had it and were charging that America, after spending hundreds of
millions of dollars for aircraft, had produced nothing but brag and
bluster; that we were in a war with no planes and no engines of our own.
White House and War Office press departments began to make counter
charges, ridiculing the report and charging Borglum with falsehood.
Washington seethed for a couple of weeks. Some unknown person called the
Dayton factory to fill two freight trains with airplane parts and to
paint on the boxcars in big letters, “Planes for Europe,” “Right of
Way,” “Our Boys Need These Planes,” and similar legends. Newspaper
reporters and government agents were posted between Dayton and Hoboken
to see these trains pass with their painted signs. From them the news
flashed to all parts of the country, and Borglum was a liar by official
count.
Borglum had his own agents scattered over the route and he knew that not
a single plane had left Dayton for anywhere. He was just getting part of
the pay for his appointment. Verification of the reports of his own
investigators was made two or three days later by General Goethals, whom
he met at breakfast at the Metropolitan Club. General Goethals was then
Quartermaster General and well acquainted with what was shipped out of
Dayton. Borglum wrote in his journal:
About this time Senator Thomas of Colorado turned bitterly upon me
and introduced a resolution “inquiring into the charges that Gutzon
Borglum had so recklessly made.” A small committee, composed of
himself as chairman, Senator Reed of Missouri, Senator
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Senator Wadsworth of New York was
appointed. Its duty was to visit the factories against which
Borglum had cast aspersions.
This committee proceeded via New Jersey up the Hudson to the great
Curtiss plant, on to Detroit and down to Dayton. At Elizabeth, New
Jersey, they reported that the speed and anxiety of the workmen to
get parts of planes into cars and on their way to Hoboken was
“little short of phenomenal.” The officer in charge was courteous
to the senators but begged them to keep out of the way, saying that
the boys in Europe needed planes and there must be no delay--all of
which impressed the senators so much that they thanked him and
left. Then they proceeded north to the Curtiss plant at Buffalo--a
plant having 14,000 men on the payroll and producing only ten to
twelve planes a day. (In Toronto a factory employing 2,800 people
was producing twelve fighting planes and twenty-four training
planes a day.) There was present the same kind of apparently
furious activity which the senators had witnessed at Elizabeth.
The committee then went on to Dayton Field, where, after watching a
schooling of the officers and a workout of the young men, they
turned to leave. As they were walking away, the officer of the day
approached Senator Reed and said, “Aren’t we going to be heard?”
Without waiting for a reply he said, “I’m through. You can strip my
buttons off, but I’ll have no more damned humbug. I am killing two
boys a day. We dig two graves every morning before breakfast, just
to be ready for their deaths. You may do what you like with me. I
am through.”
As a result, so the senator himself told me, the committee
determined to return secretly to the factories they had just
visited. There the men who had brusquely pushed the committee aside
in their anxiety to ship planes to Europe were disgorging the
airplane parts they had so carefully boxed. Thomas, who had been
very rude to me, wrote the report and presented it to a Senate that
had less than a dozen members in their seats. He complained
feelingly of the lack of interest, the lack of patriotism in a
matter which had impugned the honor and the integrity of our War
Department. To one of his committee he said afterward, “I wish
there were some way I could apologize to Mr. Borglum and tell him
how mistaken I have been.”
There was a little more to come before Gutzon could be through with his
aircraft investigation. His inquiry had brought reliable evidence of the
theft of securities worth more than a million dollars from a Western
bank through the connivance of some members of the Aeronautics Board.
This matter he took to Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, chairman of the
Senate Military Affairs Committee, whom he had known for many years.
With his own authority from the President he took it for granted that he
would not have to tell the names of the people involved until after
subpoenas for them had been issued. Hitchcock agreed. The next day he
declared he couldn’t do it, and the day after that he made a speech in
the Senate declaring that he had had a long conference with Mr. Borglum,
had seen all the aircraft evidence and that there was nothing to it.
Monday morning Borglum saw Hitchcock and was in the middle of his attack
when Senators Joseph Frelinghuysen, James Reed, John Thomas and James W.
Wadsworth, the military committee, came into the room. Somewhat
informally, as everything in Washington seems to have been done in those
days, they sat down and listened to Borglum’s demand for blank
subpoenas. Senator Reed nodded, stood up, and said, “Mr. Chairman,
owing to the high character of this witness, I move that the subpoenas
he asks be given. If he gets the evidence he says exists, I will move
from the floor of the Senate the hanging of those men.”
Borglum thanked him. “Senator Reed,” he said, “I have not told you the
half of it, and I can’t. I beg of you to give me the subpoenas and
assist me in getting the evidence.” Frelinghuysen and Wadsworth seconded
the motion.
The subpoenas voted by the committee were never issued, however. The
chairman, in whose hands the matter was left, never seemed to find time.
He retired to private life after the next election.
Borglum’s last interview with Hitchcock relative to the subpoenas was
just about the last of his aircraft investigation. President Wilson
telegraphed that Gutzon had “misunderstood” his letter of January 2, and
that he wished the inquiry stopped. When the sculptor was slow in
stopping, the President made his order of dismissal public. Borglum
published a letter in which he asked: “What is it, Mr. President, in
this country that you are afraid of? What is it in this America that the
President of the United States dare not face?”
Charles Evans Hughes conducted the next investigation. He worked from
May until October in 1918. The New York _Times_ of November 1, 1918,
printed his report. Gutzon said of it that it reminded him of the story
of an Irishman who was sent to locate a bucket lost in the bottom of a
well. He climbed down and he climbed back with great difficulty. Then he
returned to his office and reported: “Sure, it’s there.”
And that, in truth, was the result of the aircraft investigation. There
were other inquiries and other suggestions, but nobody went to jail.
Nobody seems to have been seriously discommoded. There weren’t any
airplanes that anybody could lay a hand on. And the $1,000,000,000 just
disappeared.
Gutzon Borglum was much disturbed about this. He could get angry
thinking of it to the day of his death. But it always seemed to a casual
friend that he was puzzled by the wrong side of airplane production.
What he should have contemplated as the scintillant miracle of all the
days he was to live was the fact that he was allowed to make the
investigation at all.
* * * * *
It is a little late after all these years to try to figure out how a
billion dollars could disappear without leaving a trace on somebody.
Borglum used to get indignant about the matter ten or twelve years
afterward, but the targets of his wrath were always anonymous. He had
some shrewd suspicions, but left at the bottom of the well was the
evidence which in this situation would have been necessary to convict
anyone of wrongdoing.
To give the fiasco a fair estimate, it seems likely that we were very
young then. Up to the time when war was declared we had left the
building of our planes to rugged individuals who whittled out the parts
for them with jackknives and put them together in moldering barns and
sheds. When we had to get an air force aloft we did the best we could,
which wasn’t very good. We didn’t trust our cow-barn airplane
manufacturers. Largely, they weren’t where we could find them anyway.
They had gone into the air corps themselves.
So the searchers for planes took a chance on some people who apparently
knew something about a gasoline motor and how to make forms out of
tin--that is to say, of course, the automobile makers. These lads
muddled through and nobody got any airplanes. They produced pieces in
large numbers and blithely shipped them away to places where they were
supposed to be assembled into airplanes. But, apparently, nobody had
thought to provide an assembler.
It is one thought about this--a thought that would have meant nothing to
Gutzon Borglum--that nobody about the airplane production, if it can be
called that, got rich ... not so far as can be determined. Nobody seems
to have had the remotest idea of what he was doing, and it takes at
least a billion dollars to keep thousands of men in jobs where they have
nothing to do but nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
_FLIGHT, PATIENCE AND SHERIDAN’S HORSE_
None of his sundry war activities seems to have had much of an effect on
Gutzon Borglum’s handiwork. His figure of James McConnell, in the
monument to him on the University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville,
is one of the first memorials to the First World War to be erected, and
it is surely one of the finest. It was because of his intense interest
in aeronautics that he knew about McConnell and got this commission. And
his creative skill had certainly been enriched by new experiences.
The McConnell figure was a labor of love and, considering the nature of
the subject, could hardly have been otherwise. Its start is told in a
prospectus of the project signed by Edwin A. Alderman, president of the
university:
On March 19, 1917, James Rogers McConnell met his death fighting
for France. He had been flying for France for over a year, and it
was meet and fitting that he should encounter death in the upper
air, battling with her enemies. The story of his life, since the
beginning of the Great War, is a beautiful and heroic story. Out of
pure idealism and devotion to the idea of freedom as established in
France, he gave his service to the French Republic, first as an
ambulance driver and then as one of the pioneer aviators of the
famous Lafayette Escadrille.
McConnell was a loyal son of the University of Virginia. He has
enriched her traditions and bound about her brow some of his glory.
His fellow students and his teachers take a solemn pride in his
great devotion to freedom and right, and think of him as a new and
secret tie binding us to the land of Lafayette and the home of
Thomas Jefferson. They desire to place here some simple memorial of
beauty and distinction that will recall to future generations of
youth the beauty of heroic death, the virtues of duty, valor and
self-sacrifice, and will keep green the memory of one who counted
it a gladness to give his life for a lofty end.
Gutzon’s sympathy for a boy of McConnell’s character, and his
acquaintance with others in the Lafayette Escadrille, gave him a
particular incentive to do this memorial. The commission came to him
through a very dear friend, W. W. Fuller of North Carolina and New York.
Borglum had also a deep admiration for Dr. Alderman. The sculptor’s
conception of the statue was new and extraordinary.
The form he chose was a male figure, standing tiptoe on a globe
representing the earth, in the act of taking flight. Vast wings were
strapped to his arms, almost concealing them, and to the calves of his
legs were bound something like greaves, showing that the youth was a
mortal in armor and not the mythological figure that a first glimpse
would suggest. President Alderman’s letters were numerous and helpful.
He was much concerned about the wings. In a letter to Mr. Fuller he
wrote:
Will one tire of their mass? Are they needed in such mass to subtly
suggest battle flight? Is there not some symbolism less realistic
and obstructive that would turn the trick? This thing cannot be
_near_ great. It must either be _great_ or miss greatness
altogether. Hence my anxiety.... I have faith in Borglum and admire
the calm, fine way he receives the layman’s counsel. But this work
is not a mere statue. It is a daring spiritual expression. It must
not offend any canon of form or grace.
Sometimes in writing I weary of seeking the hidden, difficult,
aptest phrase and content myself from sheer ennui with a lesser
form. He cannot do that, for my expression is ephemeral--his is
eternal and unlimited....
It is significant, in view of later comments on his irascibility, that
the sculptor welcomed such criticism as this. Because of the positioning
of the memorial--in clear space, free from buildings and silhouetted
against the sky--he made some changes in the figure. The wings were made
lighter, the feathers outlined more distinctly, and some of the feathers
were separated to admit light between them.
Characteristically, there seems to have been no discussion of price or
of compensation to the sculptor until the first model was completed. At
that time he wrote that the cost would be $12,000, owing to the
increased cost of bronze. Then he moved on to some work in Cuba. There
was delay in getting the marble from Tennessee in time for the
unveiling. Because of this the braces and rivets attaching the figure to
its round base were not in place when the draperies were lifted. Dr.
Alderman went through his speech in grave apprehension that the whole
exhibit would fall on his head. But it all came right in the
end--through sheer luck, perhaps.
Mr. Fuller wrote that a friend of his, “a learned physician and a just
and judicious man,” had looked at the memorial from an unusual point of
view.
This friend reported:
I am sure it is a great work of art, but I studied it mostly from
the position of the anatomist. The lines are perfect. What a grand
specimen of the human architecture, as if just from the hands of
his Maker! A model of human architecture! I noticed particularly
the different prominent muscles, tense and drawn in preparation for
flight--how anatomically correct they were in location and
function.... I shall never forget....
The aviator’s father was deeply touched by the figure. He wrote to
Gutzon:
I attended the unveiling of the memorial to my son at the
University of Virginia. I want to congratulate you on this
wonderful reproduction. It is magnificently beautiful ...
expressive and highly inspiring. I know of nothing in America that
equals this splendid work. I believe that not only the University
of Virginia but all America will regard this aviator as a triumph
of art and will cherish it as a priceless possession.
Then there came a committee which had thought about building a memorial
to a former governor, Charles Brantley Aycock, in Raleigh, North
Carolina. From Josephus Daniels came a letter enthusiastically outlining
this project. Gutzon read it without much interest. The committee had
decided to hold a competition but wished Borglum to submit a model
before they made a decision.
Gutzon replied that because Daniels asked it, he would be glad to lay
aside his ideas about competitions, but that he simply did not have the
time to put in the work of several days on a model that might or might
not be satisfactory. “Committees do not realize,” he said, “that the
making of a model is about one third of the entire work. Neither do they
realize that in at least nine cases out of ten, no model is carried out
as first presented. Not only the committee but the artist himself
develops it.”
So the committee abandoned the competition, invited the sculptor to come
to Raleigh for a conference and gave him the commission the day after
his arrival. He telegraphed home, “Returning this afternoon. Have
contract eighteen thousand.” The family received the news with decent
restraint. They knew Gutzon. He was always sanguine. A contract was
always the same to him as money in the bank.
The Aycock memorial was conceived by its promoters as the monument to an
ideal rather than to a man. Aycock, governor of North Carolina from 1901
to 1905, had established two reforms of importance. The first was to
make suffrage dependent on education. The second placed education
within the reach of all, rich or poor, black or white. And the sculptor
soon realized that he was going to have some trouble telling about this
in a statue.
Most of his correspondence was with Dr. Clarence Poe, son-in-law of
Governor Aycock and editor of a widely circulated paper, _The
Progressive Farmer_. He was a man of exceptional gifts, but sculpture
worried him. His first worry was because Gutzon was working on a
life-size model without having made a plaster cast of the small-sketch
model. Gutzon wrote him a long treatise on models in which he said:
I don’t mind making three or four. The man must be on his feet.
Except for that every action of the body is changeable.... In the
work I do in my studio I keep my small model in clay and do not
cast it in plaster in order not to be bound by it. If it is in
plaster it cannot be changed.... I am anxious to keep it as
flexible as possible, and to keep in mind that the big figure is
the sole thing and the permanent thing....
There was more correspondence and eventually Gutzon invited the
committee to come and look at the life-size model. In the fall of the
year the party arrived--Colonel P. M. Pearsall, Mrs. Charles Aycock, the
widow, and Judge Frank Daniels, Josephus’ brother. After suggesting some
slight changes they expressed complete satisfaction and went home. The
sculptor was on the point of casting the statue in plaster when he got a
telegram from Dr. Poe, who had been unavoidably detained. Poe, who had
learned his lesson about models, begged Gutzon to delay the casting till
he could get to Stamford. Nobody had told him what work it is to keep a
heroic-size clay figure moist for an indefinite time. For the next three
weeks Gutzon had little else to occupy his time.
Dr. Poe and a new committee were more critical than the first group had
been. Dr. Poe shook his head and announced that for one thing the model
was underweight. Aycock, he said, had weighed at least fifty pounds more
than the sculptor allowed. The rest of the committee agreed.
Gutzon had acquired patience. It was not serious, he said. He would
adjust the governor’s proportions. Sleeping quarters were engaged at a
hotel for the committee. And for three days Dr. Poe and his friends sat
around the studio while Borglum added to the governor’s girth. For this
work Judge Daniels was a voluntary model. In the end everybody was
pleased. Dr. Poe declared that “The result is a _distinguished
success_.”
The memorial was unveiled on March 15, 1924, a year later. Dr. Alderman
and Josephus Daniels made the chief speeches. Thousands of the
governor’s old friends attended, together with a crowd of school
children. It was a grand affair.
* * * * *
The Sheridan equestrian statue, which stands at the beginning of
Sheridan Road in Chicago, came out of this same period and was one of
the sculptor’s favorites. The technical perfection of it gratified him.
He used to say of the horse, rearing with his front feet off the ground,
that he could see the play of the muscles under the skin--and that is
very likely true.
The work was accomplished under external difficulties. In the first
place the construction of an armature for so huge a group was no small
undertaking. It was built of heavy timbers, boards and lath and looked
something like the pictures of the Trojan Horse. It wasn’t as
commodious, perhaps, but several able-bodied men could work inside
it--and did. A new studio was under construction with the sculptor
supervising all details. And outweighing all physical handicaps was the
mental strain of his work on Stone Mountain, where things were rapidly
approaching a crisis.
However, for his creative work there was always one tranquil spot in his
brain that no outside disturbance could enter. He believed in changing
his models frequently, stopping only when he could see what he thought
to be right. Jesse Tucker, the Stone Mountain engineer, recalls that
this was one feature of his sculpture in which he would permit no
compromise.
At one stage of the Sheridan memorial, Tucker pointed out, the sculptor
was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. Everybody in the studio knew
that he would receive a substantial sum as soon as the group was
finished and ready for casting. And one evening it looked as though this
happy moment had arrived.
Gutzon walked around the model, seriously studying it. He stopped and
picked up an ax. “Tucker,” he said, “I believe I can improve that
horse.” And without further discussion he began to hack down part of the
armature and added two weeks to the work.
This habit was well known to his assistants. Once his colored attendant,
Banks, reported on the progress of a statue: “Guess the boss is about
through. He’s started pulling it to pieces.”
The personal contacts he made during the production of the Sheridan
monument were particularly pleasing to Gutzon. “Big Bill” Thompson,
storm center of political controversy, was mayor of Chicago at the time.
They became warm friends. Stamford political leaders declined an
invitation to meet the mayor when he was due to look at the models, but
Thompson knew nothing about that. He arrived at the studio accompanied
by nine carloads of New York politicians.
Michael J. Faherty, Chicago’s commissioner of public works, was the
mayor’s first deputy in the memorial project. He had a summer home near
Hartford and would drop in at the studio at unexpected moments on his
frequent trips back and forth from Chicago. His chief interest was in
the development of the oversize model of horse and rider that nearly
filled the studio.
To save the expense of casting bronze in the United States the contract
was given to Vignali Brothers of Florence. There was an endless
interchange of letters and cables. Telephone wires had to be removed and
replaced to permit the trucking of the bronze casts to Genoa because
some of them were too high. This was the fault of the foundry and added
expense for Gutzon. On its trip from New York to Chicago the group
encountered patches of the same difficulty and had to be rerouted on a
wild course to avoid low underpasses. Faherty, who was anxiously
watching all this, finally reported, “Winchester and Sheridan still
twenty miles away.”
Sheridan eventually arrived for the unveiling. A special “Sheridan Day”
had been declared. And there was a big military display with speeches by
the governor, the mayor and other dignitaries. All went as scheduled,
after which Faherty found time to write of his own troubles. To Borglum
he wrote:
Surprises turn up as usual in reference to expense. The governor
has ordered the soldiers to turn out, but the officers have no
money; and the Sheridan Monument Association is called upon to pay
$2,500 to defray their expenses. The total receipts from the State
and others will amount to about $43,000, and the expenses will be
about $53,000. However, the job is done and meets with
satisfaction, for which I have to thank you and your wife.
Gutzon felt that he had never had a more pleasant association.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
_WARS OF AMERICA MEMORIAL_
The Wars of America group in Newark, New Jersey, is the story of a
nation told in figures from life and not by allegorical or classic
symbols. It is one of the largest bronze memorials in the world,
composed of forty-two human and two equestrian figures, all of heroic
size. It is the first monument in America to depict mass action. It took
three years in the molding, another three years to put it into bronze
and ten years of preliminary thought and study.