CHAPTER TEN

_PUBLIC MEMORIALS_

It isn’t remarkable that Borglum had virtually all the work he could do in the early 1900s. Nobody in New York seems to have been talking about anyone else. He was no mute and long-suffering artist. He was somebody who knew how to answer back ... and he did ... and the press loved him.

Gutzon was not disturbed because many of his commissions came to him through people who knew nothing whatever about sculpture except that it was expensive.

“It’s no matter,” he would say. “If they knew anything about it, they’d probably be calling for somebody else.” Nevertheless, it is true that the commissions came from people and localities as varied as those he had to do with in his own swirling life. There is, for instance, the story of the John Mackay statue in Nevada. It begins with the revival of his boyhood friendship with Bob Davis, and it is typical of how things came to him.

One day in 1908 in some puzzlement he answered a telephone call from _Munsey’s Magazine_ and heard the explosive voice of Editor Bob Davis, a voice he hadn’t heard in nearly twenty years.

“I knew you in Los Angeles--remember?” the editor began. “I have something in your line I want to talk to you about. Can you have lunch with me?”

So they had a reunion at a hotel near the studio and a pleasant meal during which nothing at all was said about sculpture. Gutzon thought that Davis was going to ask him to write an article and had quickly decided to do it. Then suddenly Davis came to his subject:

“Borglum,” he said, “would you like to make a statue of John Mackay?”

“Of course,” Gutzon answered in astonishment. “Who wouldn’t make a statue of a citizen like that?”

“Well,” said Davis, “my brother Sam is in town. The state of Nevada has trusted him with a commission. The state has authorized and voted some money for the statue, but Clarence Mackay has taken over the responsibility of financing it. So if you will take the job----”

“Let us go and see Sam,” Gutzon suggested. The next day, after a meeting with Mackay, he got the commission.

Gutzon was more than ordinarily pleased. He was doing a lot of work but nothing spectacular. He had known of Mackay since boyhood and felt that a statue to him would attract national interest.

John W. Mackay, lest people of our war-tossed world forget it, was an international personality for several reasons. He was, among other things, one of the Big Four of the Comstock Lode, a silver king and a builder of the first cable laid across the Atlantic. He had been a consistent fighter with a tough constitution and no feeling, ever, that he could fail to win.

Gutzon told Clarence Mackay that he would need all the photographs that might be available of the man and also all the data, news and rumor about him that might still be extant. Mackay saw the point. He not only gathered up all the information that his agents could find, but he visited the studio every morning on his way from Long Island to Broadway and spent a half hour reminiscing with the sculptor. Gutzon presently began to feel that he knew John W. Mackay pretty well.

The statue, inasmuch as it had to stand in the open, was scheduled to be eight or nine feet tall. Because of the static nature of the material, Gutzon said, anything less than that would look smaller than human. He made careful sketches to determine position, expression and general composition, and all of this took several months.

“I want to show my father as he was,” Mackay said, “a workman in the mines out of which his wealth and his position in life came.”

Because of this the model showed the capitalist in the dress of a miner--top boots, loose shirt open at the throat and shapeless working trousers. The left hand was grasping a pick handle against which the body leaned. The right hand was upturned, holding a piece of quartz.

Clarence Mackay liked it. When it was done he asked Gutzon to take it to Nevada and find a place to put it. “It is very difficult work to make a statue,” he said. “I think it is more difficult to find the right spot to display it. And I think the man who is qualified for one job is best qualified for the other.”

Thus began a new and complicated adventure. Gutzon met Sam Davis and went to Carson City, Nevada, carrying letters of introduction to state officials. There they met Governor Sparks, who looked interested but extremely puzzled.

Carson City was without parks, city squares or, for that matter, any cultivated landscape. The governor scratched his head and said, “Doesn’t seem to be much place where you could put a statue around here ... unless you want to stick it out in the middle of the street.”

The local organizations--patriotic, political, business, social--all had something of the governor’s attitude but were guided, in public action, by good old Western individualism. Each one suggested where Gutzon could put his statue, but no two could reach an agreement. The sculptor labored with them for several weeks and got very annoyed. He began to think that there was no reason for locating the work in Carson City. The right place for it, he

[Illustration: STONE MOUNTAIN]

[Illustration: WORKING PLATFORM NEAR SUMMIT OF STONE MOUNTAIN]

[Illustration: MODEL OF STONE MOUNTAIN GROUP

This was the model which Borglum destroyed.]

thought, was Virginia City, where Mackay had operated. But Virginia City was in worse shape than Carson.

He came one night to the home of Sam Davis, after a weary day with a government committee, and asked if he would object to communicating with Mr. Mackay about where to put his father’s statue. Sam burst into laughter. “You’re growing up,” he said. “Go as far as you please.”

Gutzon picked up the telephone and called Joseph Stubbs, president of the University of Nevada at Reno. He never could explain why he picked President Stubbs except that he had met him and found him to be just the sort of man to develop a university in that sort of town. At any rate, he called and asked, “Would it interest you to have a statue of John W. Mackay on the campus of your university?” And Stubbs said, “Certainly ... or is this a joke?”

At Gutzon’s suggestion the president sent a telegram to Clarence Mackay asking him if he would consider having the statue in Reno on the university campus. Next morning the sculptor received a telegraphic order to call on President Stubbs. A place for the memorial was located at the upper end of the campus facing the sun. It was behind a corrugated-iron shack which bore the label “School of Mines.”

In a short time the statue was dedicated with proper ceremonies and a tremendous turnout of important people. Clarence Mackay, who brought his friends from New York in a private car, didn’t like the School of Mines structure as a background for his father. So he telegraphed architect Stanford White in New York to come out and lay plans for a new one. The result was a new building which cost, before Mackay equipped it, $475,000. After that came a second and a third building which, with Mackay’s endowments, cost somewhere over $1,500,000.

That, to all intents and purposes, was the beginning of a new life for the University of Nevada. The statue that led to it cost, complete and erected, $12,000.

And it led to other things, too. Clarence Mackay was obviously a satisfied customer. He wrote to Sam Davis that he was so pleased that he had tried to discharge some of his debt of gratitude by recommending the sculptor to the sponsors of the Sheridan Memorial to be erected in Washington. Gutzon was definitely gratified. His study of the Civil War in preparing the model for the Grant competition had made him familiar with its leaders. And he loved Sheridan’s saltiness, activity and audacious courage.

He respected the general’s reputed ability to swear and his genius for making his men understand tirades that must have sounded like jabberwocky.

“A great general!” declared Borglum. “And unusual!”

Unfortunately, the United States government had already placed the commission for this memorial and the field was now open to all because the original artist had not yet produced a model satisfactory to the committee. He had been at it thirteen years.

A second misfortune lay in the fact that this sculptor was J. Q. A. Ward, president of the National Sculpture Society, who had failed to see eye to eye with Gutzon on many subjects, chief of which was the controversy over reorganizing the society. In spite of this he and Gutzon had exchanged letters expressing sorrow that there had been any bad feeling. The last thing Borglum wanted to do was to give further offense to the distinguished leader of the New York sculptors ... but he did make the memorial. Art was art, and he got it done on schedule.

Gutzon found it easy to open correspondence with the committee in charge of the memorial. He had long been acquainted with President Theodore Roosevelt, and he had met some of his military aides through their common love for horses. It was arranged to have Mrs. Sheridan and her son visit the Thirty-eighth Street studio. They came and reported that they liked what they had seen--the model for the Grant monument with its three horses, the dashing horses of the “Mares of Diomedes” group, the marble head of Lincoln.

There was still some delay about the granting of a new contract. Gutzon was interviewed. He sent photographs of his work to the committee. Presently, however, he was contemplating his old annoyance. The committee suggested a competition. Gutzon Borglum refused.

“I shall be happy to make a sketch model for the committee’s consideration,” he said, “but only after I have received a contract.”

After much discussion the committee gave in. The contract was awarded, and Gutzon made the sketch model as he had agreed. The sketch was eventually cast in bronze and presented to the Officers’ Club of Rio de Janeiro as a gift from the Officers’ Club of Washington.

The uncovering of the general’s life brought contacts with many of his old comrades in arms, including a close friend, General George Forsyth. Colonel Royal E. Whitman, an old Indian fighter who had ridden with Sheridan in the Civil War, wrote Gutzon dozens of letters covering all sorts of details. He even declared he could produce the actual accouterments of Sheridan’s horse.

Sheridan’s horse, as is well known, is preserved stuffed and mounted on Governor’s Island. Borglum wasn’t much interested in it. It was unthinkable to him that a dead horse could pose for the one that carried Sheridan on his wild ride to Winchester. Through Colonel Whitman he had bought a Virginia hunter named “Smoke” who had the run of the studio and was a tractable pet. In due course “Smoke” qualified as Sheridan’s mount.

One remarkable thing about the memorial--an innovation that now has become almost commonplace in art--assured its success. Sheridan was presented not as the older man he lived to be, but in his prime and at a supreme moment in his career--the turn of the Federal retreat at Winchester. Gutzon pictured the moment when the general, returning from a conference with Lincoln, came galloping to meet his fleeing soldiers.

In the statue he has pulled up his horse and is waving the men back into the fight. There is fury in his eye and, as the sculptor felt, a historic phrase on his lips: “You will sleep in your tents tonight or you will sleep in hell!”

Gutzon modeled the horse and rider in clay, in the size that they would have in bronze, which was another important characteristic of his work. He never turned over a small model to others to have it enlarged by mechanical process, as was being done by some sculptors. He wanted his own modeling, the imprint of his thumb, to appear in the finished work. He wanted to get the spirit of the action and pose. If he were to expend creative effort on a sketch, he declared, he would have lost interest by the time he came to make an exact copy on a larger scale.

There has been considerable controversy over Sheridan’s ride to Winchester. Some writers, like Joseph Hergesheimer, have maintained that the wild gallop was only a mild trot. General Crosby and General Forsyth, brother officers of Sheridan, favored the accepted version. So would any cavalry officer. No matter how he might have been riding at the start, he was certainly riding as fast as the horse could take him when he came up with his defeated command. An eyewitness of the ride, Private Frederick Bullis of the New York State volunteers, reported:

I was near enough to him to touch his horse when he got there. There were lumps of foam as big as my fists on the horse’s face, and his nostrils were bleeding. Sheridan stood up in his stirrups and yelled “Face the other way! Face the other way!” He kept yelling it over and over. He was swinging his sword and swearing like a demon.

The monument was unveiled with much pomp and circumstance on November 25, 1908. Mrs. Sheridan herself pulled the cord that held the draperies in place. There was a parade of the armed forces that included every branch of the services. There were speeches by notables and concerts by brass bands. There was also a long account of the event in the Omaha _Bee_. The correspondent identified Gutzon Borglum as an Omaha boy, which, indeed, he once had been.

The turbulent figure of Sheridan was acclaimed as one of the greatest military statues in America. Critics noted the anatomical perfection of the horse and the faithful picturing of the general as a young man. But their praise was for the terrific action in bronze sculpture--the captured fear and climax of battle. It is hard to imagine that this memorial and the monument to President Lincoln in Newark were both the work of the same artist. Lincoln, shown in a moment of deep dejection during the Civil War when the news from the front was bad, is pathetic. He is every man’s friend just as he is every man’s other self, face to face with unhappiness, harried by disaster.

It was Lincoln’s custom to visit the War Office late at night to get the most recent dispatches, and the memorial in Newark shows him after such a call. He is sitting on a bench, his tall hat beside him, dispirited and alone. Borglum’s idea for the statue was inspired by a letter from Lincoln to a friend shortly after his election. “I could appreciate the feelings of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.... I am now in my Garden of Gethsemane.”

Borglum received the commission to make this statue as a result of the exhibition of his marble head of Lincoln in the Capitol. Amos Van Horn, Civil War veteran and citizen of Newark, had bequeathed $150,000 for three public monuments, one to Washington, one to Lincoln and a third to the soldiers and sailors who had fought in the War between the States. He appointed three executors, chief of whom was Ralph E. Lum, a Newark lawyer who knew nothing of Borglum or his work except the Lincoln head. That seemed enough evidence. He gave the sculptor the commission for the Lincoln Memorial and thereafter was always his steadfast friend.

The work was carried out under pleasant, amicable, understanding relations. There was no competition. The executors had virtually no suggestions. They knew that Gutzon Borglum was a competent sculptor, and they left the details of the production to him. He submitted a small model which they considered and accepted. After that he made a full-sized model in clay. The location chosen for the memorial was in front of the Newark courthouse where much grading and change was needed. The city lacked a thousand dollars of enough to pay for what was needed; so Gutzon advanced the money to Park Superintendent Carl Bannwort. The architect who drew the plans for the setting was an old friend, William Price. The architect, Bannwort and Gutzon contrived to give the statue a perfect environment, and Bannwort seemed surprised to see it finished. “It’s the first time,” he said, “that I ever heard of a sculptor ever giving back a part of his own pay.”

Work was begun in 1909, and a year later the Gorham Company announced the arrival of the full-sized plaster model at their foundry in Providence, Rhode Island. The sculptor had asked that they cast the bronze in one piece, which cost forty per cent more and took more time. He thought it worth the extra expense because there would be no seams in the bronze and no danger of breakage due to extremes of heat and cold.

Gutzon was pleased with the work when it appeared in bronze. “Lincoln never left the Garden of Gethsemane,” he said. “He went right from Springfield to the labor of war. And Lee had hardly surrendered when Lincoln was shot. It is a curious and charming picture when you realize that he wandered away constantly into this garden alone.”

There was much favorable comment on the work after it was set in place. The sculptor himself thought that he had never made a finer thing. The appeal of the statue is evident in the actions of the children who cluster about it. All day in summer they come here to play. They sit in Lincoln’s lap, clasp their arms about his neck, roll about his feet, completely pleased. They could not say why. They don’t know much of who this man is supposed to be. They don’t know much about Lincoln. But they know his sadness and they feel his gentleness and friendliness.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt was principal speaker when the monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1913. Wildly cheering throngs of men, women and children lined his way of march and gave him an inspiring tribute all the way from New York City, an experience which Gutzon declared was what gave Roosevelt the idea of running for President for a third term.

Nobody seems to have remembered what he said as he pledged the country’s support to what Lincoln had stood for--Lincoln who sat with bowed head, worried and disconsolate, on a bench before him.