Gutzon Borglum

“ Out of it in half a century came a singular troop of famous persons, many of whom no doubt crossed Gutzon’s path without realizing that he was a fellow alumnus. Judges, lawyers, bishops, educators, engineers, builders, doctors, merchants, chiefs, sailors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, musicians and all the rest of them are included in the list. It is interesting to note that Borglum is the institution’s only offering to sculpture. ”

“ Gutzon Borglum died, and nobody in Atlanta talks about Stone Mountain any more. Borglum, they figure, is the only man who ever knew how to carve a mountain, and they are at least partly right. He is certainly the only man who ever did it.
On February 27, 1927, Lynn Haines, who obviously knew something about this dramatic episode, introduced Gutzon Borglum to the Penguin Club in Washington. What he said may not have been too reserved, but anyone who knew anything about the Georgia project would have admitted its truth. Haines declared:
Borglum had an impossible dream for Stone Mountain. ”

“ In a way he was right, for Gutzon was a perfectionist with unbounded confidence in himself. If he had gone in for tightrope walking, he would have tried to do it better than it had ever been done before, and, possibly, would have succeeded—possibly not. But the point that Barlow overlooked was that Borglum was always a critic of method and never of results if the work showed progress in technique. If a thing was better done, he never cared much how. ”

“ Paul Nocquet was a Belgian of real ability who had known Gutzon in Paris and had come over to be near him. Eventually he lost his life in a balloon ascension which he had undertaken in sheer despair. In an open letter to the Evening Sun he called attention to the humiliating role played by unrecognized artists in this country, all of which gave Gutzon Borglum new voice. Borglum wrote:
I have read with astonishment and pleasure the letter by Paul Nocquet pleading for the sculptor’s art in America. ”

“ Frank Brangwyn, some of whose work may be seen in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, was the one artist who made a deep impression on Gutzon in England. The Borglum diary is filled with notations such as this: “November 19, 1897—Short half hour with Brangwyn.... He belongs to art and will do work that will live.” And the feeling was mutual. In later years Brangwyn wrote, “I admire those strong virile things of yours. It is like a strong sea breeze on a hot and listless day to see your{59} honest works....” Each foresaw for the other a greatness that he could not hope for himself. ”

“ THE NOBLE SPORT And then there was the matter of The International Sporting Club. It was among Gutzon Borglum’s most altruistic endeavors and certainly one that can be viewed without any reference at all to his art.
It may seem to some readers that there is something of a retrogression when an artist involves himself in a sporting club—that the whole effort militates against his ideals of his craft. But that doesn’t seem to be the way Borglum felt about it. Boxing was just another odd subject that interested him and one with which he believed he could do something. ”

“ On February 11, 1921, ten years after the completion of the Newark Lincoln memorial, Mr. Lum, acting for the three executors, awarded the commission to Gutzon Borglum and authorized him to go to work. When photographs of the model were published wagers were laid among artists that it would be impossible for any sculptor to keep his creative impulse fixed on one subject long enough to produce an art work of such proportions. They did not know that monotony or dulled interest was an impossibility to an artist who regarded variety not as the spice of life but as its bread and butter. ”

“ CONVERSATION In those days Gutzon Borglum found time to smile once in a while, although anybody who knew the trials of mountain carving might have wondered why. He had been written down for a comfortable part of a million-dollar memorial project. Seldom, during any one carving period, did he get much of it. Some years he got none. People were donating toward Rushmore begrudgingly in nickels and dimes. He was always shorthanded. The experts he needed couldn’t exist on the cash available. Somebody raised the price of electricity. ”

“ James de la Mothe Borglum crossed the line into Idaho and reached Bear Lake on the road to Oregon. There, literally, he dug in—half the house in the ground, then sod, then log. That was in 1862—or maybe 1863. John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum joined the family there most likely, as his unfinished autobiography says, in 1867.
Gutzon remembers his mother (Ida Michelson Borglum) as a great woman, gifted and beautiful. She had one other son, Solon, born on December 22, 1868, the boy to whom Gutzon frequently referred as his little brother. ”

“ LINCOLN AND GUTZON BORGLUM IN HOIST
PLASTER MODEL IN MOUNTAIN STUDIO
G.B. has his hand on T.R.’s nose. Lincoln Borglum is at left
{257}
in sculpture. “I have learned,” he said, “what the human body looks like in motion. I know there must be strange techniques in the art that permits the transfer of this motion to blocks of stone or metal. I can sense it. I can see it although I cannot comprehend it. I have been able to recognize master productions. ”

“ So Gutzon Borglum did it.
And then Lynn Haines told the story of Stone Mountain. Or rather he told an important part of it. He neglected to call attention to the fact that what one man can do another man can undo.
In 1910 the Civil War was still one of the South’s active and bitter memories. There were still plenty of people alive who could tell from personal experience of the pillaging of homes, the burning of Atlanta, the devastation of the Southern countryside by Federal troops. ”

“ People digging down in their pockets to support a world war didn’t have much change for a memorial to the Confederacy. That had waited until now; it could wait further. But lack of cash did not delay Gutzon after he had heard from Tucker. There never had been any cash anyway.
When Borglum arrived at Stone Mountain in the summer of{183} 1921 he was filled with new enthusiasms, new ideas that had come to him during the war years and during his struggles with headstrong committeemen who couldn’t decide what they wanted. The sculptor looked at the granite mountain and took a deep breath. ”

“ FOR THE PARKS It is one of the amazing things about a sculptor that the more work he does and the more recognition he gets, the more his friends demand that he stick to his proper business. And it is probably just as amazing that the sculptor doesn’t want to and seldom does. Somebody, commenting on the varied activities and interests of Gutzon Borglum, quoted a bit of apt philosophy: “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me,” which was Borglum’s estimate of the situation, all right. The constant urge to Art was something, he thought, that made his friends seem normal. ”

“ The Stone Mountain wall must have contained millions of rocks, for there were enough to let men and boys test their muscles by rolling stones off the mountain for more than a hundred years, until Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, had the last ones thrown off in 1923 to make sure vandals did not start them rolling down among his workmen. ”

“ It was President Calvin Coolidge who said to Sculptor Gutzon Borglum that among the immortals to be carved upon Mount Rushmore a place must be found for Theodore Roosevelt, “because he was the first president to say to Big Business, ‘thus far you shall go and no farther.’” Washington is there because he was the trusted leader that made these United States possible, and was great and strong enough to refuse a crown and lay down the scepter when his work was done. ”

“ One of Ickes’ engineers went so far as to offer to relieve Borglum of all worry. “Why don’t you finish your models and give them to us to reproduce on the mountain?” he inquired. “We have plenty of men who can do that sort of work—and quickly, too.”
“Somebody has to put the life and expression into carved faces,” Gutzon began to explain as he had been explaining since his{307} first days on Stone Mountain. “That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be good sculptors.” ”

“ Frémont and is credited to “John Gutzon Borglum, 27 years old, painter and sculptor, recently returned from Spain, following his triumphs in the Paris salons of 1891 and 1892.”
What Borglum thought of this credit he does not say. He was headed for a permanent berth in a foreign country, and for once he didn’t seem to be quite certain of where he was going.{55}
CHAPTER SIX
ENGLAND There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember “the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the histories point out briefly that they were with us. ”

“ If sociologists and humanitarians could help this great body of youths to put their little heartaches into some beautiful, individual expression by creating some article in daily use, this pent-up tension, everywhere at the breaking point, would be used up at its source, as are springs of living water. And their work, their contentment and their power would be felt in every home.
{77}
The message seems important because so patently the truth. Gutzon Borglum was certainly a master craftsman, from the design of tools to the art that was his profession. ”

“ During his investigation of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, Russian-born founder of the Theosophical Society of America, came touring from India. She visited the Borglums in Omaha and sat for a portrait by young Gutzon. This portrait hung for many years in the Borglum home, and the brooding eyes of the lady seemed to follow the Borglums about the room wherever they moved. Gutzon used to explain that this was a familiar trick in painting and not hard to achieve.
Gutzon was interested in art while the family still lived in Fremont. ”

“ A political inquiry of this nature must inevitably arouse enmity and opposition in the most powerful quarters. The credit, nay, the very existence, of the government in power is at stake. An inquiry may seem to start something, but what it starts is an avalanche that will surely crush its initiators and the truth they seek to discover. Thus they will remain buried under the debris and obscured by the dust.
When Gutzon Borglum first took his demand for an aircraft investigation to the White House he was politely, if somewhat shortly, received by Joseph Tumulty, the President’s secretary. ”

“ The last time he and Boland met he was pleased with the course of the world and mellow toward Boland. He had his arm across the chairman’s shoulder and was calling him “Johnny.”
What Boland thought about these goings on is, of course, an entirely different matter. He never talks much about his struggles in behalf of majestic art. “Borglum was a great sculptor,” he sums it up. “He certainly was that.”
The matter of concessions on Mount Rushmore bothered Gutzon considerably more than most people interested in the project realized. ”

“ Heat fuses the bottom of the depression, leaving a slick, glassy surface.
Every lightning bolt for many years has left its mark. It is noticeable that they are thickest not on the highest points, but in depressions. Meteorologists say that is where the first drops from a shower soak into the granite and therefore make the best ground to attract the lightning.
From the time Gutzon Borglum began carving in 1923, stone rubble piled up at the base of the mountain below the monument. Hardly a man alive could remember what lay under it. ”

“ His Majesty went on, “the Swedes took virtually all the country. They overran the villages and cities. They captured Copenhagen. They took everything valuable. But, of course, they never took Jutland. That’s where your people were.”
The financial situation in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth century was what caused James Borglum, Gutzon’s father, to come to the United States. ”

“ Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with the sex of the angels. The model of the Angel Gabriel was still in soft clay. It was a simple matter to remove the offending face and model one with sterner features. Gutzon kept the original face, had it cast in silver and used a photograph of it as a Christmas card. It brought to the Borglum home a signed photograph of Bishop Potter. Everything was sweetness and light until a reporter noticed that Gabriel’s countenance had quit being pretty and amiable and was now a little hard ... and analytical and dour. ”

“ There is little left to mark the handiwork of man in this neighborhood. Grass and brush have covered the fallen rock. The scaffolds are down, the tool sheds and storehouses vanished. The steel hooks are gone from the face of the cliff. There are no great funds in the hands of the local patriots. But this is the place. It was because of his work here, because of what he discovered about granite at Stone Mountain, and because of his carving of the head of Robert E. Lee, which today nobody can rightfully attribute to{16} him, that Gutzon Borglum’s memory will be a long time in dying. ”

“ From these beginnings today shine forth the faces of four of the greatest men of American history, to light the path of freedom for countless generations yet to come.
16 THE ROLE OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Millions of Americans and liberty-loving people from all over the world have come to the Black Hills of South Dakota to look upon Gutzon Borglum’s Shrine of Democracy. ”

“ It is but natural that his following should, in their effort to catch his spirit, acquire only his style. His reserve becomes in their hands more reserved, his architectural and impersonal manner more mannered, and we have a pseudoclassic school which for dull mediocrity is without a rival in the whole field of art.
This analysis of another man’s work did incalculable harm to Gutzon’s position in New York art circles. The controversy became nationwide when the newspaper headlines announced, “Borglum Attacks Saint-Gaudens.” ”