Give the man room

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:

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:

The aviator’s father was deeply touched by the figure. He wrote to Gutzon:

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:

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:

Gutzon felt that he had never had a more pleasant association.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

WARS OF AMERICA MEMORIAL

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:

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:

A little later Mr. Bannwort replied:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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:

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

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: