I congratulate you on the tablet. You have done something in that bas-relief that Saint-Gaudens didn’t do. You have brought out the spirit of the sick man who didn’t believe in lying in bed, and the little uplift of his head is a perfect expression of “Come!” said I to my engine, “let’s work anyway!” This thing requires no study. It hits you between the eyes first glance. I showed it to Mrs. Baker, who owned the cottage where the Stevensons lived, and the best compliment from that old lady is this: “Yes, it’s just the way he looked when he was here.”
A few months later Lord Guthrie, acknowledged leader of the Stevenson cult in Scotland, wrote:
Gutzon Borglum the sculptor, in his Saranac memorial bas-relief, has got beneath the surface and behind the mask as Saint-Gaudens, fine as his bas-relief is as a work of art, never did. I liked the first sight of Borglum’s work, and it grows on me. It has charm, it has strength, and it has pathos. It is the invalid, but the invalid who can say, “O Pain, where is thy victory?” It is the fascinating personality of a man of genius who, with all his gaiety of manner, was yet, in the matter of essential principle, like flint.
Hundreds of people whom Dr. Trudeau had cured were anxious to erect a memorial to him, but were too poor to contribute substantial sums. They appealed to Gutzon, who again responded generously. He was deeply impressed by Dr. Trudeau’s self-sacrificing work and by the devotion of the afflicted ones he sought to heal. He agreed to put up a bronze-and-marble memorial for the cost of materials—about $7,500. After studying the matter for some weeks he made a life-size clay model of the beloved physician seated out of doors, a rug over his knees, and invited the committee to come to his studio and pass on it. Mr. Chalmers wrote in the Saranac News:
By the end of the day something little short of miraculous had taken place, the sort of thing that may be called a miracle of genius. Before the figure was again shrouded in the wet clothes that keep the clay from cracking, it had become to us not a conventional photograph image but “The Beloved Physician” himself.
“Well,” said the sculptor, stepping back with a smile, “are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” said his visitor, but with hesitation.
“I know what you miss,” said Mr. Borglum. “It’s the artificial something you used to consider Dr. Trudeau’s expression.” As he spoke he was modeling a small piece of clay in his hands. Presently he placed over the strained eyes of the face the frame of a pince-nez. And at that instant the illusion was miraculously complete. It was as if the doctor would presently lean forward and say: “Have you read Osler’s Redemption of Man? No? Oh, you must, you must!”
The figure was complete and ready for casting by the end of May 1917, but there were delays caused by the sculptor’s enforced absence on other work and the beginning of the aircraft
investigation. Also there were vexatious problems of cutting, setting and preparing the site for the statue. All these were generously solved by Doctors Walter James and Lawrenson Brown and others of Trudeau’s physician friends. Eventually the memorial was unveiled in August 1918. On the marble was carved Dr. Trudeau’s favorite quotation:
Guerir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours.
(Heal sometimes, soothe often, comfort always.)
Carl Snyder, the writer, at that time connected with Harper’s, after driving to Saranac to examine the statue wrote this friendly word to the sculptor:
May I tell you that I have never seen a portrait that impressed me so deeply. This was equally true of my wife. She and I agreed that we never had seen a piece of sculpture that seemed so alive. It seems to tell the whole life story of an extraordinary man. And I am told you only saw him once!
Man! Man! Man! With the genius to do magnificent things like this, to create and to embody the living likeness of a great man, why, why, why do you waste your precious time on anything else?
One answer to the query, which he was often heard to give, was that he was never given half the work that he was capable of and wanted to do. In quick succession members of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn wanted a monument to Henry Ward Beecher, the famous pulpit orator; the Wheeler family in Bridgeport wanted a memorial fountain in honor of the inventor of the sewing machine. For St. John’s Church, near by, he was asked to make a reredos back of the altar. From North Carolina came a call from the Daughters of the Confederacy to build a memorial to Henry Wyatt, the first Southern soldier killed in the War between the States. From England came a committee to join with Americans to plan monuments along the border between the United States and Canada to celebrate the hundred years of peace between the two nations.
All these were not enough to keep him busy. He wrote an incredible number of letters to committees that were planning public monuments, but he got very few commissions that way. Most of his jobs came through friends or others who had seen his work and liked it. Every commission brought a different set of characters and circumstances with it and threw different side lights on the sculptor’s personality. His commission to build a memorial to Altgeld in Chicago was due to the crusading spirit which had made him widely known as a champion of democracy in art as well as in politics.
Governor Altgeld of Illinois had become widely and unfavorably known as “the governor who pardoned the Haymarket rioters” after they had been tried and condemned as bomb throwers. Such was his reputation for a long time, during which he remained silent. Then an unbiased study of his career brought about a reversal of public opinion. It was presented that he was wholly unselfish; that his life motive had been to help the underprivileged; that, in the words of the poet Vachel Lindsay, “He set himself tasks which took a lion’s courage and a martyr’s heart,” and that to carry out his purpose “He threw his reputation and his health into the furnace every hour.”
So it happened in 1913, eleven years after Altgeld’s death, the Illinois legislature appropriated $25,000 for an Altgeld monument. A committee of five was appointed, including Louis F. Post of the Department of Labor, with instructions to select a sculptor after a public competition. Two competitions were held, bringing over thirty models, none satisfactory. In a letter to the committee the landscape artist, Walter B. Griffin, wrote:
This particular task should be committed to a sculptor who has attained in his art that fundamental character, the American ideal, which Altgeld served in his own field and exemplified in his career. There appears to be in our time at least one sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, who is recognized as bearing to the plastic arts a relation like Whitman’s to literature. It would be a pity not to avail ourselves of the opportunity to bring together such a man and the work he is so eminently fitted for.
Following this suggestion the committee awarded the commission to Gutzon, who received it with intense satisfaction as a recognition of what he stood for in public life as well as a testimonial to his ability as an artist. When the news came out the Chicago Tribune published this comment:
A powerful illustration of how not to do it is the history of the competition for the Altgeld monument. The commission has now been awarded to Gutzon Borglum without his being required to furnish any preliminary sketch, design or idea. That is, the committee has done what it should have done in the first place—selected a sculptor and left him free to do the work.
General competitions are so unjust to the competitors and so unproductive of good results as to be forbidden by the American Institute of Architects. The best architects never enter them, and the better sculptors have learned to follow their example.
When the contract was signed in April 1914 the sculptor began to work on two different models. Before they were done he wrote to his friend Felix Frankfurter saying that he had been reading up on Altgeld’s life and ending his letter with this statement: “That man has become a perfect giant to me. He was a kind of hero when I was a kid, but he lived out his governorship and died before I got back from Europe. So he comes along almost like a new star to me.”
Of the two small models submitted, the one selected by the committee represented Altgeld standing on a slight eminence, his right hand extended as if quelling a disturbance, his left stretched over a man, woman and child beside him. The pedestal was low, so that the governor seemed to be near his audience, his expression was noble, almost defiant in his determination to protect his charges. The committee unanimously accepted the full-size model of this statue except for slight changes which the sculptor approved. The figure was cast in bronze and erected in Lincoln Park for unveiling on Labor Day, 1915.
Then a thing occurred which to the sculptor was incomprehensible. The model had been on exhibition in the Chicago Art Institute for a whole year with no voice raised against it. Then various municipal art commissions suddenly declared they didn’t approve of it and would not permit it to be unveiled. The reason, they said, was that it was not big enough and that the laborer’s family seemed to occupy a servile position. To this the chairman of the purchasing committee, Daniel Cruice, made a quick and indignant reply:
I take exception to the criticisms which have attempted to show an insult to labor. I do not believe that labor is making a fight on the statue. Altgeld’s enemies in life are the enemies of his memory. They do not wish the perpetuation of the principles for which he stood. Consequently they are doing all in their power to destroy any reminder that such a man lived.
When the sculptor declared in characteristic fashion that he forgot more about art overnight than ordinary art commissions learn in a lifetime the Brooklyn Eagle, always quick to record a Borglum controversy, declared editorially:
The controversy between Gutzon Borglum and the Municipal Art Commission of Chicago over the statue of the late John P. Altgeld adds to the gaiety of nations. The Art Commission criticizes the conception of the work—Altgeld raising a protecting hand over a man, a woman and a child, typifying the working classes. It likewise objects to the proportions of the Borglum design. And the artist answers in his characteristic temper.
It was the fate of John P. Altgeld to be a storm center in his life. Now he becomes a post-mortem center. Large elements of the Chicago electorate still doubt the historic proportions of the Governor who pardoned the Haymarket bomb men. It is not to be wondered at if the proportions of the Borglum Altgeld annoy them. Nor is it surprising that the design, representing the Governor as the laboring people’s defender, gives offense to them. It is a safe wager that this element in the electorate is represented by the Municipal Art Commission.
