CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

_AFTERMATH_

Borglum and Tucker sat down to rest on the plantation of Colonel Beniham Cameron, head of the Bankhead Highway Commission, near Durham, North Carolina, and entertained a great outpouring of their friends. Georgia made one weak effort at extradition, but the warrant was promptly thrown out by a sympathetic judge. Governor Angus McLean announced that he would call out the militia if necessary to prevent extradition, and there the matter rested. Gutzon never condescended to answer the Association’s charges. On July 7, 1925, he wrote to Gerald Johnson:

It should be remembered that we undertook the building of a memorial to honor, not to war. We built it to the soul of Robert E. Lee, to his conscious martyrdom, to the valor and development of those the world said had failed.... Can we who have worked so disinterestedly and succeeded somewhat in reaching the ear of God for Lee and his hosts forget? Can we fail in those qualities? I am determined that history shall carry no such item in her record of our acts.

The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association eventually gave the job of finishing the mountain carving to a practitioner who was at Stone Mountain only briefly and with little success in furthering the art.

Gutzon stayed at Raleigh, North Carolina, seven or eight months preparing new models for the memorial, with the aid of Captain Tucker and Hugo Villa. One day came Homer. He had walked all the way from Stone Mountain, more than 600 miles. Tucker said that he had only to shout and they would all come “a-runnin’.” But there was little work, hardly any money, and no place for them to stay. Villa made and sold some violins. The others mostly had a hard time.

Gutzon’s family joined him in Raleigh in a home next to that of Josephus Daniels, and they were pleasantly received.

In Georgia, the Association removed from the project everyone originally connected with the memorial except Mrs. Helen Plane. But Mrs. Plane was old and ill when the notification reached her. She commented on what had happened to the great memorial and the men who had labored for it. Then she went to bed and died.

The Association prepared statements repeating and enlarging the original charges against Borglum. Gutzon saw enough of it to convince him that masses of this material were sent to every point where any sculpture was contemplated, across the country from Texas to the Dakotas. Why all this tireless effort to discredit him? His theory was that the Association was in debt to the Atlanta banks and had to stay alive long enough to sell its half dollars and pay its debts. It must maintain the theory of its integrity by picturing Borglum as a road-company villain.

In Atlanta an active member of the U.D.C. who had friends in both camps was disturbed because neither the sculptor nor Sam Venable would take legal steps against the Association. She declared the directors were destroying Gutzon’s business and would destroy him. “I cannot and will not add to this quarreling over a memorial to Lee,” he wrote her. “After I got Coolidge and Smoot and Lodge, and the Senate and Congress to authorize a coin, I was further bound by my own claims that the brotherhood of America must be strengthened and preserved.”

But the battle of words went on. And nobody called on Gutzon to produce his new models. The new sculptor had trouble. The granite firm of Weiblen Brothers, which had a lease from Sam Venable, refused to permit the importation of outside stoneworkers. Eventually they reached an agreement to do the stonecutting themselves on a basis of cost plus ten-per-cent profit.

The Association seized all of Gutzon’s papers and records as well as his personal possessions, including art works in his studio and the machinery on the mountain. When they refused to listen to the U.D.C.’s suggestion of arbitration, which was definitely provided for in Borglum’s contract, the sculptor took one step in his own defense. He sent to Georgia a certified public accountant who disproved the charge that $185,000 had been spent on his part of the project. The books showed that only $113,922.61 had gone to the mountain--and this included the sculptor’s salary and every other expense of the work. The office in Atlanta at the same time had spent more than $116,000.

There was a persistent rumor through the United States that Borglum’s real trouble had been a quarrel with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. That was not true if only for the fact that the political brothers in the Memorial Association’s directorate had taken away the voice of these women in 1924. It was thoroughly refuted in a pamphlet issued by the Atlanta chapter telling where the blame should be placed for the monument’s loss.

The pamphlet was in the precise form of the statement sent out by the Association and was distributed among U.D.C. organizations throughout the country. It never had so large a circulation as the Association’s statement for the reason that the women did not have so large a fund to draw on.

How so great a memorial could have been destroyed, how the matter of the sale of the coin could have been so confused that few could understand anything beyond the fact that the money was dissipated and lost, is a complicated story. It cannot be dismissed in a few words and in fairness to all, the story of the U.D.C. should be told. Here are some extracts from the Atlanta chapter’s pamphlet:

The Stone Mountain debacle was the result of vandalism pure and simple. It is no longer necessary to defend Gutzon Borglum. Time and the course of events have vindicated him.

Borglum contracted to produce the central group in three years for $250,000, which was to cover his ideas, his designs, models, labor, a portion of his working equipment and his personal compensation. At the end of seventeen months he had produced the first model, master model and all working parts necessary to that date, removed 25,000 tons of granite, completed head of Lee, half head of Davis, designed children’s medal, made model for Stone Mountain coin. Price for above, official audit of March 31, 1925, $113,922.61.

During the thirty months since the employment of his successor, the combined efforts of the sculptor, Weiblen Brothers, and the Association have produced: first models, master models, some working models, blasting of mountain side, roughing out of Lee’s horse. Cost, as stated by Randolph, $171,000.

Mr. Borglum formed a syndicate to buy the entire coin issue. This would immediately have placed $2,500,000 or securities to that amount in the hands of the Association. A condition of the sale was that the money should be used exclusively in carving the mountain.

Randolph declined the offer; his reaction was as follows:

“Under the Borglum proposition, his friends could have sold the coins when they pleased, at whatever price they pleased, to whatever purchasers they pleased, and could have spent the proceeds in whatever way they pleased to carve on the mountain whatever they pleased.”

Mr. Randolph has sold the coins wherever he pleased, when he pleased, to whomever he pleased, and is now engaged in carving on the mountain what he pleases against the protest of the Atlanta Chapter and hundreds of Southern people, having discarded the plans and ignored the purpose entrusted to him. The monument he is building is smaller and entirely different from the one endorsed and subscribed to by the people of the United States, whose funds he has squandered and misspent.

The document goes on at considerable length to discuss the policy of Atlanta banks in keeping the Association alive, and the piecemeal sale of coins to pay back loans that the banks advanced. The banks at the time of Borglum’s departure from Stone Mountain held the Association’s notes for $78,862.72. The marketable property owned by the Association including its bank balances was listed at $6,406.39. The banks in time were paid off by receipts from the coin sale. The statement closes:

Members of the Atlanta Chapter organized the original Stone Mountain Memorial Association and secured its charter.

Members of the Atlanta Chapter personally invited Mr. Randolph to become president of the Association.

Mr. Randolph has discarded the original models entrusted to him, altered the style, and reduced the size of the memorial.

He has plunged the work into a national scandal on false charges.

He has destroyed the confidence of the public in the work by false statements and lowered the standard of Georgia and Georgians throughout the United States.

And that isn’t all of the story of Stone Mountain. While Sam Venable and Gutzon were quietly waiting for the group then in control to take a false step and fall, the Association’s directors suddenly decided that something had to be done about Stone Mountain. Gutzon’s first intimation that something was wrong came with the publication of a news story in which the new sculptor said that Borglum had deliberately left large holes in the rock to interfere with further carving. Inasmuch as Gutzon had not known that he was to have a successor and had not been in Georgia since, the accusation seemed silly.

Next came Randolph’s announcement that Lee would never have worn his hat in the presence of ladies and that the Association was planning to remove the hat. Leading sculptors of the United States said that this could not be done without destroying the head. But the public had nothing to do with it anyway. There was little talk about it, and the work was done behind a canvas.

The book _Famous Statues and Their Stories_, published by Edwin Rayner in 1936, pictures Stone Mountain with a photograph of the second sculptor’s designs superimposed upon it. The horses’ legs are very prominent. The design is attributed to Gutzon Borglum, and there is no suggestion in the text that he had left the work.

Had Gutzon suspected what was about to be done to his head of Lee, it is probable he would have fought to retain it. It remained in his mind as one of the greatest things he had ever produced. And one close to him recalls that its destruction was caused by men who had boasted that until the end of time nothing could injure it.