It isn’t remarkable that Borglum had virtually all the work he could do
in the early 1900s. Nobody in New York seems to have been talking about
anyone else. He was no mute and long-suffering artist. He was somebody
who knew how to answer back ... and he did ... and the press loved him.
Gutzon was not disturbed because many of his commissions came to him
through people who knew nothing whatever about sculpture except that it
was expensive.
“It’s no matter,” he would say. “If they knew anything about it, they’d
probably be calling for somebody else.” Nevertheless, it is true that
the commissions came from people and localities as varied as those he
had to do with in his own swirling life. There is, for instance, the
story of the John Mackay statue in Nevada. It begins with the revival of
his boyhood friendship with Bob Davis, and it is typical of how things
came to him.
One day in 1908 in some puzzlement he answered a telephone call from
_Munsey’s Magazine_ and heard the explosive voice of Editor Bob Davis, a
voice he hadn’t heard in nearly twenty years.
“I knew you in Los Angeles--remember?” the editor began. “I have
something in your line I want to talk to you about. Can you have lunch
with me?”
So they had a reunion at a hotel near the studio and a pleasant meal
during which nothing at all was said about sculpture. Gutzon thought
that Davis was going to ask him to write an article and had quickly
decided to do it. Then suddenly Davis came to his subject:
“Borglum,” he said, “would you like to make a statue of John Mackay?”
“Of course,” Gutzon answered in astonishment. “Who wouldn’t make a
statue of a citizen like that?”
“Well,” said Davis, “my brother Sam is in town. The state of Nevada has
trusted him with a commission. The state has authorized and voted some
money for the statue, but Clarence Mackay has taken over the
responsibility of financing it. So if you will take the job----”
“Let us go and see Sam,” Gutzon suggested. The next day, after a meeting
with Mackay, he got the commission.
Gutzon was more than ordinarily pleased. He was doing a lot of work but
nothing spectacular. He had known of Mackay since boyhood and felt that
a statue to him would attract national interest.
John W. Mackay, lest people of our war-tossed world forget it, was an
international personality for several reasons. He was, among other
things, one of the Big Four of the Comstock Lode, a silver king and a
builder of the first cable laid across the Atlantic. He had been a
consistent fighter with a tough constitution and no feeling, ever, that
he could fail to win.
Gutzon told Clarence Mackay that he would need all the photographs that
might be available of the man and also all the data, news and rumor
about him that might still be extant. Mackay saw the point. He not only
gathered up all the information that his agents could find, but he
visited the studio every morning on his way from Long Island to Broadway
and spent a half hour reminiscing with the sculptor. Gutzon presently
began to feel that he knew John W. Mackay pretty well.
The statue, inasmuch as it had to stand in the open, was scheduled to
be eight or nine feet tall. Because of the static nature of the
material, Gutzon said, anything less than that would look smaller than
human. He made careful sketches to determine position, expression and
general composition, and all of this took several months.
“I want to show my father as he was,” Mackay said, “a workman in the
mines out of which his wealth and his position in life came.”
Because of this the model showed the capitalist in the dress of a
miner--top boots, loose shirt open at the throat and shapeless working
trousers. The left hand was grasping a pick handle against which the
body leaned. The right hand was upturned, holding a piece of quartz.
Clarence Mackay liked it. When it was done he asked Gutzon to take it to
Nevada and find a place to put it. “It is very difficult work to make a
statue,” he said. “I think it is more difficult to find the right spot
to display it. And I think the man who is qualified for one job is best
qualified for the other.”
Thus began a new and complicated adventure. Gutzon met Sam Davis and
went to Carson City, Nevada, carrying letters of introduction to state
officials. There they met Governor Sparks, who looked interested but
extremely puzzled.
Carson City was without parks, city squares or, for that matter, any
cultivated landscape. The governor scratched his head and said, “Doesn’t
seem to be much place where you could put a statue around here ...
unless you want to stick it out in the middle of the street.”
