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.
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: