CHAPTER ONE

_MOUNTAINTOP_

If you are studying the history of Gutzon Borglum, the place to stand is at Stone Mountain, Georgia.

It is an impressive spot, quiet, little visited, a vast bubble of granite rising abruptly some 800 feet out of a grassy plain, and thousands of feet long. Good roads lead to it from Atlanta. There is, or used to be, a little information office at the foot of its towering cliff, and usually there is someone about to sell souvenirs or to give a sketchy and bewildering account of the mountain’s history. High on the cliff there is a flat place from which several acres of surface rock have been removed; and to the left of the flat is the somewhat unidentifiable head of a man. The guide will tell you that this is the representation of Robert E. Lee, as indeed it might be--Lee or anybody.

There is little left to mark the handiwork of man in this neighborhood. Grass and brush have covered the fallen rock. The scaffolds are down, the tool sheds and storehouses vanished. The steel hooks are gone from the face of the cliff. There are no great funds in the hands of the local patriots. But this is the place. It was because of his work here, because of what he discovered about granite at Stone Mountain, and because of his carving of the head of Robert E. Lee, which today nobody can rightfully attribute to him, that Gutzon Borglum’s memory will be a long time in dying.

Stone Mountain’s story is often repeated and seldom--very seldom--authentic. What you see of the place today is mostly what was here on one dire day in February 1925 when Borglum’s work on it came to an end--forever. But there is much about it that anyone who cares may know.

Mrs. Helen Plane, an aging Daughter of the Confederacy, had dreamed one night that the history of the South’s Great Cause might be carved in vast figures on the surface of this cliff, General Robert E. Lee, President Jefferson Davis and a list of towering generals marching forever across the granite at the head of the defiant troops. She brought the matter to the attention of Borglum, and he was probably the one artist in the world who would understand what she wanted done and would find a way to get it done. That was in 1915. Borglum made a trip from Washington to Atlanta and inspected the mountain.

In 1924 this fantastic undertaking was no longer anybody’s dream; it was well under way. The first group of figures, Lee and Davis and Jackson and the generals, had been outlined on the mountain, following the flag to perpetual glory. Lee himself was appearing in a stature that Art had never before given to anyone anywhere.

Machinery was in place for diagram projection, power, hoisting, drilling, carving, hauling, dynamiting. The business of high-explosive carving had been brought to a point of almost unbelievable fineness and accuracy. After years of money shortage the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association was looking into a debt-free future with a million or two dollars of surplus cash in the treasury. The last march of the Confederacy was definitely on its way....

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Up in Pierre, South Dakota, State Historian Doane Robinson, a scholar with patriotism, an extraordinary love for beauty and very little knowledge of magnificent finance, looked at the news photographs of the Stone Mountain project and studied the rotogravure outlines of what the sculptured cliff would look like when Gutzon Borglum finished with it. And he wondered that nobody had ever thought of trying a similar scheme in the mountains of South Dakota, the Black Hills. He wrote a letter to Borglum inquiring why.

The sculptor wrote that he was perfectly willing to look into the sculptural possibilities of the Black Hills if anybody in South Dakota was willing to provide the necessary expenses. A few months later Robinson wrote, somewhat erroneously, that the state of South Dakota would underwrite this not too considerable sum; so Borglum came out, looked at the Hills and toured their hinterland late in the summer of 1925.

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In February 1925 the sculptor had a bitter disagreement with some of the executive committee of the Confederate Memorial. He thought these men careless in handling public funds. They made complaints and fired him. He broke up his models and went away from Georgia. Without him the mountain stayed uncarved.

That same year a group of Black Hills patriots guaranteed a fund of $25,000 for a patriotic mountain carving. Gifts of $5,000 each were received from Senator Coleman DuPont, Charles E. Rushmore--who gave his name to the peak later selected for the memorial in the Black Hills--The Chicago and North Western Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway and the Homestake Mine. Herbert Myrick contributed a donation of $1,500. The Northwestern Public Service Company of Huron, South Dakota, had offered a power plant. Doane Robinson sent out another call to Borglum, and Borglum made a second trip to the Black Hills.

In the summer of 1927 Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States, dedicated the Rushmore Mountain project. And before the ending of the Second World War the carving of this peak was finished--the only thing of its kind on the face of the earth.

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From the top of Mount Rushmore four Presidents of the United States--Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--gaze out from an unbelievable block of hard rock into glowing sunlight, placid but remarkably alive. Hundreds of thousands of persons have come from the far corners of the world to look at them, and are still coming in expanding companies. The money spent by the Treasury of the United States for the carving of this peak has long since been returned to its source through the gasoline tax of the tourists. The faces of four men important in the history of the country will be preserved to us, barring some unpredictable catastrophe, until the mountains are worn as flat as the surrounding prairies. And an interesting feature of all this is that there were only a handful of people in the world who believed it possible until it was done.

It is safe to say that the carving of Mount Rushmore would never have been attempted and could never have been carried out save for the early experiment on Stone Mountain. Borglum had to learn how to remove large masses of rock--more than 50,000 tons in his first twenty months in Georgia. So he had learned how to carve with dynamite and had trained stone workers so well that they could blast down to within three inches of the surface to be chiseled. He learned about drills and their sharpening. He learned how to suspend his workmen on slings that were easily maneuvered and entirely safe. He found out how to project patterns from a distance onto the rock to be carved. And he knew how to do all these things quickly when, eventually, he moved on to Rushmore.

On the South Dakota memorial his fame now rests and probably will continue to rest until the end of time. He might possibly have felt bitter about that. The sculpture into which he poured his greatest enthusiasm was undoubtedly the Confederate memorial. It had movement instead of stasis. It told a story in a language that no man could fail to understand. The piece of his carving that he himself loved best may have been the seated Lincoln at Newark, New Jersey. None of his other works--nor any sculpture in the world--is as big as the work on Rushmore. But not at this time will any expert in sculpture come to select one of the carvings of Mount Rushmore as Borglum’s masterpiece.

That is not to say that the Four Faces are not well done. They are. Lincoln’s has the same pathos that marks Borglum’s head of him in the Capitol at Washington. Jefferson and Washington come to us out of the unphotographed past of more than a century ago as real men. Theodore Roosevelt many of us knew when he was alive, and he is himself. But all four of them are overpowering because of their size. They are the product of an art that few men ever attempted before and none accomplished.

It is a striking thing about Borglum that nobody knew very much about him, even his friends. More people know of him now than ever did when he was living, and to most of them he is a man whose sole work was the carving of Mount Rushmore. Few of them know of the tragedy of Stone Mountain. Virtually none has ever heard of his Wars of America Memorial in Newark--forty-two human figures and two horses cast in bronze.

Some of his pieces that few people know about--his horses, his figures of Lincoln, whom he devoutly loved, his statue to James McConnell on the University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville, his simple tribute to Edward L. Trudeau--show his genius as a sculptor. His other pursuits are in dozens of record books, already dusty and forgotten.

For example, he was a member of the New York City Parks Association for a dozen years, and until the day he quit he was a factor in keeping the parks free from injurious exploitation. He organized a bus company in Stamford. He somehow became a leader of the Progressive party in Connecticut. He conducted an investigation of airplane manufacture during the First World War. In the same war he gave the use of his grounds and what money he could raise for the recruiting of a Czecho-Slovak expeditionary force. He designed roads and reconstructed historic old buildings. He contrived waterways and beautified highways and rivers. He designed coins and medals. He invented projection apparatus and hoisting machinery. He wrote magazine and newspaper articles and built up an amazing file of information about sculpture. He invented an airplane. He laid out a breakwater for Corpus Christi, Texas. He experimented with dynamite so long that he could calculate stone removal in ounces. And as he continued his work of mountain carving he made himself an engineer in a new and difficult trade.

It is interesting to note that he did all of these things well. Some have said that he had a touchy temper, but those of us who knew him, say, over forty years didn’t think so. He could never understand that money might have a different value to other people than it had to him. He would get annoyed when the treasurer of one of his projects would hesitate to empty the treasury for a power plant or some other machinery at the moment he needed it. He got genuinely angry only at people he suspected of being dishonest.

Neither did he make many enemies. One man, long a member of the executive committee of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission, probably knew him longer in irritating circumstances than anyone else on earth. Once he came down from Mount Rushmore to Rapid City frothing at the mouth.

“All he knows about money for this business is that somebody has to dig it up,” he roared. “He thinks I make it out of something just because he needs it. He’d bust the whole state of South Dakota in two weeks just because he needs some dynamite or an A-rig.”

“But,” someone inquired, “do you think he’ll get this memorial finished?”

“Hell, yes!” he roared. “And nobody else could do it either!”

One is surprised that such a diversified character could have had much time left to spend in sculpture. As a matter of fact, he probably did more of it than any other individual in his profession and time. He was a prodigious worker as well as a talented dilettante in fields where he thought his influence needed. His paintings between 1890 and 1901 seem to have been virtually numberless. Many of them are appearing now and then, more valuable than ever.

Some of his better sculpture has disappeared. One of his pieces was used by a lady as security for a loan. It has gone from human ken. His study of Woodrow Wilson at Poznan, Poland, was uprooted and no doubt melted by the Nazis in the Second World War. A second artist took the hat off Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain “because Lee would never wear a hat in a place where ladies were present.” The face as one sees it today was altered in this thoughtful improvement. Much of Borglum’s early work seems to have passed through similar vicissitudes.

However, most of what he did throughout his creative years seems to be with us still--statues in a dozen states, small ones, grand ones, but always anatomically perfect ones. If he had never done anything but the Newark Lincoln and the Wars of America group, he would have done enough to put him among the leaders of his art. But beside those and a generous scattering of bronze and marble all across the United States, there is still Rushmore. His own criticism of Rushmore is still the most apropos: “They’ll be a long time wearing that one down.”