have seventy or eighty feet to take off that. I think this
will keep you busy until I get there.
It did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
_CONVERSATION_
In those days Gutzon Borglum found time to smile once in a while,
although anybody who knew the trials of mountain carving might have
wondered why. He had been written down for a comfortable part of a
million-dollar memorial project. Seldom, during any one carving period,
did he get much of it. Some years he got none. People were donating
toward Rushmore begrudgingly in nickels and dimes. He was always
shorthanded. The experts he needed couldn’t exist on the cash available.
Somebody raised the price of electricity. Somebody dismantled the Diesel
engine. There were wrangles over concessions and concessionaires and
small-town politics. There were road troubles, and supplies were late.
And there were other things. The question of why anybody should wish to
become a topflight sculptor seemed unlikely to be answered--ever.
The head of Washington was officially unveiled on July 4, 1930. The rest
of the cliff was unchanged, and Washington’s chin seemed to rest on the
ledge from which it had been carved. But when the great flag swung aside
to reveal the sculptured face the witnesses, strangers to Stone
Mountain, felt that from then on the memorial would never die.
J. S. Cullinan, first president of the Rushmore Commission, presided and
gave the monument its name: “The authority of Congress to carve
colossal portraits of these great men in the granite of the Black Hills
has created a perpetual _Shrine_ for political _Democracy_.” And
Borglum, tired, dejected, almost conquered by a world where nobody ever
seemed to want to do anything, was pleased with that. A head was
finished on Rushmore, and the dullest of these laymen looking at it knew
that it was a finely done piece of sculpture. He heard someone saying
that it would be there forever, and he hoped that it would last longer
than Lee’s at Stone Mountain.
The crowd at the unveiling got safely back to Rapid City with no trouble
at all. And nobody thought of Borglum’s connection with the district’s
good roads.
In the spring of 1930, trying to get from Rapid City to Keystone with
two cars and tow aids, he had been ditched six times. He never got to
Mount Rushmore that week. However, he did get to the telegraph office
and sent word to President Hoover that the roads were impossible and
that he would shut down the project unless conditions were improved and
men could get to their work. Hoover sent the message to Governor William
J. Bulow, who in turn made an appointment for his state road commission
to meet the sculptor that week.
Meanwhile the governor telegraphed this message to Mr. Cullinan:
BORGLUM HAS THE TEMPERAMENT OF ALL GOOD ARTISTS, GETS MAD WHEN HE
CANNOT CONTROL WEATHER CONDITIONS. NOTHING SERIOUS EXCEPT THAT HE
GOT A NEW EXPERIENCE AND A NEW TOUCH OF LIFE. AM SENDING HIGHWAY
ENGINEER TO SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE. WITH GOD’S AID AND PATIENCE HOPE
TO GET HIM SMOOTHED OUT.
Within three days they had planned the beautiful road now leading from
Rapid City to the memorial. Strange as it seems, South Dakota spent
$480,000, plus a quarter of a million on other roads, to reach a
monument on which she had not spent a dollar. Meanwhile Senator Norbeck
with his Custer State Park Commission was working on a road approaching
Rushmore from the opposite direction by way of Iron Mountain.
Iron Mountain Road is one of the country’s finest examples of what can
be done with economical engineering. Engineer Charles E. Smith who laid
it out hadn’t much money to spend. The highway runs along part of its
highly beautiful journey between Keystone and Grace Coolidge Creek on
two lanes that are widely separated. It climbs terrific grades on
corkscrew uplifts built of pine logs. It is well paved, well graded and
safe.
One of the features of the highway is said to have come by accident.
Work was started from the south end and presently struck a mountain that
had to be tunneled. The hole was surveyed with no plan save to keep it
in line with the approach already built. When the miners finally broke
through they were looking into the face of Washington on Rushmore. The
two remaining tunnels were cut at the same angle, framing the memorial
with a showmanship worthy of Gutzon Borglum himself. Borglum was
intensely pleased. “Norbeck’s Iron Mountain Road,” he said, “is as much
a work of art as the carving of the mountain.”
Another Norbeck road over the so-called Pine Creek route between
Rushmore and Hill City, again a masterpiece of scenic road building, was
the cause of the sculptor’s abandoning his original plan of placing
Jefferson on Washington’s right in the Rushmore grouping. There was a
contributing factor in this decision due partly, he thought, to poor
work. Up to summer of 1931 Gutzon had been trying to place the figure of
Jefferson where he believed he belonged--on Washington’s right. Work had
continued after the unveiling until the fall of 1930 and was resumed in
the following spring. In July of that year the sculptor went to Poland,
taking Lincoln Borglum with him, to erect his statue of Woodrow Wilson.
He left Tallman and Villa in charge.
There was no way of testing the stone in the location for the Jefferson
head, so he had quickly roughed out the block and left Villa pointing
the face.
When he returned from Europe and motored out to Rushmore he noticed
while still a mile away that something was radically wrong. He exclaimed
to Villa, “What’s wrong with the Jefferson head?” Villa answered by
turning to Tallman: “Didn’t I tell you the master would notice it from a
long way off?” Then he said, “Well, there was a little difficulty about
the pointing.” The trouble, he explained, was too deep a depression
under the eye and there was not enough stone to push the head farther
back.
The sculptor did not wait to find out what had gone wrong--rock or work.
He was almost too angry for words. Gutzon thought he had taken all
precautions. About half the work was finished and it wouldn’t do. Who or
what was to blame did not matter. The damage was done. There was not
enough stone to allow free modeling of Jefferson’s face, and Norbeck’s
new road, exposing the back of the head, made a change in the
composition advisable. The sculptor made a bold decision to abandon what
had been done on Jefferson and place his figure on Washington’s left.
This necessitated a change in the whole grouping, while the flaws in the
rock in Jefferson’s new position were so deep that he had to go back
sixty feet before he found good stone for the carving. Senator Norbeck,
the only one consulted in the matter, gave complete approval.
Villa left shortly after this incident, but came to see his old master
in Texas a year or so later and greeted him with his old-time affection.
Nothing ever came between them again. Subsequently he flitted in and out
of the Rushmore studio at unpredictable times. But Villa was a city man
and was not at home in this rugged community. Gutzon missed him, for he
brought to the studio a breath of the charm found in the Old World
wherever art is active.
The year of Washington’s bicentennial, 1932, witnessed the shutdown of
work at Rushmore for lack of funds, which to the sculptor seemed an
unforgivable disgrace. However, there on the mountain was the portrait
of the first President, which Mr. Cullinan had declared was the best in
existence. The face seemed to belong to the mountain, having taken on
its elemental courage, and Gutzon figured it as vital as he could make
it. He occupied himself with regrouping the models in the studio. It had
disturbed him to have the figures as close together as in the original
composition, and now this had been opened up by putting Jefferson so far
inward that it gave room for the sun to pass back of Washington and
light Jefferson’s face. The flaws in the rock which made this necessary
began to appear a blessing in disguise.
The recomposition also involved changing Washington’s shoulders in
relation to his head. The left shoulder was moved back seven feet and
then another seven feet, while the right shoulder was moved seven feet
forward. When word got around that Borglum was moving Washington’s head
there were loud alarms. Norbeck was flustered. Monument lovers from
Rapid City rushed out to the mountain to see how a head that weighed
several tons could be transported. There was some disappointment when
they saw nothing more novel than the chiseling of the shoulders; but
they talked, and the story, it is said, made good publicity.
John A. Boland of Rapid City, chairman of the executive committee of the
Rushmore commission, was charged with the hiring of workers, purchase of
materials and payment of salaries and bills. And it must be said that
these worthy endeavors were seldom fraught with any sweetness and light.
Boland’s office was in Rapid City--too close to Rushmore, he
thought--and he could not move it because of his statewide business. He
sat there quietly and never interfered with the carving operations. He
felt that Borglum was a great artist and that the carving of Mount
Rushmore was a noble undertaking. He may one day be considered a great
patriot.
One of Boland’s handicaps in the situation was his unwillingness to
spend any money that he didn’t happen to have. This attitude was, of
course, diametrically opposed to that of Borglum, who never could be
convinced that money really mattered. And it is said that these two
stalwarts had “occasional clashes.” “Occasional clashes,” one regrets to
say, is a highly erroneous and short-weight title for what they had.
Gutzon once said that he could feel his blood pressure rising when he
got within 500 miles of Rushmore and faced the prospect of seeing
Boland. Boland’s blood pressure went up only when Borglum needed money.
But the men met, discussed the Shrine of Democracy, swapped observations
about the current financial situation and brought the language of
toe-to-toe wrangling to a new high.
Gutzon declared, of course, that he never took these arguments
seriously. No row, he said, was ever worth remembering after its cause
was gone; and that, probably, is a true report on his reactions. The
last time he and Boland met he was pleased with the course of the world
and mellow toward Boland. He had his arm across the chairman’s shoulder
and was calling him “Johnny.”
What Boland thought about these goings on is, of course, an entirely
different matter. He never talks much about his struggles in behalf of
majestic art. “Borglum was a great sculptor,” he sums it up. “He
certainly was that.”
The matter of concessions on Mount Rushmore bothered Gutzon considerably
more than most people interested in the project realized. Continuous
importunities for jobs and for permission to sell souvenirs and
postcards and photographs near the work were petty annoyances with which
he found it hard to cope. He knew that some such items had to be
provided as part of bringing knowledge of his work to the attention of
faraway people, but he would not tolerate cheap workmanship or poor
taste in anything sold near the carvings. He got along for a while by
keeping this trade under supervision in the Rushmore studio, but the
relief was only temporary. A resurgence of what he called “local petty
politics” presently involved him so that he called on the Department of
the Interior to send someone to protect him.
The Department of the Interior complied and Gutzon learned that nothing
is so bad that government intervention can’t make it worse. The
unimaginative, bureaucratic routines taught to Washington office workers
were wholly out of place in a work so constantly changing and so free
from fixed rules. The protector sent by the department turned out to be
an earnest young man who started out to confuse the South Dakota
politicians and did well at it. But he wished to do greater things. He
became aloof and secretive.
After some weeks he was discovered to be corresponding with an
engineering company in Switzerland known chiefly for its construction of
cog-wheel railroads. He thought the company might be interested in
building such a funicular line up and around the face of Rushmore so
that visitors might walk under Washington’s nose or sit in Lincoln’s
eye. Gutzon’s indignation set the young man right and was long
remembered.
The Park Service of the Department of the Interior had formulas for all
of its functions. Its personnel with whom Borglum came into contact
believed that the heads should be carved in orderly fashion. First, the
figure of Washington should be completely finished; then the workers
should move on to Jefferson, and so on. This, they pointed out, would
give people something to look at.
Once more the sculptor who had asked only that he be protected from the
harangues of would-be postcard peddlers made a protest against the
continuous suggestions of ignoramuses. Harold Ickes, head of the
department, understood Borglum’s position clearly and told him in
forceful language to ignore such suggestions. But the subordinates never
seemed to comprehend. One of Ickes’ engineers went so far as to offer to
relieve Borglum of all worry. “Why don’t you finish your models and give
them to us to reproduce on the mountain?” he inquired. “We have plenty
of men who can do that sort of work--and quickly, too.”
“Somebody has to put the life and expression into carved faces,” Gutzon
began to explain as he had been explaining since his first days on
Stone Mountain. “That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be
good sculptors.”
There was also the question of “hiring and firing” workmen. The
bureaucrats could not understand that the sculptor had to discharge
anyone who refused to obey orders, or that he might suddenly need a
certain type of workman for a particular job and then need him no
longer. It was such a complicated procedure to get a worker placed on
the government payroll that it was no wonder they didn’t want to
discharge him again in a few days. There are many letters to show that
the sculptor’s relationship with the various heads of the Park Service
was most friendly. Difficulty was due to a misunderstanding of what an
art production of this unprecedented character required.
Even the Rushmore Commission suggested impractical sculptural plans and
picked out certain parts of the work it would “like to see finished.”
And while Gutzon was pushing the work, begging more funds to get more
power, more workmen, skilled carvers, so that the work might be finished
in his lifetime, it was irritating to be told that certain commissioners
and local interests would like to keep the project going as long as
possible because more tourists would come if they could see the sculptor
at work.
After 1932 the work dragged on with frequent interruptions and without
sufficient funds. Workmen were complaining of the daily climb to their
stations--1,500 feet with a rise of 500 feet, which the sculptor himself
made several times a day--resulting in a working time loss of from an
hour to an hour and a half every day for every man on the job. To date,
approximately seventy per cent of the roughing out of the entire surface
to be carved had been completed and thirty-five per cent of the
finishing, within a total working time of twenty-two months and an
average of four to six drillers at work.
The personnel of the Commission was so changed by illness, death and
lack of interest that it became increasingly hard to get a quorum at the
semiannual meetings. Mr. Cullinan had resigned as president to be
succeeded by Fred Sargent of the Chicago and North Western Railway. Only
Gutzon could not resign. As he remarked, the rock of Rushmore was
riveted to his neck.
A new phase of the work began in 1934 when the federal government
assumed the burden of financing the memorial. Frequent stoppages,
constant lack of sufficient power and skilled workmen, plus the
unpredictable condition of the stone, had greatly increased working
costs. Congress first voted to remove the fifty-fifty matching
restriction attached to the first appropriation, making it immediately
available, and next passed a second appropriation of $200,000. There
were those near Mount Rushmore who said it was about time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
_--AND FINAL PEACE_
So then there was no trouble at all save bureaucratic misunderstandings
and the vagaries of Rushmore rock. Accurate estimates of the time
required to finish the work were impossible because of the constant
shifting and reconstruction of design. The stone on Mount Rushmore,
although the best in the Black Hills, offered interesting surprises.
Some new reddish substance appeared on Lincoln’s cheek. Silver and tin
crystals were found at the end of his nose. The feldspar crystals on
Rushmore are unusually large and add to the difficulties. This was
especially true on the lapels of Washington’s coat where no powder could
be used. Finally Jefferson’s head had to be slightly turned so that the
poor stone came in the hollow between his cheek and nose and could thus
be removed entirely.
An unfailing support to the sculptor through these difficulties was
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote a dozen or more sympathetic
letters. One of them he closed by saying, “I am very much interested in
the work you are doing, and will be glad to remove any drawbacks that
may handicap you.... With best wishes always....”
So it is not surprising that he was present at Rushmore on August 30,
1936, for the unveiling of the head of Thomas Jefferson. He had been
touring the West to see for himself the results of desperate drought and
had been routed to reach Rapid City on time.
At the President’s request the exercises were informal. Flags of Bourbon
France and Hapsburg Spain, fluttering from the top of the mountain, were
lowered as the huge American flag was swung back to reveal the face of
Jefferson. In a few words Gutzon asked the President to dedicate this
memorial as a shrine which for years to come would bring people of all
the earth to see what manner of men struggled here to establish
self-determining government in the Western world. Mr. Roosevelt
responded:
On many occasions when a new project is presented to you on paper
and then later you see the accomplishment, you are disappointed.
But it is just the opposite of that in what we are looking at now.
I had seen photographs. I had seen the drawings. I had talked with
those who were responsible for this great work. And yet I had no
conception until about ten minutes ago, not only of its magnitude
but of its permanent beauty and of its permanent importance.
Mr. Borglum has well said that this can be a monument and an
inspiration for the continuance of the democratic-republican form
of government, not only in our beloved country but, we hope,
throughout the world.
This is the second dedication. There will be others by other
Presidents in other years. When we get through there will be
something for the American people that will last through not just
generations but for thousands of thousands of years. And I think
that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans ten
thousand years from now when the weathering on the faces of
Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln shall have proceeded to
perhaps a depth of a tenth of an inch, meditate and wonder what our
descendants--and I think they will still be here--will think about
us. Let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the
doubt, that they will believe we have honestly striven every day
and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to
live in and a decent form of government to operate under.
Doane Robinson, Senator Norbeck and William Williamson occupied seats in
the front row of the platform, with John Boland immediately behind. The
President remained in his automobile throughout the ceremony, with his
party, including Governor Berry of South Dakota, around him. It was
Senator Norbeck’s last public appearance. At the end he smiled and
handed to Gutzon a note of a few lines reminding him touchingly of the
satisfaction he must feel to see this accomplishment.
At this time, the summer of 1936, the work on the Lincoln face had
advanced enough to show his eyes and part of his nose. It was pushed on
so that on September 17, 1937, the 150th anniversary of the adoption of
the Constitution, this head also was ready for unveiling.
For years Gutzon had been undecided whether to carve Lincoln with or
without a beard. He had tried it both ways in other carvings with almost
equal effect. But he had a feeling that a beard added strength to the
face and that the world was more familiar with a bearded Lincoln. That
was the face he finally decided to carve. He sent a small model of it to
Franklin Roosevelt, carrying out his promise that Roosevelt would be the
first to know.
The Lincoln head was dedicated on schedule and for the first time a
Rushmore program was carried by radio broadcast to the entire country.
Former Congressman Williamson, a member of the Rushmore Commission,
presided. United States Senator Edward R. Burke was chief speaker. There
was an impressive moment when the sculptor called the roll of “all those
friends of Rushmore whose understanding sympathy and instant aid made
this great memorial possible, and who are now with the gods--Calvin
Coolidge, Peter Norbeck, James Cullinan.” Then taps sounded from the
distant heights. The trooper who blew the call was suspended from the
side of Washington’s head, a quarter of a mile away.
During the rest of 1937 much work was done on the Roosevelt head. Gutzon
wanted it in condition to photograph for the appropriations committee.
He himself had to spend much time in Washington worrying about the
financing. He also made a brief trip to France to look after the
erection of his statue of Tom Paine, modeled in the Hermosa studio.
As a model for Roosevelt he used a bust of the President that he had
made during his lifetime. There was trouble finding stone enough for the
head. He had to go back 120 feet in the rock before the model could be
fitted. This was trying work.
All in all, 1937 was a typical Borglum year. His contract with the
Commission was due for revision. The matter dragged along for months
before an agreement could be reached. The sculptor got no pay for all
that year, and he had to pay his lawyers a quarter of what he would have
received to get any contract at all. The new contract was, in the main,
satisfactory. It provided that the sculptor working with the Commission
should prosecute work on the memorial to a successful conclusion. Gutzon
felt that nothing but his death could stop it now.
In 1938 there was a tremendous rush of tourists who could hardly be
accommodated. Congress appropriated $300,000 for the comfort of visitors
and the finishing of the carvings. In the same year the Rushmore
Commission was reorganized. Senator Key Pittman, long a friend of
Rushmore, became chairman, succeeding Fred Sargent, who had died. Kent
Keller, chairman of the House Library Committee, became vice-chairman.
An executive office was established at Rushmore for the handling of
accounts and materials.
The new commission met at Rushmore in August 1938, and the sculptor made
a report. He wasn’t worried about the statues any more, now that he’d
hit enough rock to take Roosevelt’s face. But his plans for the future
included a lot of other things, including a big storehouse, more
electric power, an adequate water supply to replace the trucking of
water four or five miles in cans. He said it was time to begin work on
the Hall and Stairway under the figures as specified in the original
contract. And he got everything but the Hall and Stairway.
The President’s reorganization bill of 1939, which conferred additional
control over Rushmore to the Department of the Interior, caused havoc.
Work on the Hall was immediately discontinued over Gutzon’s protest.
Construction of the storehouse was stopped. Lumber and materials were
left strewn about to be ruined by the weather. He complained to the
President and got a compromise order. The Commission was authorized to
control carving and finish the storehouse. But the Commission still
refused to permit Gutzon to dig his Hall.
It would have been an amazing thing, this Hall, and one day possibly
will be. It was to be a room cut out of the solid rock 100 × 80 × 32
feet to an arched ceiling, finished in dressed granite. Here Borglum had
planned to store the records of electricity beginning with
Franklin--light, heat, music, radio, telephone, telegraph and controls
of power as they were used in the spread of the republic. Man’s
accomplishments were to be preserved here, sealed in airtight glass
cases. If such an exhibition could be provided, he declared, the world a
thousand years from now would have something interesting and educational
to look at.
In 1939 South Dakota celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its
statehood, and a meeting of the people was held at Rushmore. Governor
Harlan J. Bushfield, later U. S. Senator, said, “At this time, when
freedom and democracy have been challenged in so many parts of the
world, no better place for this ceremony could possibly be selected than
the Black Hills and particularly this Shrine of Democracy.”
The Sioux Indians were there under Chief Henry Standing Bear, camped in
wigwams around the base of Rushmore cliff. Some 15,000 people had come
from all parts of South Dakota and neighboring states. Doane Robinson
appeared in the same suit of clothes and the same hat he had worn on
statehood day fifty years before. It seemed to be a fitting
contribution to Rushmore’s most enthusiastic celebration.
Across the country in Washington, Congressman Francis Case, now Senator,
of South Dakota, whose home at Custer was virtually in the shadow of the
memorial, was carrying on the old fight for funds. To a Congressional
committee he said:
The best answer to every question about Rushmore is to see it.... I
have seen it grow from a dream to a reality.... The soundness of
Doane Robinson’s idea, the dogged persistence of the late Senator
Peter Norbeck, and the ability of Gutzon Borglum to inspire people
with the works of his hands and with his vigorous exposition of
American ideals, have kept the project going on....
And Mr. Case read into the record a letter from John Boland which said
in part:
Mr. Borglum is an artist. I am a businessman. Therefore it is only
natural that we should at times disagree regarding the business
functions of the commission. Such differences, however, have never
been serious and an amicable understanding has always been reached.
My only desire is to have the Mount Rushmore memorial completed in
the best possible manner and to have Mr. Borglum carry on his great
work with the assistance of his son, Lincoln, the continued
co-operation of the commission and the efficient supervision of the
National Park Service.
So presently all human troubles had been wafted away from Rushmore, and
briefly the atmosphere was filled with the sweetness and light that
Gutzon had foreseen. As the park was landscaped and the carving of the
mountain went on with effortless speed, nobody could remember the charge
that Gutzon Borglum had an ungovernable temper. He was a keen observer,
but he was temperate and he was polite.
One remembers the day when Walter Travis of the Rapid City _Journal_
paid one of his routine calls at Rushmore. Gutzon beamed on him. Travis
knew that Gutzon had recently been in a long and futile argument with
Rapid City’s administration on the desirability of straightening and
decorating Rapid River. But he smiled, too. It was none of his business.
Gutzon pushed out his hand for a hearty greeting. “Welcome, Speedy,” he
said. “And how is everything in your backward and objectionable little
village?”
“Only a Borglum could say,” answered Travis, “because Borglums never
forget.”
People whose contacts with Borglum spread over a long time know that in
his own opinion he was indubitably _right_. But looking back over the
years they realize that most of the time he really was right, and for
the rest of the time, however reluctantly, he would listen to reason. He
wanted to get things done and he had a great impatience with people who
stopped him. But no one of his friends who knew his generosity and
gentleness ever hinted that his most vocal indignation could be classed
as ungovernable temper. Temper, possibly ... but not ungovernable.
He was one of this generation’s most accomplished showmen. He took the
jibes of the newspapermen with good grace. And he gave them back the
same way. You may remember the matter of Washington’s nose. Some
reporter, trying to spur him into a grand speech, asked him if he would
call the figures on Rushmore as _perfect_ as they might be. The great
sculptor shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “The nose of Washington
is an inch too long. It’s better that way, though. We are slowly
approaching perfection. It will erode enough to be exactly right in
10,000 years.”
Borglum, possibly, was not the man that a dullard could understand. It
is not enough to say that he was a great sculptor--perhaps the greatest
of his generation. He had to be many more things to get the Mount
Rushmore memorial finished. Looking back over his story one is
definitely confused. Should he be given world honors for his art, or
for his remarkable aptitude for getting money out of smooth and
experienced politicians, or for his incredible knowledge about the
weakness of stone, or for his skill as a dynamiter, or for his
absolutely unbreakable will? You may take your choice and be partly
right. If he had lacked any of these attributes, Rushmore would still be
back in a wilderness with dead trees piling up about its base.
