Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

Gutzon stayed at Raleigh, North Carolina, seven or eight months preparing new models for the memorial, with the aid of Captain Tucker and Hugo Villa. One day came Homer. He had walked all the way from Stone Mountain, more than 600 miles. Tucker said that he had only to shout and they would all come “a-runnin’.” But there was little work, hardly any money, and no place for them to stay. Villa made and sold some violins. The others mostly had a hard time.

Gutzon’s family joined him in Raleigh in a home next to that of Josephus Daniels, and they were pleasantly received.

In Georgia, the Association removed from the project everyone originally connected with the memorial except Mrs. Helen Plane. But Mrs. Plane was old and ill when the notification reached her. She commented on what had happened to the great memorial and the men who had labored for it. Then she went to bed and died.

The Association prepared statements repeating and enlarging the original charges against Borglum. Gutzon saw enough of it to convince him that masses of this material were sent to every point where any sculpture was contemplated, across the country from Texas to the Dakotas. Why all this tireless effort to discredit him? His theory was that the Association was in debt to the Atlanta banks and had to stay alive long enough to sell its half dollars and pay its debts. It must maintain the theory of its integrity by picturing Borglum as a road-company villain.

In Atlanta an active member of the U.D.C. who had friends in both camps was disturbed because neither the sculptor nor Sam Venable would take legal steps against the Association. She declared the directors were destroying Gutzon’s business and would destroy him. “I cannot and will not add to this quarreling over a memorial to Lee,” he wrote her. “After I got Coolidge and Smoot and Lodge, and the Senate and Congress to authorize a coin, I was further bound by my own claims that the brotherhood of America must be strengthened and preserved.”

But the battle of words went on. And nobody called on Gutzon to produce his new models. The new sculptor had trouble. The granite firm of Weiblen Brothers, which had a lease from Sam Venable, refused to permit the importation of outside stoneworkers. Eventually they reached an agreement to do the stonecutting themselves on a basis of cost plus ten-per-cent profit.

The Association seized all of Gutzon’s papers and records as well as his personal possessions, including art works in his studio and the machinery on the mountain. When they refused to listen to the U.D.C.’s suggestion of arbitration, which was definitely provided for in Borglum’s contract, the sculptor took one step in his own defense. He sent to Georgia a certified public accountant who disproved the charge that $185,000 had been spent on his part of the project. The books showed that only $113,922.61 had gone to the mountain—and this included the sculptor’s salary and every other expense of the work. The office in Atlanta at the same time had spent more than $116,000.

There was a persistent rumor through the United States that Borglum’s real trouble had been a quarrel with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. That was not true if only for the fact that the political brothers in the Memorial Association’s directorate had taken away the voice of these women in 1924. It was thoroughly refuted in a pamphlet issued by the Atlanta chapter telling where the blame should be placed for the monument’s loss.

The pamphlet was in the precise form of the statement sent out by the Association and was distributed among U.D.C. organizations throughout the country. It never had so large a circulation as the Association’s statement for the reason that the women did not have so large a fund to draw on.

How so great a memorial could have been destroyed, how the matter of the sale of the coin could have been so confused that few could understand anything beyond the fact that the money was dissipated and lost, is a complicated story. It cannot be dismissed in a few words and in fairness to all, the story of the U.D.C. should be told. Here are some extracts from the Atlanta chapter’s pamphlet: