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
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.