It was a fine interview. Coolidge was a silent man. But he always talked with me—fishing, politics, even a little about art. He was happy he had come to the Black Hills for his summer outing. He said they reminded him of the Vermont mountains.
When the day arrived for the dedication we drove up as far as we could and walked the rest of the way. The President was mounted on a safe horse, led by an orderly on each side on foot, until we reached the cabin I had taken over as a studio. It was about 1,500 feet from the cliff.
There were lots of specially invited guests who had struggled up the hill. It was something new to see the consecrating of a mountain by the President of the United States. Nothing had been left undone to make this an official act. Everything was done with the greatest of dignity and decorum. Coolidge was really impressed.
“We have come here,” he said, “to dedicate a cornerstone that was laid by the hand of the Almighty. On this towering wall of Rushmore in the heart of the Black Hills is to be inscribed a memorial that will represent some of the outstanding events in American history, and portraying the features of four of our Presidents.
“The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people. It is in no small degree due to that spirit that we have been able to produce such leaders. If coming generations are to maintain a like spirit, it will be because they continue to study the lives and times of the great men who have been leaders of this country, and continue to support the principles those men represented. It is for that purpose that we erect memorials. We cannot hold our admiration for the historic figures which we shall see here without growing stronger in our determination to perpetuate the institutions that their lives revealed and accomplished.”
That, for the most part, was the dedication. And, singularly enough, it was very effective. The hot and weary witnesses who had made the march out of Keystone had suspected it would be, and they had no reason to complain. Calvin Coolidge, for once in his life, had been deeply moved.
The little crowd stood quiet and motionless for a minute. Gutzon was called over to the President’s side.
“Look,” said Coolidge abruptly, “who’s paying for all this?”
“Well,” answered Gutzon, “the Rapid City Commercial Club has been taking care of preliminary expenses. And since the Mount Harney Memorial Association has been formed, some money has been raised in the Black Hills and the state generally. We’ve got donations from the Homestake Mine and the railroads and from people outside like Charles Rushmore, Herbert Myrick and Coleman Dupont. We are very grateful.”
The President sniffed. “You’ll not go far on that,” he said. “The people of South Dakota can’t even pay the interest on their farm mortgages.”
“They’ve had a dry year west of the Missouri River,” explained Gutzon. “We can hope for more water next year.”
“Nonsense,” declared Coolidge. “They never get water out there. When I get back to Washington I want you to come to the White House. You know Secretary Mellon?”
“Yes,” said Borglum.
“All right,” pursued the President. “He and you and I will sit down and figure out what can be done to promote this work. I know great governments do things like this.”
The President then handed the sculptor the drills and Gutzon climbed to the top of the mountain. The engines were turned on for the first time. The huddled, silent witnesses caught the sudden chatter of the drills. The carving of Mount Rushmore had begun.
Gutzon came down and presented the first drill in use to President Coolidge. The next two went to Doane Robinson and Peter Norbeck, and he kept the fourth. Then everybody plodded back down the hill to Keystone.
“See me in Washington,” repeated Coolidge as they said good-by. And that the historian might record as the beginning of Rushmore financing.
Norbeck and Borglum disagreed as to the proper approach to the problem. Borglum said that he would ask the federal government to donate as much as the memorial promoters were able to collect from other sources. Norbeck said no, that money was hard to collect privately, that you couldn’t run drills on promises and that Mellon could be made to pay the full cost. Gutzon, remembering how he had raised more than a million dollars for Stone Mountain, refused to listen to this argument. But, it turned out, Norbeck was right.
Toward the end of 1927 Borglum was in Washington. He laid his plan before Mellon just as he had said he would, and Mellon was pleased. So was President Coolidge, for Gutzon’s modesty was something unusual at the time.
Norbeck was not pleased. “You could have got it all,” he said. “Now I don’t know what you’ll get.” He put a bill through the Senate, while Congressman Williamson was doing the same thing in the House, providing for a twelve-member commission to take over the drawings, contracts and material now held by Borglum, to be held and owned by the United States government. The $50,000 fund in the Rushmore treasury was exhausted in the middle of December 1927; so work was abandoned and nothing was done in 1928 while everybody in the Black Hills waited for Congress to act.
Norbeck was discouraged in 1928. In a letter to Gutzon he wrote:
Previous to this, public sentiment has held up pretty well under our repeated assurances that everything would go right along. But the fact that neither you nor I could scare up a few dollars for the work during the summer of 1928 has led people to believe that we were just talking hot air. Very few people in South Dakota take the matter seriously any more. Doane Robinson tries to, but it keeps him awake nights and he needs sleep....
This letter came to Gutzon in San Antonio, where he was working on the memorial to Woodrow Wilson destined for Poland, and he was a bit put out. To this letter he replied:
My dear Senator, if I didn’t love you and sympathize with the difficulties you have had to face in the past year, I would get cross. But no one can respect you more than I do, know you half so well, agree with you so much and fail to feel that anything you write would be written in the best spirit. If I say anything a bit harsh, I am going to ask you to treat my remarks in the same spirit.
I have a feeling from your letter that you feel I have not raised the money that should have been raised; that I have not carried through the matters I should have carried through. Now let us clear up a few of these points. First, because it was with great reluctance that I took up the Black Hills work, for it is a terrific undertaking and I found the country and the people utterly uninformed in such matters and without funds. I agreed to go to the Hills and make a survey for a fixed sum. That was accepted; a bill was introduced in your state government with the result that nothing was paid for that service by the state. I found, in other words, that whatever I undertook, I had to carry much of the load all the time, in financing and developing interest, in engineering and production.
Finally when the work was in hand it was always in South Dakota that the inertia was felt most. While I was there, everything was promised; immediately I left, everything was put off until I returned. I have made at least three complete rounds of the cities in the southwest of South Dakota, feeling out gatherings for the purpose of informing and interesting the people and securing help for the memorial. I have been informed, time and again, at each of these gatherings, that the necessary funds were available provided your committee, or someone you designate, would either be with me or go and collect the money.
This was told me even at the Homestake Mine, where I talked for a solid hour to the manager and legal head of the concern, and secured from them the statement that they were completely sold on the proposition and would do their part. You yourself secured their contribution. I am not blaming you for anything. I have never questioned your wisdom, or your politics, or the reasons for delay in Washington. But I do think, and you must bear me out in this, that if the bill had been passed, the past year would have been one of energy, action and production, with the head of Washington completed on the mountain.
Less than a month after this exchange of letters the Rushmore bill was passed; $250,000 was appropriated on a matching basis and more than $50,000 released to match sums previously subscribed. Considering the carving program, this fund was still nothing to cause much celebration. The making of monuments has always been expensive. One such group alone—the Jefferson Memorial in Washington—had an estimated cost of $3,000,000. But one takes what one can get, and Gutzon was cheered again.
In one of his last Presidential acts Calvin Coolidge appointed ten men and one woman as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission: John A. Boland, Rapid City, South Dakota; Charles R. Crane, New York City; Joseph S. Cullinan, Houston, Texas; C. M. Day, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; D. B. Gurney, Yankton, South Dakota; Hale Holden, Chicago; Frank O. Lowden, Oregon, Illinois; Julius Rosenwald, Chicago; Fred W. Sargent, Evanston, Illinois; William Williamson, Rapid City, South Dakota; and Mrs. Lorine Jones Spoonts, Corpus Christi, Texas. At their first meeting, called by President Hoover in the White House in June 1929, J. S. Cullinan was elected president of the commission and John A. Boland chairman of the executive committee. Work on Mount Rushmore began at once.
Some people remember 1929 because of renewed hope that the great memorial would be finished. But most of the rest of the United States recall it as the year that started the big depression. Contributions came in slowly; then they stopped. Cullinan, with the blessing of President Herbert Hoover, organized the Rushmore National Memorial Society of the Black Hills to handle advertising, fund raising, memberships, management of concessions, maintenance of the park area, publicity and other matters not directly connected with the building of the memorial. Memberships were set at $100 apiece, which brought in $6,000, and that was the biggest sum that anyone in the undertaking saw for a long time.
Then there was the matter of a suitable inscription. The idea of such explanatory matter to accompany the carved figures had been set forth in the Congressional bill. It had been discussed by the sculptor and President Coolidge in the summer of 1927 and again when the pair met two years later in Texas. Borglum asked of the ex-President some eight or nine terse paragraphs covering the territorial expansion of the republic and starting with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The available space on the mountain gave room for about 375 words in letters three feet high. If reduced to two and a half feet, there would be room for 475 words. Reporters spread word throughout the country that Coolidge was writing a history of the United States in 500 words. He denied it.
Gutzon wrote a letter to Mr. Coolidge after that restating what he wanted. He was about to dress the mountainside for the entablature, he said, and would appreciate some copy. Mr. Coolidge sent the two paragraphs which read:
The Declaration of Independence—The eternal right to seek happiness through self-government and the divine duty to defend that right at any sacrifice.
The Constitution—Charter of perpetual union of free people of sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers under an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality and justice under the law.
Gutzon changed the wording slightly. He cut out the word through before self-government in the first paragraph. In the second he eliminated the phrase under the law after the word justice. Mr. Coolidge objected to the editing. The newspapers raised another storm. Coolidge complained of the publicity. The sculptor assumed all blame and got this somewhat annoyed reply from Coolidge:
I know that you are a great artist. What I meant to convey is that I do not wish to be engaged in putting up a monument to myself. I wished my name kept off the mountain. I do not see any reason for your committee giving the press any statement of any kind in relation to me. I wish you every success....
Then there were letters to the Times, and essay contests in the newspapers, and speeches by high-school students, and resolutions by the Rushmore Commission. But in the end there was not one single contribution of the required length. Flaws in the granite caused a shift of figures that left no room for the entablature; and the Commission set the whole matter aside for future reference.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CARVING THE MOUNTAIN
And there through all the deathless generations guard
The continents, and guide the gracious stars of fate:
So God made mountains for the throne of these.
Upon this mountaintop America enshrines
Her sturdy sires, exalts her noblest knight.
Where children of the earth may lift appraising eye
And feel his virtue while his strength invests their souls.
—Doane Robinson
Gutzon Borglum carved a mountain. And as the years went by he became a dynamiter, a geologist, a practical miner and, very definitely, an engineer. He got used to crawling about on the face of a cliff, and in time he used to say that his sculpture was not greatly different from the cutting of a large block of stone in a studio. But, of course, the stone of the mountainside wasn’t dressed or prepared. It couldn’t be shifted into the light or away from it. The amount of stone to be removed was prodigious, and injury of the material left for carving was always a serious possibility. How one of these projects ever got itself done is something that he wasted thousands of words trying to explain.
When Gutzon first used dynamite for carving on Stone Mountain it had been taken by the world as a fantastic idea. But there was no coyness about its use when it came to Rushmore. It was laid out there in all proportions and all quantities. The sculptor had experts who knew what could be done with a six-inch stick, or half an ounce of it, or with a percussion cap alone. And they had to be in touch not only with the drilling of the moment but with the design of the whole monument to avoid the chance of an overcharge at one point injuring stone at a distance.
Such drilling skill was developed that the sculptor could depend on them to block out a nose to within an inch of the finished surface, to shape the lips, grade the contours of the neck, cheek, brow and all round areas. He could even shape the eyeball as a whole, but the defining of the eyelids and the pupils was done by drills, air tools and by hand.
The sculptor’s first concern was the position of Washington. He put in days studying the surfaces, shadows, reflections and the course of the sun; and eventually he chose the place where Washington’s head rises today. It was the best spot on the mountain.
He began to make models to suit the cliff. He discussed the angle of the head with Carothers, one of the literary secretaries of the Hoover administration, and he had long conferences about the character of the first President with Hoover himself. They decided that uprightness should be emphasized in Washington’s statue. The head should not incline to right nor left, nor forward nor back, but should be set on the shoulders so that it would show dignity and poise. Carothers drew a straight line down the middle of a paper, put a ball on the top of it to indicate the head and remarked quite gravely, “This is the way it should be drawn.”
And that is the way it was drawn. The center of Washington’s head was fixed at the point where the horizontal line going across the brows met the vertical line through the chin. In roughing off they had to remove fifteen feet of rock before they found a hard, undamaged surface. This was done late in the summer of 1927. Blasting was not resumed until 1929.
Work on Washington taught them how to proceed quickly with other figures. It established methods, determined tools, temper of steel, arrangement of scaffolding for hoists and a labor gauge on the men who were to perform most of the rough toil on the monument.
The first preparation for carving was to draw in its proper position on the mountain an oval of the required length and width. This oval was divided into three sections—one at the line of the eyebrows, one at the end of the nose and a third at the end of the chin. These measurements were in the scale of the model; in other words, a model sixty inches in height had an enlarged outline sixty feet in height.
The work on Rushmore was done from swing harnesses developed at Stone Mountain. They were made of a leather-covered steel frame and were quite strong. The men were buckled into them. Thereafter they might be bumped or fall, but they could not get out without unbuckling themselves. The swings were suspended at the end of a 300-foot steel cable from a winch on the top of the cliff. They were housed in a shack on Washington’s head.
Ordinarily the practical method would have been to determine precisely where in the cliff the head was to be located, then fix the model at the same angle; next, to begin at the top, peel off the rough stone and finish as you went down. That’s the way any good mechanic or engineer would carry on such work, relieving the features, finishing as he descended and using the stone shelf that the work always left under his feet to stand on.
But this was a work of art, not of mechanics. The revelation of the face by the sculptor was as if he were releasing a living thing. Each drill hole must pierce the stone with certainty, so as not in any way to injure what was below. Gutzon said he could not allow mechanical methods to reduce his art production to a lifeless form.
Each day they carefully surveyed the rough-blocked face. When they reached the chin line they were thirty feet in from the original granite cliff. There they stopped and built a scaffold from chin to forehead, and the sculptor sent to Texas for his old friend and assistant Hugo Villa. It was then June and an unveiling was scheduled for July.
No man on the Rushmore project had ever carved a mountain before. But no matter. He had less difficulty with them than with any other phase of the undertaking. Most of them were the so-called forgotten men of Keystone—veteran miners, the one-time workers of the idle Holy Terror Gold Mine. They were hard-rock men; they were used to explosives; and they did not need many instructions.
In the end the sculptor had several experts on the mountain as adept as any in the country, and a loyal group of helpers. Gutzon established a boardinghouse near the blacksmith shop, engine room and other buildings at the foot of the cliff, and frequently came with his guests to eat with them. He knew them all.
Gutzon’s original contract with the Mount Harney Memorial Association had specified that Captain Jesse Tucker of Stone Mountain be named superintendent of the work at Rushmore and given a fixed salary of $10,000. To make this sum possible the sculptor reduced the amount to be paid to himself. The reason for Tucker’s position, he frankly stated, was that he must give part of his time to other sculptural work, and that while he was absent from Rushmore he needed someone to take his place.
But presently the Rushmore Commission hadn’t any money to pay to anybody. There were arguments and misunderstandings, and Tucker resigned. After that the full burden of the work fell on Gutzon. He moved with his family to the Black Hills and built a studio some distance from Rushmore at Hermosa.
Gutzon probably missed Tucker more than anybody else with whom he had ever worked. Correspondence between them during the first few months of construction on Rushmore shows the great concern of both of them for the safety of the workers. Tucker, who thought the men careless, was certain that they would contrive some bad end for themselves. But the years went on and the carving got done and somehow there were no serious accidents.
The nearest approach to disaster came when a lightning flash exploded a percussion cap just as the worker was making an artificial electrical connection. The man in the swing harness was shot out into space but by instantaneous muscular reaction flexed his knees as he was hurled back against the side of the mountain. He was badly bruised but not otherwise hurt. The sun was shining when the accident happened. Thereafter no blasts were set off without the advice of the weatherman.
The other accident occurred when a steel wire controlling the hoist broke. The open box in which three or four men were riding came hurtling down. The quick wit of a young man from Stamford, the assistant superintendent, prevented a serious crash. He stuck an iron rod between the hoist wheel and the cable that retarded the descent of the car. Only one worker jumped out as the car hit. He was treated for a minor chest injury.
Some unknown friend whom Gutzon always identified privately as Sam Insull set out a Diesel engine for him at a town in the western part of the state. For two years it furnished all the power needed not only to run the air compressors and drills on the mountain but the pumps of the Holy Terror Mine as well. A Wyoming company was started and Gutzon, on the promise of electricity for less than his own plant would furnish it, agreed to shut down. Shortly before the day scheduled for the unveiling of the Washington head the power company informed him that he must sign a contract to use the company’s electricity for twenty years or be cut off. Gutzon snorted and turned to the Diesel engine. But there was no hope from that source. Somebody had dismantled it and carried away most of the movable parts.
Commissioner John Boland rushed out from Rapid City and thereafter Gutzon bought power from the new company. But he refused to sign the twenty-year contract. The cost of the power was a matter of bitter discussion forever after.
Lincoln came to the mountain in 1932 and worked two years without pay. Gutzon trained him to do the “pointing,” which consists of measuring the models and locating their enlargements on the rock. It is the direct translation of the work of the artist from studio to the material which he will cut, and Lincoln was carefully prepared.
Gutzon declared that Lincoln was a master of this work, understanding its complicated mathematics, and father had confidence in son. Under him a staff of three assistants served as a “pointing crew” for the measurement of all models to be enlarged on the mountain. When not measuring they acted as aids and guides to the drillers. The instructions given to Lincoln at one period when the sculptor’s arrival at Rushmore was delayed indicate the dramatic quality of the work. The sculptor instructed his son thus:
I want you, in beginning the work and allotting the positions to the men, to avoid the two finished faces completely. Do not touch the hairlines around the face of Washington or his chin, or under his chin. Do not approach the face lines of Jefferson, or to the side of his face or under his chin.
On Photograph No. 1, I have drawn a circle where you can locate Payne [a driller] to begin down-drilling under what will be Washington’s ear and the left-hand lapel of his coat. Put one or two men on the lapel, which I have marked No. 2. Put two men on Washington’s shoulders and work carefully from the top, which I have marked No. 3. That will dispose of five or six men.
I have marked Lincoln’s eye. You can put two men in cages in each of the eyes. I would use Anderson on the one side and Bianco on the other, putting Bianco where the feldspar streaks run down, and Anderson on the outside. I would give Payne, with Bianco, a position on the nose and have them begin to take off stone by drilling in squares and breaking it off down to within six or seven inches of the finished surface. But do not try to cut the eyelid or eyeball. Make a round mass for each of these. Lincoln’s face in that way will take up probably six more men.
You can put about three men on the Roosevelt stone, marking carefully the contour of Lincoln’s face so that none of that is disturbed, and going back into the hole next to Jefferson’s face as deep as you can. If you can put any men down on the block that I have marked No. 8, without any danger of tools and stone falling on them, all right. I would put about three men down on the big crag. We still have seventy or eighty feet to take off that. I think this will keep you busy until I get there.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CONVERSATION
In those days Gutzon Borglum found time to smile once in a while, although anybody who knew the trials of mountain carving might have wondered why. He had been written down for a comfortable part of a million-dollar memorial project. Seldom, during any one carving period, did he get much of it. Some years he got none. People were donating toward Rushmore begrudgingly in nickels and dimes. He was always shorthanded. The experts he needed couldn’t exist on the cash available. Somebody raised the price of electricity. Somebody dismantled the Diesel engine. There were wrangles over concessions and concessionaires and small-town politics. There were road troubles, and supplies were late. And there were other things. The question of why anybody should wish to become a topflight sculptor seemed unlikely to be answered—ever.
The head of Washington was officially unveiled on July 4, 1930. The rest of the cliff was unchanged, and Washington’s chin seemed to rest on the ledge from which it had been carved. But when the great flag swung aside to reveal the sculptured face the witnesses, strangers to Stone Mountain, felt that from then on the memorial would never die.
J. S. Cullinan, first president of the Rushmore Commission, presided and gave the monument its name: “The authority of Congress to carve colossal portraits of these great men in the granite of the Black Hills has created a perpetual Shrine for political Democracy.” And Borglum, tired, dejected, almost conquered by a world where nobody ever seemed to want to do anything, was pleased with that. A head was finished on Rushmore, and the dullest of these laymen looking at it knew that it was a finely done piece of sculpture. He heard someone saying that it would be there forever, and he hoped that it would last longer than Lee’s at Stone Mountain.
The crowd at the unveiling got safely back to Rapid City with no trouble at all. And nobody thought of Borglum’s connection with the district’s good roads.
