the shoulders of two others and using a lariat over a projecting sliver
of rock as a hoist line. With torn hands and broken nails they reached
the upper floor and looked down on the mining town of Keystone, about
three miles away. The sculptor related his impressions thus:
When I first saw the shoulders of Rushmore I knew instinctively
that I was a doomed man. I knew that while the years and I reshaped
the mountain, I must be reshaped myself.
Once before I had something of the same intense, emotional shock.
That was when I stood in front of Stone Mountain and listened to
Helen Plane pleading with me to cut into the wall the story of Lee
and his associates.
Such thoughts passed through my mind as we lay prostrate to rest
in the sun on the top of Mount Rushmore. Here great masses of rock
of new dimensions, of greater hardness, rose above and about me. I
was conscious we were in another world. We could imagine clouds
moving over us and around us in stately dignity, or driven by
hurrying winds out of the north, or falling as rain or snow against
the chill white cliff. And there a new thought seized me--a thought
that frightened me and was to redirect me and dominate all my
carving: the scale of the mountain peak!
We were 6,200 feet above sea level--500 feet above the surrounding
cliffs. We looked out over a horizon, level and beaten like the rim
of a great cartwheel, 2,000 feet below. We had reached up toward
the heavenly bodies; we were looking at the forms removed from the
detail of earth in the valleys, with crude colossi piercing the
sky. I had worked seven years on Stone Mountain without real
consciousness of this changing relationship of lofty mountain forms
isolated in space. And it came over me in an almost terrifying
manner that I never had sensed what I was planning. Plans must
change. The vastness that I saw here demanded it.
The Rushmore elevation is the highest elevation of granite, except
near-by Harney Peak, between the Rocky Mountains and Europe. It is a
hard formation called pegmatite, peculiar to the Black Hills, and on
Rushmore it is of a finer, more even grain than that of surrounding
rocks.
Once there was a sea in this region, then rising tracts of sediments
compressed into complicated folds. At some remote time the earth’s
interior intruded upon the sedimentary folds, pushing steadily upward
beneath the surface, and so formed in time the granite batholith of the
Harney Peak region. The overload above the granite must have been of
great height before it was destroyed by erosion. It was torn down and
now lies scattered across the Bad Lands and in valleys all the way to
the sea.
There is no telling when Mount Rushmore was exposed to the sky. Dr.
O’Harra believed it to be one of the oldest mountain formations in the
world--older than the Alps or the Apennines or the Pyrenees or the
Caucasus--older, even, than the Himalayas. Said Dr. O’Harra:
Mount Rushmore, placed near the center of the Black Hills, in the
heart of the continent, midst a galaxy of the world’s profoundest
splendors, where every stone shows an imprint of sanctity and every
bush is aflame with glory, for thousands of years, yes, for
millions of years, has surveyed its entrancing surroundings and
with uncovered head has looked into the benign face of a kindly
creator.
So now a mountain had been discovered such as the sculptor had never
hoped to see. There remained the twin problems of getting the means to
carve it and a majestic design to put on it. Senator Norbeck, notified
the next day, was cautious. He declared flatly that the location
wouldn’t do. It was inaccessible. There were better cliffs and he could
point them out. He and the sculptor met in Keystone, twenty miles from
Rapid City, and spent another day in the hot sun looking for the cliffs
that Norbeck remembered. After that the senator gave in.
The parks of South Dakota were Senator Norbeck’s hobby. He had
antagonized farmers by including their lands in park areas, and he had
schemed to find money in the state and national treasuries that could be
used for landscaping them. Virtually every road in the Black Hills and
Bad Lands is his creation. If he needed a new one, he could make it. So
he wasn’t much worried about the remoteness of Rushmore.
“We’ll get a highway up to it,” he said. “Now, what are you going to put
on it?”
It was Robinson who gave the clew. Years before, in the shale hills west
of old Fort Pierre on the Missouri River, some children had found a
leaden plate left there in 1743 by the Vérendrye brothers, French
explorers. They had claimed the region for the French king as part of
the Louisiana Territory. And it was brought out that Dakota was linked
with the little colonial republic on the Atlantic seaboard in 1803 when
President Thomas Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Considering these two episodes, Gutzon Borglum in his own stepless way
decided what he would do. He would build a memorial to symbolize the
creation and extension of the great republic, the forming of its
government, the saving of its political union, and the completion of the
dream of Columbus--a water route to India--by the cutting of the Panama
Canal.
The characters he chose for the carving were obviously four: Jefferson,
author of the Declaration of Independence and our political gospel;
Washington, who made the visions of Jefferson practicable; Lincoln, who
preserved the union; and Theodore Roosevelt, who was chiefly
instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal. When the design became
clear in his mind Gutzon said:
Our forefathers wrote in the canon of human government that a man
has the right to be free and happy. They formed a sisterhood of
states on that simple creed, and their challenge became the tocsin
cry of the world’s oppressed souls. Those words have changed the
philosophy of the world’s governments. They are the motive, spirit
and purpose back of the Rushmore memorial.
We have not created a monument to Washington or Jefferson or
Lincoln or Roosevelt, but to the meaning of those eleven words as
maintained in our government by those four great leaders. Those
words--man has a right to be free and to be happy--hold the Western
experiment as the guide that leaped out of medieval Europe, more
important to humanity’s immortality than creeds and governments.
So the names of the Presidents to be carved on Mount Rushmore were
agreed on by Norbeck, Robinson and Borglum as early as the fall of 1925.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Of course not. From press reports it was
difficult to see that any two people agreed on any man as a possible
candidate for the super carving. The women’s clubs got turned into a
movement for Dr. Susan B. Anthony, the noted feminist. And they argued
bitterly and earnestly. Somebody introduced a bill in Congress for her
support.
Gutzon, however, wasn’t to be shaken. He said that the men selected
might not be the greatest the United States had produced, but they
exemplified the four great periods of the country’s progress and so
deserved their places in the memorial. He would carve other figures
later, he said, in some places where they would not be crowded.
He went to work first on the head of Washington and studied long in an
attempt to find out what kind of man he was. Of the familiar Washington
portraits he said:
I have examined all the available portraits of value--the Stuart
and Trumbull portraits, and the Houdon portrait which I consider
best of all. Not the statue by Houdon in Richmond, the figure of
which is poor, but the unretouched mask by Houdon which is now in
the Corcoran Art Gallery. It is unquestionably the most valuable
evidence of the appearance of Washington extant. I choose to
represent him before retirement. In retirement a certain fulness of
cheek becomes apparent as in Stuart’s last picture. His face,
definitely masculine, takes on a more rugged form and reminds one
of Cromwell at forty-five. There is much of the robust Britisher,
the country squire or nobleman. There is none of the prettified
Virginia gentleman that Stuart always produced. I recall a story to
the effect that Martha Washington once told him that Stuart had
said he had an awful temper, and that he must warn Stuart not to
circulate such stories. Washington is said to have pondered a
moment and replied, “My dear, I’m afraid Mr. Stuart is right.”
The sculptor made a small model of the group in San Antonio in 1926.
When he returned to Rushmore that same year he made an enlarged plaster
model of Washington’s head on a scale of an inch to a foot. By this time
he had determined to make the heads sixty feet high; his previous
thought of thirty-foot heads he found to be completely out of scale with
the mountain. To make sure of the size he had gone down over the face of
the cliff, located the nose line perpendicularly and the eyebrows and
chin horizontally. From those lines he was able to calculate the scale.
For the next several days he crawled about the cliff and valley
studying the points he had marked on the mountain in red paint with a
six-inch brush.
The enlargement of the Washington head was made in an old log cabin more
than two miles away from the cliff of Rushmore. Plans were afoot to
raise money for the vast work, he was told. But that summer, at least,
nobody was able to find it. Gutzon and his family lived until September
in Keystone. Their living quarters were typical of the mining boom that
had cluttered the valley with shacks in the late seventies.
“Compared with the setting of the rest of the project,” said Gutzon,
“they were ultramodern.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
_DEDICATION_
One of the favorite jibes of the scoffers who didn’t think the Shrine of
Democracy would ever amount to more than a big scar on a hill was that
the workmen spent all their time dedicating it Gutzon listened to these
charges gravely and without heat. “People like to go to dedications,” he
said. “And if you don’t get people out here, nobody is going to know
what you’ve got.” In addition to being a top sculptor he was also a good
showman.
One remembers that the enterprise had virtually no friends in the summer
of 1927--certainly no friends with ready money. The citizenry knew about
it. That is to say, the citizenry of the Hill towns knew about it. They
had heard it was buried somewhere out in the _bosque_ near Keystone.
Gutzon Borglum and a couple of aides went up there each day on rented
horses and surveyed and measured. In Keystone Gutzon talked with
representatives of the power company and salesmen from machinery
companies. But certainly nobody was cutting any rock off the surface of
Mount Rushmore.
And then, in one of the most fantastic journeys that the history of the
Presidents records, Calvin Coolidge came out to look at the West. The
White House Correspondents’ Corps has never reached a decision about why
Coolidge chose the Black Hills for his vacation that year. He caught
trout with bait. Somebody should have advised him not to put on Sioux
eagle feathers. He played a weird game of golf on a private course that
was nearly vertical. And the best thought of the Washington press on the
subject was that he was just a New Englander who had learned how to be a
tourist. Now it is permitted to wonder.
Coolidge came out to the Game Lodge, thirty miles southwest of Rapid
City, chiefly because Peter Norbeck suggested it and carefully laid the
way for him. Norbeck was one of two South Dakotans who was really
enthusiastic about making the Harney Peak region an object of national
interest. Norbeck and Gutzon were friends who believed in each other’s
magic, and Gutzon was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. You may make out of
these premises anything you like. But there isn’t any doubt that the
carving of Rushmore ceased to be idle conversation when the President
arrived and slogged three miles up the hill through the dust to raise
his hand and give the project its sacred quality.
The President was rolled out over a new road from Rapid City to the Game
Lodge, a hostelry on Squaw Creek, handed a fishing rod and assigned to a
preserve that had been packed with specimens from the state hatchery.
Indian chiefs came and made obeisance. The grumbling correspondents
installed themselves in Rapid City. Then, on the second day, Gutzon
Borglum paid his respects to the distinguished visitor. He hired an
airplane--which nobody else had thought of--and flew over the Game Lodge
to drop a huge bouquet of mountain flowers on Mrs. Coolidge’s lawn.
The next day he arrived more formally at the President’s picnic plot to
arrange, as he afterward reported, “a visit of dedication to Mount
Rushmore.” And it is significant that the interview seems to have been
previously arranged and the subject of the discussion well understood.
Nobody was surprised when the date for the dedication was set--August
10, 1927. By that time everybody near enough to see was convinced that
the President was just doing the things he had his heart set on.
Recalling his interview with President Coolidge, Gutzon wrote:
It was a fine interview. Coolidge was a silent man. But he always
talked with me--fishing, politics, even a little about art. He was
happy he had come to the Black Hills for his summer outing. He said
they reminded him of the Vermont mountains.
When the day arrived for the dedication we drove up as far as we
could and walked the rest of the way. The President was mounted on
a safe horse, led by an orderly on each side on foot, until we
reached the cabin I had taken over as a studio. It was about 1,500
feet from the cliff.
There were lots of specially invited guests who had struggled up
the hill. It was something new to see the consecrating of a
mountain by the President of the United States. Nothing had been
left undone to make this an official act. Everything was done with
the greatest of dignity and decorum. Coolidge was really impressed.
“We have come here,” he said, “to dedicate a cornerstone that was
laid by the hand of the Almighty. On this towering wall of Rushmore
in the heart of the Black Hills is to be inscribed a memorial that
will represent some of the outstanding events in American history,
and portraying the features of four of our Presidents.
“The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people.
It is in no small degree due to that spirit that we have been able
to produce such leaders. If coming generations are to maintain a
like spirit, it will be because they continue to study the lives
and times of the great men who have been leaders of this country,
and continue to support the principles those men represented. It is
for that purpose that we erect memorials. We cannot hold our
admiration for the historic figures which we shall see here without
growing stronger in our determination to perpetuate the
institutions that their lives revealed and accomplished.”
That, for the most part, was the dedication. And, singularly enough, it
was very effective. The hot and weary witnesses who had made the march
out of Keystone had suspected it would be, and they had no reason to
complain. Calvin Coolidge, for once in his life, had been deeply moved.
The little crowd stood quiet and motionless for a minute. Gutzon was
called over to the President’s side.
“Look,” said Coolidge abruptly, “who’s paying for all this?”
“Well,” answered Gutzon, “the Rapid City Commercial Club has been taking
care of preliminary expenses. And since the Mount Harney Memorial
Association has been formed, some money has been raised in the Black
Hills and the state generally. We’ve got donations from the Homestake
Mine and the railroads and from people outside like Charles Rushmore,
Herbert Myrick and Coleman Dupont. We are very grateful.”
The President sniffed. “You’ll not go far on that,” he said. “The people
of South Dakota can’t even pay the interest on their farm mortgages.”
“They’ve had a dry year west of the Missouri River,” explained Gutzon.
“We can hope for more water next year.”
“Nonsense,” declared Coolidge. “They never get water out there. When I
get back to Washington I want you to come to the White House. You know
Secretary Mellon?”
“Yes,” said Borglum.
“All right,” pursued the President. “He and you and I will sit down and
figure out what can be done to promote this work. I know great
governments do things like this.”
The President then handed the sculptor the drills and Gutzon climbed to
the top of the mountain. The engines were turned on for the first time.
The huddled, silent witnesses caught the sudden chatter of the drills.
The carving of Mount Rushmore had begun.
Gutzon came down and presented the first drill in use to President
Coolidge. The next two went to Doane Robinson and Peter Norbeck, and he
kept the fourth. Then everybody plodded back down the hill to Keystone.
“See me in Washington,” repeated Coolidge as they said good-by. And that
the historian might record as the beginning of Rushmore financing.
Norbeck and Borglum disagreed as to the proper approach to the problem.
Borglum said that he would ask the federal government to donate as much
as the memorial promoters were able to collect from other sources.
Norbeck said no, that money was hard to collect privately, that you
couldn’t run drills on promises and that Mellon could be made to pay the
full cost. Gutzon, remembering how he had raised more than a million
dollars for Stone Mountain, refused to listen to this argument. But, it
turned out, Norbeck was right.
Toward the end of 1927 Borglum was in Washington. He laid his plan
before Mellon just as he had said he would, and Mellon was pleased. So
was President Coolidge, for Gutzon’s modesty was something unusual at
the time.
Norbeck was not pleased. “You could have got it all,” he said. “Now I
don’t know what you’ll get.” He put a bill through the Senate, while
Congressman Williamson was doing the same thing in the House, providing
for a twelve-member commission to take over the drawings, contracts and
material now held by Borglum, to be held and owned by the United States
government. The $50,000 fund in the Rushmore treasury was exhausted in
the middle of December 1927; so work was abandoned and nothing was done
in 1928 while everybody in the Black Hills waited for Congress to act.
Norbeck was discouraged in 1928. In a letter to Gutzon he wrote:
Previous to this, public sentiment has held up pretty well under
our repeated assurances that everything would go right along. But
the fact that neither you nor I could scare up a few dollars for
the work during the summer of 1928 has led people to believe that
we were just talking hot air. Very few people in South Dakota take
the matter seriously any more. Doane Robinson tries to, but it
keeps him awake nights and he needs sleep....
This letter came to Gutzon in San Antonio, where he was working on the
memorial to Woodrow Wilson destined for Poland, and he was a bit put
out. To this letter he replied:
[Illustration:
_Photo by Lincoln Borglum_
VIEW OF RUSHMORE SHOWING HEADS OF THE FOUR PRESIDENTS]
[Illustration: F.D.R. AT THE UNVEILING OF JEFFERSON, AUGUST 1936]
My dear Senator, if I didn’t love you and sympathize with the
difficulties you have had to face in the past year, I would get
cross. But no one can respect you more than I do, know you half so
well, agree with you so much and fail to feel that anything you
write would be written in the best spirit. If I say anything a bit
harsh, I am going to ask you to treat my remarks in the same
spirit.
I have a feeling from your letter that you feel I have not raised
the money that should have been raised; that I have not carried
through the matters I should have carried through. Now let us clear
up a few of these points. First, because it was with great
reluctance that I took up the Black Hills work, for it is a
terrific undertaking and I found the country and the people utterly
uninformed in such matters and without funds. I agreed to go to the
Hills and make a survey for a fixed sum. That was accepted; a bill
was introduced in your state government with the result that
nothing was paid for that service by the state. I found, in other
words, that whatever I undertook, I had to carry much of the load
all the time, in financing and developing interest, in engineering
and production.
Finally when the work was in hand it was always in South Dakota
that the inertia was felt most. While I was there, everything was
promised; immediately I left, everything was put off until I
returned. I have made at least three complete rounds of the cities
in the southwest of South Dakota, feeling out gatherings for the
purpose of informing and interesting the people and securing help
for the memorial. I have been informed, time and again, at each of
these gatherings, that the necessary funds were available provided
your committee, or someone you designate, would either be with me
or go and collect the money.
This was told me even at the Homestake Mine, where I talked for a
solid hour to the manager and legal head of the concern, and
secured from them the statement that they were completely sold on
the proposition and would do their part. You yourself secured their
contribution. I am not blaming you for anything. I have never
questioned your wisdom, or your politics, or the reasons for delay
in Washington. But I do think, and you must bear me out in this,
that if the bill had been passed, the past year would have been one
of energy, action and production, with the head of Washington
completed on the mountain.
Less than a month after this exchange of letters the Rushmore bill was
passed; $250,000 was appropriated on a matching basis and more than
$50,000 released to match sums previously subscribed. Considering the
carving program, this fund was still nothing to cause much celebration.
The making of monuments has always been expensive. One such group
alone--the Jefferson Memorial in Washington--had an estimated cost of
$3,000,000. But one takes what one can get, and Gutzon was cheered
again.
In one of his last Presidential acts Calvin Coolidge appointed ten men
and one woman as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission: John
A. Boland, Rapid City, South Dakota; Charles R. Crane, New York City;
Joseph S. Cullinan, Houston, Texas; C. M. Day, Sioux Falls, South
Dakota; D. B. Gurney, Yankton, South Dakota; Hale Holden, Chicago; Frank
O. Lowden, Oregon, Illinois; Julius Rosenwald, Chicago; Fred W. Sargent,
Evanston, Illinois; William Williamson, Rapid City, South Dakota; and
Mrs. Lorine Jones Spoonts, Corpus Christi, Texas. At their first
meeting, called by President Hoover in the White House in June 1929, J.
S. Cullinan was elected president of the commission and John A. Boland
chairman of the executive committee. Work on Mount Rushmore began at
once.
Some people remember 1929 because of renewed hope that the great
memorial would be finished. But most of the rest of the United States
recall it as the year that started the big depression. Contributions
came in slowly; then they stopped. Cullinan, with the blessing of
President Herbert Hoover, organized the Rushmore National Memorial
Society of the Black Hills to handle advertising, fund raising,
memberships, management of concessions, maintenance of the park area,
publicity and other matters not directly connected with the building of
the memorial. Memberships were set at $100 apiece, which brought in
$6,000, and that was the biggest sum that anyone in the undertaking saw
for a long time.
Then there was the matter of a suitable inscription. The idea of such
explanatory matter to accompany the carved figures had been set forth in
the Congressional bill. It had been discussed by the sculptor and
President Coolidge in the summer of 1927 and again when the pair met two
years later in Texas. Borglum asked of the ex-President some eight or
nine terse paragraphs covering the territorial expansion of the republic
and starting with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
The available space on the mountain gave room for about 375 words in
letters three feet high. If reduced to two and a half feet, there would
be room for 475 words. Reporters spread word throughout the country that
Coolidge was writing a history of the United States in 500 words. He
denied it.