CHAPTER FIFTEEN

_FLIGHT, PATIENCE AND SHERIDAN’S HORSE_

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:

On March 19, 1917, James Rogers McConnell met his death fighting for France. He had been flying for France for over a year, and it was meet and fitting that he should encounter death in the upper air, battling with her enemies. The story of his life, since the beginning of the Great War, is a beautiful and heroic story. Out of pure idealism and devotion to the idea of freedom as established in France, he gave his service to the French Republic, first as an ambulance driver and then as one of the pioneer aviators of the famous Lafayette Escadrille.

McConnell was a loyal son of the University of Virginia. He has enriched her traditions and bound about her brow some of his glory. His fellow students and his teachers take a solemn pride in his great devotion to freedom and right, and think of him as a new and secret tie binding us to the land of Lafayette and the home of Thomas Jefferson. They desire to place here some simple memorial of beauty and distinction that will recall to future generations of youth the beauty of heroic death, the virtues of duty, valor and self-sacrifice, and will keep green the memory of one who counted it a gladness to give his life for a lofty end.

Gutzon’s sympathy for a boy of McConnell’s character, and his acquaintance with others in the Lafayette Escadrille, gave him a particular incentive to do this memorial. The commission came to him through a very dear friend, W. W. Fuller of North Carolina and New York. Borglum had also a deep admiration for Dr. Alderman. The sculptor’s conception of the statue was new and extraordinary.

The form he chose was a male figure, standing tiptoe on a globe representing the earth, in the act of taking flight. Vast wings were strapped to his arms, almost concealing them, and to the calves of his legs were bound something like greaves, showing that the youth was a mortal in armor and not the mythological figure that a first glimpse would suggest. President Alderman’s letters were numerous and helpful. He was much concerned about the wings. In a letter to Mr. Fuller he wrote:

Will one tire of their mass? Are they needed in such mass to subtly suggest battle flight? Is there not some symbolism less realistic and obstructive that would turn the trick? This thing cannot be _near_ great. It must either be _great_ or miss greatness altogether. Hence my anxiety.... I have faith in Borglum and admire the calm, fine way he receives the layman’s counsel. But this work is not a mere statue. It is a daring spiritual expression. It must not offend any canon of form or grace.

Sometimes in writing I weary of seeking the hidden, difficult, aptest phrase and content myself from sheer ennui with a lesser form. He cannot do that, for my expression is ephemeral--his is eternal and unlimited....

It is significant, in view of later comments on his irascibility, that the sculptor welcomed such criticism as this. Because of the positioning of the memorial--in clear space, free from buildings and silhouetted against the sky--he made some changes in the figure. The wings were made lighter, the feathers outlined more distinctly, and some of the feathers were separated to admit light between them.

Characteristically, there seems to have been no discussion of price or of compensation to the sculptor until the first model was completed. At that time he wrote that the cost would be $12,000, owing to the increased cost of bronze. Then he moved on to some work in Cuba. There was delay in getting the marble from Tennessee in time for the unveiling. Because of this the braces and rivets attaching the figure to its round base were not in place when the draperies were lifted. Dr. Alderman went through his speech in grave apprehension that the whole exhibit would fall on his head. But it all came right in the end--through sheer luck, perhaps.

Mr. Fuller wrote that a friend of his, “a learned physician and a just and judicious man,” had looked at the memorial from an unusual point of view.

This friend reported:

I am sure it is a great work of art, but I studied it mostly from the position of the anatomist. The lines are perfect. What a grand specimen of the human architecture, as if just from the hands of his Maker! A model of human architecture! I noticed particularly the different prominent muscles, tense and drawn in preparation for flight--how anatomically correct they were in location and function.... I shall never forget....

The aviator’s father was deeply touched by the figure. He wrote to Gutzon:

I attended the unveiling of the memorial to my son at the University of Virginia. I want to congratulate you on this wonderful reproduction. It is magnificently beautiful ... expressive and highly inspiring. I know of nothing in America that equals this splendid work. I believe that not only the University of Virginia but all America will regard this aviator as a triumph of art and will cherish it as a priceless possession.

Then there came a committee which had thought about building a memorial to a former governor, Charles Brantley Aycock, in Raleigh, North Carolina. From Josephus Daniels came a letter enthusiastically outlining this project. Gutzon read it without much interest. The committee had decided to hold a competition but wished Borglum to submit a model before they made a decision.

Gutzon replied that because Daniels asked it, he would be glad to lay aside his ideas about competitions, but that he simply did not have the time to put in the work of several days on a model that might or might not be satisfactory. “Committees do not realize,” he said, “that the making of a model is about one third of the entire work. Neither do they realize that in at least nine cases out of ten, no model is carried out as first presented. Not only the committee but the artist himself develops it.”

So the committee abandoned the competition, invited the sculptor to come to Raleigh for a conference and gave him the commission the day after his arrival. He telegraphed home, “Returning this afternoon. Have contract eighteen thousand.” The family received the news with decent restraint. They knew Gutzon. He was always sanguine. A contract was always the same to him as money in the bank.

The Aycock memorial was conceived by its promoters as the monument to an ideal rather than to a man. Aycock, governor of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905, had established two reforms of importance. The first was to make suffrage dependent on education. The second placed education within the reach of all, rich or poor, black or white. And the sculptor soon realized that he was going to have some trouble telling about this in a statue.

Most of his correspondence was with Dr. Clarence Poe, son-in-law of Governor Aycock and editor of a widely circulated paper, _The Progressive Farmer_. He was a man of exceptional gifts, but sculpture worried him. His first worry was because Gutzon was working on a life-size model without having made a plaster cast of the small-sketch model. Gutzon wrote him a long treatise on models in which he said:

I don’t mind making three or four. The man must be on his feet. Except for that every action of the body is changeable.... In the work I do in my studio I keep my small model in clay and do not cast it in plaster in order not to be bound by it. If it is in plaster it cannot be changed.... I am anxious to keep it as flexible as possible, and to keep in mind that the big figure is the sole thing and the permanent thing....

There was more correspondence and eventually Gutzon invited the committee to come and look at the life-size model. In the fall of the year the party arrived--Colonel P. M. Pearsall, Mrs. Charles Aycock, the widow, and Judge Frank Daniels, Josephus’ brother. After suggesting some slight changes they expressed complete satisfaction and went home. The sculptor was on the point of casting the statue in plaster when he got a telegram from Dr. Poe, who had been unavoidably detained. Poe, who had learned his lesson about models, begged Gutzon to delay the casting till he could get to Stamford. Nobody had told him what work it is to keep a heroic-size clay figure moist for an indefinite time. For the next three weeks Gutzon had little else to occupy his time.

Dr. Poe and a new committee were more critical than the first group had been. Dr. Poe shook his head and announced that for one thing the model was underweight. Aycock, he said, had weighed at least fifty pounds more than the sculptor allowed. The rest of the committee agreed.

Gutzon had acquired patience. It was not serious, he said. He would adjust the governor’s proportions. Sleeping quarters were engaged at a hotel for the committee. And for three days Dr. Poe and his friends sat around the studio while Borglum added to the governor’s girth. For this work Judge Daniels was a voluntary model. In the end everybody was pleased. Dr. Poe declared that “The result is a _distinguished success_.”

The memorial was unveiled on March 15, 1924, a year later. Dr. Alderman and Josephus Daniels made the chief speeches. Thousands of the governor’s old friends attended, together with a crowd of school children. It was a grand affair.

* * * * *

The Sheridan equestrian statue, which stands at the beginning of Sheridan Road in Chicago, came out of this same period and was one of the sculptor’s favorites. The technical perfection of it gratified him. He used to say of the horse, rearing with his front feet off the ground, that he could see the play of the muscles under the skin--and that is very likely true.

The work was accomplished under external difficulties. In the first place the construction of an armature for so huge a group was no small undertaking. It was built of heavy timbers, boards and lath and looked something like the pictures of the Trojan Horse. It wasn’t as commodious, perhaps, but several able-bodied men could work inside it--and did. A new studio was under construction with the sculptor supervising all details. And outweighing all physical handicaps was the mental strain of his work on Stone Mountain, where things were rapidly approaching a crisis.

However, for his creative work there was always one tranquil spot in his brain that no outside disturbance could enter. He believed in changing his models frequently, stopping only when he could see what he thought to be right. Jesse Tucker, the Stone Mountain engineer, recalls that this was one feature of his sculpture in which he would permit no compromise.

At one stage of the Sheridan memorial, Tucker pointed out, the sculptor was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. Everybody in the studio knew that he would receive a substantial sum as soon as the group was finished and ready for casting. And one evening it looked as though this happy moment had arrived.

Gutzon walked around the model, seriously studying it. He stopped and picked up an ax. “Tucker,” he said, “I believe I can improve that horse.” And without further discussion he began to hack down part of the armature and added two weeks to the work.

This habit was well known to his assistants. Once his colored attendant, Banks, reported on the progress of a statue: “Guess the boss is about through. He’s started pulling it to pieces.”

The personal contacts he made during the production of the Sheridan monument were particularly pleasing to Gutzon. “Big Bill” Thompson, storm center of political controversy, was mayor of Chicago at the time. They became warm friends. Stamford political leaders declined an invitation to meet the mayor when he was due to look at the models, but Thompson knew nothing about that. He arrived at the studio accompanied by nine carloads of New York politicians.

Michael J. Faherty, Chicago’s commissioner of public works, was the mayor’s first deputy in the memorial project. He had a summer home near Hartford and would drop in at the studio at unexpected moments on his frequent trips back and forth from Chicago. His chief interest was in the development of the oversize model of horse and rider that nearly filled the studio.

To save the expense of casting bronze in the United States the contract was given to Vignali Brothers of Florence. There was an endless interchange of letters and cables. Telephone wires had to be removed and replaced to permit the trucking of the bronze casts to Genoa because some of them were too high. This was the fault of the foundry and added expense for Gutzon. On its trip from New York to Chicago the group encountered patches of the same difficulty and had to be rerouted on a wild course to avoid low underpasses. Faherty, who was anxiously watching all this, finally reported, “Winchester and Sheridan still twenty miles away.”

Sheridan eventually arrived for the unveiling. A special “Sheridan Day” had been declared. And there was a big military display with speeches by the governor, the mayor and other dignitaries. All went as scheduled, after which Faherty found time to write of his own troubles. To Borglum he wrote:

Surprises turn up as usual in reference to expense. The governor has ordered the soldiers to turn out, but the officers have no money; and the Sheridan Monument Association is called upon to pay $2,500 to defray their expenses. The total receipts from the State and others will amount to about $43,000, and the expenses will be about $53,000. However, the job is done and meets with satisfaction, for which I have to thank you and your wife.

Gutzon felt that he had never had a more pleasant association.