* * * * *
Borglum died suddenly on March 6, 1941, in Chicago. He had spoken a few
nights before for Dr. Harry Kelly, a friend of many years’ standing, in
Park Ridge. He was in severe pain, yet he stood for more than an hour to
deliver an impassioned plea for faith in America and the principles of
personal liberty on which the government was founded. He was plainly ill
at the close. He was taken to a hospital the next day and eventually
failed to survive a coronary thrombosis. The years on Rushmore had done
his heart no good.
Despite the fact that he was supposed to have been making his fortune in
the Black Hills, he died thousands of dollars in debt. It was years
before the hospital and doctor bills could be paid. Lincoln Borglum knew
what details were still lacking on the almost finished figures on
Rushmore. The Commission, with the concurrence of the Park Service,
designated him to finish the work. Lincoln refused to make any changes
or to carry the work any farther than indicated by his father’s models.
Congress passed a resolution for Gutzon Borglum’s interment in a tomb to
be carved in the rock at Mount Rushmore. But Gutzon, some time before
his death, had extracted a promise from Lincoln that he should be buried
among the flowers in California. His friends, led by Commander E. F.
McDonald, Jr., decided with the family that his wishes should be carried
out.
So he was buried in a memorial court of honor with the inscription
composed by his lifelong friend Rupert Hughes close by him:
His birthplace was Idaho; California first taught him art,
Then France who gave him fame;
England welcomed him: America called him home.
His genius for the exquisite as for the colossal
Gave permanence on canvas, in bronze,
In marble, to moods of beauty or passion,
To figures of legend and history.
Nations, cities, colleges paid him tribute.
As patriot he stripped corruption bare. As
Statesman he toiled for equality in the
Rights of man. At last he carved a
Mountain for a monument: He made the mountain
Chant, “Remember! These giant
Souls set America free and kept her free.
Hold fast your sacred heritage, Americans!
Remember! Remember!”
So, for a time, there is a pause in the story of Gutzon Borglum. You may
still rouse an argument about the art of mountain carving. Some relicts
of the Stone Mountain Association are still convinced that he was
angry-tempered and erratic and that nobody could get along with him.
What they do not see is that all such things make no difference. The
Four Faces of Rushmore stand looking into the sun. And Gutzon Borglum
seems likely to live as long as any human man who ever trod this earth,
except the four he helped make immortal.
_INDEX_
_INDEX_
Abbot, Harry, 110
Adair, Forrest, 177, 183
Alderman, Edwin A., 151-152, 153
Altgeld, Governor John P., 126, 130-133
Anglin, Margaret, 272
Anthony, Susan B., 281
Arkright, Preston, 184, 223
Arnold, Reuben, 190
Art Students’ League, 74
Aycock Memorial, 154-156
Bad Lands, 279, 280
Baillie, Robert (“Bob”), 80, 168, 170
Baldwin, “Lucky,” 43
Baker, Newton D., 139, 144-145
Bannwort, Carl, 163-164
Barlow, Lester, 180, 210, 263
Barnard, George Gray, 71
Bates, Blanche, 273-274
Beecher, Henry Ward, 129
Bell, Marian, 79
Biddle, A. J. Drexel, 259, 261
Black Hills, 276-280 _et seq._
Blavatsky, Madame Elena, 37
Boland, John A., 290, 298, 304-305, 314
Borglum, Elizabeth Putnam, 42-43, 55-56
Borglum, Gutzon, 15 _et seq._
Borglum, Ida Michelson, 28
Borglum, James de la Mothe, 27-28, 30-34, 36-38
Borglum, Lincoln, 177, 237, 238, 270-271, 298, 302, 314, 316
Borglum, Mary Ellis, 177, 271
Borglum, Mary Montgomery, 104 _et seq._
Borglum, Solon, 28, 39, 68
Borglum Kloster, 25, 26
Borglum Memorial Studio, 226
Borie, Adolph, 268
Bradford, Ralph, 266
Brady, “Diamond Jim,” 63
Brangwyn, Frank, 58
Bricka, Madame Helen, 63
Bryan, William Jennings, 133
Bulow, Governor William J., 301
Burke, “Calamity Jane,” 277
Burke, Senator Edward R., 311
Burmeister, Charles, 248
Bushfield, Harlan J., 313
Butterfield, General Daniel, 134
Butterworth, Frank, 109
Cameron, Colonel Beniham, 214
Cannon, Speaker Joseph G., 119
Case, Francis, 314
Chalmers, Stephen, 126, 127
Chavannes, Puvis de, 47, 49
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, 17
Chicago and North Western Railway, 17, 308
Clarke, Sir Purdon, 85
Coolidge, President Calvin, 17, 202, 284-288, 290, 291, 311