The issue is really not an art issue at all. In essence it is historic and political, or rather sociological. Altgeld’s keenness as a thinker and debater no one who ever heard him doubts. That he showed moral courage in that historic pardon, most of his enemies will concede. Our guess is that Borglum will succeed in immortalizing him as the friend of labor, though many obstacles may first have to be overcome.
The surprising denouement was furnished by William H. (Big Bill) Thompson. He was then mayor and had made an appointment to discuss the matter with the Art Commission. They were waiting for him at the Art Institute where his messenger rather bluntly announced to them that the Commission was no longer in existence nor had any authority, its term of office having expired. “The statue looks good to me,” said the mayor, “and the committee doesn’t.”
So the memorial was unveiled as scheduled on Labor Day, 1915, before an immense crowd including thousands of labor-union men and women. Governor Edward F. Dunne presided, and William Jennings Bryan delivered the speech of the day. The sculptor made a puzzled comment:
I have been not a little surprised that in America, the foster mother of mankind, there exist no memorials of consequence dealing with the struggles and pathos of life. It is a matter of amazement and regret that Chicago, a city whose life has been crowned through sacrifice and struggle as it has been sweetened by suffering, should show antagonism to a memorial which develops or suggests a humane situation where one human being befriends another.
There is something stern and vital behind this. But censorship, be it ever so official, will not arrest one beat in the natural heart of mankind, nor stop the natural expression of what is true, of what is good. And that which is true and good is, at least, a full sister of that which is beautiful. Millet’s “Angelus” and his “Man With a Hoe” would be subjects of supreme beauty and pathos in sculpture, admirably composed for public parks. How much more human and akin would be this interpretation of life than the cheap allegories or conventional vagaries which the unthinking call art.
General Daniel Butterfield was a Union hero who distinguished himself at “Little Round Top” in the battle of Gettysburg. His wife outlived him and at her death bequeathed a fortune, part of which she specified should be spent on a monument for her husband. She left instructions for the unknown sculptor who might be chosen by her executors. He was to visit the battlefield, familiarize himself with Little Round Top and, so far as possible, incorporate the contour of that famous site in his design for the monument. He was also to study certain photographs of the general, one of which represented him standing with folded arms and wearing a cocked hat, “as in the bas-relief at Utica.”
In the contract all that was said about the figure was that it was to be over eight feet high, in the dress uniform of a major general, supported by a foundation of natural work representing Round Top. It was specified that the sculptor was to make a model forty inches high and that when that was approved he would proceed with a full-size model “which shall be submitted to the executors for their approval and acceptance and shall be in accordance with the will of Julia L. Butterfield.”
All that appears plain enough, but there was a catch which would presently cause the sculptor no end of tribulation. To him it seemed that in financial reward it was the best commission he had ever received, the only one from which he might expect a reasonable profit. For a single figure, with side panels at the base, he was to receive $54,000, a generous allowance. The chairman of the executive committee, Colonel E. M. Ehlers, a Dane by birth, showed him one photograph of the general in full-dress uniform, arms folded, wearing an imposing military hat with a plume. Another photograph showed him hatless, with his hands at his side. But this, said Colonel Ehlers, should be ignored because Mrs. Butterfield preferred the other.
Following his instructions in good faith the sculptor made a forty-inch model, using the selected photograph as a guide for the pose. One of the executors, Mr. Hagar, criticized the nose and mustache of the model and the sculptor changed these features to his satisfaction. All four executors then approved the model and signed the voucher for the payment due at this stage of the work. When the full-size model was accepted only three executors were present, but again the voucher for payment was signed by all four. The model was then cast in plaster and sent to the Gorham Company to be put into bronze.
Gutzon was delegated to find a place for the memorial, preferably in Central Park, New York City. He was told that the park was out of the question but was offered a site near Riverside Drive, opposite Grant’s Tomb, where the statue was placed in January 1917. The secretary of the executors, Dr. May, in formal acknowledgment that the work was completed, added this friendly, personal word:
I am sure that it will ever remain a monument to your art. Could Mrs. Butterfield see it, it would have her complete approval and gratify her pride in leaving a memorial so creditable to her husband and to the city. It is located, as I can tell you, only a short distance from the home of her birth and girlhood.
And then the unbelievable happened. The three executors with whom most of the sculptor’s contacts had been made all died within a very short time of one another. Everything was left in the hands of the fourth, Albert Hagar, who announced that he had never liked the statue, that the “bas-relief in Utica” mentioned in the will showed the general without a hat, with his arms down, and that he didn’t think the figure was big enough. He wanted the whole thing done over and refused any further payment unless this was done. The worst feature of this arbitrary decision was that many beneficiaries of Mrs. Butterfield’s will could not be paid until the status of the monument was settled. Hagar’s sudden reversal was no doubt sincere but it made inconvenience and trouble for many.
The Gorham Company offered to handle the suit which had to be brought against Hagar. The case dragged into the time when the sculptor had the aircraft investigation on his hands. Meanwhile the contractors who had done the granite work sued Gutzon for the payment of their bill. Gorham had not been paid for the casting, the architects were clamoring for their money and Stamford taxes were in arrears. The suit was carried on at Cold Spring, near Poughkeepsie, so far away that the sculptor lost a whole day every time he appeared as a witness.
Of course the Gorham Company won the suit eventually, but payments were not made until 1920. By that time the sculptor had assigned what little would have been left over for him to other debtors, so it is doubtful if he ever received a penny for all his work on this big contract. It was said by people who should know that some of the Butterfield heirs went to the poorhouse while waiting for their inheritance. Gutzon blamed himself for having accepted the commission in the first place. When later the location of the statue had to be changed on account of the Rockefeller church construction he declared he wouldn’t mind if they dropped it into the Hudson River.
The Vance memorial for North Carolina, of which a copy stands in Statuary Hall in the nation’s capital, was made during this period. It remains where it was put in the first place.
The American Congress appropriated over one thousand million dollars that were expended for aviation during the nineteen months of war. When the armistice was signed, not a single American-made fighting or combat plane had reached the front. No American-made fighting or combat plane was ever produced. America depended upon her allies to furnish a few obsolete fighting planes with which our armies were equipped. Our contribution to wartime aircraft consisted of two hundred and thirteen “utterly dangerous” observation planes that reached the front with others on the way. That is the record. (Report of aircraft investigation under House resolution of June 4, 1919.)
Mr. Borglum is the man who started the entire aircraft investigation at the outset and performed a great public service. (Congressman James A. Frear, Wisconsin, speech to House of Representatives, Congressional Record, March 1, 1920.)
You may have gathered from the record thus far that Gutzon Borglum was a bit unused to doing things the way other people did them. There was only one of him, and there were so many of the rest of the population that maybe one shouldn’t be disturbed by this technique. He had a genius’ variety of talent; so it probably isn’t remarkable that his art studio should have been filled with frightening projects for roads, transportation, parks, breakwaters, engineering, airplane models, philosophy, abstract science and the saving of the world. He believed he could do anything—so he did it. All of this is fairly obvious on his history sheet. But, for all that, his investigation of the aircraft industry in 1918 remains today one of the most incredible things that ever happened to America.
We start our study of this attempt of one man to produce some honesty in a $1,000,000,000 delusion with the knowledge that Borglum was not only a fairly competent theoretical engineer, but also a practical mechanic who had been following closely the growth of air power. And that is fortunate, because few other matters in the aircraft investigation are that obvious or sensible. In November 1917, after the United States had been eight months in World War I, he got a look at an airplane factory in Dayton, Ohio. He was shocked, as he admitted, almost into a state of speechlessness. He had a brief visit with a man in a high position in the direction of aircraft production, listened to him, and, instead of going home, made a quick trip to Washington. Next morning he was at the White House, demanding to see President Wilson.
And here is the first amazing part of his procedure. He had seen that the United States wasn’t producing airplanes and he felt that something ought to be done about it. But he didn’t look for anybody to help him prepare the case for presentation to somebody who might be able to correct the situation. It never occurred to him that he needed any. The man best able to get quick action was, undoubtedly, the President of the United States.
Gutzon Borglum knew Woodrow Wilson and Woodrow Wilson knew Gutzon Borglum, but the pair took a dim view of each other, as well they might. Borglum, in his Progressive-party campaign, had been loudly critical of the Wilson administration. Wilson, who was a scholar, appreciated Borglum’s art. But, as the record shows, he didn’t think enough of his politics to consider him a crusader for the democratic ideal.
And yet Borglum was appointed, with authority direct from the President, to conduct his investigation from an office in the War Department. He ran the boys into corners for several months, and he stirred up senators and congressmen and Department heads and cabinet officers. That in the end his inquiry failed to put anybody in jail or get back any of the §1,000,000,000 is not surprising. What is incredible about the whole affair is that he was allowed to start at all.
There isn’t much doubt about our dismal performance in building airplanes in 1917-1918. The propagandized public was a long time finding out that the chief trouble with our planes was their continued nonexistence. But we did get to hear about the “dangerous” De Haviland Fours, of which we sent 213 to France. This plane was widely celebrated across the country as “The Flaming Coffin.” It had a large gas tank mounted in the most vulnerable position, and a pilot was seldom able to get away from one after it was hit.
Soldier after soldier from the front came before the Frear committee to tell of seeing his comrades shot down in these planes. Yet reports of such catastrophes, as the Frear report scathingly pointed out, did not prevent Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and Aircraft Director John D. Ryan from continuing the manufacture of DH 4s.
After the war the taxpayers began to find out what they had purchased for §1,000,000,000. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, ace flyer and national hero, told them when he came home to testify before an investigating committee. “Why did the army continue to use French planes?” he was asked. This was his reply:
The answer is simple. We hadn’t any others except the two hundred and thirteen “flaming coffins.” The American air forces were in dire need of machines of all kinds. We were thankful to get any kind that would fly. The French had already discarded the Nieuport for the steadier, stronger Spad, and our government was thus able to buy from the French a certain number of these out-of-date Nieuports for American pilots—or got on without. Consequently our American pilots in France were compelled to venture out in Nieuports against more experienced pilots in more modern machinery. None of us in France could understand what prevented our great country from furnishing machines equal to the best in the world. Many a gallant life was lost to American aviation in those early months of 1918, the responsibility for which must lie heavily on some guilty consciences.
There had been a lot of inquiry before the House began its investigation. And when Congress had finished there was a widespread display of indignation with the aid of aeronautic associations, farmers’ associations and two New York daily newspapers. For a while the scandals they dug up overshadowed what had caused the wrath of Borglum. He had worked in wartime and in a closed circle, and what he found out was reported to the President and the few others who had a right to hear. He was satisfied with that arrangement, for he had no faith in the efficiency of official inquiries. On this subject he said:
There is a radical defect in a system that occasions such investigations. A political inquiry of this nature must inevitably arouse enmity and opposition in the most powerful quarters. The credit, nay, the very existence, of the government in power is at stake. An inquiry may seem to start something, but what it starts is an avalanche that will surely crush its initiators and the truth they seek to discover. Thus they will remain buried under the debris and obscured by the dust.
When Gutzon Borglum first took his demand for an aircraft investigation to the White House he was politely, if somewhat shortly, received by Joseph Tumulty, the President’s secretary. Mr. Wilson was frightfully busy on account of the war, Mr. Tumulty mentioned, but he would undoubtedly be able to read a note explaining the purposes of Mr. Borglum’s visit. Mr. Borglum left the note and went home to Stamford.
There in due time he received a short letter from Mr. Tumulty saying that the President wished Mr. Borglum to get in touch with Mr. Howard Coffin of the Aeronautics Board. Mr. Borglum thought this humorous inasmuch as Mr. Coffin was principally interested in automobile production, which was what Borglum found wrong with the Aeronautics Board. So he wrote something of the sort to the President’s secretary on November 22, 1917. He finished it somewhat tartly:
The program of the Aeronautics Board was invented by Automobile Production men before they had picked up their representation on that board, or even before the appropriations had been passed. They are now engaged in a grandiose project, incapable of fulfillment, which cannot but bring scandal and disaster, and which, in turn, can harm your administration.
President Wilson was disturbed and sent a reply on December 5, asking Borglum to point out specifically the weaknesses in the aircraft organization as it then stood. Borglum replied at once and suggested that the Aeronautics Board should be really two boards, one of design and one of production, and that the military board should have nothing to do but order what sort of planes it needed. When he had posted this suggestion he went back to Dayton to take another look at the plant he had first seen, and he loitered on his way home at the Curtiss factory in Buffalo. That was a better-looking establishment, but it seemed disorganized and full of idle men, and it wasn’t producing any airplanes.
Then, on Christmas Day, 1917, he wrote to Wilson the letter that, no matter what you may think of it, put his aircraft investigation in business. He said:
Since writing you, I have visited two other factories and attended several aeronautics conferences. This so disturbs me that I must write further with the hope that Congressional investigation of the aeronautics bodies may be avoided while there is yet time to correct conditions from within and so avoid the ship-and-ordnance scandals.
