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:

_Photo by Lincoln Borglum_

VIEW OF RUSHMORE SHOWING HEADS OF THE FOUR PRESIDENTS]

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.

Gutzon wrote a letter to Mr. Coolidge after that restating what he wanted. He was about to dress the mountainside for the entablature, he said, and would appreciate some copy. Mr. Coolidge sent the two paragraphs which read:

_The Declaration of Independence_--The eternal right to seek
happiness through self-government and the divine duty to defend
that right at any sacrifice.

_The Constitution_--Charter of perpetual union of free people of
sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers under
an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide
security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality
and justice under the law.

Gutzon changed the wording slightly. He cut out the word _through_ before _self-government_ in the first paragraph. In the second he eliminated the phrase _under the law_ after the word _justice_. Mr. Coolidge objected to the editing. The newspapers raised another storm. Coolidge complained of the publicity. The sculptor assumed all blame and got this somewhat annoyed reply from Coolidge:

I know that you are a great artist. What I meant to convey is that
I do not wish to be engaged in putting up a monument to myself. I
wished my name kept off the mountain. I do not see any reason for
your committee giving the press any statement of any kind in
relation to me. I wish you every success....

Then there were letters to the _Times_, and essay contests in the newspapers, and speeches by high-school students, and resolutions by the Rushmore Commission. But in the end there was not one single contribution of the required length. Flaws in the granite caused a shift of figures that left no room for the entablature; and the Commission set the whole matter aside for future reference.