Connally, Thomas W., 190
Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille, 49
Corpus Christi, Texas, sea wall, 229, 231
Crandall, Arthur, 110-111
Crane, Charles R., 290
Crews, Laura Hope, 272
Cullinan Joseph S., 290, 300-301, 303-304, 307-308, 311
Czecho-Slovak Army, 250-254
Dalou, Jules, 49
Daniels, Bebe, 40
Daniels, Judge Frank, 155
Daniels, Josephus, 154, 155, 215
Davis, Bob, 41, 94, 126, 268
Davis, Cliff (“Dynamite”), 188, 223
Davis, Jefferson, 171, 175, 188, 199, 203, 204, 209, 217
Davis, Madge, 268
Davis, Sam, 95, 96-98
Day, C. M., 290
Dempsey, Jack, 260
Drought, Mrs. J. P., 227-228
Duncan, Isadora, 64
Dunne, Governor Edward F., 133
DuPont, Senator Coleman, 17, 262
Eassie, R. M., 64
Edwards, Henry Stilwell, 201
Ehlers, Colonel E. M., 135
Ellis, Dr. James N., 175, 177
Enters, Angna, 271
Faherty, Michael J., 157-158
Faville, William B., 74
Fort Pierre, 280
Frankfurter, Felix, 131
Frémont, Jessie Benton, 41-42, 43, 45, 53, 54, 56
Frémont, General John C., 41-42
Fuller, Loie, 62
Fuller, W. W., 152-153, 209
Game Lodge, 285
Garrison, Bob, 79
Gary, Judge Elbert, 209
Gavin, William A., 256-262
Gettysburg Memorial, _see_ North Carolina Civil War Memorial
Gibson, Charles Dana, 262
Greenway, General John, 232
Greenway, Isabella, 232
Griffin, George Butler, 40
Gurney, D. B., 290
Haines, Lynn, 172, 173
Harris, Frank, 79
Harvey, Robert, 190
Hickok, “Wild Bill,” 277
Heins, G. L., 88
Hill, Alice, 79
Hill, Ebenezer, 114
Hitchcock, Senator Gilbert, 147
Hoffman, Malvina, 79
Holden, Hale, 290
Homestake Mine, 287, 289
Hood, Ethel, 79
Hoover, President Herbert, 290, 294
Howell, Albert, 213
Hoyt, Cornelia, 175
Hudson, E. W., 89
Hughes, Charles Evans, 117, 124, 125, 148
Hughes, Rupert, 104, 316-317
Huntington, Collis P., 45-46
Inman, Mrs. Sam, 190
Insull, Samuel, 297
International Sporting Club, 255-262
Ito, Michow, 271
Jackson, General Thomas J. (“Stonewall”), 171, 175,
185, 188, 193, 199, 209
Jefferson, President Thomas, 152, 281, 298-299, 303, 309
Johnson, Governor Hiram, 119
Jones, Dr. Ashby, 223
Kaufman, John, 223
Keith, William, 41
Keller, Kent, 272-312
Kelly, Dr. Harry, 316
Kennedy, Charles Rann, 269
Key, Mayor James L., 222
King, Stanley, 143, 144
Kingsley Society, 59
Kirby, John, 209
Lee, General Robert E., 21, 102, 171, 174, 175,
184-185, 191-199, 212, 218-219, 221
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 280
Lincoln, President Abraham, 21, 85-86, 99, 101-103,
159, 160, 161, 162, 281, 298-299, 306, 309, 311
Lincoln, Robert, 86
Lober, George, 79
Lodge, Senator Henry Cabot, 202
Lowden, Frank O., 290
Luks, George, 83, 252
Lum, Ralph, 101, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170
Lummis, Charles, 40, 51, 52
McConnell, James Rogers, 19, 151-154
McCord, L. Lawrence, 222
McDonald, Commander Eugene F., Jr., 316
McGuire, O. R., 49
McKinley, Congressman William, 118
McKinley, President William, 116
McLean, Governor Angus, 214
Mackay, Clarence, 95-98
Mackay, John, 94-97
Malin, M. F., 79
“Mares of Diomedes, The,” 71, 84-85, 99
Masaryk, Thomas, 250, 251, 254
Mason, Frank, 175
Mason, Mrs. Frank, 175, 221
Matthison, Edith Wynne, 82, 269
Mellon, Andrew, 202-203, 287, 288
Meloney, Mrs. William Brown, 249, 265
Metropolitan Parks Association, 247-249
Midland Railway Company, 60-61
Miller, Henry, 272
Mitchell, John Purroy, 162
Montgomery, Mary, _see_ Borglum, Mary Montgomery
Moody, William Vaughn, 272
Mount Harney Memorial Association, 287, 296
Mount Rushmore, 17-19, 21, 86, 278-283, 284-315 _et passim_
Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission, 20, 290, 296
Munger, Dr. T. T., 105
Myrick, Herbert, 17, 287
National Arts Club, 73-74
National Sculpture Society, 73
Nocquet, Paul, 69-70, 266-267
Norbeck, Senator Peter, 277, 280, 281, 285,
287-289, 301-302, 303, 311, 314
North Carolina Civil War Memorial, 232-235
“Nude Descending a Staircase,” 72-73
O’Harra, Dr. Cleophas C., 276
Orme, Coribel Kellogg, 175, 212
Paderewski, Ignace Jan, 235-243, 254
Pardo, Gregory, 49, 50
Pearsall, Colonel P. M., 155
Percy, Julia, 80-81
Perkins, George W., 114, 118, 119, 123, 248
Peters, Dr. John, 91-93
Pickett’s Charge, _see_ North Carolina Civil War Memorial
Pittman, Senator Key, 312
Plane, C. Helen, 16, 173-178, 189, 196, 197, 198, 215, 223, 278
Poe, Dr. Clarence, 155-156
Potter, Bishop Henry C., 92
Putnam, Arthur, 43
Randolph, Hollins, 190, 192, 197, 209, 210, 211, 217, 218, 221.
Rayford, Julian Lee, 267-268
Raymond, Mayor Thomas L., 168
Reid, Whitelaw, 46
Reilly, James, 270
“Return of the Boer, The,” 62
Rhind, J. Massey, 159
Rickenbacker, Captain Eddie, 139-140
Rivers, R. (“Petie”), 190, 192
Road Beautification, 230-231
Robinson, Boardman, 268
Robinson, Doane, 16-17, 276, 281, 288, 293, 313-314
Rodin, Auguste, 47-49, 89
Rollins, Philip, 53-54
Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 309-311, 313
Roosevelt, President Theodore, 45, 86, 98, 103,
110, 112, 113-125, 169, 266, 277, 281, 299, 312
Roper, Mrs. Robert Thornton, 175
Rosenwald, Julius, 290
Rushmore, Charles, 17, 287
Rushmore National Memorial Society of the Black Hills, 290
Ruskin, John, 59
Russell, Lillian, 274
Russell, Tom, 225
Ryan, John D., 139
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 68, 70-71, 82, 127
St. John the Divine, Cathedral of, 87-93
St. Mary’s College, Kansas, 37-38, 39
Sargent, Fred W., 290, 308
Saunders, George, 225
Schiff, Jacob, 74, 248
Schiff, Mortimer, 82
Sedden, Mrs. J., 50
Selfridge, Lieutenant, 245
Shaw, George Bernard, 59
Sheridan, Mrs. Philip H., 98, 100
Sheridan Memorial, Chicago, 156-158
Sheridan Memorial, Washington, 98-101
Shrine of Democracy, _see_ Mount Rushmore
Shumaker, Theo, 277
Smith, Charles E., 302
Smith, Edith Cornell, 267
Smith, Herbert Knox, 111, 114
Smith, Spencer J., 42
Smith, Sydney, 267
Sobieski, Carl, 64
Sparks, Governor, 96
Spoonts, Lorine Jones, 290
Squier, General George 143
Stephens Memorial, 220-221
Stetson, Francis L., 248
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 126-128
Stewart, John A., 119
Stillman, James, 85
Stone Mountain, 15, 17, 18, 19, 86, 93, 167,
168, 171-181, 182-220, 221-224
Stone Mountain Coin, 200-203
Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association,
16, 171, 189-190, 196, 201, 205, 206-221
Stone Mountain Executive Committee, 189, 199-200, 201
Sullivan, Louis, 67
Sutton, W. A., 190
Taft, President William Howard, 116-117
Teck, Duchess of, 63
Teck, Duke of, 63
Texas Centennial, 230
Thompson, William Hale, 133, 157
Tiffany, Marie, 183
Tolentino, William, 79
Trail Drivers’ Association, 224-226
Travis, Walter (“Speedy”), 314-315
Trudeau, Dr. Edward L., 19, 126-129
Tucker, Jesse, 178-183, 188, 191-192, 210-212, 214-215, 296-297
Tumulty, Joseph, 140-141
Turner, Eva Griffin, 40-41
Ullman, Isaac, 115
Ulrich, W. R., 222
United Daughters of the Confederacy, 173-174, 176, 188-192, 196, 206-218
Van Horn, Amos, 101, 159
Vanophem, Jean, 188
Venable, Sam, 174-177, 183, 190, 211, 212, 218, 221, 222
Victoria, Queen of England, 63
Villa, Hugo, 165-166, 168, 191, 215, 220, 302, 303
Vincent, S. E., 111
Wadsworth, Herbert, 267
Walker, Bill, 259
Walker, James J., 259
Ward, J. Q. A., 98
Wars of America Memorial, 19, 21, 159-170, 182, 271
Washington, President George, 161, 281, 282, 283, 298, 303, 306, 309
Webb, David, 190, 204, 209
Whiting, Lillian, 84
Whitman, Colonel Royal E., 99, 100, 106
Wilbur, R. L., 169
Williams, Henry Smith, 104
Williams, Virgil, 41
Williamson, Congressman William, 277, 288, 290, 311
Willis, G. F., 221
Wilson, President Woodrow, 138, 140-143, 148, 252
Wilson Memorial, 21, 25, 235-243, 302
Winter, Rogers, 190
Wood, General Leonard, 117-124, 262
Wright, Orville, 244
Wright, Wilbur, 244
Wyatt, Henry, 129
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