Chapter THIRTY-TWO: 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. Somebody dismantled the Diesel engine. There were wrangles over concessions and concessionaires and small-town politics. There were road troubles, and supplies were late. And there were other things. The question of why anybody should wish to become a topflight sculptor seemed unlikely to be answered--ever.

The head of Washington was officially unveiled on July 4, 1930. The rest of the cliff was unchanged, and Washington’s chin seemed to rest on the ledge from which it had been carved. But when the great flag swung aside to reveal the sculptured face the witnesses, strangers to Stone Mountain, felt that from then on the memorial would never die.

J. S. Cullinan, first president of the Rushmore Commission, presided and gave the monument its name: “The authority of Congress to carve colossal portraits of these great men in the granite of the Black Hills has created a perpetual _Shrine_ for political _Democracy_.” And Borglum, tired, dejected, almost conquered by a world where nobody ever seemed to want to do anything, was pleased with that. A head was finished on Rushmore, and the dullest of these laymen looking at it knew that it was a finely done piece of sculpture. He heard someone saying that it would be there forever, and he hoped that it would last longer than Lee’s at Stone Mountain.

The crowd at the unveiling got safely back to Rapid City with no trouble at all. And nobody thought of Borglum’s connection with the district’s good roads.

In the spring of 1930, trying to get from Rapid City to Keystone with two cars and tow aids, he had been ditched six times. He never got to Mount Rushmore that week. However, he did get to the telegraph office and sent word to President Hoover that the roads were impossible and that he would shut down the project unless conditions were improved and men could get to their work. Hoover sent the message to Governor William J. Bulow, who in turn made an appointment for his state road commission to meet the sculptor that week.

Meanwhile the governor telegraphed this message to Mr. Cullinan:

BORGLUM HAS THE TEMPERAMENT OF ALL GOOD ARTISTS, GETS MAD WHEN HE
CANNOT CONTROL WEATHER CONDITIONS. NOTHING SERIOUS EXCEPT THAT HE
GOT A NEW EXPERIENCE AND A NEW TOUCH OF LIFE. AM SENDING HIGHWAY
ENGINEER TO SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE. WITH GOD’S AID AND PATIENCE HOPE
TO GET HIM SMOOTHED OUT.

Within three days they had planned the beautiful road now leading from Rapid City to the memorial. Strange as it seems, South Dakota spent $480,000, plus a quarter of a million on other roads, to reach a monument on which she had not spent a dollar. Meanwhile Senator Norbeck with his Custer State Park Commission was working on a road approaching Rushmore from the opposite direction by way of Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain Road is one of the country’s finest examples of what can be done with economical engineering. Engineer Charles E. Smith who laid it out hadn’t much money to spend. The highway runs along part of its highly beautiful journey between Keystone and Grace Coolidge Creek on two lanes that are widely separated. It climbs terrific grades on corkscrew uplifts built of pine logs. It is well paved, well graded and safe.

One of the features of the highway is said to have come by accident. Work was started from the south end and presently struck a mountain that had to be tunneled. The hole was surveyed with no plan save to keep it in line with the approach already built. When the miners finally broke through they were looking into the face of Washington on Rushmore. The two remaining tunnels were cut at the same angle, framing the memorial with a showmanship worthy of Gutzon Borglum himself. Borglum was intensely pleased. “Norbeck’s Iron Mountain Road,” he said, “is as much a work of art as the carving of the mountain.”

Another Norbeck road over the so-called Pine Creek route between Rushmore and Hill City, again a masterpiece of scenic road building, was the cause of the sculptor’s abandoning his original plan of placing Jefferson on Washington’s right in the Rushmore grouping. There was a contributing factor in this decision due partly, he thought, to poor work. Up to summer of 1931 Gutzon had been trying to place the figure of Jefferson where he believed he belonged--on Washington’s right. Work had continued after the unveiling until the fall of 1930 and was resumed in the following spring. In July of that year the sculptor went to Poland, taking Lincoln Borglum with him, to erect his statue of Woodrow Wilson. He left Tallman and Villa in charge.

There was no way of testing the stone in the location for the Jefferson head, so he had quickly roughed out the block and left Villa pointing the face.

When he returned from Europe and motored out to Rushmore he noticed while still a mile away that something was radically wrong. He exclaimed to Villa, “What’s wrong with the Jefferson head?” Villa answered by turning to Tallman: “Didn’t I tell you the master would notice it from a long way off?” Then he said, “Well, there was a little difficulty about the pointing.” The trouble, he explained, was too deep a depression under the eye and there was not enough stone to push the head farther back.

The sculptor did not wait to find out what had gone wrong--rock or work. He was almost too angry for words. Gutzon thought he had taken all precautions. About half the work was finished and it wouldn’t do. Who or what was to blame did not matter. The damage was done. There was not enough stone to allow free modeling of Jefferson’s face, and Norbeck’s new road, exposing the back of the head, made a change in the composition advisable. The sculptor made a bold decision to abandon what had been done on Jefferson and place his figure on Washington’s left. This necessitated a change in the whole grouping, while the flaws in the rock in Jefferson’s new position were so deep that he had to go back sixty feet before he found good stone for the carving. Senator Norbeck, the only one consulted in the matter, gave complete approval.

Villa left shortly after this incident, but came to see his old master in Texas a year or so later and greeted him with his old-time affection. Nothing ever came between them again. Subsequently he flitted in and out of the Rushmore studio at unpredictable times. But Villa was a city man and was not at home in this rugged community. Gutzon missed him, for he brought to the studio a breath of the charm found in the Old World wherever art is active.

The year of Washington’s bicentennial, 1932, witnessed the shutdown of work at Rushmore for lack of funds, which to the sculptor seemed an unforgivable disgrace. However, there on the mountain was the portrait of the first President, which Mr. Cullinan had declared was the best in existence. The face seemed to belong to the mountain, having taken on its elemental courage, and Gutzon figured it as vital as he could make it. He occupied himself with regrouping the models in the studio. It had disturbed him to have the figures as close together as in the original composition, and now this had been opened up by putting Jefferson so far inward that it gave room for the sun to pass back of Washington and light Jefferson’s face. The flaws in the rock which made this necessary began to appear a blessing in disguise.

The recomposition also involved changing Washington’s shoulders in relation to his head. The left shoulder was moved back seven feet and then another seven feet, while the right shoulder was moved seven feet forward. When word got around that Borglum was moving Washington’s head there were loud alarms. Norbeck was flustered. Monument lovers from Rapid City rushed out to the mountain to see how a head that weighed several tons could be transported. There was some disappointment when they saw nothing more novel than the chiseling of the shoulders; but they talked, and the story, it is said, made good publicity.

John A. Boland of Rapid City, chairman of the executive committee of the Rushmore commission, was charged with the hiring of workers, purchase of materials and payment of salaries and bills. And it must be said that these worthy endeavors were seldom fraught with any sweetness and light. Boland’s office was in Rapid City--too close to Rushmore, he thought--and he could not move it because of his statewide business. He sat there quietly and never interfered with the carving operations. He felt that Borglum was a great artist and that the carving of Mount Rushmore was a noble undertaking. He may one day be considered a great patriot.

One of Boland’s handicaps in the situation was his unwillingness to spend any money that he didn’t happen to have. This attitude was, of course, diametrically opposed to that of Borglum, who never could be convinced that money really mattered. And it is said that these two stalwarts had “occasional clashes.” “Occasional clashes,” one regrets to say, is a highly erroneous and short-weight title for what they had.

Gutzon once said that he could feel his blood pressure rising when he got within 500 miles of Rushmore and faced the prospect of seeing Boland. Boland’s blood pressure went up only when Borglum needed money. But the men met, discussed the Shrine of Democracy, swapped observations about the current financial situation and brought the language of toe-to-toe wrangling to a new high.

Gutzon declared, of course, that he never took these arguments seriously. No row, he said, was ever worth remembering after its cause was gone; and that, probably, is a true report on his reactions. 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. Continuous importunities for jobs and for permission to sell souvenirs and postcards and photographs near the work were petty annoyances with which he found it hard to cope. He knew that some such items had to be provided as part of bringing knowledge of his work to the attention of faraway people, but he would not tolerate cheap workmanship or poor taste in anything sold near the carvings. He got along for a while by keeping this trade under supervision in the Rushmore studio, but the relief was only temporary. A resurgence of what he called “local petty politics” presently involved him so that he called on the Department of the Interior to send someone to protect him.

The Department of the Interior complied and Gutzon learned that nothing is so bad that government intervention can’t make it worse. The unimaginative, bureaucratic routines taught to Washington office workers were wholly out of place in a work so constantly changing and so free from fixed rules. The protector sent by the department turned out to be an earnest young man who started out to confuse the South Dakota politicians and did well at it. But he wished to do greater things. He became aloof and secretive.

After some weeks he was discovered to be corresponding with an engineering company in Switzerland known chiefly for its construction of cog-wheel railroads. He thought the company might be interested in building such a funicular line up and around the face of Rushmore so that visitors might walk under Washington’s nose or sit in Lincoln’s eye. Gutzon’s indignation set the young man right and was long remembered.

The Park Service of the Department of the Interior had formulas for all of its functions. Its personnel with whom Borglum came into contact believed that the heads should be carved in orderly fashion. First, the figure of Washington should be completely finished; then the workers should move on to Jefferson, and so on. This, they pointed out, would give people something to look at.

Once more the sculptor who had asked only that he be protected from the harangues of would-be postcard peddlers made a protest against the continuous suggestions of ignoramuses. Harold Ickes, head of the department, understood Borglum’s position clearly and told him in forceful language to ignore such suggestions. But the subordinates never seemed to comprehend. 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 first days on Stone Mountain. “That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be good sculptors.”

There was also the question of “hiring and firing” workmen. The bureaucrats could not understand that the sculptor had to discharge anyone who refused to obey orders, or that he might suddenly need a certain type of workman for a particular job and then need him no longer. It was such a complicated procedure to get a worker placed on the government payroll that it was no wonder they didn’t want to discharge him again in a few days. There are many letters to show that the sculptor’s relationship with the various heads of the Park Service was most friendly. Difficulty was due to a misunderstanding of what an art production of this unprecedented character required.

Even the Rushmore Commission suggested impractical sculptural plans and picked out certain parts of the work it would “like to see finished.” And while Gutzon was pushing the work, begging more funds to get more power, more workmen, skilled carvers, so that the work might be finished in his lifetime, it was irritating to be told that certain commissioners and local interests would like to keep the project going as long as possible because more tourists would come if they could see the sculptor at work.

After 1932 the work dragged on with frequent interruptions and without sufficient funds. Workmen were complaining of the daily climb to their stations--1,500 feet with a rise of 500 feet, which the sculptor himself made several times a day--resulting in a working time loss of from an hour to an hour and a half every day for every man on the job. To date, approximately seventy per cent of the roughing out of the entire surface to be carved had been completed and thirty-five per cent of the finishing, within a total working time of twenty-two months and an average of four to six drillers at work.

The personnel of the Commission was so changed by illness, death and lack of interest that it became increasingly hard to get a quorum at the semiannual meetings. Mr. Cullinan had resigned as president to be succeeded by Fred Sargent of the Chicago and North Western Railway. Only Gutzon could not resign. As he remarked, the rock of Rushmore was riveted to his neck.

A new phase of the work began in 1934 when the federal government assumed the burden of financing the memorial. Frequent stoppages, constant lack of sufficient power and skilled workmen, plus the unpredictable condition of the stone, had greatly increased working costs. Congress first voted to remove the fifty-fifty matching restriction attached to the first appropriation, making it immediately available, and next passed a second appropriation of $200,000. There were those near Mount Rushmore who said it was about time.