If the opportunity arrives, I will tell you of conditions which strike at the root of honest, disinterested public service; of irregularities, graft, self-interest and collateral profiting in the very heart of our production department. But public knowledge of actual aeronautic conditions would be a military disaster to American arms, as well as an unwarranted blow at our Government.
Therefore I suggest:
Immediate selection of three competent, fearless and incorruptible men, whose loyalty to you is above question. Give them authority, without publicity, to go quickly over the present plan and accomplishment in our aircraft and report on:
Engines, planes and propellers.
Contracts placed where, system employed selecting contractors.
Supply sources, by whom held.
Relation of members of production board to supply controls, also to contractors.
Test experiments. Why are our planes inferior to all foreign planes and vastly poorer than German planes?
What use is being made of data constantly being sent here covering Germany’s planes.
Such inquiry should not audit accounts. A larger principle is at stake.
For this report you need a highly trained engineer, an expert production man and a man who knows the art of machine flying and the history and possibilities of machines.
1. Your engineer should be an internal-combustion engine man who knows that an airplane engine is not merely a refined truck engine. He should know propellers. This latter item has almost been forgotten. No reliable propeller exists that can safely be standardized.
2. Your production manager should be trained as a specialist on organization.
3. The third position I should like to fill personally. There are no principles related to flying heavier-than-air machines that I am not thoroughly familiar with. I feel as Da Vinci did when seeking a commission. He wrote: “As for that art, I know all that is known.” The open-mindedness of this carries its own forgiveness. I observe accurately, avoid prejudices, have no fears that I know of. I know I’m a good organizer, one who can handle and keep the confidence of men. I am not only anxious but prepared to serve you and the great service which you, for America, have undertaken. I could put into your hands in the briefest possible time a report on existing conditions and war needs, and avoid scandal. Investigations during wartime should be periodic and automatic. This would rob them of abnormal interest and make them policy affecting functions.
Somebody slipped the letter out and published it. The automobile industry was noisily indignant and Borglum was much annoyed. But those results somehow seem natural in the circumstances. What must continue to confuse students of political procedure for some time is the fact that it brought a quick appointment. On the second of January President Wilson had written a letter. The Secretary of War would be pleased to give Mr. Borglum full authority. Stanley King of the Secretary’s personal staff would be at Mr. Borglum’s disposal for advice or assistance. Mr. Borglum would be put in touch with General George Squier, whom he already knew, and he was to have the assistance of any experts he might think required. He was to report directly to President Wilson.
Why this appointment should have come through is one of the things that surpasses all understanding. It is quite likely that Wilson suspected what was wrong with aircraft production and thought an investigation by a recognized Republican not connected with politics might stir up some action without hurting the administration. That is one thought. It also comes to anyone who has watched political maneuvering that a good way to get rid of an investigator who was getting troublesome would be to put him where he couldn’t talk for publication.
Anyway, the sculptor went to Washington, notified the White House and the War Department of his arrival, called on the Secretary of State and was assigned to a room on the second floor of the War Department offices. Borglum felt that he would have every possible aid. The Secretary’s office door was just across the hall.
Gutzon went to work at once. He asked Mr. King to get him a report on how many war planes had been ordered and how many delivered up to January 1, 1918. The War Department’s answer was quickly brought and easily digested: “Training planes contracted for, 7,500; delivered, 1,444. Service planes contracted for, 12,500; 4,000 to be built by Dayton Wright. Service planes delivered to January 1, 1918, none.”
Borglum called that same day on Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, who telephoned instructions to the Intelligence Bureau of the Navy. Naval records were laid open to the sculptor and he went through them personally, making what notes seemed relevant. Three days later when he went to the War Department he was informed that they had none of the records he requested—nor any memory of any. He was virtually compelled to pick up a copy of the Aeronautics Committee report from the office of the chairman, who apparently did not even know of its existence. He was blocked in an effort to get Intelligence reports on spy activities in Buffalo. Secret Service men were assigned to follow him wherever he went. One of his aides in the War Department warned two of his witnesses not to talk to him. He was informed of the looting of a bank in Dayton, Ohio, by an agile group which substituted Aeronautics Board agreements and checks for tangible assets. He was invited to join the Aeronautics Board, but he didn’t accept. He discovered that his office telephone was tapped and that his mail was being systematically examined. He opened an outside office as headquarters for his own aides, investigators and stenographers.
By the end of February he knew that we hadn’t planes of any kind and that we hadn’t engines of any kind and that, nearing the second year of war, we had less than 130,000 soldiers at the front and that they were using shoes, socks and other equipment provided by France and England.
Borglum went to talk about this to Secretary Baker. Baker, slumped in his chair with his feet on his desk, puffed his pipe and listened with indifference. Not until the condition of aircraft manufacture was reached did he show any animation. Then he shifted his feet and said casually, “Why, Borglum, you don’t think we are actually getting into this war, do you?”
“My God!” said Borglum. “Do you mean to tell me that all this is just a gesture?”
Baker nodded and puffed contentedly.
Borglum couldn’t contain himself. “Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that all America has to do is hint that she is going into war, loan Europe a lot of money, send over a regiment or two and that this is going to bluff Germany into retirement?”
“I mean,” Baker said, “that there won’t be any real war as far as we are concerned.” And so closed an astonishing interview.
Hurriedly and in anger Borglum made his second report to the President. He hadn’t been too successful with his first report; there had been leaks concerning its contents. His second report, which he delivered himself on February 9, was in the hands of Secretary Baker on February 11. Baker made light of it after it had become public property.
Who released the report was never learned, but shortly the newspapers had it and were charging that America, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars for aircraft, had produced nothing but brag and bluster; that we were in a war with no planes and no engines of our own. White House and War Office press departments began to make counter charges, ridiculing the report and charging Borglum with falsehood.
Washington seethed for a couple of weeks. Some unknown person called the Dayton factory to fill two freight trains with airplane parts and to paint on the boxcars in big letters, “Planes for Europe,” “Right of Way,” “Our Boys Need These Planes,” and similar legends. Newspaper reporters and government agents were posted between Dayton and Hoboken to see these trains pass with their painted signs. From them the news flashed to all parts of the country, and Borglum was a liar by official count.
Borglum had his own agents scattered over the route and he knew that not a single plane had left Dayton for anywhere. He was just getting part of the pay for his appointment. Verification of the reports of his own investigators was made two or three days later by General Goethals, whom he met at breakfast at the Metropolitan Club. General Goethals was then Quartermaster General and well acquainted with what was shipped out of Dayton. Borglum wrote in his journal:
About this time Senator Thomas of Colorado turned bitterly upon me and introduced a resolution “inquiring into the charges that Gutzon Borglum had so recklessly made.” A small committee, composed of himself as chairman, Senator Reed of Missouri, Senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Senator Wadsworth of New York was appointed. Its duty was to visit the factories against which Borglum had cast aspersions.
This committee proceeded via New Jersey up the Hudson to the great Curtiss plant, on to Detroit and down to Dayton. At Elizabeth, New Jersey, they reported that the speed and anxiety of the workmen to get parts of planes into cars and on their way to Hoboken was “little short of phenomenal.” The officer in charge was courteous to the senators but begged them to keep out of the way, saying that the boys in Europe needed planes and there must be no delay—all of which impressed the senators so much that they thanked him and left. Then they proceeded north to the Curtiss plant at Buffalo—a plant having 14,000 men on the payroll and producing only ten to twelve planes a day. (In Toronto a factory employing 2,800 people was producing twelve fighting planes and twenty-four training planes a day.) There was present the same kind of apparently furious activity which the senators had witnessed at Elizabeth.
The committee then went on to Dayton Field, where, after watching a schooling of the officers and a workout of the young men, they turned to leave. As they were walking away, the officer of the day approached Senator Reed and said, “Aren’t we going to be heard?” Without waiting for a reply he said, “I’m through. You can strip my buttons off, but I’ll have no more damned humbug. I am killing two boys a day. We dig two graves every morning before breakfast, just to be ready for their deaths. You may do what you like with me. I am through.”
As a result, so the senator himself told me, the committee determined to return secretly to the factories they had just visited. There the men who had brusquely pushed the committee aside in their anxiety to ship planes to Europe were disgorging the airplane parts they had so carefully boxed. Thomas, who had been very rude to me, wrote the report and presented it to a Senate that had less than a dozen members in their seats. He complained feelingly of the lack of interest, the lack of patriotism in a matter which had impugned the honor and the integrity of our War Department. To one of his committee he said afterward, “I wish there were some way I could apologize to Mr. Borglum and tell him how mistaken I have been.”
There was a little more to come before Gutzon could be through with his aircraft investigation. His inquiry had brought reliable evidence of the theft of securities worth more than a million dollars from a Western bank through the connivance of some members of the Aeronautics Board. This matter he took to Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, whom he had known for many years. With his own authority from the President he took it for granted that he would not have to tell the names of the people involved until after subpoenas for them had been issued. Hitchcock agreed. The next day he declared he couldn’t do it, and the day after that he made a speech in the Senate declaring that he had had a long conference with Mr. Borglum, had seen all the aircraft evidence and that there was nothing to it.
Monday morning Borglum saw Hitchcock and was in the middle of his attack when Senators Joseph Frelinghuysen, James Reed, John Thomas and James W. Wadsworth, the military committee, came into the room. Somewhat informally, as everything in Washington seems to have been done in those days, they sat down and listened to Borglum’s demand for blank subpoenas. Senator Reed nodded, stood up, and said, “Mr. Chairman, owing to the high character of this witness, I move that the subpoenas he asks be given. If he gets the evidence he says exists, I will move from the floor of the Senate the hanging of those men.”
Borglum thanked him. “Senator Reed,” he said, “I have not told you the half of it, and I can’t. I beg of you to give me the subpoenas and assist me in getting the evidence.” Frelinghuysen and Wadsworth seconded the motion.
The subpoenas voted by the committee were never issued, however. The chairman, in whose hands the matter was left, never seemed to find time. He retired to private life after the next election.
Borglum’s last interview with Hitchcock relative to the subpoenas was just about the last of his aircraft investigation. President Wilson telegraphed that Gutzon had “misunderstood” his letter of January 2, and that he wished the inquiry stopped. When the sculptor was slow in stopping, the President made his order of dismissal public. Borglum published a letter in which he asked: “What is it, Mr. President, in this country that you are afraid of? What is it in this America that the President of the United States dare not face?”
Charles Evans Hughes conducted the next investigation. He worked from May until October in 1918. The New York Times of November 1, 1918, printed his report. Gutzon said of it that it reminded him of the story of an Irishman who was sent to locate a bucket lost in the bottom of a well. He climbed down and he climbed back with great difficulty. Then he returned to his office and reported: “Sure, it’s there.”
And that, in truth, was the result of the aircraft investigation. There were other inquiries and other suggestions, but nobody went to jail. Nobody seems to have been seriously discommoded. There weren’t any airplanes that anybody could lay a hand on. And the $1,000,000,000 just disappeared.
Gutzon Borglum was much disturbed about this. He could get angry thinking of it to the day of his death. But it always seemed to a casual friend that he was puzzled by the wrong side of airplane production. What he should have contemplated as the scintillant miracle of all the days he was to live was the fact that he was allowed to make the investigation at all.
It is a little late after all these years to try to figure out how a billion dollars could disappear without leaving a trace on somebody. Borglum used to get indignant about the matter ten or twelve years afterward, but the targets of his wrath were always anonymous. He had some shrewd suspicions, but left at the bottom of the well was the evidence which in this situation would have been necessary to convict anyone of wrongdoing.
To give the fiasco a fair estimate, it seems likely that we were very young then. Up to the time when war was declared we had left the building of our planes to rugged individuals who whittled out the parts for them with jackknives and put them together in moldering barns and sheds. When we had to get an air force aloft we did the best we could, which wasn’t very good. We didn’t trust our cow-barn airplane manufacturers. Largely, they weren’t where we could find them anyway. They had gone into the air corps themselves.
So the searchers for planes took a chance on some people who apparently knew something about a gasoline motor and how to make forms out of tin—that is to say, of course, the automobile makers. These lads muddled through and nobody got any airplanes. They produced pieces in large numbers and blithely shipped them away to places where they were supposed to be assembled into airplanes. But, apparently, nobody had thought to provide an assembler.
It is one thought about this—a thought that would have meant nothing to Gutzon Borglum—that nobody about the airplane production, if it can be called that, got rich ... not so far as can be determined. Nobody seems to have had the remotest idea of what he was doing, and it takes at least a billion dollars to keep thousands of men in jobs where they have nothing to do but nothing.
None of his sundry war activities seems to have had much of an effect on Gutzon Borglum’s handiwork. His figure of James McConnell, in the monument to him on the University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville, is one of the first memorials to the First World War to be erected, and it is surely one of the finest. It was because of his intense interest in aeronautics that he knew about McConnell and got this commission. And his creative skill had certainly been enriched by new experiences.
The McConnell figure was a labor of love and, considering the nature of the subject, could hardly have been otherwise. Its start is told in a prospectus of the project signed by Edwin A. Alderman, president of the university: