Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

Still he went on. He became acquainted with Alexander Klemin and his wind tunnel. He was greatly interested in Major Ocker’s development of blind flying. He invented an airplane brake which, with modifications, was the type used in the Second World War.

In a speech before the Aeronautical Society at the Astor Hotel in New York early in 1904 he outlined his plans for a “cylindrical type of machine with the engine in the pointed nose directly behind the propeller and winglike fins to steady the flight.” He demonstrated what he meant with two little models that flew gracefully over the audience. He said:

Consider the bird struggling with the power of a water freshet. The model for the aeroplane should not be the bird, but the fish. The only fish that can move in stormy water is the trout, and the trout, I am convinced, gives us an unbeatable design for an airship.

There is something in that speech to remind one of Cellini’s departures from art, and the activities of Da Vinci when he was looking most clearly at the patterns of a future life. But his friends weren’t impressed. Mrs. William Brown Meloney of the Herald-Tribune and This Week magazine, with whom he carried on a ceaseless correspondence, gave him a sharp rebuke and told him that art needed him more than the airplane business. And he sent her this prompt answer:

Dear Missy: You regret as many of my friends do that I am not eternally astride a ton of clay, constantly modeling. On the other hand, the insistent application of a man’s mind or his body to one activity creates lopsidedness.

I was hardly out of my teens before I discovered that it was only men of varied interest in life, men of varied capacities, whose minds survived middle age....

I mean the sort of men who can turn from the study of an orchid to the building of a fortress, to mending a sewer, to designing a fleet, to colonizing a continent.

Gutzon spoke a lot. He liked public speaking and he was good at it. Any good cause was his cause, and, inasmuch as he never seemed to be looking for any personal reward from his public fighting, he made a lot of friends in unexpected places.

He loved children and he was disturbed by New York’s lack of room for them. He remembered his own childhood—so much of it in the fresh, open air—and he campaigned vigorously for playgrounds or parks or unplanned pieces of the outdoors that would give them a chance to stretch their legs. He began to write on such subjects for the newspapers and spent most of his days in wordy controversy. He wrote largely on political subjects and was rated among the country’s foremost essayists on the subject of world peace. His peace article, “An Essay on Economic Boycott,” was one of twelve selected from 20,000 for publication in the book “Ways to Peace.” It was widely reported in the newspapers, widely discussed, and carried abroad by President Wilson when he went to make his futile treaty of Versailles.

The park controversies pleased Gutzon for two reasons. He thought they might bring about a little better living for the children. And they might promote a general love for flowers—bring a new generation into the open air and give it a consciousness of nature. He loved growing things—green trees, soft grass and the smell of aromatic shrubs. He never forgot his chase to capture the moon in Fremont.