when He made you. A glorious thought that, seeing the Infinite Hand
reach down and gather up the dust of the mighty and the great and
mold it with terrific force into the hardest--and softest--soul I
have ever known. Out of Milton and a speck of Angelo, and a grain
of Napoleon, an atom from Paul and a flame from the Immortal
Redeemer. It is a thought to play with. Such a strange, complex,
unlimited person you are ... counting a line of vital importance,
throwing away a fortune, soothing a crying baby, harboring an army,
fighting for peace, loving a friend. You and Mary are destroyers of
weak faith, and I love you both.
“Missy’s” picture of him is the one that his friends knew best. He never
felt that he or anybody else had been endowed at birth with superior
talents, though he always felt that he had done well with what he had.
His ability to be successful as an artist, he declared, was due to
trained observation and hard work. As a matter of course, he never
talked down to an individual or to an audience. Once a Texas friend of
his, Ralph Bradford, remarked that he was going to a “little hick town”
to give a speech and didn’t need to prepare for it. Gutzon disagreed
with him. “You never know the brains of an audience by the size of the
town,” he said. “How do you know you won’t be talking to some ‘king
maker’ who’s just there waiting for a train?” So Bradford, who presently
moved on to an important post in Washington, did so because he stopped
to prepare what he had to say--and the ambient “king maker” was in the
audience.
“If there hadn’t been any ‘king maker,’” Gutzon commented afterward, “it
would have been just the same; somebody, if it was only Bradford, would
have known that the orator was doing a good job.”
Among the sculptor’s oldest friends was the painter Martin Borgord, a
man of Norwegian extraction whom he had known in California and France.
Borgord received honors in Paris and late in life returned to
California. He stopped to visit Gutzon in South Dakota. Through him
Gutzon met another well-known painter, William Singer, and his wife, and
visited them in Norway. Mrs. Singer bought two of his marbles for her
museum in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Another friend of the early Paris days was the Belgian sculptor Paul
Nocquet, who came to New York to be near Gutzon and lost his life in a
balloon ascension. After his death Gutzon collected his art works, had
some of them cast in bronze and arranged an exhibition. The sale netted
several thousand dollars for Nocquet’s mother and sisters in Belgium.
Among the patrons of the show, whose names appeared in a handsome
catalogue, were President Theodore Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, and the
French and Belgian ambassadors to the United States.
Gutzon took care of Nocquet’s burial in Mt. Kisco and prepared a
calf-bound volume, _In Memoriam_, which contained, among other mementos,
prints of the first air photographs of Long Island. Nocquet had taken a
camera on his final trip, and the films were found in his pocket. Though
wet, they were successfully developed and are probably the first
pictures taken from the air to be reproduced in the public press.
Gutzon, after his return from Europe in 1901, met the Herbert Wadsworths
of Washington and the Genesee Valley. They were horse enthusiasts. So
was Gutzon. Martha Wadsworth was a dominating personality, and she was a
social power in Washington. But once she motored all the way to Hermosa,
South Dakota, and again to Stamford, Connecticut, just to visit with the
Borglums.
Herbert Wadsworth’s attitude toward his wife’s activities was one of
whimsical tolerance and his view of Gutzon’s enthusiasms was much the
same. In 1912 he wrote this to Borglum:
Any indication that you are recovering from the
Too-Many-Things-at-Once disease is most gratifying. Once I wanted
to reform the world and now I’m too exhausted to reform myself. By
and by, when you can take a long time off, come up to Ashantee--The
Dawdlers’ Do-Nothing Roost--and do nothing with me. Say, where is
home, anywhere?...
Another equally old friend and brilliant woman who also motored out once
to Texas to spend the winter near Gutzon was Edith Cornell Smith, wife
of Sydney. She and her husband lived in Thirty-eighth Street, near
Gutzon’s studio. They were old New Yorkers to whom tickets at Carnegie
Hall and the Opera House, and various club memberships, were as much a
part of the annual budget as taxes and rent. Edith was deeply artistic
and after her husband’s death spent most of her summers in Stamford
where she was a welcome part of the Borglum family. There were many such
travelers. In time Gutzon came to look on their arrivals as he did the
rains or the rising of the sun. But he was overcome with wonderment when
Julian Lee Rayford, then an obscure young artist, thumbed his way from
North Carolina to Texas just to talk to him. “I don’t think I ever meant
that much to anybody before,” said Gutzon. And he meant it.
During his bachelor days in New York, Gutzon occupied a quaint brick
apartment on 104th Street where other artists lived, including the
Boardman Robinsons. It had been built by a strange woman who, in her
youth, had gone abroad to study art and life. She had come back with
strong distaste for the respectability of her well-to-do relations.
After erecting this flat building, she had taken up her abode in the
basement amid an assortment of art treasures gathered up in Europe. The
sculptor admired what he called her wild streak, by which he meant her
defiance of the conventions, and they got along quite well.
She would allow him to do what he pleased to the second-floor rear
apartment, she said. So he rented it and transformed it completely and
extravagantly, equipping it with furniture built from his own designs.
The dining room had a round mahogany table six feet in diameter. Around
it were twelve circular chairs all painted green and rubbed to a soft
patina. There was a sideboard to match.
Gutzon passed out twelve keys to twelve friends who could come when they
pleased and find a place at his table. Among them was Adolph E. Borie,
called “Billy” by Gutzon and “Doppie” by everybody else. As president of
the Savage Arms Company he was of considerable help in the aircraft
investigation and in settling the affairs of the Sporting Club. He was
an ardent fisherman, and, therefore, one of Borglum’s own kind.
The sculptor would go almost anywhere fishing with anybody he trusted.
But now and then he would decline to make a second trip. Bob and Madge
Davis once invited him to fish with them in a Canadian lake. He didn’t
like it. Sitting in a boat and trolling was too tame a sport, he said.
“You might as well be pulling a suitcase aboard the boat as one of those
lake trout.” The trout stream near Hermosa was the chief reason for his
buying the Black Hills ranch. It was expensive and brought more debts
and embarrassment. But the fishing was a compensation--or so he said.
In the duplex apartment where he lived in New York before moving to
Stamford, close friends, Charles Rann Kennedy and his wife Edith Wynne
Matthison, occupied the flat upstairs. Gutzon became acquainted with
them through a neighbor, Henry Miller, who first staged Kennedy’s play
_The Servant in the House_. Edith was leading lady, and in the cast were
Walter Hampden and his wife and the elder Tyrone Power. The sculptor
engaged the company for a special performance in honor of the Howard
Lodge at the Masonic Temple. A special edition of the play bound in
vellum with the Howard Lodge emblem stamped in gold on the cover was
presented to each of the players and to distinguished guests.
There wasn’t much privacy about Gutzon’s home life. At Stamford there
were usually more outsiders than he had room for. He lived too far from
town for studio assistants to go back and forth. At least one of them
lived with the family all the time. And because he liked to do his
writing after work hours or on holidays, a secretary was another
permanent member of the group. A few of the outstanding ones came to be
friends.
In the earlier days there were Eugenia Flagg and Helen Johnson Keyes,
daughter of the historian. In Georgia, Lillian Taylor, who fought
through the Stone Mountain war, was always on Gutzon’s side and
frequently stayed with the Borglums in Stamford or out at Rushmore. Jean
Philip was also ready to take up cudgels for the chief and was
frequently called.
When the barracks of the Czecho-Slovak volunteers were vacated the
Borglum part of the community was enlarged to care for casual visitors
and studio staff. In looking after all these tides of people Banks, the
chauffeur, became an invaluable help and seemed so much like one of the
family that Mrs. Borglum’s nieces and nephews referred to him in their
prayers as “Uncle Banks.” Another indispensable person came to Stamford
in those early days--James Reilley, the Irishman who has now been there
for thirty years. His children grew up with Gutzon’s, and one of them
reached a position of importance at Rushmore. Old Reilley is still
there, still keeping count of the empty acres.
The sculptor was likewise a dutiful son and brother. Very often some
member of his family was living with him. With the first large amount of
money he received for a monument commission he sent his father and
others on a six-month trip to Denmark. Again he brought to New York a
younger brother and his family, to keep them for a whole year while the
brother was taking a medical course. There are many letters to show that
moments of crisis were not infrequent in the Borglum family and that
Gutzon was always ready to aid.
When his son Lincoln was born Gutzon’s happiness was touching. This was
his miracle, he virtually announced, and his alone. Within a week he was
quarreling with the trained nurse because she would not let him pick up
the baby when he pleased, day or night. There was also some resentment
about the timing of the boy’s appearance. He had arrived on April 9,
1912, and, in keeping with the name the sculptor had in mind for him,
his birth date should have been Lincoln’s birthday. Some friend fixed up
this worrisome situation by mentioning that April 9 was Appomattox Day.
In due course the baby was taken to Bridgeport to pose for the baby
faces spouting water from the rim of the Wheeler Fountain. In that same
fountain he was christened by his uncle, Rev. Marshall Montgomery, after
which he was registered in near-by St. John’s Church, for which Gutzon
had made the reredos.
The child, apparently, was the most important thing that had yet come
into the sculptor’s life. He took him everywhere he was allowed to,
presented him to friends up and down the Atlantic coast, and presumably
was grateful that the child’s mother was a calm and tolerant woman.
Once, when Lincoln was four years old, Gutzon picked him up suddenly and
said they were going to Boston on a two-day trip. But they weren’t back
in two days--or in thirty days. By that time the anxious mother was
telegraphing to every place where she thought Gutzon might have chanced
to go. And from Atlanta she got an answering wire: “Don’t worry. Both
boys here. And well.”
When his daughter Mary Ellis was born on her father’s birthday, March
25, 1916, he began to make plans to have her with him wherever he went.
But he learned that the arrangements were not so easily taken care of.
However, by the time of the Stone Mountain break, Mrs. Borglum had
learned to drive a car and the four Borglums were constantly on the go,
exiles from home, but, wherever humanly possible, together.
Life at the Stamford home and studio is recalled by those who took part
in it as a continuous carnival. Michow Ito, Japanese dancer, moved onto
the old campsite of Mrs. Lanier and the Greenwich girls with a summer
school. He taught dancing and listed classes in history and provided
some art theory, taught by an old American artist. His men pupils and
his staff, including a Japanese cook, lived in tents. The girl students
were billeted in the old Czech barracks. One of the girls, Angna Enters,
stayed on after the rest had gone. She wrote several books and became
famous as a dancer, but is known best locally for _Silly Girl_, in which
the days of the fantastic summer school are recalled.
Ito, who was an odd character, is now known to history principally
because one of his pupils posed for the leading figure in Gutzon’s “Wars
of America” group. Ito had plans for establishing the peace of the world
through the promotion of fine arts. But he wasn’t consistent at it. One
day, when he heard that a Japanese envoy had arrived in Washington to
take part in the 1922 naval conference, he borrowed a Bible and hurried
down to the capital with a message. There he created something of a
sensation by arguing with the Japanese delegate that it would be better
to throw away the sword altogether than to haggle about its relative
length. The envoy thanked him kindly and paid no attention.
Probably because of friendship with Henry Miller, Gutzon knew many
actors. They were in and out of Stamford for years. When Margaret Anglin
was rehearsing her play _The Bronze Woman_ she sent her leading man, who
was playing the part of a sculptor, to the Borglum studio to pick up
local color. He borrowed some authentic stage properties such as a
mallet and chisel.
Later Gutzon, who knew Edgar Davis, tried to get a part for Miss Anglin
in _The Ladder_. This play was about Davis’ thoughts on reincarnation,
but that is not what one remembers it for now. Its Broadway record was
established chiefly by the fact that nobody had to pay to see it. The
tickets were given away free. And it went on almost to a performance
record with virtually nobody in the house. Miss Anglin, however, never
played in it.
With much interest the sculptor liked Laura Hope Crews. She played in
_The Great Divide_ by William Vaughn Moody, another of Gutzon’s
favorites. Gutzon found a resemblance between Moody’s philosophy and his
own, particularly as shown in the poet’s _The Fire Bringer_. Gutzon
frequently talked of Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_ as he might have
concerned himself with somebody living, breathing and immortal. He was a
glamorous, free spirit, and anyone who had anything to do with his
chronicle was a demigod.
Another seldom chronicled trait about Gutzon is the fact that he was
passionately fond of the violin. He had to give it up in order to find
time for his modeling, but he cherished an old fiddle for years until
vandals broke into his Stamford studio and smashed it and other things
to bits. Toward the end of his life Congressman Kent Keller gave him
another violin which is somewhat remembered by those about him. He
received the gift on the ranch in Hermosa and, thereafter, it was his
custom to rise at five in the morning to practice before the day’s work
began.
Whatever one’s criticism of this almost secret work as a virtuoso, it
must be conceded that he liked good music and probably tried to learn to
play it. He knew and loved the great classics--and also the country’s
folk tunes. He hated grand opera, but he liked brass bands.
He had a remarkable love for motion pictures. This was partly due to the
fact that at Rushmore there was hardly any other diversion. But it was
likewise because actors who first appeared to him only as people who
moved about the screen suddenly became real and interesting to him.
Anyway, he used to go to the theaters in Rapid City several times a week
whether they changed programs or not. He saw Jeanette MacDonald seven
nights in succession in _Naughty Marietta_, and Grace Moore, Irene
Dunne, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and others of the sisterhood with
less concentration.
Almost as much as the glamour girls he loved the pictured cowboys. Not
that he cared whether the cowboy was a good hand or bad, but he liked
the horses.
For more quiet relaxation he enjoyed Wild West stories of the good old
dime-novel kind. He and Mrs. Borglum used to read them aloud to each
other on long cross-country trips. Although there are countless Wild
West story magazines on the newsstands, they discovered that only one is
recognized by connoisseurs. In the sparsely settled regions of the
West--even in San Antonio--this magazine was hard to find, and Gutzon
sometimes used to lay out a trip so that on a special day he would be at
a place where it would be available. Thus he would miss no time getting
to the next installment of some continued story.
Gutzon used to look for stories by Max Brand on the ground that his
literary style was superior. Long afterward he discovered that Max Brand
was actually a well-known writer who had made a fortune writing under
different pseudonyms.
In meeting friends new or old the sculptor’s outstanding trait was his
unworldly attitude, totally unaffected by praise or blame, by newspaper
gossip or radio commentators. This is exemplified in a story that he
used to tell on himself.
During his early days in New York the actress Blanche Bates, who had
known him in California, invited him to a matinee where he found himself
the lone male in a box of women. He noticed that opera glasses were
being turned on the box, presumably because of the exceptional beauty of
the woman beside him, and tactfully he withdrew into the background.
As he was filing out after the performance he overtook Miss Bates and
asked, “Who was that striking woman sitting next to me?”
Her laugh was spontaneous as she called to her friend, “Oh, Lillian,
here’s one man in the world who never heard of you!”
He had been spending the afternoon with the most glamorous woman in the
world, Lillian Russell, and he hadn’t realized it. He was not
embarrassed. He never liked to be told in advance the names and
positions of people he was likely to meet.
“I don’t care to be hampered by other people’s opinions--or guesses,” he
said. “I like to discover people for themselves. And I do.”
“You certainly do,” conceded Miss Bates.
And, of course, he did.
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.