out to Stone Mountain. Sam Venable was waiting for him there with his
sister Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Grace, of Macon, Georgia; and Mrs. Purdue,
president of the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The women went up on the
scaffolding to view the progress of the work.
Word of what was happening in Atlanta took the sculptor completely by
surprise. He listened, stunned, to the telephone message that the
committee had voted to dismiss him. Quietly he broke the news to the
little group about him, then considered the situation.
“I shall have to break up the models to protect my design,” he said.
The plaster model of Lee’s head had already served its purpose. There
was a copy of the Jackson head in Stamford. He ordered these models to
be dropped off the platform onto the rocks below. And, finally, he told
his man Homer to break up the model in the studio, the one showing Davis
on his horse. Mr. Venable said there were tears in his eyes as he took
one last look at his work and turned his back.
He talked to the U.D.C. women in Mrs. Coribel Venable Orme’s house,
urging them to carry on without him. Then suddenly Tucker came bounding
in from the road and took him by the arm.
“Quick!” Tucker said. “Kiss your wife good-by.”
“But where to?” asked Gutzon.
“I’ll tell you that afterward,” said Tucker, pulling him toward the
door.
Shortly they were gone and the people in the house heard a car roaring
out the back way on a road from the city that was virtually impassable.
The sound had died out and they were well on their way when the local
constable arrived and sheepishly produced an order for Gutzon’s arrest
on a charge of “malicious mischief.” The complaint declared that the
sculptor had destroyed a model valued at $25.
Nobody has ever pointed out how the Association directors found out
about the smashing of the models within two hours after it happened. The
constable didn’t know. He had just been called on to serve it, and,
well, if Mr. Borglum had gone away, he couldn’t do that. So he accepted
a drink and sat down to enjoy it.
Not until long afterward did Mrs. Borglum discover that the head Gutzon
was accused of having destroyed was the useless plaster image of Lee.
The morning after the Association meeting of February 25, 1925, the
Atlanta newspapers gave roaring accounts of the affair, one of them
announcing in letters three inches high: “Borglum Fugitive From
Justice.” There were long lists of his crimes, misdemeanors and
delinquencies for which he had been driven away from Stone Mountain.
Chief of these were “loafing on the job,” “inordinate love of money,”
“wasteful expenditures,” “ungovernable temper.” And there was the old
story of the angels of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Clarke
Howell, editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_ and Francis Clark, the city
editor, were Gutzon’s friends, and they sniffed at the angel story. They
were the ones who telegraphed the cathedral to get the straight of it.
But no matter. There was no end to such charges nor to the people who
believed them. Mrs. Borglum, warned by her attorney, Albert Howell, to
refrain from comment, nevertheless issued one statement: “The Greeks of
old drove Phidias into exile, but his name has lived on while those who
persecuted him are forgotten.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
_AFTERMATH_
Borglum and Tucker sat down to rest on the plantation of Colonel Beniham
Cameron, head of the Bankhead Highway Commission, near Durham, North
Carolina, and entertained a great outpouring of their friends. Georgia
made one weak effort at extradition, but the warrant was promptly thrown
out by a sympathetic judge. Governor Angus McLean announced that he
would call out the militia if necessary to prevent extradition, and
there the matter rested. Gutzon never condescended to answer the
Association’s charges. On July 7, 1925, he wrote to Gerald Johnson:
It should be remembered that we undertook the building of a
memorial to honor, not to war. We built it to the soul of Robert E.
Lee, to his conscious martyrdom, to the valor and development of
those the world said had failed.... Can we who have worked so
disinterestedly and succeeded somewhat in reaching the ear of God
for Lee and his hosts forget? Can we fail in those qualities? I am
determined that history shall carry no such item in her record of
our acts.
The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association eventually gave the
job of finishing the mountain carving to a practitioner who was at Stone
Mountain only briefly and with little success in furthering the art.
Gutzon stayed at Raleigh, North Carolina, seven or eight months
preparing new models for the memorial, with the aid of Captain Tucker
and Hugo Villa. One day came Homer. He had walked all the way from Stone
Mountain, more than 600 miles. Tucker said that he had only to shout and
they would all come “a-runnin’.” But there was little work, hardly any
money, and no place for them to stay. Villa made and sold some violins.
The others mostly had a hard time.
Gutzon’s family joined him in Raleigh in a home next to that of Josephus
Daniels, and they were pleasantly received.
In Georgia, the Association removed from the project everyone originally
connected with the memorial except Mrs. Helen Plane. But Mrs. Plane was
old and ill when the notification reached her. She commented on what had
happened to the great memorial and the men who had labored for it. Then
she went to bed and died.
The Association prepared statements repeating and enlarging the original
charges against Borglum. Gutzon saw enough of it to convince him that
masses of this material were sent to every point where any sculpture was
contemplated, across the country from Texas to the Dakotas. Why all this
tireless effort to discredit him? His theory was that the Association
was in debt to the Atlanta banks and had to stay alive long enough to
sell its half dollars and pay its debts. It must maintain the theory of
its integrity by picturing Borglum as a road-company villain.
In Atlanta an active member of the U.D.C. who had friends in both camps
was disturbed because neither the sculptor nor Sam Venable would take
legal steps against the Association. She declared the directors were
destroying Gutzon’s business and would destroy him. “I cannot and will
not add to this quarreling over a memorial to Lee,” he wrote her. “After
I got Coolidge and Smoot and Lodge, and the Senate and Congress to
authorize a coin, I was further bound by my own claims that the
brotherhood of America must be strengthened and preserved.”
But the battle of words went on. And nobody called on Gutzon to produce
his new models. The new sculptor had trouble. The granite firm of
Weiblen Brothers, which had a lease from Sam Venable, refused to permit
the importation of outside stoneworkers. Eventually they reached an
agreement to do the stonecutting themselves on a basis of cost plus
ten-per-cent profit.
The Association seized all of Gutzon’s papers and records as well as his
personal possessions, including art works in his studio and the
machinery on the mountain. When they refused to listen to the U.D.C.’s
suggestion of arbitration, which was definitely provided for in
Borglum’s contract, the sculptor took one step in his own defense. He
sent to Georgia a certified public accountant who disproved the charge
that $185,000 had been spent on his part of the project. The books
showed that only $113,922.61 had gone to the mountain--and this included
the sculptor’s salary and every other expense of the work. The office in
Atlanta at the same time had spent more than $116,000.
There was a persistent rumor through the United States that Borglum’s
real trouble had been a quarrel with the United Daughters of the
Confederacy. That was not true if only for the fact that the political
brothers in the Memorial Association’s directorate had taken away the
voice of these women in 1924. It was thoroughly refuted in a pamphlet
issued by the Atlanta chapter telling where the blame should be placed
for the monument’s loss.
The pamphlet was in the precise form of the statement sent out by the
Association and was distributed among U.D.C. organizations throughout
the country. It never had so large a circulation as the Association’s
statement for the reason that the women did not have so large a fund to
draw on.
How so great a memorial could have been destroyed, how the matter of the
sale of the coin could have been so confused that few could understand
anything beyond the fact that the money was dissipated and lost, is a
complicated story. It cannot be dismissed in a few words and in fairness
to all, the story of the U.D.C. should be told. Here are some extracts
from the Atlanta chapter’s pamphlet:
The Stone Mountain debacle was the result of vandalism pure and
simple. It is no longer necessary to defend Gutzon Borglum. Time
and the course of events have vindicated him.
Borglum contracted to produce the central group in three years for
$250,000, which was to cover his ideas, his designs, models, labor,
a portion of his working equipment and his personal compensation.
At the end of seventeen months he had produced the first model,
master model and all working parts necessary to that date, removed
25,000 tons of granite, completed head of Lee, half head of Davis,
designed children’s medal, made model for Stone Mountain coin.
Price for above, official audit of March 31, 1925, $113,922.61.
During the thirty months since the employment of his successor, the
combined efforts of the sculptor, Weiblen Brothers, and the
Association have produced: first models, master models, some
working models, blasting of mountain side, roughing out of Lee’s
horse. Cost, as stated by Randolph, $171,000.
Mr. Borglum formed a syndicate to buy the entire coin issue. This
would immediately have placed $2,500,000 or securities to that
amount in the hands of the Association. A condition of the sale was
that the money should be used exclusively in carving the mountain.
Randolph declined the offer; his reaction was as follows:
“Under the Borglum proposition, his friends could have sold the
coins when they pleased, at whatever price they pleased, to
whatever purchasers they pleased, and could have spent the proceeds
in whatever way they pleased to carve on the mountain whatever they
pleased.”
Mr. Randolph has sold the coins wherever he pleased, when he
pleased, to whomever he pleased, and is now engaged in carving on
the mountain what he pleases against the protest of the Atlanta
Chapter and hundreds of Southern people, having discarded the plans
and ignored the purpose entrusted to him. The monument he is
building is smaller and entirely different from the one endorsed
and subscribed to by the people of the United States, whose funds
he has squandered and misspent.
The document goes on at considerable length to discuss the policy of
Atlanta banks in keeping the Association alive, and the piecemeal sale
of coins to pay back loans that the banks advanced. The banks at the
time of Borglum’s departure from Stone Mountain held the Association’s
notes for $78,862.72. The marketable property owned by the Association
including its bank balances was listed at $6,406.39. The banks in time
were paid off by receipts from the coin sale. The statement closes:
Members of the Atlanta Chapter organized the original Stone
Mountain Memorial Association and secured its charter.
Members of the Atlanta Chapter personally invited Mr. Randolph to
become president of the Association.
Mr. Randolph has discarded the original models entrusted to him,
altered the style, and reduced the size of the memorial.
He has plunged the work into a national scandal on false charges.
He has destroyed the confidence of the public in the work by false
statements and lowered the standard of Georgia and Georgians
throughout the United States.
And that isn’t all of the story of Stone Mountain. While Sam Venable and
Gutzon were quietly waiting for the group then in control to take a
false step and fall, the Association’s directors suddenly decided that
something had to be done about Stone Mountain. Gutzon’s first intimation
that something was wrong came with the publication of a news story in
which the new sculptor said that Borglum had deliberately left large
holes in the rock to interfere with further carving. Inasmuch as Gutzon
had not known that he was to have a successor and had not been in
Georgia since, the accusation seemed silly.
Next came Randolph’s announcement that Lee would never have worn his hat
in the presence of ladies and that the Association was planning to
remove the hat. Leading sculptors of the United States said that this
could not be done without destroying the head. But the public had
nothing to do with it anyway. There was little talk about it, and the
work was done behind a canvas.
The book _Famous Statues and Their Stories_, published by Edwin Rayner
in 1936, pictures Stone Mountain with a photograph of the second
sculptor’s designs superimposed upon it. The horses’ legs are very
prominent. The design is attributed to Gutzon Borglum, and there is no
suggestion in the text that he had left the work.
Had Gutzon suspected what was about to be done to his head of Lee, it is
probable he would have fought to retain it. It remained in his mind as
one of the greatest things he had ever produced. And one close to him
recalls that its destruction was caused by men who had boasted that
until the end of time nothing could injure it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
_BACKSIGHT_
One of the most remarkable features of Gutzon Borglum’s quarrel with
Georgia seems to be Georgia’s unawareness of it. The sculptor left Stone
Mountain ahead of the constables on February 25, 1925. And he sat for a
long time in Raleigh aware that a large group of worthy patriots was
demanding that he be extradited to stand trial in the municipal court
for breaking up a worthless lot of plaster. Then in March 1926 he
received a remarkable call. The state of Georgia, which had him roughly
classified as a fugitive from justice, conferred on him the signal honor
of asking him to make a statue of one of her most distinguished sons,
Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. The statue was
to find permanent place in Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building at
Washington, D. C.
Gutzon carried on conversations about this piece of work by mail and
carved the figure in San Antonio, Texas. It was a striking portrait,
fine, strongly intellectual features, lighted by an inner serenity and
gentleness. It was a seated figure, for Stephens could not stand. And
the hands, resting on the arms of his chair, were modeled to show great
firmness of character. Hugo Villa, who had followed the sculptor to
Texas, helped carve the statue, slightly oversize, in Georgian marble.
The unveiling in Washington in 1927 was a gala affair. A special
trainload of Georgians had come to the capital with the governor of the
state in the lead. The National Guard of Georgia, brilliantly uniformed,
was on hand to lend color.
Most of these people were from Atlanta. Some were even members of the
Stone Mountain executive committee. All seemed to ignore the tragic
happenings of only two years before. It must be noted, however, that
Gutzon was as good at that as they were. He was calm, pleasantly aloof
and unconcerned.
* * * * *
In 1928 the time set for the finishing of the central group on Stone
Mountain expired with only Lee’s head and part of his horse completed.
An attempt was made by the donors to reclaim the property. They said
that the work on Stone Mountain was at a standstill and that the
operating Association was insolvent.
Sam Venable circulated an open letter in which he charged that he had
added together all the sums spent by the Association on bank loans,
etc., and had reached the stupendous figure of $1,421,665 which, he
said, it had cost Gutzon’s successor to complete his model and change
the bust of Lee. He added this comment:
Furthermore, Mr. Borglum’s head of Lee everybody recognized. His
successor’s head of Lee, nobody recognizes. The nose is crooked.
The left arm is withered and paralyzed. The hilt of the sword is
gone and the stirrup of the saddle is broken off. The money is all
gone and the carving of Lee, in my opinion and the opinion of
hundreds of others, is a mutilated imperfection that cannot be
rectified.
The Association was in debt to the Founders’ Roll for the use of
$260,800 paid for tablets, and to the Children’s Founders’ Roll for
$35,019.91. Suits were being brought by contributors to the first of
these funds. G. F. Willis succeeded Hollins Randolph as president. The
Association begged for an extension of time, and the Venable family
agreed to allow work to proceed until May 1931. However, nothing was
done on the mountain during that period.
In 1930 the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of Park
Committee Chairman L. Lawrence McCord, got interested in finishing the
monument. Mayor-elect James L. Key, largely celebrated for his huge
Sunday School Bible Class, sent a telegram to Gutzon who was then in the
Black Hills. He wanted to have Mr. Borglum come to Atlanta as his guest,
he said, for the purpose of conference on Stone Mountain Memorial. The
telegram was sent in August 1930. It might be mentioned that on July 4
of that year the head of Washington had been unveiled on Mount Rushmore
with a great deal of publicity.
The sculptor arrived in Atlanta on the first of September and was given
a rousing welcome and reception by a capacity house at the Fox theater.
It was the first chance public opinion had had to express itself, and
the result was gratifying to a man who had had to suffer in silence for
five years. He mentioned that if he had to do it over again, he would
make the Stone Mountain figures twice the size. He had learned something
of mountain carving. The crowd cheered him enthusiastically, and he came
home. But little came of it.
In 1931 McCord got a bill through the Georgia state legislature, giving
the state right of eminent domain to take over Stone Mountain and
adjacent property for a park. On this basis talks went on for years and
years.
In 1933 Sam Venable with Mrs. Frank Mason, to whom he gave his share of
Stone Mountain, presented a deed to Mayor Key for the portion of the
cliff required for carving, and an attempt was made to get W.P.A. funds
to finance the undertaking. There was a vast amount of correspondence
without result. In 1936 the governor made an investigation of
possibilities. In 1937 W. R. Ulrich of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce
met Borglum in Washington and they had a friendly conference.
In the winter of 1939-1940 there was another revival of interest, and
once more Gutzon was called to Atlanta. The hotel men of Atlanta had
suddenly become aware that tourists coming to see Mount Rushmore were
dumping large amounts of cash into South Dakota. They were wondering why
they had never foreseen this golden reward, and they could see that they
needed Gutzon’s help. They were willing to put up enough money to pay
for the labor week by week if he would donate his time and use his
influence to get credit with the machinery and powder companies.
Gutzon was jubilant. Dr. Ashby Jones, popular clergyman, and Preston
Arkright, president of the Georgia Power Company, gave him their
blessing. Success seemed so near that the sculptor wrote a letter to
John Kaufman, who had succeeded Cliff Davis as stand-by on Stone
Mountain, to be ready for starting work next Monday, to lay out a
program for a full week. And then that too joined the futile history of
the mountain. The other half-owners of the mountain wanted a million
dollars which they insisted must be paid to them before work could be
resumed. So this chance failed. The matter of the carving on Stone
Mountain remained unchanged a year later when the sculptor suddenly
died.
Despite the course of ill luck, bickering and unexplained hatred that
has accompanied it, the dream of Atlanta for a Confederate memorial--or
the dream of Atlanta hotel men for a popular tourist attraction--is
still showing signs of life. The state of Georgia has appropriated funds
for the purchase of Stone Mountain and the establishment of a park at
its base. An Atlanta sculptor has been appointed to take charge of any
carving that may be done on the tremendous uplift of granite. The
wording of the commission is a bit indefinite as, after all popular
experience with the memorial, it should be. But, somehow, the emergence
of the Confederate armies from the rock seems a bit nearer than it did
yesterday.
There is no recognizable trace today of Gutzon Borglum’s magnificent
head of Lee, or of anything else identifiable with the vision of Helen
Plane. There is a disfiguring scar, the remnant of a head, part of a
horse. But no matter. Some starry-eyed sculptor, somewhere, is figuring
on a new supply of dynamite and drills, and some epochal work--it will
start any day now, you may hear--to recover Borglum’s unfortunate plan.
The mark of his hand is dim, perhaps, but it is still to be found there
on the rock--the reminder of what was certainly a noble and, as it turns
out, continuous experiment.
* * * * *
The Borglum family moved to Texas from North Carolina in 1925 because
the Trail Drivers’ Association wanted a monument and because the Stone
Mountain Confederate Memorial Association had definitely set its trail
toward nothing. Texas would have been a remarkable spot for them in any
case, and it was one place in the universe that they knew little about.
The romantic history of the state--its gracious women, tall men, Spanish
warriors and grandees, American pioneers and land seekers, its Alamo,
its victorious revolution, its statehood, Indians, rangers, ranchmen,
cowboys, trail drivers--all appealed to Gutzon like a journey back to
boyhood when he received the invitation of the Trail Drivers’
Association to their conference in 1925. These men, now grown old,
wanted a memorial. They wanted to perpetuate the heroes of an epoch when
cowboys braved heat and cold, drought and flood, hostile Indians and
rustlers, as they drove herds of longhorns northward across hundreds of
miles of continent to Kansas or Montana.
It was disappointing to some of the newcomers to discover that San
Antonio was a highly civilized city with a cultural history antedating
the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. As for their equipment, Mrs.
Borglum’s sidesaddle stood for years in a saddle-shop window as an
eye-opening evidence of an effete custom.
A studio was improvised in a shed previously used to house floats before
the annual “Battle of Flowers” parade. There, while making the first
model for the Trail Drivers’ monument, Gutzon was initiated into the
lore of the trail. Old cowmen came in
[Illustration: GUTZON BORGLUM AND SON LINCOLN]
[Illustration: LINCOLN BORGLUM]
numbers and sat at ease as they yarned about how cattle behaved; how
cowboys talked, rode, ate and slept; how they dressed by putting their
big hats on; how they soothed the bedded herd by singing a ballad of
uncounted verses. When the time came for the sculptor to make scenes in
bas-relief around the base of the monument talk rose to feverish heat
over such moot questions as whether thirsty cattle lift their tails when
they scent water, or whether cowboys squat on their heels around a
campfire at night.
Gutzon tracked down the few remaining longhorn cattle in the state and
took time to witness driving, riding, roping--all the details of the
cattle business as exposed in numerous rodeos. A cowboy known as “Red”
posed for one of the chief figures in the group. And when a question
arose as to who should be pictured in the other, there was rivalry over
the claims of George Saunders, president of the association, and another
old cowman, Tom Russell, recently deceased. Russell’s widow was a prime
mover in the memorial project, but she wasn’t looking for a personal
monument. She and her committee worked tirelessly to raise money for
this tribute to the unsung heroism of their menfolk.