The local organizations--patriotic, political, business, social--all had
something of the governor’s attitude but were guided, in public action,
by good old Western individualism. Each one suggested where Gutzon could
put his statue, but no two could reach an agreement. The sculptor
labored with them for several weeks and got very annoyed. He began to
think that there was no reason for locating the work in Carson City. The
right place for it, he
[Illustration: STONE MOUNTAIN]
[Illustration: WORKING PLATFORM NEAR SUMMIT OF STONE MOUNTAIN]
[Illustration: MODEL OF STONE MOUNTAIN GROUP
This was the model which Borglum destroyed.]
thought, was Virginia City, where Mackay had operated. But Virginia City
was in worse shape than Carson.
He came one night to the home of Sam Davis, after a weary day with a
government committee, and asked if he would object to communicating with
Mr. Mackay about where to put his father’s statue. Sam burst into
laughter. “You’re growing up,” he said. “Go as far as you please.”
Gutzon picked up the telephone and called Joseph Stubbs, president of
the University of Nevada at Reno. He never could explain why he picked
President Stubbs except that he had met him and found him to be just the
sort of man to develop a university in that sort of town. At any rate,
he called and asked, “Would it interest you to have a statue of John W.
Mackay on the campus of your university?” And Stubbs said, “Certainly
... or is this a joke?”
At Gutzon’s suggestion the president sent a telegram to Clarence Mackay
asking him if he would consider having the statue in Reno on the
university campus. Next morning the sculptor received a telegraphic
order to call on President Stubbs. A place for the memorial was located
at the upper end of the campus facing the sun. It was behind a
corrugated-iron shack which bore the label “School of Mines.”
In a short time the statue was dedicated with proper ceremonies and a
tremendous turnout of important people. Clarence Mackay, who brought his
friends from New York in a private car, didn’t like the School of Mines
structure as a background for his father. So he telegraphed architect
Stanford White in New York to come out and lay plans for a new one. The
result was a new building which cost, before Mackay equipped it,
$475,000. After that came a second and a third building which, with
Mackay’s endowments, cost somewhere over $1,500,000.
That, to all intents and purposes, was the beginning of a new life for
the University of Nevada. The statue that led to it cost, complete and
erected, $12,000.
And it led to other things, too. Clarence Mackay was obviously a
satisfied customer. He wrote to Sam Davis that he was so pleased that he
had tried to discharge some of his debt of gratitude by recommending the
sculptor to the sponsors of the Sheridan Memorial to be erected in
Washington. Gutzon was definitely gratified. His study of the Civil War
in preparing the model for the Grant competition had made him familiar
with its leaders. And he loved Sheridan’s saltiness, activity and
audacious courage.
He respected the general’s reputed ability to swear and his genius for
making his men understand tirades that must have sounded like
jabberwocky.
“A great general!” declared Borglum. “And unusual!”
Unfortunately, the United States government had already placed the
commission for this memorial and the field was now open to all because
the original artist had not yet produced a model satisfactory to the
committee. He had been at it thirteen years.
A second misfortune lay in the fact that this sculptor was J. Q. A.
Ward, president of the National Sculpture Society, who had failed to see
eye to eye with Gutzon on many subjects, chief of which was the
controversy over reorganizing the society. In spite of this he and
Gutzon had exchanged letters expressing sorrow that there had been any
bad feeling. The last thing Borglum wanted to do was to give further
offense to the distinguished leader of the New York sculptors ... but he
did make the memorial. Art was art, and he got it done on schedule.
Gutzon found it easy to open correspondence with the committee in charge
of the memorial. He had long been acquainted with President Theodore
Roosevelt, and he had met some of his military aides through their
common love for horses. It was arranged to have Mrs. Sheridan and her
son visit the Thirty-eighth Street studio. They came and reported that
they liked what they had seen--the model for the Grant monument with its
three horses, the dashing horses of the “Mares of Diomedes” group, the
marble head of Lincoln.
There was still some delay about the granting of a new contract. Gutzon
was interviewed. He sent photographs of his work to the committee.
Presently, however, he was contemplating his old annoyance. The
committee suggested a competition. Gutzon Borglum refused.
“I shall be happy to make a sketch model for the committee’s
consideration,” he said, “but only after I have received a contract.”
After much discussion the committee gave in. The contract was awarded,
and Gutzon made the sketch model as he had agreed. The sketch was
eventually cast in bronze and presented to the Officers’ Club of Rio de
Janeiro as a gift from the Officers’ Club of Washington.
The uncovering of the general’s life brought contacts with many of his
old comrades in arms, including a close friend, General George Forsyth.
Colonel Royal E. Whitman, an old Indian fighter who had ridden with
Sheridan in the Civil War, wrote Gutzon dozens of letters covering all
sorts of details. He even declared he could produce the actual
accouterments of Sheridan’s horse.
Sheridan’s horse, as is well known, is preserved stuffed and mounted on
Governor’s Island. Borglum wasn’t much interested in it. It was
unthinkable to him that a dead horse could pose for the one that carried
Sheridan on his wild ride to Winchester. Through Colonel Whitman he had
bought a Virginia hunter named “Smoke” who had the run of the studio and
was a tractable pet. In due course “Smoke” qualified as Sheridan’s
mount.
One remarkable thing about the memorial--an innovation that now has
become almost commonplace in art--assured its success. Sheridan was
presented not as the older man he lived to be, but in his prime and at a
supreme moment in his career--the turn of the Federal retreat at
Winchester. Gutzon pictured the moment when the general, returning from
a conference with Lincoln, came galloping to meet his fleeing soldiers.
In the statue he has pulled up his horse and is waving the men back into
the fight. There is fury in his eye and, as the sculptor felt, a
historic phrase on his lips: “You will sleep in your tents tonight or
you will sleep in hell!”
Gutzon modeled the horse and rider in clay, in the size that they would
have in bronze, which was another important characteristic of his work.
He never turned over a small model to others to have it enlarged by
mechanical process, as was being done by some sculptors. He wanted his
own modeling, the imprint of his thumb, to appear in the finished work.
He wanted to get the spirit of the action and pose. If he were to expend
creative effort on a sketch, he declared, he would have lost interest by
the time he came to make an exact copy on a larger scale.
There has been considerable controversy over Sheridan’s ride to
Winchester. Some writers, like Joseph Hergesheimer, have maintained that
the wild gallop was only a mild trot. General Crosby and General
Forsyth, brother officers of Sheridan, favored the accepted version. So
would any cavalry officer. No matter how he might have been riding at
the start, he was certainly riding as fast as the horse could take him
when he came up with his defeated command. An eyewitness of the ride,
Private Frederick Bullis of the New York State volunteers, reported:
I was near enough to him to touch his horse when he got there.
There were lumps of foam as big as my fists on the horse’s face,
and his nostrils were bleeding. Sheridan stood up in his stirrups
and yelled “Face the other way! Face the other way!” He kept
yelling it over and over. He was swinging his sword and swearing
like a demon.
The monument was unveiled with much pomp and circumstance on November
25, 1908. Mrs. Sheridan herself pulled the cord that held the draperies
in place. There was a parade of the armed forces that included every
branch of the services. There were speeches by notables and concerts by
brass bands. There was also a long account of the event in the Omaha
_Bee_. The correspondent identified Gutzon Borglum as an Omaha boy,
which, indeed, he once had been.
The turbulent figure of Sheridan was acclaimed as one of the greatest
military statues in America. Critics noted the anatomical perfection of
the horse and the faithful picturing of the general as a young man. But
their praise was for the terrific action in bronze sculpture--the
captured fear and climax of battle. It is hard to imagine that this
memorial and the monument to President Lincoln in Newark were both the
work of the same artist. Lincoln, shown in a moment of deep dejection
during the Civil War when the news from the front was bad, is pathetic.
He is every man’s friend just as he is every man’s other self, face to
face with unhappiness, harried by disaster.
It was Lincoln’s custom to visit the War Office late at night to get the
most recent dispatches, and the memorial in Newark shows him after such
a call. He is sitting on a bench, his tall hat beside him, dispirited
and alone. Borglum’s idea for the statue was inspired by a letter from
Lincoln to a friend shortly after his election. “I could appreciate the
feelings of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.... I am now in my Garden
of Gethsemane.”
Borglum received the commission to make this statue as a result of the
exhibition of his marble head of Lincoln in the Capitol. Amos Van Horn,
Civil War veteran and citizen of Newark, had bequeathed $150,000 for
three public monuments, one to Washington, one to Lincoln and a third to
the soldiers and sailors who had fought in the War between the States.
He appointed three executors, chief of whom was Ralph E. Lum, a Newark
lawyer who knew nothing of Borglum or his work except the Lincoln head.
That seemed enough evidence. He gave the sculptor the commission for
the Lincoln Memorial and thereafter was always his steadfast friend.
The work was carried out under pleasant, amicable, understanding
relations. There was no competition. The executors had virtually no
suggestions. They knew that Gutzon Borglum was a competent sculptor, and
they left the details of the production to him. He submitted a small
model which they considered and accepted. After that he made a
full-sized model in clay. The location chosen for the memorial was in
front of the Newark courthouse where much grading and change was needed.
The city lacked a thousand dollars of enough to pay for what was needed;
so Gutzon advanced the money to Park Superintendent Carl Bannwort. The
architect who drew the plans for the setting was an old friend, William
Price. The architect, Bannwort and Gutzon contrived to give the statue a
perfect environment, and Bannwort seemed surprised to see it finished.
“It’s the first time,” he said, “that I ever heard of a sculptor ever
giving back a part of his own pay.”
Work was begun in 1909, and a year later the Gorham Company announced
the arrival of the full-sized plaster model at their foundry in
Providence, Rhode Island. The sculptor had asked that they cast the
bronze in one piece, which cost forty per cent more and took more time.
He thought it worth the extra expense because there would be no seams in
the bronze and no danger of breakage due to extremes of heat and cold.
Gutzon was pleased with the work when it appeared in bronze. “Lincoln
never left the Garden of Gethsemane,” he said. “He went right from
Springfield to the labor of war. And Lee had hardly surrendered when
Lincoln was shot. It is a curious and charming picture when you realize
that he wandered away constantly into this garden alone.”
There was much favorable comment on the work after it was set in place.
The sculptor himself thought that he had never made a finer thing. The
appeal of the statue is evident in the actions of the children who
cluster about it. All day in summer they come here to play. They sit in
Lincoln’s lap, clasp their arms about his neck, roll about his feet,
completely pleased. They could not say why. They don’t know much of who
this man is supposed to be. They don’t know much about Lincoln. But they
know his sadness and they feel his gentleness and friendliness.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt was principal speaker when the
monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1913. Wildly cheering throngs of
men, women and children lined his way of march and gave him an inspiring
tribute all the way from New York City, an experience which Gutzon
declared was what gave Roosevelt the idea of running for President for a
third term.
Nobody seems to have remembered what he said as he pledged the country’s
support to what Lincoln had stood for--Lincoln who sat with bowed head,
worried and disconsolate, on a bench before him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
_STAMFORD AND POLITICS_
In 1909 John Gutzon Borglum married Mary Williams Montgomery, to
nobody’s great surprise. Mary Montgomery was born in Turkey of
missionary parents and had lived there twelve years. She was educated at
Wellesley and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Berlin. She
could argue with Gutzon, sometimes successfully.
Their meeting, in a way, was accidental. On her way back to the United
States after her Berlin studies, she had boarded a ship at Rotterdam. It
turned out to be the same one that the sculptor barely caught at
Cherbourg. He joined her party for shipboard games and poker, and they
were quickly friends. He met her family and she became well acquainted
with his sisters; and a family association went on for years.
Miss Montgomery taught French for a year in New Haven, then joined two
other girls in a literary agency that did translations, research work
and special articles until they married and broke up the partnership.
She worked with Dr. Henry Smith Williams on _The Historians’ History of
the World_ and there met Rupert Hughes, another friend of Gutzon’s. She
also worked with Dr. Isidore Singer as manager in the preparation of
_The Jewish Encyclopedia_. Much of her life was spent in the vicinity of
Thirty-eighth Street. After leaving Dr. Williams she did secretarial
work, some of it for Gutzon, and became acquainted with many more of
the Borglum friends. She learned a great deal about the operations of
the Thirty-eighth Street studio.
So, in 1909 they were married at Short Beach, Connecticut, with a New
Haven divine, Dr. T. T. Munger, and Miss Montgomery’s two brothers
officiating. The Borglums went for a honeymoon to some trout stream in
Canada and thence to a place on the Gunnison River in Colorado. By that
time Mrs. Borglum was certain that her life was going to be vastly
different.
And so it was. In 1910 Gutzon announced that they would move to
Stamford, Connecticut, where they would cultivate peace and associate
with gentle, quiet people. Almost overnight he was making speeches for
the common man and beating the drums for politics.
In Stamford he was promptly introduced to the famous Connecticut Town
Meeting and was intensely interested because he had never heard of
anything like it. He went home with staring eyes to write that he had
just learned the part an individual could play, first in his home town,
next in his state and finally in his native land. He rewrote a pair of
sentiments from his diary: “A man’s first love is his mother; his
second, his sweetheart; his third, art; his fourth, _all_.” And he
underlined this warning: “No individual’s life is worth the immortality
he seeks unless he articulates the voice of his tribe.”
You may take that as typical of Gutzon. He had been in Stamford one or
two nights and he belonged to it as much as the oldest inhabitant.
The moving from the old duplex apartment in New York to the country was
a momentous undertaking. The two horses, Smoke and Halool, were taken to
New Rochelle for the night by the faithful Banks. The next day Gutzon
and a friend, like knights of old, rode on horseback to the new domain.
The feat wasn’t so startling to beholders as it might have been in New
York. Horses in Stamford in 1910 were regularly in view and
continuously in use. Gutzon himself became a familiar figure in the
countryside as he drove Smoke back and forth between the railroad
station and home. Wife and furniture arrived in Stamford on that first
day by train and van.
Most of the stable equipment came from the old establishment of Colonel
Whitman in Washington. Much of it accompanied the colonel, who arrived
to spend the summer. The procession of visitors who came to luncheon, to
dinner or to spend the week seems appalling from this distance of time,
and emphasizes the contrast of that era when there was no difficulty
about entertaining. Stamford grocery stores of the day were primitive.
They made no delivery to the Borglum ménage six miles away; so hampers
of foodstuffs were shipped by express twice a week from New York.
The old farmhouse was completely rebuilt, partitions pulled down and new
rooms added. The house stood on a slope, and one large living room was
dug out of the bank after the master bedroom, above, had been finished
and was being lived in. The barn, which had been close to the house, was
hauled a thousand feet and placed beside a brook. The brook was dammed
to make a pond. Gutzon took an active part in all the digging, trimming
of trees and laying out of roads.
Road building had always been one of Gutzon’s hobbies, and in later
years he was to become associated with national highway-building
projects. On his place in Stamford he built a road, cutting the arc on
the Wire Mill Road, which until that time had passed close to the
Marshall House, the new home. The town accepted the sculptor’s changed
road and thirty-five years later it was still in use. After the passing
of those years a local highway engineer located and unearthed an old
drainpipe, placed there by Gutzon. “Well,” he said, “Borglum was known
throughout the town as a good builder.”
Filled with the old Town Meeting spirit, the sculptor quickly organized
the neighbors living along the main road leading into Stamford as an
association to beautify and improve their grounds bordering on it. Next
he managed to get lighting for the road from the town electric company
and a similar gift for the Long Ridge Road, which was equally important.
By studying the town, county and state road-building and bonding
regulations, he discovered that the town could borrow money against the
stipulated return to it of the same amount from the state or county,
thus securing funds for the building of improved roads at once. The
matter was taken to the Town Meeting, of course, and it caused much
debate. But eventually it passed, and both High Ridge and Long Ridge
roads were benefited.
Then, presently, he had a new and interesting idea. He founded a bus
company “so that,” as he said, “the farm women might have a chance to
come to town when their husbands are using the horses in the fields.” He
was very happy in the designing of bus bodies to be fitted onto Reo
Truck chassis and in arranging a suitable pageant to celebrate the
beginning of the service.