In the spring of 1930, trying to get from Rapid City to Keystone with two cars and tow aids, he had been ditched six times. He never got to Mount Rushmore that week. However, he did get to the telegraph office and sent word to President Hoover that the roads were impossible and that he would shut down the project unless conditions were improved and men could get to their work. Hoover sent the message to Governor William J. Bulow, who in turn made an appointment for his state road commission to meet the sculptor that week.
Meanwhile the governor telegraphed this message to Mr. Cullinan:
BORGLUM HAS THE TEMPERAMENT OF ALL GOOD ARTISTS, GETS MAD WHEN HE CANNOT CONTROL WEATHER CONDITIONS. NOTHING SERIOUS EXCEPT THAT HE GOT A NEW EXPERIENCE AND A NEW TOUCH OF LIFE. AM SENDING HIGHWAY ENGINEER TO SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE. WITH GOD’S AID AND PATIENCE HOPE TO GET HIM SMOOTHED OUT.
Within three days they had planned the beautiful road now leading from Rapid City to the memorial. Strange as it seems, South Dakota spent $480,000, plus a quarter of a million on other roads, to reach a monument on which she had not spent a dollar. Meanwhile Senator Norbeck with his Custer State Park Commission was working on a road approaching Rushmore from the opposite direction by way of Iron Mountain.
Iron Mountain Road is one of the country’s finest examples of what can be done with economical engineering. Engineer Charles E. Smith who laid it out hadn’t much money to spend. The highway runs along part of its highly beautiful journey between Keystone and Grace Coolidge Creek on two lanes that are widely separated. It climbs terrific grades on corkscrew uplifts built of pine logs. It is well paved, well graded and safe.
One of the features of the highway is said to have come by accident. Work was started from the south end and presently struck a mountain that had to be tunneled. The hole was surveyed with no plan save to keep it in line with the approach already built. When the miners finally broke through they were looking into the face of Washington on Rushmore. The two remaining tunnels were cut at the same angle, framing the memorial with a showmanship worthy of Gutzon Borglum himself. Borglum was intensely pleased. “Norbeck’s Iron Mountain Road,” he said, “is as much a work of art as the carving of the mountain.”
Another Norbeck road over the so-called Pine Creek route between Rushmore and Hill City, again a masterpiece of scenic road building, was the cause of the sculptor’s abandoning his original plan of placing Jefferson on Washington’s right in the Rushmore grouping. There was a contributing factor in this decision due partly, he thought, to poor work. Up to summer of 1931 Gutzon had been trying to place the figure of Jefferson where he believed he belonged—on Washington’s right. Work had continued after the unveiling until the fall of 1930 and was resumed in the following spring. In July of that year the sculptor went to Poland, taking Lincoln Borglum with him, to erect his statue of Woodrow Wilson. He left Tallman and Villa in charge.
There was no way of testing the stone in the location for the Jefferson head, so he had quickly roughed out the block and left Villa pointing the face.
When he returned from Europe and motored out to Rushmore he noticed while still a mile away that something was radically wrong. He exclaimed to Villa, “What’s wrong with the Jefferson head?” Villa answered by turning to Tallman: “Didn’t I tell you the master would notice it from a long way off?” Then he said, “Well, there was a little difficulty about the pointing.” The trouble, he explained, was too deep a depression under the eye and there was not enough stone to push the head farther back.
The sculptor did not wait to find out what had gone wrong—rock or work. He was almost too angry for words. Gutzon thought he had taken all precautions. About half the work was finished and it wouldn’t do. Who or what was to blame did not matter. The damage was done. There was not enough stone to allow free modeling of Jefferson’s face, and Norbeck’s new road, exposing the back of the head, made a change in the composition advisable. The sculptor made a bold decision to abandon what had been done on Jefferson and place his figure on Washington’s left. This necessitated a change in the whole grouping, while the flaws in the rock in Jefferson’s new position were so deep that he had to go back sixty feet before he found good stone for the carving. Senator Norbeck, the only one consulted in the matter, gave complete approval.
Villa left shortly after this incident, but came to see his old master in Texas a year or so later and greeted him with his old-time affection. Nothing ever came between them again. Subsequently he flitted in and out of the Rushmore studio at unpredictable times. But Villa was a city man and was not at home in this rugged community. Gutzon missed him, for he brought to the studio a breath of the charm found in the Old World wherever art is active.
The year of Washington’s bicentennial, 1932, witnessed the shutdown of work at Rushmore for lack of funds, which to the sculptor seemed an unforgivable disgrace. However, there on the mountain was the portrait of the first President, which Mr. Cullinan had declared was the best in existence. The face seemed to belong to the mountain, having taken on its elemental courage, and Gutzon figured it as vital as he could make it. He occupied himself with regrouping the models in the studio. It had disturbed him to have the figures as close together as in the original composition, and now this had been opened up by putting Jefferson so far inward that it gave room for the sun to pass back of Washington and light Jefferson’s face. The flaws in the rock which made this necessary began to appear a blessing in disguise.
The recomposition also involved changing Washington’s shoulders in relation to his head. The left shoulder was moved back seven feet and then another seven feet, while the right shoulder was moved seven feet forward. When word got around that Borglum was moving Washington’s head there were loud alarms. Norbeck was flustered. Monument lovers from Rapid City rushed out to the mountain to see how a head that weighed several tons could be transported. There was some disappointment when they saw nothing more novel than the chiseling of the shoulders; but they talked, and the story, it is said, made good publicity.
John A. Boland of Rapid City, chairman of the executive committee of the Rushmore commission, was charged with the hiring of workers, purchase of materials and payment of salaries and bills. And it must be said that these worthy endeavors were seldom fraught with any sweetness and light. Boland’s office was in Rapid City—too close to Rushmore, he thought—and he could not move it because of his statewide business. He sat there quietly and never interfered with the carving operations. He felt that Borglum was a great artist and that the carving of Mount Rushmore was a noble undertaking. He may one day be considered a great patriot.
One of Boland’s handicaps in the situation was his unwillingness to spend any money that he didn’t happen to have. This attitude was, of course, diametrically opposed to that of Borglum, who never could be convinced that money really mattered. And it is said that these two stalwarts had “occasional clashes.” “Occasional clashes,” one regrets to say, is a highly erroneous and short-weight title for what they had.
Gutzon once said that he could feel his blood pressure rising when he got within 500 miles of Rushmore and faced the prospect of seeing Boland. Boland’s blood pressure went up only when Borglum needed money. But the men met, discussed the Shrine of Democracy, swapped observations about the current financial situation and brought the language of toe-to-toe wrangling to a new high.
Gutzon declared, of course, that he never took these arguments seriously. No row, he said, was ever worth remembering after its cause was gone; and that, probably, is a true report on his reactions. The last time he and Boland met he was pleased with the course of the world and mellow toward Boland. He had his arm across the chairman’s shoulder and was calling him “Johnny.”
What Boland thought about these goings on is, of course, an entirely different matter. He never talks much about his struggles in behalf of majestic art. “Borglum was a great sculptor,” he sums it up. “He certainly was that.”
The matter of concessions on Mount Rushmore bothered Gutzon considerably more than most people interested in the project realized. Continuous importunities for jobs and for permission to sell souvenirs and postcards and photographs near the work were petty annoyances with which he found it hard to cope. He knew that some such items had to be provided as part of bringing knowledge of his work to the attention of faraway people, but he would not tolerate cheap workmanship or poor taste in anything sold near the carvings. He got along for a while by keeping this trade under supervision in the Rushmore studio, but the relief was only temporary. A resurgence of what he called “local petty politics” presently involved him so that he called on the Department of the Interior to send someone to protect him.
The Department of the Interior complied and Gutzon learned that nothing is so bad that government intervention can’t make it worse. The unimaginative, bureaucratic routines taught to Washington office workers were wholly out of place in a work so constantly changing and so free from fixed rules. The protector sent by the department turned out to be an earnest young man who started out to confuse the South Dakota politicians and did well at it. But he wished to do greater things. He became aloof and secretive.
After some weeks he was discovered to be corresponding with an engineering company in Switzerland known chiefly for its construction of cog-wheel railroads. He thought the company might be interested in building such a funicular line up and around the face of Rushmore so that visitors might walk under Washington’s nose or sit in Lincoln’s eye. Gutzon’s indignation set the young man right and was long remembered.
The Park Service of the Department of the Interior had formulas for all of its functions. Its personnel with whom Borglum came into contact believed that the heads should be carved in orderly fashion. First, the figure of Washington should be completely finished; then the workers should move on to Jefferson, and so on. This, they pointed out, would give people something to look at.
Once more the sculptor who had asked only that he be protected from the harangues of would-be postcard peddlers made a protest against the continuous suggestions of ignoramuses. Harold Ickes, head of the department, understood Borglum’s position clearly and told him in forceful language to ignore such suggestions. But the subordinates never seemed to comprehend. One of Ickes’ engineers went so far as to offer to relieve Borglum of all worry. “Why don’t you finish your models and give them to us to reproduce on the mountain?” he inquired. “We have plenty of men who can do that sort of work—and quickly, too.”
“Somebody has to put the life and expression into carved faces,” Gutzon began to explain as he had been explaining since his first days on Stone Mountain. “That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be good sculptors.”
There was also the question of “hiring and firing” workmen. The bureaucrats could not understand that the sculptor had to discharge anyone who refused to obey orders, or that he might suddenly need a certain type of workman for a particular job and then need him no longer. It was such a complicated procedure to get a worker placed on the government payroll that it was no wonder they didn’t want to discharge him again in a few days. There are many letters to show that the sculptor’s relationship with the various heads of the Park Service was most friendly. Difficulty was due to a misunderstanding of what an art production of this unprecedented character required.
Even the Rushmore Commission suggested impractical sculptural plans and picked out certain parts of the work it would “like to see finished.” And while Gutzon was pushing the work, begging more funds to get more power, more workmen, skilled carvers, so that the work might be finished in his lifetime, it was irritating to be told that certain commissioners and local interests would like to keep the project going as long as possible because more tourists would come if they could see the sculptor at work.
After 1932 the work dragged on with frequent interruptions and without sufficient funds. Workmen were complaining of the daily climb to their stations—1,500 feet with a rise of 500 feet, which the sculptor himself made several times a day—resulting in a working time loss of from an hour to an hour and a half every day for every man on the job. To date, approximately seventy per cent of the roughing out of the entire surface to be carved had been completed and thirty-five per cent of the finishing, within a total working time of twenty-two months and an average of four to six drillers at work.
The personnel of the Commission was so changed by illness, death and lack of interest that it became increasingly hard to get a quorum at the semiannual meetings. Mr. Cullinan had resigned as president to be succeeded by Fred Sargent of the Chicago and North Western Railway. Only Gutzon could not resign. As he remarked, the rock of Rushmore was riveted to his neck.
A new phase of the work began in 1934 when the federal government assumed the burden of financing the memorial. Frequent stoppages, constant lack of sufficient power and skilled workmen, plus the unpredictable condition of the stone, had greatly increased working costs. Congress first voted to remove the fifty-fifty matching restriction attached to the first appropriation, making it immediately available, and next passed a second appropriation of $200,000. There were those near Mount Rushmore who said it was about time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
—AND FINAL PEACE
So then there was no trouble at all save bureaucratic misunderstandings and the vagaries of Rushmore rock. Accurate estimates of the time required to finish the work were impossible because of the constant shifting and reconstruction of design. The stone on Mount Rushmore, although the best in the Black Hills, offered interesting surprises. Some new reddish substance appeared on Lincoln’s cheek. Silver and tin crystals were found at the end of his nose. The feldspar crystals on Rushmore are unusually large and add to the difficulties. This was especially true on the lapels of Washington’s coat where no powder could be used. Finally Jefferson’s head had to be slightly turned so that the poor stone came in the hollow between his cheek and nose and could thus be removed entirely.
An unfailing support to the sculptor through these difficulties was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote a dozen or more sympathetic letters. One of them he closed by saying, “I am very much interested in the work you are doing, and will be glad to remove any drawbacks that may handicap you.... With best wishes always....”
So it is not surprising that he was present at Rushmore on August 30, 1936, for the unveiling of the head of Thomas Jefferson. He had been touring the West to see for himself the results of desperate drought and had been routed to reach Rapid City on time.
At the President’s request the exercises were informal. Flags of Bourbon France and Hapsburg Spain, fluttering from the top of the mountain, were lowered as the huge American flag was swung back to reveal the face of Jefferson. In a few words Gutzon asked the President to dedicate this memorial as a shrine which for years to come would bring people of all the earth to see what manner of men struggled here to establish self-determining government in the Western world. Mr. Roosevelt responded: