CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

_SHRINE OF DEMOCRACY_

A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events memorialized.--GUTZON BORGLUM.

Back to the mountains came the boy who had felt kinship for them more than half a century before, to put into form a dream that was as yet nebulous and disturbed. Vaguely he felt that he was going to preserve forever some symbol of a great national ideal. The trouble was that he did not yet have an inkling of what the symbol looked like or how he was going to keep it intact for future generations to look at. And he had the granite--the living rock of the mountains--that would turn the weather as it had been turning it for thousands of years. It would keep what he carved on it down through time to the rim of eternity.

It sprang from the Stone Mountain conception, this project. But it wouldn’t be the same thing. There would be no army of horsemen riding across the white face of a cliff. For this, as he knew but found it hard to express, must provide a quick glance at the history of the whole republic, and not until he had accomplished it did he find the words. He said:

The Shrine of Democracy, carved on Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, is the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps in the world. It is a memorial to the conception and organization of this great government. Monuments have almost never been built deliberately to make note of the intellectual or political acts of a people. The great memorials of China, Angkor, India, Egypt and Greece were incidental to the life and religion of the nations. None, I believe, was deliberately so conceived, so designed and so located that it would remain an understandable message to posterity ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or, if the material survived, a million years hence.

Each succeeding race destroys or buries its predecessor, appropriates what it can and throws the rest to the winds. Only the most enlightened of human beings revere the remains of others. So it was thoughts of this sort regarding the failure of mankind to make suitable, indestructible records of its attainments that led me to carve our national record on a cliff, on rocks that are of communally useless material. Therefore our sons will not pull them down.

Gutzon Borglum arrived for the first time in Rapid City, accompanied by his son Lincoln, then 12 years old, on September 25, 1924. He was met by State Historian Doane Robinson, who had invited him on behalf of the Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Association, and was taken to the Harney Peak region by a group of citizens including Dr. Cleophas C. O’Harra, president of the South Dakota School of Mines. The road led into a region of rising plateaus, then past rocky spars that were called the Needles, and to the Sylvan Lake, where they spent the night The next day they climbed Harney Peak. Gutzon observed several locations suitable for carving, and he said so. But there was nothing so fine in that area as the Stone Mountain cliff. He reserved decision pending further inspection and went back East.

The result of this short visit was that Mr. Robinson proceeded to get the permission of the government to undertake the carving in the Harney Forest area, which was federal property, and to try to get an appropriation from the South Dakota state legislature. There was no difficulty about his first effort. He got his governmental permission through the Congressional delegates from South Dakota, led by Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson, whose support and interest were valuable assets. Mr. Robinson almost as quickly discovered something that is undeniably true about mountain-carving projects: They cost a lot and it is almost impossible to get anybody to donate money toward them. The state authorized the formation of the Mount Harney Memorial Association, but could find no money. The state of South Dakota, as an organization, never did find any.

The Stone Mountain storm burst in the spring of 1925 and was responsible for a lot of Robinson’s troubles, for the desks of the legislators were shortly piled high with literature sent out by the Stone Mountain Association trying to discredit Borglum. The only result of this warning call was a temporary delay. Senator Norbeck reported that Gutzon was a friend of the President and was known and respected as an artist and a patriot by both senators and congressmen. So the legislators of South Dakota figured that the gentlemen in Atlanta were kindly but mistaken.

Gutzon came back to the Black Hills in the fall of 1925 to look for available granite. He was piloted on a camping trip by Theodore Shumaker, an old bear hunter and former man-hunting sheriff. Before meeting Gutzon he had been well acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt, “Wild Bill” Hickok and “Calamity Jane” Burke.

They entered the Hills near Harney Peak through pathless, rugged, almost impassable timber and tree falls. What Borglum wanted was a granite cliff, four or five hundred feet in height and towering that much above neighboring cliffs. It must lie in such an angle that the main wall would face the southeast, and there should be enough of fairly even, unbroken stone to provide at least an acre of upright surface for carving.

The wall facing southeast was a necessary condition because on it the figures would be cut to face the sun. It looked almost like an impossible requirement.

The party had been two weeks in the open, clambering up and down over seemingly inaccessible mountains, when they suddenly came face to face with Mount Rushmore. Gutzon was too tired to try to scale it in the waning day. But he knew that, barring serious cracks in the rock, this cliff was the one he’d been seeking. They camped in a quiet ravine in the mountain’s shadow, preparing for supper and a comfortable night’s rest.

“This looks like what I want,” said Gutzon. “Where is it?”

One of his guides shook his head. “About due east of Harney Peak,” he said. “But I never saw it before. There’s probably never been a man within miles of this place.”

So the next morning they started to climb and presently came to an entrance to the great dike they hoped to surmount. Wear and tear of wind, water and ice had cut this opening, piercing the cliff to half its depth. The climbers were still 150 feet from the top--the top that became the heads of Lincoln and Roosevelt. The heads of Jefferson and Washington were placed 200 feet farther south and higher.

They surmounted this last perpendicular wall by pyramiding one man on the shoulders of two others and using a lariat over a projecting sliver of rock as a hoist line. With torn hands and broken nails they reached the upper floor and looked down on the mining town of Keystone, about three miles away. The sculptor related his impressions thus:

When I first saw the shoulders of Rushmore I knew instinctively that I was a doomed man. I knew that while the years and I reshaped the mountain, I must be reshaped myself.

Once before I had something of the same intense, emotional shock. That was when I stood in front of Stone Mountain and listened to Helen Plane pleading with me to cut into the wall the story of Lee and his associates.

Such thoughts passed through my mind as we lay prostrate to rest in the sun on the top of Mount Rushmore. Here great masses of rock of new dimensions, of greater hardness, rose above and about me. I was conscious we were in another world. We could imagine clouds moving over us and around us in stately dignity, or driven by hurrying winds out of the north, or falling as rain or snow against the chill white cliff. And there a new thought seized me--a thought that frightened me and was to redirect me and dominate all my carving: the scale of the mountain peak!

We were 6,200 feet above sea level--500 feet above the surrounding cliffs. We looked out over a horizon, level and beaten like the rim of a great cartwheel, 2,000 feet below. We had reached up toward the heavenly bodies; we were looking at the forms removed from the detail of earth in the valleys, with crude colossi piercing the sky. I had worked seven years on Stone Mountain without real consciousness of this changing relationship of lofty mountain forms isolated in space. And it came over me in an almost terrifying manner that I never had sensed what I was planning. Plans must change. The vastness that I saw here demanded it.

The Rushmore elevation is the highest elevation of granite, except near-by Harney Peak, between the Rocky Mountains and Europe. It is a hard formation called pegmatite, peculiar to the Black Hills, and on Rushmore it is of a finer, more even grain than that of surrounding rocks.

Once there was a sea in this region, then rising tracts of sediments compressed into complicated folds. At some remote time the earth’s interior intruded upon the sedimentary folds, pushing steadily upward beneath the surface, and so formed in time the granite batholith of the Harney Peak region. The overload above the granite must have been of great height before it was destroyed by erosion. It was torn down and now lies scattered across the Bad Lands and in valleys all the way to the sea.

There is no telling when Mount Rushmore was exposed to the sky. Dr. O’Harra believed it to be one of the oldest mountain formations in the world--older than the Alps or the Apennines or the Pyrenees or the Caucasus--older, even, than the Himalayas. Said Dr. O’Harra:

Mount Rushmore, placed near the center of the Black Hills, in the heart of the continent, midst a galaxy of the world’s profoundest splendors, where every stone shows an imprint of sanctity and every bush is aflame with glory, for thousands of years, yes, for millions of years, has surveyed its entrancing surroundings and with uncovered head has looked into the benign face of a kindly creator.

So now a mountain had been discovered such as the sculptor had never hoped to see. There remained the twin problems of getting the means to carve it and a majestic design to put on it. Senator Norbeck, notified the next day, was cautious. He declared flatly that the location wouldn’t do. It was inaccessible. There were better cliffs and he could point them out. He and the sculptor met in Keystone, twenty miles from Rapid City, and spent another day in the hot sun looking for the cliffs that Norbeck remembered. After that the senator gave in.

The parks of South Dakota were Senator Norbeck’s hobby. He had antagonized farmers by including their lands in park areas, and he had schemed to find money in the state and national treasuries that could be used for landscaping them. Virtually every road in the Black Hills and Bad Lands is his creation. If he needed a new one, he could make it. So he wasn’t much worried about the remoteness of Rushmore.

“We’ll get a highway up to it,” he said. “Now, what are you going to put on it?”

It was Robinson who gave the clew. Years before, in the shale hills west of old Fort Pierre on the Missouri River, some children had found a leaden plate left there in 1743 by the Vérendrye brothers, French explorers. They had claimed the region for the French king as part of the Louisiana Territory. And it was brought out that Dakota was linked with the little colonial republic on the Atlantic seaboard in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Considering these two episodes, Gutzon Borglum in his own stepless way decided what he would do. He would build a memorial to symbolize the creation and extension of the great republic, the forming of its government, the saving of its political union, and the completion of the dream of Columbus--a water route to India--by the cutting of the Panama Canal.

The characters he chose for the carving were obviously four: Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and our political gospel; Washington, who made the visions of Jefferson practicable; Lincoln, who preserved the union; and Theodore Roosevelt, who was chiefly instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal. When the design became clear in his mind Gutzon said:

Our forefathers wrote in the canon of human government that a man has the right to be free and happy. They formed a sisterhood of states on that simple creed, and their challenge became the tocsin cry of the world’s oppressed souls. Those words have changed the philosophy of the world’s governments. They are the motive, spirit and purpose back of the Rushmore memorial.

We have not created a monument to Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln or Roosevelt, but to the meaning of those eleven words as maintained in our government by those four great leaders. Those words--man has a right to be free and to be happy--hold the Western experiment as the guide that leaped out of medieval Europe, more important to humanity’s immortality than creeds and governments.

So the names of the Presidents to be carved on Mount Rushmore were agreed on by Norbeck, Robinson and Borglum as early as the fall of 1925. But that wasn’t the end of it. Of course not. From press reports it was difficult to see that any two people agreed on any man as a possible candidate for the super carving. The women’s clubs got turned into a movement for Dr. Susan B. Anthony, the noted feminist. And they argued bitterly and earnestly. Somebody introduced a bill in Congress for her support.

Gutzon, however, wasn’t to be shaken. He said that the men selected might not be the greatest the United States had produced, but they exemplified the four great periods of the country’s progress and so deserved their places in the memorial. He would carve other figures later, he said, in some places where they would not be crowded.

He went to work first on the head of Washington and studied long in an attempt to find out what kind of man he was. Of the familiar Washington portraits he said:

I have examined all the available portraits of value--the Stuart and Trumbull portraits, and the Houdon portrait which I consider best of all. Not the statue by Houdon in Richmond, the figure of which is poor, but the unretouched mask by Houdon which is now in the Corcoran Art Gallery. It is unquestionably the most valuable evidence of the appearance of Washington extant. I choose to represent him before retirement. In retirement a certain fulness of cheek becomes apparent as in Stuart’s last picture. His face, definitely masculine, takes on a more rugged form and reminds one of Cromwell at forty-five. There is much of the robust Britisher, the country squire or nobleman. There is none of the prettified Virginia gentleman that Stuart always produced. I recall a story to the effect that Martha Washington once told him that Stuart had said he had an awful temper, and that he must warn Stuart not to circulate such stories. Washington is said to have pondered a moment and replied, “My dear, I’m afraid Mr. Stuart is right.”

The sculptor made a small model of the group in San Antonio in 1926. When he returned to Rushmore that same year he made an enlarged plaster model of Washington’s head on a scale of an inch to a foot. By this time he had determined to make the heads sixty feet high; his previous thought of thirty-foot heads he found to be completely out of scale with the mountain. To make sure of the size he had gone down over the face of the cliff, located the nose line perpendicularly and the eyebrows and chin horizontally. From those lines he was able to calculate the scale. For the next several days he crawled about the cliff and valley studying the points he had marked on the mountain in red paint with a six-inch brush.

The enlargement of the Washington head was made in an old log cabin more than two miles away from the cliff of Rushmore. Plans were afoot to raise money for the vast work, he was told. But that summer, at least, nobody was able to find it. Gutzon and his family lived until September in Keystone. Their living quarters were typical of the mining boom that had cluttered the valley with shacks in the late seventies.

“Compared with the setting of the rest of the project,” said Gutzon, “they were ultramodern.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

_DEDICATION_

One of the favorite jibes of the scoffers who didn’t think the Shrine of Democracy would ever amount to more than a big scar on a hill was that the workmen spent all their time dedicating it Gutzon listened to these charges gravely and without heat. “People like to go to dedications,” he said. “And if you don’t get people out here, nobody is going to know what you’ve got.” In addition to being a top sculptor he was also a good showman.

One remembers that the enterprise had virtually no friends in the summer of 1927--certainly no friends with ready money. The citizenry knew about it. That is to say, the citizenry of the Hill towns knew about it. They had heard it was buried somewhere out in the _bosque_ near Keystone. Gutzon Borglum and a couple of aides went up there each day on rented horses and surveyed and measured. In Keystone Gutzon talked with representatives of the power company and salesmen from machinery companies. But certainly nobody was cutting any rock off the surface of Mount Rushmore.

And then, in one of the most fantastic journeys that the history of the Presidents records, Calvin Coolidge came out to look at the West. The White House Correspondents’ Corps has never reached a decision about why Coolidge chose the Black Hills for his vacation that year. He caught trout with bait. Somebody should have advised him not to put on Sioux eagle feathers. He played a weird game of golf on a private course that was nearly vertical. And the best thought of the Washington press on the subject was that he was just a New Englander who had learned how to be a tourist. Now it is permitted to wonder.

Coolidge came out to the Game Lodge, thirty miles southwest of Rapid City, chiefly because Peter Norbeck suggested it and carefully laid the way for him. Norbeck was one of two South Dakotans who was really enthusiastic about making the Harney Peak region an object of national interest. Norbeck and Gutzon were friends who believed in each other’s magic, and Gutzon was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. You may make out of these premises anything you like. But there isn’t any doubt that the carving of Rushmore ceased to be idle conversation when the President arrived and slogged three miles up the hill through the dust to raise his hand and give the project its sacred quality.

The President was rolled out over a new road from Rapid City to the Game Lodge, a hostelry on Squaw Creek, handed a fishing rod and assigned to a preserve that had been packed with specimens from the state hatchery. Indian chiefs came and made obeisance. The grumbling correspondents installed themselves in Rapid City. Then, on the second day, Gutzon Borglum paid his respects to the distinguished visitor. He hired an airplane--which nobody else had thought of--and flew over the Game Lodge to drop a huge bouquet of mountain flowers on Mrs. Coolidge’s lawn.

The next day he arrived more formally at the President’s picnic plot to arrange, as he afterward reported, “a visit of dedication to Mount Rushmore.” And it is significant that the interview seems to have been previously arranged and the subject of the discussion well understood. Nobody was surprised when the date for the dedication was set--August 10, 1927. By that time everybody near enough to see was convinced that the President was just doing the things he had his heart set on. Recalling his interview with President Coolidge, Gutzon wrote:

It was a fine interview. Coolidge was a silent man. But he always talked with me--fishing, politics, even a little about art. He was happy he had come to the Black Hills for his summer outing. He said they reminded him of the Vermont mountains.

When the day arrived for the dedication we drove up as far as we could and walked the rest of the way. The President was mounted on a safe horse, led by an orderly on each side on foot, until we reached the cabin I had taken over as a studio. It was about 1,500 feet from the cliff.

There were lots of specially invited guests who had struggled up the hill. It was something new to see the consecrating of a mountain by the President of the United States. Nothing had been left undone to make this an official act. Everything was done with the greatest of dignity and decorum. Coolidge was really impressed.

“We have come here,” he said, “to dedicate a cornerstone that was laid by the hand of the Almighty. On this towering wall of Rushmore in the heart of the Black Hills is to be inscribed a memorial that will represent some of the outstanding events in American history, and portraying the features of four of our Presidents.

“The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people. It is in no small degree due to that spirit that we have been able to produce such leaders. If coming generations are to maintain a like spirit, it will be because they continue to study the lives and times of the great men who have been leaders of this country, and continue to support the principles those men represented. It is for that purpose that we erect memorials. We cannot hold our admiration for the historic figures which we shall see here without growing stronger in our determination to perpetuate the institutions that their lives revealed and accomplished.”

That, for the most part, was the dedication. And, singularly enough, it was very effective. The hot and weary witnesses who had made the march out of Keystone had suspected it would be, and they had no reason to complain. Calvin Coolidge, for once in his life, had been deeply moved.

The little crowd stood quiet and motionless for a minute. Gutzon was called over to the President’s side.

“Look,” said Coolidge abruptly, “who’s paying for all this?”

“Well,” answered Gutzon, “the Rapid City Commercial Club has been taking care of preliminary expenses. And since the Mount Harney Memorial Association has been formed, some money has been raised in the Black Hills and the state generally. We’ve got donations from the Homestake Mine and the railroads and from people outside like Charles Rushmore, Herbert Myrick and Coleman Dupont. We are very grateful.”

The President sniffed. “You’ll not go far on that,” he said. “The people of South Dakota can’t even pay the interest on their farm mortgages.”

“They’ve had a dry year west of the Missouri River,” explained Gutzon. “We can hope for more water next year.”

“Nonsense,” declared Coolidge. “They never get water out there. When I get back to Washington I want you to come to the White House. You know Secretary Mellon?”

“Yes,” said Borglum.

“All right,” pursued the President. “He and you and I will sit down and figure out what can be done to promote this work. I know great governments do things like this.”

The President then handed the sculptor the drills and Gutzon climbed to the top of the mountain. The engines were turned on for the first time. The huddled, silent witnesses caught the sudden chatter of the drills. The carving of Mount Rushmore had begun.

Gutzon came down and presented the first drill in use to President Coolidge. The next two went to Doane Robinson and Peter Norbeck, and he kept the fourth. Then everybody plodded back down the hill to Keystone.

“See me in Washington,” repeated Coolidge as they said good-by. And that the historian might record as the beginning of Rushmore financing.

Norbeck and Borglum disagreed as to the proper approach to the problem. Borglum said that he would ask the federal government to donate as much as the memorial promoters were able to collect from other sources. Norbeck said no, that money was hard to collect privately, that you couldn’t run drills on promises and that Mellon could be made to pay the full cost. Gutzon, remembering how he had raised more than a million dollars for Stone Mountain, refused to listen to this argument. But, it turned out, Norbeck was right.

Toward the end of 1927 Borglum was in Washington. He laid his plan before Mellon just as he had said he would, and Mellon was pleased. So was President Coolidge, for Gutzon’s modesty was something unusual at the time.

Norbeck was not pleased. “You could have got it all,” he said. “Now I don’t know what you’ll get.” He put a bill through the Senate, while Congressman Williamson was doing the same thing in the House, providing for a twelve-member commission to take over the drawings, contracts and material now held by Borglum, to be held and owned by the United States government. The $50,000 fund in the Rushmore treasury was exhausted in the middle of December 1927; so work was abandoned and nothing was done in 1928 while everybody in the Black Hills waited for Congress to act.

Norbeck was discouraged in 1928. In a letter to Gutzon he wrote:

Previous to this, public sentiment has held up pretty well under our repeated assurances that everything would go right along. But the fact that neither you nor I could scare up a few dollars for the work during the summer of 1928 has led people to believe that we were just talking hot air. Very few people in South Dakota take the matter seriously any more. Doane Robinson tries to, but it keeps him awake nights and he needs sleep....

This letter came to Gutzon in San Antonio, where he was working on the memorial to Woodrow Wilson destined for Poland, and he was a bit put out. To this letter he replied:

[Illustration:

_Photo by Lincoln Borglum_

VIEW OF RUSHMORE SHOWING HEADS OF THE FOUR PRESIDENTS]

[Illustration: F.D.R. AT THE UNVEILING OF JEFFERSON, AUGUST 1936]

My dear Senator, if I didn’t love you and sympathize with the difficulties you have had to face in the past year, I would get cross. But no one can respect you more than I do, know you half so well, agree with you so much and fail to feel that anything you write would be written in the best spirit. If I say anything a bit harsh, I am going to ask you to treat my remarks in the same spirit.

I have a feeling from your letter that you feel I have not raised the money that should have been raised; that I have not carried through the matters I should have carried through. Now let us clear up a few of these points. First, because it was with great reluctance that I took up the Black Hills work, for it is a terrific undertaking and I found the country and the people utterly uninformed in such matters and without funds. I agreed to go to the Hills and make a survey for a fixed sum. That was accepted; a bill was introduced in your state government with the result that nothing was paid for that service by the state. I found, in other words, that whatever I undertook, I had to carry much of the load all the time, in financing and developing interest, in engineering and production.

Finally when the work was in hand it was always in South Dakota that the inertia was felt most. While I was there, everything was promised; immediately I left, everything was put off until I returned. I have made at least three complete rounds of the cities in the southwest of South Dakota, feeling out gatherings for the purpose of informing and interesting the people and securing help for the memorial. I have been informed, time and again, at each of these gatherings, that the necessary funds were available provided your committee, or someone you designate, would either be with me or go and collect the money.

This was told me even at the Homestake Mine, where I talked for a solid hour to the manager and legal head of the concern, and secured from them the statement that they were completely sold on the proposition and would do their part. You yourself secured their contribution. I am not blaming you for anything. I have never questioned your wisdom, or your politics, or the reasons for delay in Washington. But I do think, and you must bear me out in this, that if the bill had been passed, the past year would have been one of energy, action and production, with the head of Washington completed on the mountain.

Less than a month after this exchange of letters the Rushmore bill was passed; $250,000 was appropriated on a matching basis and more than $50,000 released to match sums previously subscribed. Considering the carving program, this fund was still nothing to cause much celebration. The making of monuments has always been expensive. One such group alone--the Jefferson Memorial in Washington--had an estimated cost of $3,000,000. But one takes what one can get, and Gutzon was cheered again.

In one of his last Presidential acts Calvin Coolidge appointed ten men and one woman as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission: John A. Boland, Rapid City, South Dakota; Charles R. Crane, New York City; Joseph S. Cullinan, Houston, Texas; C. M. Day, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; D. B. Gurney, Yankton, South Dakota; Hale Holden, Chicago; Frank O. Lowden, Oregon, Illinois; Julius Rosenwald, Chicago; Fred W. Sargent, Evanston, Illinois; William Williamson, Rapid City, South Dakota; and Mrs. Lorine Jones Spoonts, Corpus Christi, Texas. At their first meeting, called by President Hoover in the White House in June 1929, J. S. Cullinan was elected president of the commission and John A. Boland chairman of the executive committee. Work on Mount Rushmore began at once.

Some people remember 1929 because of renewed hope that the great memorial would be finished. But most of the rest of the United States recall it as the year that started the big depression. Contributions came in slowly; then they stopped. Cullinan, with the blessing of President Herbert Hoover, organized the Rushmore National Memorial Society of the Black Hills to handle advertising, fund raising, memberships, management of concessions, maintenance of the park area, publicity and other matters not directly connected with the building of the memorial. Memberships were set at $100 apiece, which brought in $6,000, and that was the biggest sum that anyone in the undertaking saw for a long time.

Then there was the matter of a suitable inscription. The idea of such explanatory matter to accompany the carved figures had been set forth in the Congressional bill. It had been discussed by the sculptor and President Coolidge in the summer of 1927 and again when the pair met two years later in Texas. Borglum asked of the ex-President some eight or nine terse paragraphs covering the territorial expansion of the republic and starting with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The available space on the mountain gave room for about 375 words in letters three feet high. If reduced to two and a half feet, there would be room for 475 words. Reporters spread word throughout the country that Coolidge was writing a history of the United States in 500 words. He denied it.

Gutzon wrote a letter to Mr. Coolidge after that restating what he wanted. He was about to dress the mountainside for the entablature, he said, and would appreciate some copy. Mr. Coolidge sent the two paragraphs which read:

_The Declaration of Independence_--The eternal right to seek happiness through self-government and the divine duty to defend that right at any sacrifice.

_The Constitution_--Charter of perpetual union of free people of sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers under an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality and justice under the law.

Gutzon changed the wording slightly. He cut out the word _through_ before _self-government_ in the first paragraph. In the second he eliminated the phrase _under the law_ after the word _justice_. Mr. Coolidge objected to the editing. The newspapers raised another storm. Coolidge complained of the publicity. The sculptor assumed all blame and got this somewhat annoyed reply from Coolidge:

I know that you are a great artist. What I meant to convey is that I do not wish to be engaged in putting up a monument to myself. I wished my name kept off the mountain. I do not see any reason for your committee giving the press any statement of any kind in relation to me. I wish you every success....

Then there were letters to the _Times_, and essay contests in the newspapers, and speeches by high-school students, and resolutions by the Rushmore Commission. But in the end there was not one single contribution of the required length. Flaws in the granite caused a shift of figures that left no room for the entablature; and the Commission set the whole matter aside for future reference.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

_CARVING THE MOUNTAIN_

Some sons of God must stand upon the mountaintops And there through all the deathless generations guard The continents, and guide the gracious stars of fate: So God made mountains for the throne of these. Upon this mountaintop America enshrines Her sturdy sires, exalts her noblest knight. Where children of the earth may lift appraising eye And feel his virtue while his strength invests their souls. --DOANE ROBINSON

Gutzon Borglum carved a mountain. And as the years went by he became a dynamiter, a geologist, a practical miner and, very definitely, an engineer. He got used to crawling about on the face of a cliff, and in time he used to say that his sculpture was not greatly different from the cutting of a large block of stone in a studio. But, of course, the stone of the mountainside wasn’t dressed or prepared. It couldn’t be shifted into the light or away from it. The amount of stone to be removed was prodigious, and injury of the material left for carving was always a serious possibility. How one of these projects ever got itself done is something that he wasted thousands of words trying to explain.

When Gutzon first used dynamite for carving on Stone Mountain it had been taken by the world as a fantastic idea. But there was no coyness about its use when it came to Rushmore. It was laid out there in all proportions and all quantities. The sculptor had experts who knew what could be done with a six-inch stick, or half an ounce of it, or with a percussion cap alone. And they had to be in touch not only with the drilling of the moment but with the design of the whole monument to avoid the chance of an overcharge at one point injuring stone at a distance.

Such drilling skill was developed that the sculptor could depend on them to block out a nose to within an inch of the finished surface, to shape the lips, grade the contours of the neck, cheek, brow and all round areas. He could even shape the eyeball as a whole, but the defining of the eyelids and the pupils was done by drills, air tools and by hand.

The sculptor’s first concern was the position of Washington. He put in days studying the surfaces, shadows, reflections and the course of the sun; and eventually he chose the place where Washington’s head rises today. It was the best spot on the mountain.

He began to make models to suit the cliff. He discussed the angle of the head with Carothers, one of the literary secretaries of the Hoover administration, and he had long conferences about the character of the first President with Hoover himself. They decided that _uprightness_ should be emphasized in Washington’s statue. The head should not incline to right nor left, nor forward nor back, but should be set on the shoulders so that it would show dignity and poise. Carothers drew a straight line down the middle of a paper, put a ball on the top of it to indicate the head and remarked quite gravely, “This is the way it should be drawn.”

And that is the way it was drawn. The center of Washington’s head was fixed at the point where the horizontal line going across the brows met the vertical line through the chin. In roughing off they had to remove fifteen feet of rock before they found a hard, undamaged surface. This was done late in the summer of 1927. Blasting was not resumed until 1929.

Work on Washington taught them how to proceed quickly with other figures. It established methods, determined tools, temper of steel, arrangement of scaffolding for hoists and a labor gauge on the men who were to perform most of the rough toil on the monument.

The first preparation for carving was to draw in its proper position on the mountain an oval of the required length and width. This oval was divided into three sections--one at the line of the eyebrows, one at the end of the nose and a third at the end of the chin. These measurements were in the scale of the model; in other words, a model sixty inches in height had an enlarged outline sixty feet in height.

The work on Rushmore was done from swing harnesses developed at Stone Mountain. They were made of a leather-covered steel frame and were quite strong. The men were buckled into them. Thereafter they might be bumped or fall, but they could not get out without unbuckling themselves. The swings were suspended at the end of a 300-foot steel cable from a winch on the top of the cliff. They were housed in a shack on Washington’s head.

Ordinarily the practical method would have been to determine precisely where in the cliff the head was to be located, then fix the model at the same angle; next, to begin at the top, peel off the rough stone and finish as you went down. That’s the way any good mechanic or engineer would carry on such work, relieving the features, finishing as he descended and using the stone shelf that the work always left under his feet to stand on.

But this was a work of art, not of mechanics. The revelation of the face by the sculptor was as if he were releasing a living thing. Each drill hole must pierce the stone with certainty, so as not in any way to injure what was below. Gutzon said he could not allow mechanical methods to reduce his art production to a lifeless form.

Each day they carefully surveyed the rough-blocked face. When they reached the chin line they were thirty feet in from the original granite cliff. There they stopped and built a scaffold from chin to forehead, and the sculptor sent to Texas for his old friend and assistant Hugo Villa. It was then June and an unveiling was scheduled for July.

No man on the Rushmore project had ever carved a mountain before. But no matter. He had less difficulty with them than with any other phase of the undertaking. Most of them were the so-called forgotten men of Keystone--veteran miners, the one-time workers of the idle Holy Terror Gold Mine. They were hard-rock men; they were used to explosives; and they did not need many instructions.

In the end the sculptor had several experts on the mountain as adept as any in the country, and a loyal group of helpers. Gutzon established a boardinghouse near the blacksmith shop, engine room and other buildings at the foot of the cliff, and frequently came with his guests to eat with them. He knew them all.

Gutzon’s original contract with the Mount Harney Memorial Association had specified that Captain Jesse Tucker of Stone Mountain be named superintendent of the work at Rushmore and given a fixed salary of $10,000. To make this sum possible the sculptor reduced the amount to be paid to himself. The reason for Tucker’s position, he frankly stated, was that he must give part of his time to other sculptural work, and that while he was absent from Rushmore he needed someone to take his place.

But presently the Rushmore Commission hadn’t any money to pay to anybody. There were arguments and misunderstandings, and Tucker resigned. After that the full burden of the work fell on Gutzon. He moved with his family to the Black Hills and built a studio some distance from Rushmore at Hermosa.

Gutzon probably missed Tucker more than anybody else with whom he had ever worked. Correspondence between them during the first few months of construction on Rushmore shows the great concern of both of them for the safety of the workers. Tucker, who thought the men careless, was certain that they would contrive some bad end for themselves. But the years went on and the carving got done and somehow there were no serious accidents.

The nearest approach to disaster came when a lightning flash exploded a percussion cap just as the worker was making an artificial electrical connection. The man in the swing harness was shot out into space but by instantaneous muscular reaction flexed his knees as he was hurled back against the side of the mountain. He was badly bruised but not otherwise hurt. The sun was shining when the accident happened. Thereafter no blasts were set off without the advice of the weatherman.

The other accident occurred when a steel wire controlling the hoist broke. The open box in which three or four men were riding came hurtling down. The quick wit of a young man from Stamford, the assistant superintendent, prevented a serious crash. He stuck an iron rod between the hoist wheel and the cable that retarded the descent of the car. Only one worker jumped out as the car hit. He was treated for a minor chest injury.

Some unknown friend whom Gutzon always identified privately as Sam Insull set out a Diesel engine for him at a town in the western part of the state. For two years it furnished all the power needed not only to run the air compressors and drills on the mountain but the pumps of the Holy Terror Mine as well. A Wyoming company was started and Gutzon, on the promise of electricity for less than his own plant would furnish it, agreed to shut down. Shortly before the day scheduled for the unveiling of the Washington head the power company informed him that he must sign a contract to use the company’s electricity for twenty years or be cut off. Gutzon snorted and turned to the Diesel engine. But there was no hope from that source. Somebody had dismantled it and carried away most of the movable parts.

Commissioner John Boland rushed out from Rapid City and thereafter Gutzon bought power from the new company. But he refused to sign the twenty-year contract. The cost of the power was a matter of bitter discussion forever after.

Lincoln came to the mountain in 1932 and worked two years without pay. Gutzon trained him to do the “pointing,” which consists of measuring the models and locating their enlargements on the rock. It is the direct translation of the work of the artist from studio to the material which he will cut, and Lincoln was carefully prepared.

Gutzon declared that Lincoln was a master of this work, understanding its complicated mathematics, and father had confidence in son. Under him a staff of three assistants served as a “pointing crew” for the measurement of all models to be enlarged on the mountain. When not measuring they acted as aids and guides to the drillers. The instructions given to Lincoln at one period when the sculptor’s arrival at Rushmore was delayed indicate the dramatic quality of the work. The sculptor instructed his son thus:

I want you, in beginning the work and allotting the positions to the men, to avoid the two finished faces completely. Do not touch the hairlines around the face of Washington or his chin, or under his chin. Do not approach the face lines of Jefferson, or to the side of his face or under his chin.

On Photograph No. 1, I have drawn a circle where you can locate Payne [a driller] to begin down-drilling under what will be Washington’s ear and the left-hand lapel of his coat. Put one or two men on the lapel, which I have marked No. 2. Put two men on Washington’s shoulders and work carefully from the top, which I have marked No. 3. That will dispose of five or six men.

I have marked Lincoln’s eye. You can put two men in cages in each of the eyes. I would use Anderson on the one side and Bianco on the other, putting Bianco where the feldspar streaks run down, and Anderson on the outside. I would give Payne, with Bianco, a position on the nose and have them begin to take off stone by drilling in squares and breaking it off down to within six or seven inches of the finished surface. But do not try to cut the eyelid or eyeball. Make a round mass for each of these. Lincoln’s face in that way will take up probably six more men.

You can put about three men on the Roosevelt stone, marking carefully the contour of Lincoln’s face so that none of that is disturbed, and going back into the hole next to Jefferson’s face as deep as you can. If you can put any men down on the block that I have marked No. 8, without any danger of tools and stone falling on them, all right. I would put about three men down on the big crag. We still have seventy or eighty feet to take off that. I think this will keep you busy until I get there.

It did.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

_CONVERSATION_

In those days Gutzon Borglum found time to smile once in a while, although anybody who knew the trials of mountain carving might have wondered why. He had been written down for a comfortable part of a million-dollar memorial project. Seldom, during any one carving period, did he get much of it. Some years he got none. People were donating toward Rushmore begrudgingly in nickels and dimes. He was always shorthanded. The experts he needed couldn’t exist on the cash available. Somebody raised the price of electricity. Somebody dismantled the Diesel engine. There were wrangles over concessions and concessionaires and small-town politics. There were road troubles, and supplies were late. And there were other things. The question of why anybody should wish to become a topflight sculptor seemed unlikely to be answered--ever.

The head of Washington was officially unveiled on July 4, 1930. The rest of the cliff was unchanged, and Washington’s chin seemed to rest on the ledge from which it had been carved. But when the great flag swung aside to reveal the sculptured face the witnesses, strangers to Stone Mountain, felt that from then on the memorial would never die.

J. S. Cullinan, first president of the Rushmore Commission, presided and gave the monument its name: “The authority of Congress to carve colossal portraits of these great men in the granite of the Black Hills has created a perpetual _Shrine_ for political _Democracy_.” And Borglum, tired, dejected, almost conquered by a world where nobody ever seemed to want to do anything, was pleased with that. A head was finished on Rushmore, and the dullest of these laymen looking at it knew that it was a finely done piece of sculpture. He heard someone saying that it would be there forever, and he hoped that it would last longer than Lee’s at Stone Mountain.

The crowd at the unveiling got safely back to Rapid City with no trouble at all. And nobody thought of Borglum’s connection with the district’s good roads.

In the spring of 1930, trying to get from Rapid City to Keystone with two cars and tow aids, he had been ditched six times. He never got to Mount Rushmore that week. However, he did get to the telegraph office and sent word to President Hoover that the roads were impossible and that he would shut down the project unless conditions were improved and men could get to their work. Hoover sent the message to Governor William J. Bulow, who in turn made an appointment for his state road commission to meet the sculptor that week.

Meanwhile the governor telegraphed this message to Mr. Cullinan:

BORGLUM HAS THE TEMPERAMENT OF ALL GOOD ARTISTS, GETS MAD WHEN HE CANNOT CONTROL WEATHER CONDITIONS. NOTHING SERIOUS EXCEPT THAT HE GOT A NEW EXPERIENCE AND A NEW TOUCH OF LIFE. AM SENDING HIGHWAY ENGINEER TO SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE. WITH GOD’S AID AND PATIENCE HOPE TO GET HIM SMOOTHED OUT.

Within three days they had planned the beautiful road now leading from Rapid City to the memorial. Strange as it seems, South Dakota spent $480,000, plus a quarter of a million on other roads, to reach a monument on which she had not spent a dollar. Meanwhile Senator Norbeck with his Custer State Park Commission was working on a road approaching Rushmore from the opposite direction by way of Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain Road is one of the country’s finest examples of what can be done with economical engineering. Engineer Charles E. Smith who laid it out hadn’t much money to spend. The highway runs along part of its highly beautiful journey between Keystone and Grace Coolidge Creek on two lanes that are widely separated. It climbs terrific grades on corkscrew uplifts built of pine logs. It is well paved, well graded and safe.

One of the features of the highway is said to have come by accident. Work was started from the south end and presently struck a mountain that had to be tunneled. The hole was surveyed with no plan save to keep it in line with the approach already built. When the miners finally broke through they were looking into the face of Washington on Rushmore. The two remaining tunnels were cut at the same angle, framing the memorial with a showmanship worthy of Gutzon Borglum himself. Borglum was intensely pleased. “Norbeck’s Iron Mountain Road,” he said, “is as much a work of art as the carving of the mountain.”

Another Norbeck road over the so-called Pine Creek route between Rushmore and Hill City, again a masterpiece of scenic road building, was the cause of the sculptor’s abandoning his original plan of placing Jefferson on Washington’s right in the Rushmore grouping. There was a contributing factor in this decision due partly, he thought, to poor work. Up to summer of 1931 Gutzon had been trying to place the figure of Jefferson where he believed he belonged--on Washington’s right. Work had continued after the unveiling until the fall of 1930 and was resumed in the following spring. In July of that year the sculptor went to Poland, taking Lincoln Borglum with him, to erect his statue of Woodrow Wilson. He left Tallman and Villa in charge.

There was no way of testing the stone in the location for the Jefferson head, so he had quickly roughed out the block and left Villa pointing the face.

When he returned from Europe and motored out to Rushmore he noticed while still a mile away that something was radically wrong. He exclaimed to Villa, “What’s wrong with the Jefferson head?” Villa answered by turning to Tallman: “Didn’t I tell you the master would notice it from a long way off?” Then he said, “Well, there was a little difficulty about the pointing.” The trouble, he explained, was too deep a depression under the eye and there was not enough stone to push the head farther back.

The sculptor did not wait to find out what had gone wrong--rock or work. He was almost too angry for words. Gutzon thought he had taken all precautions. About half the work was finished and it wouldn’t do. Who or what was to blame did not matter. The damage was done. There was not enough stone to allow free modeling of Jefferson’s face, and Norbeck’s new road, exposing the back of the head, made a change in the composition advisable. The sculptor made a bold decision to abandon what had been done on Jefferson and place his figure on Washington’s left. This necessitated a change in the whole grouping, while the flaws in the rock in Jefferson’s new position were so deep that he had to go back sixty feet before he found good stone for the carving. Senator Norbeck, the only one consulted in the matter, gave complete approval.

Villa left shortly after this incident, but came to see his old master in Texas a year or so later and greeted him with his old-time affection. Nothing ever came between them again. Subsequently he flitted in and out of the Rushmore studio at unpredictable times. But Villa was a city man and was not at home in this rugged community. Gutzon missed him, for he brought to the studio a breath of the charm found in the Old World wherever art is active.

The year of Washington’s bicentennial, 1932, witnessed the shutdown of work at Rushmore for lack of funds, which to the sculptor seemed an unforgivable disgrace. However, there on the mountain was the portrait of the first President, which Mr. Cullinan had declared was the best in existence. The face seemed to belong to the mountain, having taken on its elemental courage, and Gutzon figured it as vital as he could make it. He occupied himself with regrouping the models in the studio. It had disturbed him to have the figures as close together as in the original composition, and now this had been opened up by putting Jefferson so far inward that it gave room for the sun to pass back of Washington and light Jefferson’s face. The flaws in the rock which made this necessary began to appear a blessing in disguise.

The recomposition also involved changing Washington’s shoulders in relation to his head. The left shoulder was moved back seven feet and then another seven feet, while the right shoulder was moved seven feet forward. When word got around that Borglum was moving Washington’s head there were loud alarms. Norbeck was flustered. Monument lovers from Rapid City rushed out to the mountain to see how a head that weighed several tons could be transported. There was some disappointment when they saw nothing more novel than the chiseling of the shoulders; but they talked, and the story, it is said, made good publicity.

John A. Boland of Rapid City, chairman of the executive committee of the Rushmore commission, was charged with the hiring of workers, purchase of materials and payment of salaries and bills. And it must be said that these worthy endeavors were seldom fraught with any sweetness and light. Boland’s office was in Rapid City--too close to Rushmore, he thought--and he could not move it because of his statewide business. He sat there quietly and never interfered with the carving operations. He felt that Borglum was a great artist and that the carving of Mount Rushmore was a noble undertaking. He may one day be considered a great patriot.

One of Boland’s handicaps in the situation was his unwillingness to spend any money that he didn’t happen to have. This attitude was, of course, diametrically opposed to that of Borglum, who never could be convinced that money really mattered. And it is said that these two stalwarts had “occasional clashes.” “Occasional clashes,” one regrets to say, is a highly erroneous and short-weight title for what they had.

Gutzon once said that he could feel his blood pressure rising when he got within 500 miles of Rushmore and faced the prospect of seeing Boland. Boland’s blood pressure went up only when Borglum needed money. But the men met, discussed the Shrine of Democracy, swapped observations about the current financial situation and brought the language of toe-to-toe wrangling to a new high.

Gutzon declared, of course, that he never took these arguments seriously. No row, he said, was ever worth remembering after its cause was gone; and that, probably, is a true report on his reactions. The last time he and Boland met he was pleased with the course of the world and mellow toward Boland. He had his arm across the chairman’s shoulder and was calling him “Johnny.”

What Boland thought about these goings on is, of course, an entirely different matter. He never talks much about his struggles in behalf of majestic art. “Borglum was a great sculptor,” he sums it up. “He certainly was that.”

The matter of concessions on Mount Rushmore bothered Gutzon considerably more than most people interested in the project realized. Continuous importunities for jobs and for permission to sell souvenirs and postcards and photographs near the work were petty annoyances with which he found it hard to cope. He knew that some such items had to be provided as part of bringing knowledge of his work to the attention of faraway people, but he would not tolerate cheap workmanship or poor taste in anything sold near the carvings. He got along for a while by keeping this trade under supervision in the Rushmore studio, but the relief was only temporary. A resurgence of what he called “local petty politics” presently involved him so that he called on the Department of the Interior to send someone to protect him.

The Department of the Interior complied and Gutzon learned that nothing is so bad that government intervention can’t make it worse. The unimaginative, bureaucratic routines taught to Washington office workers were wholly out of place in a work so constantly changing and so free from fixed rules. The protector sent by the department turned out to be an earnest young man who started out to confuse the South Dakota politicians and did well at it. But he wished to do greater things. He became aloof and secretive.

After some weeks he was discovered to be corresponding with an engineering company in Switzerland known chiefly for its construction of cog-wheel railroads. He thought the company might be interested in building such a funicular line up and around the face of Rushmore so that visitors might walk under Washington’s nose or sit in Lincoln’s eye. Gutzon’s indignation set the young man right and was long remembered.

The Park Service of the Department of the Interior had formulas for all of its functions. Its personnel with whom Borglum came into contact believed that the heads should be carved in orderly fashion. First, the figure of Washington should be completely finished; then the workers should move on to Jefferson, and so on. This, they pointed out, would give people something to look at.

Once more the sculptor who had asked only that he be protected from the harangues of would-be postcard peddlers made a protest against the continuous suggestions of ignoramuses. Harold Ickes, head of the department, understood Borglum’s position clearly and told him in forceful language to ignore such suggestions. But the subordinates never seemed to comprehend. One of Ickes’ engineers went so far as to offer to relieve Borglum of all worry. “Why don’t you finish your models and give them to us to reproduce on the mountain?” he inquired. “We have plenty of men who can do that sort of work--and quickly, too.”

“Somebody has to put the life and expression into carved faces,” Gutzon began to explain as he had been explaining since his first days on Stone Mountain. “That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be good sculptors.”

There was also the question of “hiring and firing” workmen. The bureaucrats could not understand that the sculptor had to discharge anyone who refused to obey orders, or that he might suddenly need a certain type of workman for a particular job and then need him no longer. It was such a complicated procedure to get a worker placed on the government payroll that it was no wonder they didn’t want to discharge him again in a few days. There are many letters to show that the sculptor’s relationship with the various heads of the Park Service was most friendly. Difficulty was due to a misunderstanding of what an art production of this unprecedented character required.

Even the Rushmore Commission suggested impractical sculptural plans and picked out certain parts of the work it would “like to see finished.” And while Gutzon was pushing the work, begging more funds to get more power, more workmen, skilled carvers, so that the work might be finished in his lifetime, it was irritating to be told that certain commissioners and local interests would like to keep the project going as long as possible because more tourists would come if they could see the sculptor at work.

After 1932 the work dragged on with frequent interruptions and without sufficient funds. Workmen were complaining of the daily climb to their stations--1,500 feet with a rise of 500 feet, which the sculptor himself made several times a day--resulting in a working time loss of from an hour to an hour and a half every day for every man on the job. To date, approximately seventy per cent of the roughing out of the entire surface to be carved had been completed and thirty-five per cent of the finishing, within a total working time of twenty-two months and an average of four to six drillers at work.

The personnel of the Commission was so changed by illness, death and lack of interest that it became increasingly hard to get a quorum at the semiannual meetings. Mr. Cullinan had resigned as president to be succeeded by Fred Sargent of the Chicago and North Western Railway. Only Gutzon could not resign. As he remarked, the rock of Rushmore was riveted to his neck.

A new phase of the work began in 1934 when the federal government assumed the burden of financing the memorial. Frequent stoppages, constant lack of sufficient power and skilled workmen, plus the unpredictable condition of the stone, had greatly increased working costs. Congress first voted to remove the fifty-fifty matching restriction attached to the first appropriation, making it immediately available, and next passed a second appropriation of $200,000. There were those near Mount Rushmore who said it was about time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

_--AND FINAL PEACE_

So then there was no trouble at all save bureaucratic misunderstandings and the vagaries of Rushmore rock. Accurate estimates of the time required to finish the work were impossible because of the constant shifting and reconstruction of design. The stone on Mount Rushmore, although the best in the Black Hills, offered interesting surprises. Some new reddish substance appeared on Lincoln’s cheek. Silver and tin crystals were found at the end of his nose. The feldspar crystals on Rushmore are unusually large and add to the difficulties. This was especially true on the lapels of Washington’s coat where no powder could be used. Finally Jefferson’s head had to be slightly turned so that the poor stone came in the hollow between his cheek and nose and could thus be removed entirely.

An unfailing support to the sculptor through these difficulties was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote a dozen or more sympathetic letters. One of them he closed by saying, “I am very much interested in the work you are doing, and will be glad to remove any drawbacks that may handicap you.... With best wishes always....”

So it is not surprising that he was present at Rushmore on August 30, 1936, for the unveiling of the head of Thomas Jefferson. He had been touring the West to see for himself the results of desperate drought and had been routed to reach Rapid City on time.

At the President’s request the exercises were informal. Flags of Bourbon France and Hapsburg Spain, fluttering from the top of the mountain, were lowered as the huge American flag was swung back to reveal the face of Jefferson. In a few words Gutzon asked the President to dedicate this memorial as a shrine which for years to come would bring people of all the earth to see what manner of men struggled here to establish self-determining government in the Western world. Mr. Roosevelt responded:

On many occasions when a new project is presented to you on paper and then later you see the accomplishment, you are disappointed. But it is just the opposite of that in what we are looking at now. I had seen photographs. I had seen the drawings. I had talked with those who were responsible for this great work. And yet I had no conception until about ten minutes ago, not only of its magnitude but of its permanent beauty and of its permanent importance.

Mr. Borglum has well said that this can be a monument and an inspiration for the continuance of the democratic-republican form of government, not only in our beloved country but, we hope, throughout the world.

This is the second dedication. There will be others by other Presidents in other years. When we get through there will be something for the American people that will last through not just generations but for thousands of thousands of years. And I think that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans ten thousand years from now when the weathering on the faces of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln shall have proceeded to perhaps a depth of a tenth of an inch, meditate and wonder what our descendants--and I think they will still be here--will think about us. Let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.

Doane Robinson, Senator Norbeck and William Williamson occupied seats in the front row of the platform, with John Boland immediately behind. The President remained in his automobile throughout the ceremony, with his party, including Governor Berry of South Dakota, around him. It was Senator Norbeck’s last public appearance. At the end he smiled and handed to Gutzon a note of a few lines reminding him touchingly of the satisfaction he must feel to see this accomplishment.

At this time, the summer of 1936, the work on the Lincoln face had advanced enough to show his eyes and part of his nose. It was pushed on so that on September 17, 1937, the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution, this head also was ready for unveiling.

For years Gutzon had been undecided whether to carve Lincoln with or without a beard. He had tried it both ways in other carvings with almost equal effect. But he had a feeling that a beard added strength to the face and that the world was more familiar with a bearded Lincoln. That was the face he finally decided to carve. He sent a small model of it to Franklin Roosevelt, carrying out his promise that Roosevelt would be the first to know.

The Lincoln head was dedicated on schedule and for the first time a Rushmore program was carried by radio broadcast to the entire country. Former Congressman Williamson, a member of the Rushmore Commission, presided. United States Senator Edward R. Burke was chief speaker. There was an impressive moment when the sculptor called the roll of “all those friends of Rushmore whose understanding sympathy and instant aid made this great memorial possible, and who are now with the gods--Calvin Coolidge, Peter Norbeck, James Cullinan.” Then taps sounded from the distant heights. The trooper who blew the call was suspended from the side of Washington’s head, a quarter of a mile away.

During the rest of 1937 much work was done on the Roosevelt head. Gutzon wanted it in condition to photograph for the appropriations committee. He himself had to spend much time in Washington worrying about the financing. He also made a brief trip to France to look after the erection of his statue of Tom Paine, modeled in the Hermosa studio.

As a model for Roosevelt he used a bust of the President that he had made during his lifetime. There was trouble finding stone enough for the head. He had to go back 120 feet in the rock before the model could be fitted. This was trying work.

All in all, 1937 was a typical Borglum year. His contract with the Commission was due for revision. The matter dragged along for months before an agreement could be reached. The sculptor got no pay for all that year, and he had to pay his lawyers a quarter of what he would have received to get any contract at all. The new contract was, in the main, satisfactory. It provided that the sculptor working with the Commission should prosecute work on the memorial to a successful conclusion. Gutzon felt that nothing but his death could stop it now.

In 1938 there was a tremendous rush of tourists who could hardly be accommodated. Congress appropriated $300,000 for the comfort of visitors and the finishing of the carvings. In the same year the Rushmore Commission was reorganized. Senator Key Pittman, long a friend of Rushmore, became chairman, succeeding Fred Sargent, who had died. Kent Keller, chairman of the House Library Committee, became vice-chairman. An executive office was established at Rushmore for the handling of accounts and materials.

The new commission met at Rushmore in August 1938, and the sculptor made a report. He wasn’t worried about the statues any more, now that he’d hit enough rock to take Roosevelt’s face. But his plans for the future included a lot of other things, including a big storehouse, more electric power, an adequate water supply to replace the trucking of water four or five miles in cans. He said it was time to begin work on the Hall and Stairway under the figures as specified in the original contract. And he got everything but the Hall and Stairway.

The President’s reorganization bill of 1939, which conferred additional control over Rushmore to the Department of the Interior, caused havoc. Work on the Hall was immediately discontinued over Gutzon’s protest. Construction of the storehouse was stopped. Lumber and materials were left strewn about to be ruined by the weather. He complained to the President and got a compromise order. The Commission was authorized to control carving and finish the storehouse. But the Commission still refused to permit Gutzon to dig his Hall.

It would have been an amazing thing, this Hall, and one day possibly will be. It was to be a room cut out of the solid rock 100 × 80 × 32 feet to an arched ceiling, finished in dressed granite. Here Borglum had planned to store the records of electricity beginning with Franklin--light, heat, music, radio, telephone, telegraph and controls of power as they were used in the spread of the republic. Man’s accomplishments were to be preserved here, sealed in airtight glass cases. If such an exhibition could be provided, he declared, the world a thousand years from now would have something interesting and educational to look at.

In 1939 South Dakota celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its statehood, and a meeting of the people was held at Rushmore. Governor Harlan J. Bushfield, later U. S. Senator, said, “At this time, when freedom and democracy have been challenged in so many parts of the world, no better place for this ceremony could possibly be selected than the Black Hills and particularly this Shrine of Democracy.”

The Sioux Indians were there under Chief Henry Standing Bear, camped in wigwams around the base of Rushmore cliff. Some 15,000 people had come from all parts of South Dakota and neighboring states. Doane Robinson appeared in the same suit of clothes and the same hat he had worn on statehood day fifty years before. It seemed to be a fitting contribution to Rushmore’s most enthusiastic celebration.

Across the country in Washington, Congressman Francis Case, now Senator, of South Dakota, whose home at Custer was virtually in the shadow of the memorial, was carrying on the old fight for funds. To a Congressional committee he said:

The best answer to every question about Rushmore is to see it.... I have seen it grow from a dream to a reality.... The soundness of Doane Robinson’s idea, the dogged persistence of the late Senator Peter Norbeck, and the ability of Gutzon Borglum to inspire people with the works of his hands and with his vigorous exposition of American ideals, have kept the project going on....

And Mr. Case read into the record a letter from John Boland which said in part:

Mr. Borglum is an artist. I am a businessman. Therefore it is only natural that we should at times disagree regarding the business functions of the commission. Such differences, however, have never been serious and an amicable understanding has always been reached. My only desire is to have the Mount Rushmore memorial completed in the best possible manner and to have Mr. Borglum carry on his great work with the assistance of his son, Lincoln, the continued co-operation of the commission and the efficient supervision of the National Park Service.

So presently all human troubles had been wafted away from Rushmore, and briefly the atmosphere was filled with the sweetness and light that Gutzon had foreseen. As the park was landscaped and the carving of the mountain went on with effortless speed, nobody could remember the charge that Gutzon Borglum had an ungovernable temper. He was a keen observer, but he was temperate and he was polite.

One remembers the day when Walter Travis of the Rapid City _Journal_ paid one of his routine calls at Rushmore. Gutzon beamed on him. Travis knew that Gutzon had recently been in a long and futile argument with Rapid City’s administration on the desirability of straightening and decorating Rapid River. But he smiled, too. It was none of his business.

Gutzon pushed out his hand for a hearty greeting. “Welcome, Speedy,” he said. “And how is everything in your backward and objectionable little village?”

“Only a Borglum could say,” answered Travis, “because Borglums never forget.”

People whose contacts with Borglum spread over a long time know that in his own opinion he was indubitably _right_. But looking back over the years they realize that most of the time he really was right, and for the rest of the time, however reluctantly, he would listen to reason. He wanted to get things done and he had a great impatience with people who stopped him. But no one of his friends who knew his generosity and gentleness ever hinted that his most vocal indignation could be classed as ungovernable temper. Temper, possibly ... but not ungovernable.

He was one of this generation’s most accomplished showmen. He took the jibes of the newspapermen with good grace. And he gave them back the same way. You may remember the matter of Washington’s nose. Some reporter, trying to spur him into a grand speech, asked him if he would call the figures on Rushmore as _perfect_ as they might be. The great sculptor shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “The nose of Washington is an inch too long. It’s better that way, though. We are slowly approaching perfection. It will erode enough to be exactly right in 10,000 years.”

Borglum, possibly, was not the man that a dullard could understand. It is not enough to say that he was a great sculptor--perhaps the greatest of his generation. He had to be many more things to get the Mount Rushmore memorial finished. Looking back over his story one is definitely confused. Should he be given world honors for his art, or for his remarkable aptitude for getting money out of smooth and experienced politicians, or for his incredible knowledge about the weakness of stone, or for his skill as a dynamiter, or for his absolutely unbreakable will? You may take your choice and be partly right. If he had lacked any of these attributes, Rushmore would still be back in a wilderness with dead trees piling up about its base.

* * * * *

Borglum died suddenly on March 6, 1941, in Chicago. He had spoken a few nights before for Dr. Harry Kelly, a friend of many years’ standing, in Park Ridge. He was in severe pain, yet he stood for more than an hour to deliver an impassioned plea for faith in America and the principles of personal liberty on which the government was founded. He was plainly ill at the close. He was taken to a hospital the next day and eventually failed to survive a coronary thrombosis. The years on Rushmore had done his heart no good.

Despite the fact that he was supposed to have been making his fortune in the Black Hills, he died thousands of dollars in debt. It was years before the hospital and doctor bills could be paid. Lincoln Borglum knew what details were still lacking on the almost finished figures on Rushmore. The Commission, with the concurrence of the Park Service, designated him to finish the work. Lincoln refused to make any changes or to carry the work any farther than indicated by his father’s models.

Congress passed a resolution for Gutzon Borglum’s interment in a tomb to be carved in the rock at Mount Rushmore. But Gutzon, some time before his death, had extracted a promise from Lincoln that he should be buried among the flowers in California. His friends, led by Commander E. F. McDonald, Jr., decided with the family that his wishes should be carried out.

So he was buried in a memorial court of honor with the inscription composed by his lifelong friend Rupert Hughes close by him:

His birthplace was Idaho; California first taught him art, Then France who gave him fame; England welcomed him: America called him home. His genius for the exquisite as for the colossal Gave permanence on canvas, in bronze, In marble, to moods of beauty or passion, To figures of legend and history. Nations, cities, colleges paid him tribute. As patriot he stripped corruption bare. As Statesman he toiled for equality in the Rights of man. At last he carved a Mountain for a monument: He made the mountain Chant, “Remember! These giant Souls set America free and kept her free. Hold fast your sacred heritage, Americans! Remember! Remember!”

So, for a time, there is a pause in the story of Gutzon Borglum. You may still rouse an argument about the art of mountain carving. Some relicts of the Stone Mountain Association are still convinced that he was angry-tempered and erratic and that nobody could get along with him. What they do not see is that all such things make no difference. The Four Faces of Rushmore stand looking into the sun. And Gutzon Borglum seems likely to live as long as any human man who ever trod this earth, except the four he helped make immortal.

_INDEX_

_INDEX_

Abbot, Harry, 110

Adair, Forrest, 177, 183

Alderman, Edwin A., 151-152, 153

Altgeld, Governor John P., 126, 130-133

Anglin, Margaret, 272

Anthony, Susan B., 281

Arkright, Preston, 184, 223

Arnold, Reuben, 190

Art Students’ League, 74

Aycock Memorial, 154-156

Bad Lands, 279, 280

Baillie, Robert (“Bob”), 80, 168, 170

Baldwin, “Lucky,” 43

Baker, Newton D., 139, 144-145

Bannwort, Carl, 163-164

Barlow, Lester, 180, 210, 263

Barnard, George Gray, 71

Bates, Blanche, 273-274

Beecher, Henry Ward, 129

Bell, Marian, 79

Biddle, A. J. Drexel, 259, 261

Black Hills, 276-280 _et seq._

Blavatsky, Madame Elena, 37

Boland, John A., 290, 298, 304-305, 314

Borglum, Elizabeth Putnam, 42-43, 55-56

Borglum, Gutzon, 15 _et seq._

Borglum, Ida Michelson, 28

Borglum, James de la Mothe, 27-28, 30-34, 36-38

Borglum, Lincoln, 177, 237, 238, 270-271, 298, 302, 314, 316

Borglum, Mary Ellis, 177, 271

Borglum, Mary Montgomery, 104 _et seq._

Borglum, Solon, 28, 39, 68

Borglum Kloster, 25, 26

Borglum Memorial Studio, 226

Borie, Adolph, 268

Bradford, Ralph, 266

Brady, “Diamond Jim,” 63

Brangwyn, Frank, 58

Bricka, Madame Helen, 63

Bryan, William Jennings, 133

Bulow, Governor William J., 301

Burke, “Calamity Jane,” 277

Burke, Senator Edward R., 311

Burmeister, Charles, 248

Bushfield, Harlan J., 313

Butterfield, General Daniel, 134

Butterworth, Frank, 109

Cameron, Colonel Beniham, 214

Cannon, Speaker Joseph G., 119

Case, Francis, 314

Chalmers, Stephen, 126, 127

Chavannes, Puvis de, 47, 49

Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, 17

Chicago and North Western Railway, 17, 308

Clarke, Sir Purdon, 85

Coolidge, President Calvin, 17, 202, 284-288, 290, 291, 311

Connally, Thomas W., 190

Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille, 49

Corpus Christi, Texas, sea wall, 229, 231

Crandall, Arthur, 110-111

Crane, Charles R., 290

Crews, Laura Hope, 272

Cullinan Joseph S., 290, 300-301, 303-304, 307-308, 311

Czecho-Slovak Army, 250-254

Dalou, Jules, 49

Daniels, Bebe, 40

Daniels, Judge Frank, 155

Daniels, Josephus, 154, 155, 215

Davis, Bob, 41, 94, 126, 268

Davis, Cliff (“Dynamite”), 188, 223

Davis, Jefferson, 171, 175, 188, 199, 203, 204, 209, 217

Davis, Madge, 268

Davis, Sam, 95, 96-98

Day, C. M., 290

Dempsey, Jack, 260

Drought, Mrs. J. P., 227-228

Duncan, Isadora, 64

Dunne, Governor Edward F., 133

DuPont, Senator Coleman, 17, 262

Eassie, R. M., 64

Edwards, Henry Stilwell, 201

Ehlers, Colonel E. M., 135

Ellis, Dr. James N., 175, 177

Enters, Angna, 271

Faherty, Michael J., 157-158

Faville, William B., 74

Fort Pierre, 280

Frankfurter, Felix, 131

Frémont, Jessie Benton, 41-42, 43, 45, 53, 54, 56

Frémont, General John C., 41-42

Fuller, Loie, 62

Fuller, W. W., 152-153, 209

Game Lodge, 285

Garrison, Bob, 79

Gary, Judge Elbert, 209

Gavin, William A., 256-262

Gettysburg Memorial, _see_ North Carolina Civil War Memorial

Gibson, Charles Dana, 262

Greenway, General John, 232

Greenway, Isabella, 232

Griffin, George Butler, 40

Gurney, D. B., 290

Haines, Lynn, 172, 173

Harris, Frank, 79

Harvey, Robert, 190

Hickok, “Wild Bill,” 277

Heins, G. L., 88

Hill, Alice, 79

Hill, Ebenezer, 114

Hitchcock, Senator Gilbert, 147

Hoffman, Malvina, 79

Holden, Hale, 290

Homestake Mine, 287, 289

Hood, Ethel, 79

Hoover, President Herbert, 290, 294

Howell, Albert, 213

Hoyt, Cornelia, 175

Hudson, E. W., 89

Hughes, Charles Evans, 117, 124, 125, 148

Hughes, Rupert, 104, 316-317

Huntington, Collis P., 45-46

Inman, Mrs. Sam, 190

Insull, Samuel, 297

International Sporting Club, 255-262

Ito, Michow, 271

Jackson, General Thomas J. (“Stonewall”), 171, 175, 185, 188, 193, 199, 209

Jefferson, President Thomas, 152, 281, 298-299, 303, 309

Johnson, Governor Hiram, 119

Jones, Dr. Ashby, 223

Kaufman, John, 223

Keith, William, 41

Keller, Kent, 272-312

Kelly, Dr. Harry, 316

Kennedy, Charles Rann, 269

Key, Mayor James L., 222

King, Stanley, 143, 144

Kingsley Society, 59

Kirby, John, 209

Lee, General Robert E., 21, 102, 171, 174, 175, 184-185, 191-199, 212, 218-219, 221

Lewis and Clark Expedition, 280

Lincoln, President Abraham, 21, 85-86, 99, 101-103, 159, 160, 161, 162, 281, 298-299, 306, 309, 311

Lincoln, Robert, 86

Lober, George, 79

Lodge, Senator Henry Cabot, 202

Lowden, Frank O., 290

Luks, George, 83, 252

Lum, Ralph, 101, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170

Lummis, Charles, 40, 51, 52

McConnell, James Rogers, 19, 151-154

McCord, L. Lawrence, 222

McDonald, Commander Eugene F., Jr., 316

McGuire, O. R., 49

McKinley, Congressman William, 118

McKinley, President William, 116

McLean, Governor Angus, 214

Mackay, Clarence, 95-98

Mackay, John, 94-97

Malin, M. F., 79

“Mares of Diomedes, The,” 71, 84-85, 99

Masaryk, Thomas, 250, 251, 254

Mason, Frank, 175

Mason, Mrs. Frank, 175, 221

Matthison, Edith Wynne, 82, 269

Mellon, Andrew, 202-203, 287, 288

Meloney, Mrs. William Brown, 249, 265

Metropolitan Parks Association, 247-249

Midland Railway Company, 60-61

Miller, Henry, 272

Mitchell, John Purroy, 162

Montgomery, Mary, _see_ Borglum, Mary Montgomery

Moody, William Vaughn, 272

Mount Harney Memorial Association, 287, 296

Mount Rushmore, 17-19, 21, 86, 278-283, 284-315 _et passim_

Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission, 20, 290, 296

Munger, Dr. T. T., 105

Myrick, Herbert, 17, 287

National Arts Club, 73-74

National Sculpture Society, 73

Nocquet, Paul, 69-70, 266-267

Norbeck, Senator Peter, 277, 280, 281, 285, 287-289, 301-302, 303, 311, 314

North Carolina Civil War Memorial, 232-235

“Nude Descending a Staircase,” 72-73

O’Harra, Dr. Cleophas C., 276

Orme, Coribel Kellogg, 175, 212

Paderewski, Ignace Jan, 235-243, 254

Pardo, Gregory, 49, 50

Pearsall, Colonel P. M., 155

Percy, Julia, 80-81

Perkins, George W., 114, 118, 119, 123, 248

Peters, Dr. John, 91-93

Pickett’s Charge, _see_ North Carolina Civil War Memorial

Pittman, Senator Key, 312

Plane, C. Helen, 16, 173-178, 189, 196, 197, 198, 215, 223, 278

Poe, Dr. Clarence, 155-156

Potter, Bishop Henry C., 92

Putnam, Arthur, 43

Randolph, Hollins, 190, 192, 197, 209, 210, 211, 217, 218, 221.

Rayford, Julian Lee, 267-268

Raymond, Mayor Thomas L., 168

Reid, Whitelaw, 46

Reilly, James, 270

“Return of the Boer, The,” 62

Rhind, J. Massey, 159

Rickenbacker, Captain Eddie, 139-140

Rivers, R. (“Petie”), 190, 192

Road Beautification, 230-231

Robinson, Boardman, 268

Robinson, Doane, 16-17, 276, 281, 288, 293, 313-314

Rodin, Auguste, 47-49, 89

Rollins, Philip, 53-54

Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 309-311, 313

Roosevelt, President Theodore, 45, 86, 98, 103, 110, 112, 113-125, 169, 266, 277, 281, 299, 312

Roper, Mrs. Robert Thornton, 175

Rosenwald, Julius, 290

Rushmore, Charles, 17, 287

Rushmore National Memorial Society of the Black Hills, 290

Ruskin, John, 59

Russell, Lillian, 274

Russell, Tom, 225

Ryan, John D., 139

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 68, 70-71, 82, 127

St. John the Divine, Cathedral of, 87-93

St. Mary’s College, Kansas, 37-38, 39

Sargent, Fred W., 290, 308

Saunders, George, 225

Schiff, Jacob, 74, 248

Schiff, Mortimer, 82

Sedden, Mrs. J., 50

Selfridge, Lieutenant, 245

Shaw, George Bernard, 59

Sheridan, Mrs. Philip H., 98, 100

Sheridan Memorial, Chicago, 156-158

Sheridan Memorial, Washington, 98-101

Shrine of Democracy, _see_ Mount Rushmore

Shumaker, Theo, 277

Smith, Charles E., 302

Smith, Edith Cornell, 267

Smith, Herbert Knox, 111, 114

Smith, Spencer J., 42

Smith, Sydney, 267

Sobieski, Carl, 64

Sparks, Governor, 96

Spoonts, Lorine Jones, 290

Squier, General George 143

Stephens Memorial, 220-221

Stetson, Francis L., 248

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 126-128

Stewart, John A., 119

Stillman, James, 85

Stone Mountain, 15, 17, 18, 19, 86, 93, 167, 168, 171-181, 182-220, 221-224

Stone Mountain Coin, 200-203

Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association, 16, 171, 189-190, 196, 201, 205, 206-221

Stone Mountain Executive Committee, 189, 199-200, 201

Sullivan, Louis, 67

Sutton, W. A., 190

Taft, President William Howard, 116-117

Teck, Duchess of, 63

Teck, Duke of, 63

Texas Centennial, 230

Thompson, William Hale, 133, 157

Tiffany, Marie, 183

Tolentino, William, 79

Trail Drivers’ Association, 224-226

Travis, Walter (“Speedy”), 314-315

Trudeau, Dr. Edward L., 19, 126-129

Tucker, Jesse, 178-183, 188, 191-192, 210-212, 214-215, 296-297

Tumulty, Joseph, 140-141

Turner, Eva Griffin, 40-41

Ullman, Isaac, 115

Ulrich, W. R., 222

United Daughters of the Confederacy, 173-174, 176, 188-192, 196, 206-218

Van Horn, Amos, 101, 159

Vanophem, Jean, 188

Venable, Sam, 174-177, 183, 190, 211, 212, 218, 221, 222

Victoria, Queen of England, 63

Villa, Hugo, 165-166, 168, 191, 215, 220, 302, 303

Vincent, S. E., 111

Wadsworth, Herbert, 267

Walker, Bill, 259

Walker, James J., 259

Ward, J. Q. A., 98

Wars of America Memorial, 19, 21, 159-170, 182, 271

Washington, President George, 161, 281, 282, 283, 298, 303, 306, 309

Webb, David, 190, 204, 209

Whiting, Lillian, 84

Whitman, Colonel Royal E., 99, 100, 106

Wilbur, R. L., 169

Williams, Henry Smith, 104

Williams, Virgil, 41

Williamson, Congressman William, 277, 288, 290, 311

Willis, G. F., 221

Wilson, President Woodrow, 138, 140-143, 148, 252

Wilson Memorial, 21, 25, 235-243, 302

Winter, Rogers, 190

Wood, General Leonard, 117-124, 262

Wright, Orville, 244

Wright, Wilbur, 244

Wyatt, Henry, 129