CHAPTER TWENTY

_MONEY_

It became evident during the summer of 1924 that the Confederate memorial of Stone Mountain was on its way to a considerable solvency. The memorial half dollar would presently be minted, whatever the Yankee quarrels about the status of Jefferson Davis and the need for pants on eagles. In the meantime a new project of the inventive David Webb showed signs of lucrative popularity.

“The Children’s Founders’ Roll,” Webb called this new appeal for cash. And all he needed to recruit the eager children to the Founders’ Roll was a children’s medal that he could exchange for their donations. This, he thought, didn’t involve anything very difficult inasmuch as he had one side of the medal already depicted in the first model for the coin. The other side was to carry an inscription of the committee’s choosing. But he didn’t want the medal to cost too much, and there came difficulty.

The United States mint maintains a rigid high standard in its coinage, and Gutzon wanted the children’s medals to be equally fine. He turned his model over to the Medallic Art Company of New York, whose workmanship satisfied him. The company agreed to make the medals for six or seven cents apiece. They were to be sold to the public for fifty cents or a dollar.

However, there turned out to be competition. Another company had made overtures to the Stone Mountain Memorial Association offering to do the job for a cent or two less and intimating that somebody--they wouldn’t of course say Gutzon Borglum--was to profit in some way on the difference in price. Gutzon, who had put away his anger during his coin negotiations in Washington, suddenly went berserk again. He turned over to the committee all his correspondence with the Medallic Art Company, showing that he was not getting a cent. He reminded them that he had made all the models for the coin and children’s medal without recompense, and pointed out one after another the things he was doing on the mountain for love alone.

“You seem to forget the promotion of your coin idea,” he snapped at them. “Who paid me for that? Who paid me for the time I spent getting pushed from one office to another? Who around here ever pays for anything? Who is honest enough to think that he has to?”

Most of the directors tried to placate him, but some weren’t convinced. Borglum’s blood pressure was still rising when he went out.

In another week there was another bitter quarrel. Gutzon, whose view of his associates was still pretty dim, came across some publicity material designed to promote the sale of the memorial coin. He might not have liked it had he been untroubled by other things. He certainly did not like it in his present state of mind, and his criticism of the publicity director was sudden and bitter. The publicity director answered him in kind, bowed and retired, and, thereafter, the two men never got along together.

Amity was singularly lacking around the memorial headquarters for the rest of the summer. Unfortunate things just continued to happen. The Borglums, toward the end of August, went to Nantucket where, at the request of Ed Howe, the sculptor was to give some talks at the summer school for social science. They had barely arrived when Gutzon got an emergency call to get back to New York. In a heat wave of unexpected virulence the wax model of the children’s medal had melted and the completion of the work had been stopped.

The records show that the Stone Mountain Memorial Association was loudly indignant and remarkably bitter. Letters subsequent to the telegrams complained about the sculptor idly vacationing while there was important work to be done.

Gutzon replied that he hadn’t melted the wax and that he had previously expressed himself on the subject of the company employing the thumb-fingered medal maker who did do it. Conditions of mutual trust and good will when he repaired the damage and returned to Atlanta were no better than they had been.

Work on the memorial, however, was proceeding smoothly. Gutzon had moved his family into a house near Stone Mountain. The hard-rock men and dynamiters in the crew had learned their jobs. The figure of Jackson would be ready for unveiling in April and that of Davis in June 1925. L. M. Roberts, the Association’s engineer, had examined the work and reported that everything was going along according to contract. Gutzon was ahead of his schedule.

In March 1924 the fund-raising activities of the Association began to pay their way. At the end of the month receipts equaled expenditures. In April, before the start of any extraordinary fund-raising campaign, receipts amounted to more than $28,000 and there was plentiful evidence that the flow of cash would continue during May.

The annual meeting of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association was held in April 1924 and was marked by some political maneuvers that greatly irritated the U.D.C. Officers had to be elected. A new board of directors and a new executive committee was to be chosen to act for the next twelve months. It was an understanding in the Association that the presidency would be passed around from year to year, but this year the old president made a plea for re-election. The national presidential campaign was in full progress. The Association president had been active in support of William Gibbs McAdoo and was having some friction with the editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_. If he were re-elected president of the Association, he said, he would have greater status in politics, and he would resign immediately after the primary election. His request, unfortunately, was granted. It was no help to McAdoo.

The date of the Association’s election day was the same as that of the selection of a presidential primary candidate. The political meeting was held first. After it had adjourned the Association president went to the Association’s annual meeting accompanied by a large number of politicians.

Up to that point the Association hadn’t had many active members. The dues had been five dollars. Nobody seems to have known what the total membership was. Nobody ever counted the attendance. And most of those present were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Eighty-six politicians came into the hall with the re-elected Association president. Somebody moved to reduce dues to one dollar, and someone else slapped eighty-six dollars on the desk of the treasurer. Eighty-six new names were added to the roster of the Association. And these eighty-six, along with the president, dominated the meeting.

There had hitherto been five or six people on the board of directors. The number was immediately changed to fifty. The membership of the executive committee was increased from nine to fifteen and was to be chosen by the board of directors. A resolution was passed to bar any increase in the membership of the Association except with the approval of the president and a subcommittee of three appointed by him. The president and the executive business manager, as the result of these arrangements, were then in absolute control of the organization. The president forgot his promise to resign.

An executive committee of fourteen men and one woman was named. The men were persons of big affairs--several of them bankers whose daily routine gave them little time for benevolent causes. There was not a member to represent the U.D.C.

* * * * *

There has been a lot of controversy over the Stone Mountain memorial. There will, no doubt, continue to be. Nobody who ever knew Gutzon Borglum would attempt to say he was a complacent character. Decidedly he was not. He knew what he thought was right, and that is what he wanted. He wanted nothing else. Calm argument could change his point of view, of course, for he was intelligent. But he could not be browbeaten. He was honest--so he could not be bribed. His anger could be Jovian, and in his indignation he could be intolerant and insulting. No one will deny these things.

There isn’t much doubt that the executive committee of the Stone Mountain Association encountered him in many moods, for he was in and about the premises from 1915 to 1925. When things went wrong with Gutzon’s plans, when anybody thwarted him, the world knew about it, and few will say that the early days of the work on the mountain were without confusion.

The story is still circulated in the South that Gutzon Borglum was a genius of evil temper with whom no one could possibly get along; that he had quarreled bitterly with the ladies of the U.D.C. and, in a huff, had destroyed his models and all that it was possible to destroy of the carving on Stone Mountain, and had gone away. But none of that is true except that he did destroy a pair of models.

If anybody thinks that the carving of the Confederate memorial was a simple thing, he may consider the odd politics that took over the project at the annual meeting of the Association in 1924. There would have been nothing simple about that even if Borglum had never lived.

Little had changed in the atmosphere except that money had begun to roll into the treasury and there was prospect of more. The Children’s Founders’ Roll was getting a large number of members, the children’s medals were being distributed in quantities, and presently the memorial coin would come out of the mint.

Gutzon Borglum, back at work on the mountain, paid little attention to the political maneuvering in the Association. If he was displeased with anything, he went down to Atlanta and told somebody about it. Otherwise he was getting President Davis and General Jackson out of the rock in shape for presentation on Davis’ birthday, June 3. He was looking forward to the completion of the entire central group by the end of 1926.

He was called from this work to discuss the problem of selling the memorial half dollars. Commercial institutions experienced in such jobs wanted too large a percentage of the profit. Pseudo-patriotic associations wanted more. At a bankers’ meeting in the Biltmore Hotel early in 1925 it was suggested that a number of wealthy men might underwrite the coin so that the money or some part of it might be available at once. The board of the Association authorized the proponent of this scheme to find such a group. And the man who had made the suggestion was Gutzon Borglum.

Borglum wrote to John Kirby of Houston, Texas, and got promise of $100,000 toward a fund of $500,000. With Dave Webb he went into Mississippi and got promise of more money. W. W. Fuller urged him to come to New York and there, with friends in the American Tobacco Company, he lined up a sheaf of pledges. Judge Elbert Gary promised to find more. Gutzon invited these people to meet Hollins Randolph at a dinner in Washington where the sums to be subscribed would be agreed on.

President Randolph of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association failed to show up or to answer telegrams. He was out duck shooting. Nobody, it appears, had time to go and look for him.

Gutzon considered the situation somewhat sadly. The only problem in mountain carving that he could not solve was that caused by human ignorance or cupidity. The Stone Mountain Association somehow had been happy as long as its treasury had been empty. There was now an expectation of an even two million dollars in the till.

The men of the Association formed a quick plan to abandon most of the carving program. It would be simpler, they thought, to spend $250,000 on the central group and reserve the rest of the money “for future causes and purposes.”

On February 18, 1925, Gutzon was going through Atlanta from Stone Mountain to Washington with Lester Barlow, inventor of a depth bomb. Barlow had promised that if the government were to pay him his back royalties, he would donate $100,000 of the sum to the Confederate monument.[A] Barlow says that the sculptor was so outraged at the idea of holding up the spending of money for work on the mountain that he went straight to Washington and got an immediate interview with President Coolidge. His single purpose was to stop the minting of any more Stone Mountain coins.

[A] His claim was settled in 1940 when he was given nearly $700,000.

Coolidge, who sat knee to knee with him in serious and intimate conversation, became incensed. He slapped Gutzon on the shoulder and declared--as Barlow remembers it--“We won’t let those rebels put anything like that over on us.” Barlow does remember vividly that the President promised to put an end to the issuance of the coins. Gutzon slapped him on the knee and thanked him. Of course, nothing more came of this than conversation. Gutzon had hardly reached the Metropolitan Club after his conference when Bascom Slemp, Presidential secretary, called him on the phone. The President, it seems, had not understood. The promise to stop the coin must be considered unofficial.

Things were moving fast in Atlanta. Tucker was called in from Stone Mountain to meet with some of the men who were active in the Association. Tucker refused to talk with them as a group, and Randolph met him alone.

The conversation was what the engineer had expected. The directors were going to get rid of Borglum and were offering him $15,000 a year to carry on the building of the memorial. Tucker laughed. It was Borglum’s idea, he said. He wouldn’t consider taking the job even if he thought himself qualified.

Randolph seemed disappointed. “You could put _something_ up there that would be satisfactory,” he said.

Tucker telephoned to Gutzon in Washington and begged him to come back. The sculptor said he would. The next day Hollins Randolph gave out a statement which at least one Atlanta newspaper printed under the heading: “Borglum’s Dismissal as Sculptor Is Imminent.”

Gutzon was back in Atlanta twenty-four hours after receiving Tucker’s message. A meeting of the executive committee of the Association had been called for the next day. But the sculptor fully believed that his contract would protect him, and he was not so worried as his friends. Virtually everybody else in Atlanta knew what the executive committee was going to do. A full copy of the proceedings of the scheduled meeting, to its climax in a resolution dismissing Gutzon Borglum, had been given in advance to the Atlanta _Journal_ and was in type hours before the committeemen were called to order.

The sculptor was met at the station in Atlanta by Tucker, who drove him out to Stone Mountain. Sam Venable was waiting for him there with his sister Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Grace, of Macon, Georgia; and Mrs. Purdue, president of the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The women went up on the scaffolding to view the progress of the work.

Word of what was happening in Atlanta took the sculptor completely by surprise. He listened, stunned, to the telephone message that the committee had voted to dismiss him. Quietly he broke the news to the little group about him, then considered the situation.

“I shall have to break up the models to protect my design,” he said.

The plaster model of Lee’s head had already served its purpose. There was a copy of the Jackson head in Stamford. He ordered these models to be dropped off the platform onto the rocks below. And, finally, he told his man Homer to break up the model in the studio, the one showing Davis on his horse. Mr. Venable said there were tears in his eyes as he took one last look at his work and turned his back.

He talked to the U.D.C. women in Mrs. Coribel Venable Orme’s house, urging them to carry on without him. Then suddenly Tucker came bounding in from the road and took him by the arm.

“Quick!” Tucker said. “Kiss your wife good-by.”

“But where to?” asked Gutzon.

“I’ll tell you that afterward,” said Tucker, pulling him toward the door.

Shortly they were gone and the people in the house heard a car roaring out the back way on a road from the city that was virtually impassable. The sound had died out and they were well on their way when the local constable arrived and sheepishly produced an order for Gutzon’s arrest on a charge of “malicious mischief.” The complaint declared that the sculptor had destroyed a model valued at $25.

Nobody has ever pointed out how the Association directors found out about the smashing of the models within two hours after it happened. The constable didn’t know. He had just been called on to serve it, and, well, if Mr. Borglum had gone away, he couldn’t do that. So he accepted a drink and sat down to enjoy it.

Not until long afterward did Mrs. Borglum discover that the head Gutzon was accused of having destroyed was the useless plaster image of Lee.

The morning after the Association meeting of February 25, 1925, the Atlanta newspapers gave roaring accounts of the affair, one of them announcing in letters three inches high: “Borglum Fugitive From Justice.” There were long lists of his crimes, misdemeanors and delinquencies for which he had been driven away from Stone Mountain. Chief of these were “loafing on the job,” “inordinate love of money,” “wasteful expenditures,” “ungovernable temper.” And there was the old story of the angels of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Clarke Howell, editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_ and Francis Clark, the city editor, were Gutzon’s friends, and they sniffed at the angel story. They were the ones who telegraphed the cathedral to get the straight of it. But no matter. There was no end to such charges nor to the people who believed them. Mrs. Borglum, warned by her attorney, Albert Howell, to refrain from comment, nevertheless issued one statement: “The Greeks of old drove Phidias into exile, but his name has lived on while those who persecuted him are forgotten.”